Photo by SweetJen34.

By now, you’ve probably heard that last month was the hottest month ever recorded in the 140 years since people started documenting the weather with any kind of reliability. And it’s quite possible that the first week of August will also see records falling. But at least we aren’t living in Baghdad!

Temperatures in Iraq today are hitting 122 degrees Fahrenheit, leading the Iraqi government to declare the first ever “heat holiday” in the nation’s history:

Television news programs began announcing the closures Sunday night — just as American newscasts might inform viewers of snow days. The closures apply to government offices in the Baghdad region, Diyala province in central Iraq and all southern provinces — including Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra. Government offices in the northern Kurdistan region remain open, thanks to slightly cooler temperatures (110 degrees) and the region’s more reliable electricity supply.

Local residents and officials said they could not recall the government ever before closing due to excessive heat. The nation’s schools are not affected, because children are on summer vacation.

In some cases, residents said they fought the heat and power shortages Sunday night by sleeping half-naked in pools of water thrown on the floors of their bedrooms.

Of course, today is also the first day of Ramadan, when many Iraqis will be fasting — something tells me that not eating anything on a day and working on a day where the temperatures are that high could lead to some bad consequences.

When a country where the average temperature is around 110 degrees in the summer is cancelling work due to heat, well, that kind of diminishes our suffering a bit. (But, hey, at least Baghdadians have full voting rights!)