A heat wave hitting Alaska may not rival the blazing heat of Phoenix or Las Vegas, but to residents of the 49th state, the days of hot weather feel like a stifling oven — or a tropical paradise.

With temperatures topping 80 degrees in Anchorage, and higher in other parts of the state, people have been sweltering in a place where few homes have air conditioning.

They're sunbathing and swimming at local lakes, hosing down their dogs and cleaning out supplies of fans in at least one local hardware store. Mid-June normally brings high temperatures in the 60s in Anchorage, and just a month ago, it was still snowing.

The weather feels like anywhere but Alaska to 18-year-old Jordan Rollison, who was sunbathing with three friends and several hundred others lolling at the beach of Anchorage's Goose Lake.

"I love it, I love it," Rollison said. "I've never seen a summer like this, ever."

State health officials even took the unusual step of posting a Facebook message reminding people to slather on the sunscreen.

Some people aren't so thrilled, complaining that it's just too hot.

"It's almost unbearable to me," said Lorraine Roehl, who has lived in Anchorage for two years after moving here from the community of Sand Point in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. "I don't like being hot. I'm used to cool ocean breeze."

On Tuesday, the official afternoon high in Anchorage was 81 degrees, breaking the city's record of 80 set in 1926 for that date.

Other smaller communities throughout a wide swath of the state are seeing even higher temperatures.

All-time highs were recorded elsewhere, including 96 degrees on Monday 80 miles to the north in the small community of Talkeetna, purported to be the inspiration for the town in the TV series, "Northern Exposure" and the last stop for climbers heading to Mount McKinley, North America's tallest mountain. One unofficial reading taken at a lodge near Talkeetna even measured 98 degrees, which would tie the highest undisputed temperature recorded in Alaska.

That record was set in 1969, according to Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the online forecasting service Weather Underground.

The expansion of the Bad Teacher universe knows no bounds. On top of the announcement that CBS had added a Bad Teacher spinoff series to their fall roster, Columbia Pictures announced Thursday that they’d begun development on a sequel to the 2011 Cameron Diaz film.

Bad Teacher may have been a critical dark horse (it boasts a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score), but the raunchy comedy, which also starred Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, was a runaway summer box office success, bringing in $216.2 million worldwide on an estimated $20 million budget.

According to the announcement, the project is being developed for Diaz, but she has not officially signed on for the sequel yet. The busy actress is currently at work on The Other Woman with Leslie Mann and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and has a number of projects lined up, including Agent: Century 21 with Benicio Del Toro and Jake Kasdan’s Sex Tape.

Kasdan (Orange County) will return to direct the sequel off of a script from Justin Malen, a screenwriter best known at this point for making the 2011 Black List for his screenplay Bastards. The first film was co-written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, who both wrote for The Office.

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“We love Justin’s take on the material,” said Columbia Pictures President of Production Hannah Minghella in the press release. “It hits all the notes that made the first film such a breakthrough hit and also takes the characters in a new direction that is fresh and fun.”

Up to 115,000 partiers are expected each night this weekend for a dusk-to-dawn sensory salad of electronic dance music, lights, partying and mingling at a sprawling speedway complex outside Las Vegas.

Electric Daisy Carnival officials said Wednesday that all 345,000 available tickets had been sold for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday night event at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

The festival founder, Insomniac Events CEO Pasquale Rotella, likes to call the fans and the revelry the headline attraction at his nocturnal gatherings, which drew criticism in Los Angeles before moving to Las Vegas in 2011.

"That's one of the biggest spectacles of the entire event, 115,000 like-minded people all dressed up and having a good time," said Simon Rust Lamb, Insomniac chief operating officer and general counsel. "We want to create moments and memories that are full of joy and that help people create and connect with the people around them."

Hundreds of artists and theatrical performers like fire-twirlers and stilt-walkers are slated to roam the nearly 2-square-mile festival grounds, along with "art cars" blasting music from rolling mock-ups like a pirate ship or a boom box.

Fireworks are planned. Twenty art displays and three graffiti walls are being erected, along with a brightly-lit amusement park featuring several Ferris wheels. Performers include the collaborative fire art group Flaming Lotus Girls and a Rotella creation, Night Owl Experience.

Don't call it a concert. It's a carnival. And don't call it a rave, Lamb said, because that connotes an illegal underground warehouse party.

"The common thread is electronic music," he said. "There's nothing illegal, underground or warehouse about what we do."

The nonstop lineup on seven stages features more than 200 music producers and deejays, including Afrojack, Tiesto, Above & Beyond, Calvin Harris, Madeon, Armin van Buuren, Bloody Beetroots and former Swedish House Mafia member Steve Angelo.

Pat Christenson, whose role as Las Vegas Events president is to attract events to the city and tourists to the hotels, called Las Vegas uniquely able to handle the festival because it has years of experience hosting large events and a remote venue with parking for hundreds of thousands of fans.

"The footprint is big. The music is loud. But it's miles from downtown," Christenson said, "and the way the grandstand is, it's hard to hear the sound outside the speedway."

Insomniac Events has tried to expand the event – and the number of people booking hotel stays – by promoting pool parties, nightclub events and EDMbiz, a $500-per-ticket two-day conference on the business of dance music and culture. It began Wednesday.

This might be the strangest way of keeping aggressive men at bay, but we have to give it major points for being clever.

"Super sexy, summertime anti-pervert full-leg-of-hair stockings, essential for all young girls going out," @HappyZhangJiang describes the item on China's popular microblogging service, Sina Weibo.

They remind us somewhat of the less playful, more functional "anti-rape" lingerie developed recently by three engineering students in India. That garment is wired to deliver an electric shock to sexual attackers and can send an alert message, with GPS coordinates, to the attacked woman's friends and family.

The idea behind the hair stockings, we're guessing, is that lewd gropers wouldn't come anywhere near you. Tongue-in-cheek, but inventive nonetheless.