Mine is the Month of Roses; yes, and mine
The Month of Marriages! All pleasant sights
And scents, the fragrance of the blossoming vine,
The foliage of the valleys and the heights.
Mine are the longest days, the loveliest nights;
The mower’s scythe makes music to my ear;
I am the mother of all dear delights;
I am the fairest daughter of the year. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The apparent path of the sun will cross the celestial equator at 17:16 Universal Time today, which is to say 12:16 Central Daylight Saving Time. For those of us in the northern hemisphere this means today is the first day of astronomical summer, but for our friends in the southern hemisphere it is the first day of astronomical winter; so while today is the longest day of the year in the north, it’s the shortest in the south.
I must admit that as an adult, I’ve never been a fan of summer. Of course, as a child I was thrilled to be out of school and spent the hottest part of each day reading, but once I entered the working world summer just meant longer, hotter days and much higher electricity bills. In South Louisiana the summers are particularly oppressive; actual temperatures there rarely exceed 33 Celsius, but since the humidity is generally over 80% it feels like an oven and even the shade offers little respite. Nor are the evenings much better; due to “Daylight Saving Time” darkness doesn’t come until almost 9 PM, and both the buildings and the very air itself store up heat through the long, sultry afternoons and don’t often become noticeably cooler until well after midnight. While I was escorting there were many evenings in which I emerged from air-conditioned hotels after 3 AM to find myself glowing with perspiration before I could make it to my car. And when I was in my teens and twenties, I tended to lose weight every summer because the heat often stole my appetite; in those intervals when I lived alone my summer meals might consist of egg salad sandwiches, and I was a cheap date because sometimes all I could manage was a milkshake, a sno-ball or maybe a glass of iced tea with an order of onion rings.
As I got older I grew to tolerate the heat more, then once I moved farther inland it wasn’t nearly as bad. The summers are shorter here (in New Orleans it’s often brutally hot from early May through the end of September) and the humidity isn’t nearly as high; though it isn’t unusual for the temperature to climb above 40 several times in July and August, the drier air means it’s much cooler in the shade and the temperature usually drops to the low 20s at night. Of course, like most modern people I don’t rely on the beneficence of the sun as our ancestors did; for them summer was the time of growth, the season when their crops moved toward harvest and the season of snow was farthest away. And of course, in Northern Europe the summers are far milder than they are in the American South!
For our ancestors, and for modern pagans, Midsummer was the festival commemorating the sun at his zenith; as is my Sabbat custom, here is an essay from my witch friend JustStarshine on the spiritual significance of the day:
The Significance of Litha
The Latin for solstice – solsitium – literally means “sun stands still” and refers to the way the sun seems to hang there without moving on this the longest day of the year. In the northern hemisphere this will take place on June 21 at 17.16 but the day can vary from year to year between June 21 – 24.
This time, which heralds the shortening of the days, has been marked throughout recorded history by different cultures. In witch law it is often given the Saxon name “Litha” and on the Wheel of the Year occupies the position immediately opposite the Winter Solstice or Yule.
According to old folklaw summer begins at Beltane (May 1) and ends at Lammas (August 1) with the Summer Solstice between, which has given it its other name, Midsummer.
For witches this is a time of celebration when we can sit back and enjoy what we have and thank the Goddess for what she has given us. It’s a time of year when we feel nearest to the Holy Grail, a cup of happiness given by the Goddess.
But it’s also a time of change. The sun is at his strongest but from now on his strength begins to wane and we, too, must change, since we cannot hold on to the golden moment however much we may want to. The Wheel must turn; it cannot stand still.
During our ritual we meditate on what is currently bringing fulfillment and what we need to do to make further changes in our lives. We visualize these changes, see them as though they have already happened and then attempt to see life as it would be afterwards.
May all my readers, no matter what your beliefs, find happiness in what you have already and experience an increase in your fortunes even as the days decrease in their length. Blessed Be!
Canadian writing here. I’m so used to doing the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion in my head it really threw me off to see an American using Celsius. Not that I mind.
We’re having our Party in the Park in my neighborhood today. It should be a lot of fun, although it’s mainly an excuse to exhaust our children.
I started using Celsius when I was a science major, quickly realized it made much more sense than Fahrenheit (32? 212? WTF?) and have never gone back. My thermometers here are set to Celsius, as are my personal Weather Channel settings.
Its an easy enough conversion, multiply by 1.8 and add 32
But I agree fareinheit is just stupid
I’ve started to be a little annoyed when I see weight expressed in kilograms, particularly things like “If you weigh sixty Kg on Earth, you would only weigh six Kg on the Moon.” No, no, no. Kg are mass, not weight. You have exactly the same Kg on the Moon as on Earth. You would find yourself weighing fewer pounds, newtons, or stone.
Until we start experiencing different gravity or acceleration regularly, it doesn’t make much practical difference in day-to-day life. But dammit! Kg are mass, not weight!
I’m glad I’ve never seen that; it would highly irritate me as well!
Do you know what the Imperial unit of mass is? It’s kind of obscure, and I only know it because in my late teens I dated an engineer.
Yay, someone else who shares my obsession with the distinction between mass and weight (force)! Maggie, I knew the answer, slugs, to your question; wish you hadn’t given it away with the link! 😉
Here’s a brain teaser: On earth, you have two oscillating devices: a spring with a hanging weight which moves vertically, and a pendulum. Both oscillate at 1 cycle/sec. Take both to a hypothetical planet with 1/4 earth’s gravity. What frequencies do they exhibit there?
I figured putting it as a link was link printing the answer upside-down like they used to do in magazines. As for the teaser- too much math too early in the morning! But I know they’d be the same as each other since the same force drives both. Or am I missing something due to lack of tea?
I forgot, you stay up till midnight, whereas I crash out at 9 and spring awake at 4, raring to attack math problems. Please revisit after n cups of tea, where n > 2. 😉
You’re right, the link didn’t reveal the answer unless I hovered over it, and you probably believe me when I say I knew about slugs already. Speaking of slugs, I write engineering software, and those danged engineers, who ought to know better, come up with wonderfully bastardized units, such as kg-meter for torque, or kg/meter^2 for pressure, when there’s a perfectly good unit, newtons, available to represent force. Encountering them always presses my “Begin Ranting Now” button.
So what happens with the pendulum and spring?
I’ll make a guess: they both continue to oscillate at 1 cycle/second. I’m guessing this based on the fact that on Earth, how quickly the pendulum cycles is not linked to how heavy the weight is, so taking it to the 0.25 G planet is like substituting a weight of 0.25 the original weight.
I just now noticed that I wrote this as if the gravity of our moon were one-tenth that of the Earth. Wow do I feel dumb. Please read the sentence which annoys me as “If you weigh sixty Kg on Earth, you would only weigh ten Kg on the Moon.”
Sixty to ten, not six. My bad. Nearly five years ago.
The Latin for solstice – solsitium – literally means “sun stands still” and refers to the way the sun seems to hang there without moving on this the longest day of the year.
I’m picking nits here, but I read this to be saying that the sun seems to stand still on the solstice. It doesn’t, of course; it moves across the sky with the same angular speed as it does on any day. What stands still is the location of sunrise (or sunset) from one day to the next. Conversely, on either equinox, the location of the sun at sunrise or sunset moves more from the previous day’s location than on any other days of the year.
The mathematical analog is that a sine wave has zero derivative (slope) when its value is at a maximum or minimum (summer and winter solstice), and highest derivative when its value is zero (equinox). This concludes today’s math lesson. 😉
Off topic, I know, but apparently this Physics professor shares your view on the propriety of prostitution. He set up a website to make it safe for whores and clients to get together.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2006339/Married-physics-professor-David-Flory-ran-prostitution-site-allowing-1-200-clients-meet-girls.html
Yes, I just wrote a column on it, which will appear on July 2nd.
Argggggh!! Time to take up the pitchforks! This kind of B***S*** can NOT be allowed to go on. Maggie, I look forward to your column.
OT…
Hi Maggie.
I thought this an interesting commentary you might want to note.
“As Trymaine Lee has reported, black, poor and transgender women are being disproportionately and systematically branded as criminal “sex offenders” on an online database for engaging in “survival sex” in New Orleans. Under the cover of an obscure, slave-era legal term called “crimes against nature,” police officers target those who engage in oral or anal sex-for-money. Those targeted for a second time are charged as felons (vaginal sex-for-money, meanwhile, is considered misdemeanor prostitution). 40 percent of those who appear on the sexual predator database are there because they were accused of committing a “crime against nature;” more than 80 percent of those are black women.”
http://tothecurb.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/slutwalk-a-stroll-through-white-supremacy/
I’ve done several columns on that, most recently on February 26th.
The reason shade offers no releif from the heat in high humidity is that water molecules transfer heat 25 times more efficently then oxygen and nitrogen molecules
Ah, Rosetti. If i was pressed to nominate one era of art that typifies the concept for me personally, It would be Rosetti, Raphael et al.
The Divine Feminine. yep. This. 😇