Happy Father’s Day, fathers! And happy June Solstice, everyone!
The sun is at its northernmost position today, hovering over the Tropic of Cancer like a thrown ball at its apex. It’s the longest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere and is commonly treated as the first day of summer. As a child, my father painstakingly laid out the night sky with glow-in-the-dark stars on his bedroom ceiling. He passed that curiosity and joy in the world’s magic on to us.
Happy Juneteenth, everyone! If you’re interested in the history behind the holiday celebrating the effective end of legalized slavery in the United States, I’ve written about it before.
This year, I’m marking the day with a biracial poem.
Bloomsday celebrates Thursday, 16th June 1904 — the day immortalised in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The day is named after Leopold Bloom, one of the novel’s protagonists. The novel follows Bloom’s life and thoughts (as well as those of Stephen Dedalus and a host of other characters, real and fictional) from early in the morning to the twilight hours of the following day.
It may also be helpful for other writers to know that even Joyce worried about his work being forgotten.
Today is Earth Day. If you were born before 1965 or so, you probably remember a time when there was no such thing. It was a time of smoky bars, trash littering the roadsides, choking smog, and Superfund sites masquerading as playgrounds, among other things. Rivers regularly caught on fire.
“The river was a scary little thing,” Donovan says. “There was a general rule that if you fell in, God forbid, you would go immediately to the hospital.”
And then publicity turned what was just the latest in a long line of “oops, the water’s on fire” stories into the seed of a new movement. The first Earth Day took place in 1970. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970. The idea that maybe we didn’t have to live in a toxic stew of pollution and dangerous chemicals slowly began to take hold. Crazy, I know!
Are there still plenty of places we could improve? Of course. But we’ve come a long way, and our successes are proof that we can take the next step, and the next.
The March equinox – aka the vernal equinox – marks the sun’s crossing above Earth’s equator, moving from south to north. Earth’s tilt on its axis is what causes this northward shift of the sun’s path across our sky at this time of year. Earth’s tilt is now bringing spring and summer to the Northern Hemisphere. At the same time, the March equinox marks the beginning of autumn – and a shift toward winter – in the Southern Hemisphere.
I did spot a lovely V of Canada Geese a couple of days ago, and hopefully we’ll see more signs of spring soon!
What is pi, anyway? Divide any circle’s circumference by its diameter; the answer (whether for a pie plate or a planet) is always approximately 3.14, a number we represent with the Greek letter π. Keep calculating pi’s digits with more and more accuracy—as mathematicians have been doing for 4,000 years—and you’ll discover they go on literally forever…
Infinite, like my love for pie. I might go savory this year, actually.
There are a lot of holidays happening today or starting this week, including some of the big ones: Lunar New Year and the Spring Festival, Mardi Gras (and Lent), and Ramadan.
If I used AI casually I might ask it for an image of a fiery horse eating a beignet at an iftar meal, but instead I’ll just wish you all a wonderful week!
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