July 11, 2006
Lazy Hazy Days of Summer
ROLL OUT THOSE LAZY, HAZY, CRAZY DAYS OF SUMMER
The Fourth of July is past us now and the long, torpid days of summer lie ahead. Days for picnics, swimming, boating and backyard activities like badminton, volleyball and sandlot baseball. My childhood summer memories are filled with miniature golf, drive-in movies ( do these even EXIST anymore???) and collecting lightning bugs in a big glass jar. Yep...for those who can’t get enough of the sun, those “Dog Days� are just around the corner. As a kid I always thought those humid, do-less, HOT days of July and August were called dog days because our family pet seemed to be the only one smart enough to just lie quietly in the shade of a big tree until the sun started to set - however, it seems these days have been notorious for quite some time.
The term itself was coined by the ancient Romans, who called these days caniculares dies (days of the dogs) after the constellation of Canis Major, ( the Big Dog) within which Sirius “Canis Majoris� - the Dog Star - is found. As the hottest and most humid days of summer generally coincided with the period where Sirius rose and set with the sun, they believed that heat from Sirius was increasing the heat of the sun.
Sirius ( the brightest star of all as seen from Earth ), both rises after, and sets before, the sun and is hence lost in the latter's glare. This period of invisibility, for Northern Hemisphere observers, is caused by the fact that the position of Sirius in the sky is well to the south of the horizon. The ancient Egyptians observed that the annual flooding of the Nile Delta would typically occur shortly after the star returned to view immediately before sunrise, taken to be around mid-August in the current calendar.
Incidentally, dog meat is a food traditionally eaten during the hottest days of the year in South Korea. Sadly....no recipes for this delicacy will be appearing in our Summer Recipes section....
Susanna King