Solstice 2003

“…all the rest have 31, except February…”

12/21/03
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

I got asked a few months back why I never write a piece about the SUMMER solstice. After all, that’s the brightest, sunniest, happiest day of the year. People have parades, and look forward to several months of summer. If I was doing essays on both solstices, this would justify setting up a separate mailing list for the handful of readers I have in Australia (I think I have one in New Zealand, too), and on the day I send out my summer solstice message, I could send out a winter solstice message to them, and six months later, I could versa the vice.

Well, the problem is that I talk about the winter solstice being the birth of hope, the day when the days start getting longer. The sun escapes the mouth of the dragon, and people start counting the days until spring.

So what’s the message for the summer solstice? “It’s all downhill from here!” This is your brief moment of glory, folks. From now on, sunsets are earlier, and all too soon, the leaves will fall, followed by the snow, and it will be dark and cold. All summer solstice does is remind you that you are “shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.”

So what say when we get done reading the summer solstice piece, we all just go out and shoot ourselves? Forget this “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” stuff, and just snuff it now, before another summer solstice comes along to plunge us further into the depths of despair!

Actually, I just enjoy the summer solstice for what it is, and I imagine most people do, as well. But I toyed around once with the idea of a calendar designed for folks with seasonal affective disorder, aka “the wintertime blues.” The calendar would run from December 21st to December 21st, instead of the conventional News Years’ dates (thus getting the Christmas hassle out of the way right at the start) and would start out with the local sunrise and sunset listing. The listings would continue until June 21st, whereupon they would stop. The further you get from the equator, the more painfully evident it would be that the days were getting shorter, so why rub peoples’ faces in it? Denial is a river in Egypt!

On a local note, I toyed with a calendar that would list the sunrises and sunsets at the peak of Mt. Shasta. This would give everyone an extra 12 minutes of sunlight a day, and anything to do with that big pile of volcanic scree and rubble is always going to be a big hit with the woos, who would doubtlessly interpret the extra length of the days as a sign that the Lemurians or Pleiadeans or Jehovah or somebody had blessed us. Such an affirmation of the divinity of the mountain usually means big sales.

It wasn’t the first time I had taken it upon myself to dick around with the calendar.

When I was eight, I got introduced to the metric system, which in that time and place consisted of metres, grammes, and centigrade. Everything was divisible by ten, and even better, everything had something to do with reality. A centigrade degree was 1/100th of the difference between freezing and boiling water. A gramme was what one cubic centimetre of water weighed. None of this nonsense about the length of King John’s foot, or Noah’s forearm, or King Henry’s thumb. Real measurements, based on real things to do with the earth. (None of the measurements would have such a basis on Mars, or any other planet. Details, details.)

I had a little trouble with the way metres were designed. They were 1/10,000th of the distance between the equator and the north pole, passing through Paris. Why Paris? London already had the meridian, the line separating the eastern hemisphere from the western hemisphere, zero degrees on all the maps. Greenwich. I had personally stood on the meridian, with a testicle in each hemisphere! Surely London was much better qualified to be the line along which metres were determined than Paris!

But that was a quibble. Clearly, the metric system was superior. It wasn’t so arbitrary. When a man (ok, a seven year old kid) has a testicle in each hemisphere, he can’t be arbitrary.

The metric system also wasn’t duodecimal. I didn’t know the word duodecimal when I was a kid, but I noticed that the number 12 and its multiples kept showing up in the English measuring system. Twelve inches to a foot. Sixty seconds to a minute. Twelve pennies to a shilling. And so on.

The first thing to make metric, of course, would be the money. Ten pennies to the shilling, ten shillings to the pound. Pennies would still be big copper coins you could kill people with, and Britannia would still be sitting on her rock threatening to swamp Sir Francis Drake’s boat. The shilling would still be the same size so the coins would fit in the “shilling heaters,” the pay gas heaters in vogue that gave fifteen minutes of reluctant heat. (It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the gas company would have been pleased with this arrangement, insofar as it doubled the value of the shilling). By then, I reasoned, the Queen would be dead (the old gal had to be pushing 30!) and the revered Winston Churchill would be king, so he would be on the back. (Some of the details here were a bit hazy).

Having solved the currency crisis, I moved to fix the way we told time. Obviously, this was a real mess. Two sets of twelve hours a day, sixty minutes per hour, sixty seconds per minute. Who invented this, anyway? Iraq?

The first thing, of course, was to get it based on a physical attribute of the earth. The daily rotation seemed a good place to start. The earth swung through a degree of rotation every four minutes exactly, so one degree of rotation would be one metric minute. You would have fifteen minutes per hour, and 24…

Ooops. I was trying to get away from duodecimal. Already I had corrupted my otherwise perfect system with 24 hours based on 360 degrees. I wanted everything to be divisible by ten.

Start over. One hundred degrees to a circle. (I didn’t realize it then, but had my notion prevailed, first year geometry, often a challenge to most folks, would have been a pure-d bear. You see, ten is divisible only by 1, 2, 5 and itself, but 360 is divisible by nearly anything, making figuring out angles of triangles, hexagons, and all those other shapes relatively easy.)

One hundred degrees to a circle. (Sorry, Geometry 101!) Ten minutes to a degree, one hundred seconds to a minute. A metric minute would be about 86.4 old seconds.

The daily schedule would be something like this:

25 degrees: get out of bed.
25 degrees, 5 minutes: eat breakfast.
26 degrees, 2 minutes: leave for school.
27 degrees, 8 minutes: arrive at school
28 degrees: first class.
50 degrees: lunch
52 degrees: end of lunch
62 degrees: go home
75 degrees: dinner
85 degrees five minutes: go to bed

From this, it’s easy to tell whose side I would have been on in the French revolution. Clearly I am a menace to society. But it was, indisputably, a metric clock.

By now, brimming with the sort of self-confidence that only an eight year old with his first wristwatch can muster, I turned to the calendar itself. That would be a piece of cake, I reasoned. If I had known then that September meant “seventh month,” October, “eighth month,” November, “ninth month,” and December, “tenth month,” I might have reconsidered. But ignorance is bliss.

I quickly discovered that the earth’s rotation, and the revolutions around the sun, didn’t jibe. Nor did the moon’s orbit around the earth relate in any way to the year or day.

I was amazed nobody had ever noticed that before. Talk about sloppy planning!

There’s a couple of approaches that could be taken. First, you could move the earth into a lower orbit around the sun. 37,000,000 miles from the sun would result in a 100 day year, give or take. But people would be bound to complain, especially everyone who just bought new calendars for the new year.

You could slow the earth’s rotation so a day was exactly 1/100th of a year. But then I would have to tear up that nice new digital clock I had just invented.

Eventually, I just decided that humanity was going to have to go to hell in its own way, and I would just grin a secret grin as I watched people struggle with the baffling array of months, leap years, and leap centuries that our inefficient solar system had foisted on us. Serves ‘em right!

Now, if you can stop trying to remember how many days hath September, take a deep breath, and reflect on the fact that the days, once again, are getting longer.

Happy Solsitce.

And don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

BONUS:

Happy Holidays to all, and hope you can make use of the following recipe!

Zepp’s Killer Low-Carb Fudge

Ingredients:

One box (eight squares) of Baker’s unsweetened chocolate.
2 Tablespoons Stevia
Two pints (one quart) heavy whipping cream
Two eggs
One half cube of real butter
One tablespoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup Atkins maple syrup (for fake syrup, the stuff is
pretty good)

Optional: one cup nuts (walnuts, peanuts, anything like that)
Other flavored extracts (maple, mint, coffee, whatever)

In a double boiler, melt chocolate cubes with butter. Add one quart heavy whipping cream, two cups sweetener, eggs, and vanilla extract. Stir slowly until thoroughly blended. Taste, and add more
stevia until it tastes the way you want it. (You’ll probably end up using nearly the whole box). Stir for about an hour until utterly smooth. Add optional ingredients (nuts, coffee beans, whatever) Pour into pans with wax paper, and put in fridge to cool for four hours. Serves most of Alameda County.

Now for some caveats:

Just because this is reasonably low in carbs (about 9 grams per cubic inch is my estimate) doesn’t mean it’s good for you. It’s still got tons of calories and cholesterol, and Atkins does NOT mean you can go out and inhale ten thousand calories and the lack of carbs will cause you to still lose weight. Don’t go overboard.

If you want to add nuts for texture, that’s fine. But avoid raisins or candied fruit, since those are high in carbs.

Some folks prefer to use just the egg whites. Either way, it works, but having at least one yolk helps with the emulsification. I say, go ahead and use the yolks. If healthy diet was such a big concern, what are you doing making fudge in the first place?

Stirring is key. If you don’t want to spend a bunch of time stirring with a spoon, you can use a hand-held blender at its lowest setting – but only have ONE of the beaters on. If you use both, you’ll be beating a lot of air into your fudge, and remember that you’ve already got a quart of whipping cream and two egg whites in there. You might end up with several cubic yards of brown cotton candy or something. Using just one blade on the blender does the trick quite nicely, I’ve found.

Don’t give the bowl to the dog to lick out, unless of course, you are fed up with the dog and wish to get rid of him.

This will be the richest fudge you ever tasted. Since life is short, make it sweet.