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The Dog Days of
Summer are Sirius Stuff
by Mad Dog
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More important than why the Dog Days exist is their
effect—they cause people to go, well, a little wacky. |
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The Dog Days of summer are
upon us. This is the time of year when the thermometer hits triple
digits, there’s so much humidity in the air you get in the shower to
dry off, and the power company sends thank-you notes because your air
conditioning is making the electric meter spin faster than a
Tilt-a-Whirl at a meth convention. The Dog Days show up like clockwork
every year between mid-July and the end of August, right along with the
fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, sunburns, and back-to-school sales, and is
equally as welcome.
The Dog Days received their name from
the ancient Romans, who noticed that the dog star Sirius rises and sets
with the sun during the summer months. Interestingly, the word Sirius
comes from the Greek Seirios,
which means burning, or hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk. The
Romans believed it was the combination of Sirius and the sun that made
it so hot and humid. Now, of course, we know that’s silly—it’s the
heat index. Just kidding. Actually the heat index is an arbitrary
combination of the temperature and humidity that was concocted by
meteorologists who needed a seasonal counterpart to the wind chill
factor so we could feel more miserable than either indicator alone would
allow. This proves that we really have progressed since ancient Roman
times. Not only do we have the heat index, we now know that since Sirius
is 8.6 light-years away—which is twice as long as the line to get into
Space Mountain on a typical summer day—it has no effect on the heat
build-up during the summer months. That, it turns out, is actually
caused by a hot air mass that gets trapped over the country as a result
of everyone talking about global warming.
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The question is, With all this wackiness going on, how do we
get through the Dog Days of Summer with our sanity and antiperspirant
intact?
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But more important than why the Dog Days exist is their
effect—they cause people to go, well, a little wacky. Children get
cranky and bored, begging for suggestions about something fun to do that
all manage to sound mind-numbingly dull, pathetic, and abhorrent unless
it entails spending money, playing video games, or preferably a
combination of the two. Teenagers move into the mall for weeks at a
time, whole families migrate like lemmings towards any body of water
larger than a coffee pot, and adults who have a vocabulary of 60,000
words only manage to mutter “Hot enough for you?” over and over. But
wait, there’s more! During this year’s Dog Days, celebrities are
naming their babies Knox and Sunday, a naked man in Las Vegas stole a
beer from a convenience store then hijacked a bus, two groups in Georgia
have been battling over whether a new state law means it’s okay to
carry a concealed handgun in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta
International Airport—hey, there aren’t three ounces of liquid in
it—and New Zealand's trade minister announced that they’ve developed
an inoculation to stop flatulence in sheep and cows so the country can
comply with the reduced methane emissions mandated by the Kyoto
Protocol. See what I mean?
But these are Dog Days, not Sheep,
Cow or Silly Baby Name Days, which is why it should come as no surprise
that pollsters are interested in Fido. Yes it’s true, AP and Yahoo
News recently teamed up to spend time, money, and energy that could have
been used to uncover a rutabaga in the shape of the Virgin Mary to
correlate presidential candidate preferences to pet ownership. It turns
out that dog owners prefer John McCain over Barack Obama, 43 percent to
34 percent. Honestly. Not only that, but pet owners as a group prefer
McCain, those who don’t own pets prefer Obama, and all agree this
proves that pollsters ran out of intelligent questions in 1972 and the
media need to find a disaster or celebrity divorce/birth/rehab to keep
them busy. Hopefully soon.
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After
all, carrying a couple of watermelons when you go to a bar is a dead
giveaway that you’re not really looking for someone to just chat
with. |
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The question is, With all this wackiness going on, how do we get
through the Dog Days of Summer with our sanity and antiperspirant
intact? Obviously the usual recommendations hold—stay cool, drink
plenty of liquids, and don’t go out in the noonday sun, even if
you’re a Mad Dog or an Englishmen. And eat plenty of watermelon.
It’s cooling, tasty, and cheap. Well, it is unless you pay $6,100 for
one like some guy in Japan did. No kidding. A black 17-pound
"Densuke" watermelon was sold at auction for $6,100, making it
the most expensive watermelon in the world. That comes to $359 a pound,
$120 a slice, or $2.60 per calorie. Since an adult male would need
nearly that whole watermelon for one day’s calorie intake, it could be
pretty expensive. On the plus side though, it could help his sex life.
It’s true. Scientists at Texas
A&M's Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center (motto: “Bigger,
sweeter, longer shelf life”) say watermelon contains a chemical that
reacts with enzymes in the body to boost nitric oxide, which relaxes
blood vessels, the same basic effect as Viagra. While this is good news
for male watermelon lovers, it’s actually not very practical. After
all, carrying a couple of watermelons when you go to a bar is a dead
giveaway that you’re not really looking for someone to just chat with.
And when the news gets out, our email inboxes are going to fill up with
even more spam, these offering cheap generic watermelons from Canada
that will be shipped in a plain brown wrapper.
So maybe the best thing to do about
the Dog Days is to just wait them out. After all, it won’t be long
until Fall is here and then winter. And with it cold, yucky weather and
the wind chill factor. It kind of makes the fleas, ticks, mosquitoes,
sunburns, back-to-school sales, and Dog Days sound pretty good,
doesn’t it?
©2008 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them before they melt.
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