The shortest day of the year

...or, conversely, the longest night of the year, has arrived.

The winter solstice occurred at 5:30 a.m. UTC today. That is, the axial tilt of our planet’s polar hemisphere is farthest away from the star that it orbits.

And by “our planet” I mean Earth. Terra firma. Any inhabitants of other planets who happen to be reading this, I refer you to Emily Latella.

And if you are a Neo-Druid -- I’m not, by the way -- this might be of interest to you as well:

(Photo of sunrise at Stonehenge taken by Mark Grant on Dec. 22, 1985. Released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5)

The long, hot summer approaches

If memory serves, I have blogged about the equinoxes but never about the solstice. Another solstice is right around the corner, too, on Sunday, June 21, at 05:45 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which is what GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) has been called since January 1, 1972. So says the Wikipedia article on Solstice.

Read the article to your heart’s content. Enjoy all the drawings and illustrations. You will probably encounter a lot of information you didn’t know.

But I would bet dollars (remember them?) to doughnuts that you will still be confused.

My memory turns out to be wrong; I have blogged about the solstice before, right here, last year (oh, look, I made a little rhyme). It’s all coming back to me now. When I blogged last year about the June solstice I subsequently learned that Pat of Arkansas had actually visited both Stonehenge and Machu Picchu, which I erroneously called Macchu Pichu.

I hope the Inca can find it in their hearts to forgive me.

I have it on good authority from old-time comedian Jimmy Durante that the Inka Dinka do.


Sweet!

Some may say I have already been out in the sun too long, but this post makes perfect sense to me.

And good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.