Friday Flames | 6.21.24
A weekly synopsis of what we figured out about the heat, the hytter, the honeymoon, the hairy spines, and the holy Doodlebug.
Today is the longest day of the year! Isn’t it? Maybe it is, but the summer solstice was technically yesterday at 4:51pm ET, its earliest arrival since 1796. Why? Because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is 365.24 days, and solstices and equinoxes shift around from year to year, and that’s why 2100 will not be a leap year.
Also, tonight’s full moon will be a Strawberry Moon (a/k/a the Rose Moon, the Mead Moon, Vat Purnima, and Poson Poya), when the Moon’s orbit around the Earth is in almost in the same plane as the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. It’s also the Honey Moon, which is why a honeymoon is the “sweetest” month of marriage.
There are Supermoons and Micromoons and Blue Moons and Blood Moons, and since very monthly full moon has its own name, we can get cool combinations like a Beaver Blood Moon or a Full Beaver Moon Eclipse (which is more SFW than it sounds).
All of which is to say that when life throws more crap your way than usual (as it has for this week’s podcast guest), it might be a comfort to remember that we’ll never run out of new things to learn about this very complicated universe. Taking some time to get over the moon, or lasso or howl at it, is essential.
Embers in the News
Here are some of the links that peeked through the noisy news cycle this week:
Practice makes perfect There are many scientific factors involved in taking the perfect nap—including why you can increase creativity by holding a steel ball.
Is Time OK? Time “magazine” is also posting a lot about urging us to do less and take more breaks between doing those fewer things.
Will Marvel sue? The name of the 78-million-year-old Lokiceratops rangiformis translates roughly to “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou.”
You’re jiggling, baby Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees for trying to fake out their bosses with “mouse jigglers.”
This week on the podcast
Many 50-year-olds grapple with losing a parent, sending a kid to college, losing a job, or saying goodbye to a home. Catherine Connors has experienced all those things, back-to-back-to-back.
Episode 50: Catherine Connors is grieving everything everywhere all at once.
Currently reading
Magda is reading books about Norwegian summer cabins, hytter, and is finding it's a mixed bag. She's loving Robert Ferguson's loopy The Cabin In The Mountains but felt sad and bleak about Island Summers by Tilly Culme-Seymour. If anyone else knows any books involving a hytte, whether it's memoir or fiction, please let her know.
As part of his continuing “Stuff He Should’ve Read By Now” series, Doug is breathing in the arid despair of The Sheltering Sky. Expressive phrases like “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred” make this heat wave seem balmy. (Read Tennessee Williams’s review here.)
Currently watching
Doug saw Alex Edelman: Just For Us on Broadway armed only with a friend’s endorsement and was amazed by how Edelman commands the stage with pathos and manic energy. The show was planned for just three weeks off-Broadway, and when the Tonys realized it didn’t fit into a specific award category, they made one up.
Before they were interrupted, Mike thought Argylle was hilarious. But on a day where the absolute temperature was in the 90s, Magda found it a little too whimsical. Maybe Magda will be able to fix her attitude when they get back to it, hopefully after this heatwave blows over.
Currently cooking
It was so hot this week that Magda made pasta salad, but her lack of will to live in the heat resulted in a more mid pasta salad than she had envisioned. The missing ingredient was probably marinated artichoke hearts; instead, the black olives and cherry tomatoes had to do all the heavy lifting.
For tonight’s strawberry moon, Doug’s dinner (and beverage) will be on theme. It’s the perfect refreshing antidote—along with a steady supply of Klondike ice cream sandwiches—for when the AQI goes VSF.
Next on the podcast
We’re off next week, as our summer schedule for July and August kicks in. We’ll be back on July 3 with Episode 51, at which point we’ll start publishing this newsletter every other Friday. Why add more Flames to heat like this?
Thanks for reading, and do you want the moon, Mary?
Magda and Doug