The New York Times Takes A Stand On A Controversial Issue
In case you were in doubt, the Editorial Board of The New York Times is pro-summer:
No matter how we think of summer, it is, astronomically speaking, like any other season — a segment of the sun’s annual voyage north and south as seen from Earth. Forget the beach towels and the sunscreen. Celestial summer has nothing to do with us. It may seem like the time of year when we drive to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, but it is really the season when the sun begins to set a little farther south each day.
Most of us live within these temporal abstractions easily enough. And no matter what the clock, the calendar or the scientists say, the season is whatever our senses and emotions say it is. It may feel like summer in early April or fall on a cool, gray day in July. The calendar wants to apportion just so much summer and no more. But we know better. We’ll take whatever summer we can find, whenever we can find it.
Tomorrow on the Editorial Page, “Puppies: Super Cute Or Super Adorable?”
Shaking my head.
I think what happened here was, they (NYT staff) were getting ready to finalize the edition for printing and some one realized, “hey, are we going to have an editorial today?” They called upstairs and no one was around, so with about 20 minutes left on deadline, an unpaid summer intern from Princeton (who also has a second unpaid internship at The Onion) put this editorial together.
Maybe they’re trying to hint that global warming could be a good thing.
@al-Ameda:
They should let that intern write Tom Friedman’s column. I bet it would be better
I prefer winter myself, but I’m weird.
You have to get up pretty early in the morning but it also rises a bit further south.
Oh, and summer doesn’t officially start until it is as far south as it’s going to get and starts coming back north. The time when the sun sets a little farther south each day is called winter and spring in the Northern hemisphere
But then they opine about the meteorological summer while speaking of the astronomical season. Wikipedia informs me that many in the Southern Hemisphere such as Australia use the meteorological summer beginning on December 1.
I like how they miss the local color of how the standardization of time was pushed along by the Long Island railroad and the need to keep a schedule. Plus they miss that zone noon happens after it happens in NYC but both are now an hour later due to the day light savings time.
@JKB:
Before someone points it out, I will point out I had my solar movement wrong.
This is why we have temporal abstractions. Time, unconstrained, is a very confusing concept with deep dependency upon your frame of reference.