The dog days of summer are back again. If you see people wandering around with blank looks on their faces, sleeping peacefully at their desks, and forgetting what they went to the grocery store to get, don't be surprised. These are the days when Sirius the Dog Star rises at about the same time as the sun. Ancients sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing the star was the cause of the hot sultry weather. They believed it to be an evil time when "the sea boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad and all creatures became languid."
Languid. That's what I am, languid. That's a fancy word for "don't want to do anything but stay in an air conditioned room and read a good mystery." Probably as a result of reading British murder mysteries at an early age, the word "languid" always makes me think of a sweet young thing lying back in a punt on the Thames letting her hand trail languidly in the water while a young man in white flannels slowly pushes the pole.
Those of us, who have the urge to take it easy, but feel guilty about it, should realize that laziness is perfectly natural in any season and is shared by nearly every creature on the planet. Contrary to the popular opinion that ants and bees and beavers are industrious and always busy, they really spend most of their time doing nothing at all.
Usually the hot days of late summer bring on silly news stories that match our mood. This summer, though the stories have been strong on the serious side, what with JonBenet Ramsey, OJ and Timothy McVeigh.
But there have been a few to match the season. There was the black "thing" behind Hale Bopp that had many citizens scanning the sky and waiting for the arrival of little green men. And thousands of people visited the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico hunting for the remains of space ships from out there somewhere.
There was one pretty weird story in the papers just last week. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic those $2 billion Stealth bombers that were supposed to save us from the Soviets can't go out in the rain. A couple of years ago it was found that their radar couldn't tell a rain cloud from a mountainside. Now the investigative arm of Congress reports that the world's most expensive aircraft deteriorates in rain, heat and humidity. The plane cannot be deployed overseas, because there are no climate-controlled shelters.
Twenty-one of them are being built at a cost of $44.7 billion. According to the New York Times story, the plane's price tag roughly equals three times its weight in gold. And the funny part of the story is that some members of Congress want to build more of them.
On a more cheerful note, women's professional basketball fits the dog days pattern for fans of women's sports. Three networks have been televising some of the games. We get three a week, and I have been reclining comfortably without guilt for six hours each week watching every game. The first season of the Women's National Basketball Association has been an outstanding success. Attendance figures for the league have now exceeded the million mark.
Then there is the real "dog days crazy" story. Over the Internet recently came a very clever speech given by Kurt Vonnegut at the MIT commencement. It contained such gems as "Use sunscreen; Do one thing every day that scares you; Sing; be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone." Only it turns out that Vonnegut didn't go near MIT and didn't write the speech. It was written by a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich one Friday afternoon while she was "high on coffee and M & M's." Somehow it got onto the e-mail network, somebody for some mysterious reason tacked Vonnegut's name to it and, according to Mary, "It went rocketing through the cyber swamp, from L. A. to Scotland in a vast e-mail letter." I received copies from Aspen, Phoenix, Denver and Houston.
Be patient. That lovely, long Colorado autumn is about to begin.