Hot fun in the summertime

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/06/2016 (3378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prepare to be overwhelmed with excitement, because there are only two more sleeps until it arrives. For those of you not sure what “it” is, we’re talking about the first day of summer.

We know what some of you are thinking: “What? With the fact it’s been pretty hot lately and we’ve been busy barbecuing and driving to the cottage, we assumed summer was already here.”

From a meteorological perspective, you are correct. For professional weather prognosticators, summer began almost three weeks ago (June 1).

From an astronomical perspective, however, the first day of summer formally arrives in Winnipeg on Monday, precisely at 5:34 p.m., the moment the June solstice rolls into town.

It’s the precise time the sun reaches its northernmost point — directly over the Tropic of Cancer — and the Earth’s North Pole tilts directly towards the sun, at about 23.4 degrees.

In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the longest day of the year in terms of daylight; in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the shortest day of the year and known as the winter solstice.

For us northerners, from Monday on out, the days will get a bit shorter each day until the winter solstice trudges into our hemisphere in December.

Still, the solstice is traditionally a time of celebration around the world, which is why we’re welcoming it with our sweltering list of the Top Five Things You Didn’t Know About Summer and Were Too Sweaty to Ask:

 

5) School’s out for summer!

As the Alice Cooper rock anthem School’s Out continues: “School’s out forever / School’s been blown to pieces.”

We all know why students get a two-month holiday in the summer, don’t we? It’s a holdover from our agrarian past, isn’t it? They had to let children out of school so they could spend the long, hot summer months toiling away on the farm, right? We said, RIGHT?

Well, forget it. According to most historical sources, that is nothing more than a myth. The reality is, the busiest times for farmers are spring planting and fall harvest. As the website MentalFloss.com notes, the notion of summer vacation has little to do with plowing fields and everything to do with sweaty, rich, city kids playing hooky with their sweaty, well-to-do parents.

In the past, farm kids didn’t get summers off, instead staying home to help with crops in the spring and fall. It was tougher for city kids who were in classes all year. As cities grew into concrete jungles, MentalFloss explains, middle- and upper-class families started beating the summer heat by fleeing to the cooler countryside.

It didn’t take long for school administrators and politicians to hop on the summer-holiday bandwagon. “So by the turn of the (20th) century, urban districts had managed to cut about 60 school days from the most sweltering part of the year,” the site says. “Rural schools soon adopted the same pattern so they wouldn’t fall behind. Business folks obviously saw an opportunity here.

The summer vacation biz soon ballooned into what is now — one of the country’s largest billion-dollar industries.” Like the song says, “No more pencils / No more books / No more teacher’s dirty looks.”

 

4) ‘I’ve got the fastest set of wheels in town’

Whether you’ve got a little deuce coupe with a flat head mill or a rust bucket held together with duct tape, summer is the time for driving to the beach. What could be safer, right? The most dangerous time to drive is in the winter when roads are turned into treacherous skating rinks covered with ice and snow, right?

Guess what? Once again, you could not be more wrong.

While most drivers (more than 80 per cent) think the roads are more dangerous in winter, studies have shown there are far more accidents and fatalities in the summer months — with August being the most hazardous.

“More fatalities occur on Canadian roads during the summer months than at any other time of year, including the winter holiday season,” the Canada Safety Council warns on its website. “Alcohol, fatigue and aggressive driving are often implicated in these tragedies.”

An estimated one in three traffic fatalities happen during the three months of summer. Fatalities typically drop during days with high amounts of snow, because more people stay at home and those on the road tend to drive more slowly in inclement weather, experts say.

What makes summer so dangerous? It’s all in the math: in summer, there is more of everything on the roads, including inexperienced drivers, distracted vacationers, motorcyclists and construction sites.

The hot weather can also do a number on a vehicle’s tires, increasing the risk of blowouts.

“Vacationing drivers are often unfamiliar with the roads, as well, which can lead to erratic or unpredictable driving (especially when there’s something cool to look at),” notes esurance.com. “And because they’re unfamiliar, they may drive too slowly.”

 

3) ‘Sing along with us: dee dee dee-dee dee’

Bathing suit? Check! A cooler full of ice-cold drinks? Check! Several gallons of sunscreen? Check! Think you’re ready for summer? Well, check again, because unless you’ve loaded up your mobile device with hundreds of the hottest tunes, there’s no way you are ready to chill and eke out every ounce of enjoyment from this all-too-short season.

Whether you’re bopping to the beach, hosting a backyard barbecue, or sitting on the stoop with a pitcher of margaritas, everyone knows summer isn’t summer unless you’re blasting your music at a decibel level that can drown out the neighbour’s lawn mower.

Where the arguments start is when you try to pin down the single greatest summer song of all time. For example, in a surprise selection in 2013, Rolling Stone magazine picked 1964’s Dancing in the Street by Martha and the Vandellas as No. 1 on its list of the top 100 summer songs of all time. Gushed the magazine: “The ultimate invitation to get outside and cut loose, Dancing in the Street reinvents the world as a giant summertime block party. Co-written by Marvin Gaye, it has the greatest party-jam lyrics ever written and the drums hit like a gunshot. Martha Reeves sounds like she’s doing more than just kicking off a party — she sounds like she’s starting a revolution.”

On the other-other hand, Billboard magazine’s choice for summer’s greatest anthem is (dramatic pause) the 1962 classic Surfin’ Safari by The Beach Boys. Argues Billboard: “The Beach Boys pay homage to their favourite sport… with lines about loading up their Woodie — that’s a board-friendly station wagon for you gremmies — and inviting the world to the best beaches for waves.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOg1MxozVPc

Our personal favourite? In the Summertime, the mega-hit that took Ray Dorset, lead singer of British bubblegum blues band Mungo Jerry, all of 10 minutes to write. It contains such questionable lyrics as: “Have a drink, have a drive / Go out and see what you can find.” No wonder the roads are so (bad word) dangerous in the summer.

 

2) ‘Summer loving happened so fast’

 

As anyone who has seen the musical Grease multiple times can tell you, there’s nothing like a summer night to encourage young lovers to, as the song says, get “friendly down in the sand.” That said, it’s a bit hard to say whether people feel friskier in the summer months.

For instance, according to LiveScience.com, a 2012 study in the U.S. found people are most interested in sex during the early summer — as well as December and January. Researchers at Villanova University spent four years analyzing keywords in Google searches and found searches for keywords related to “finding dates, prostitutes and pornography” peaked during June and July, and again in winter.  “Wherever we looked within these three different areas, whether it was searches for ‘eHarmony’ or for ‘brothel’ — there was this exact same pattern,” researcher Patrick Markey, an associate professor of psychology, was quoted as saying.

The findings suggest the peaks are linked to an increase in the amount of time people spend around other people at summer activities or holiday gatherings.

On the other hand, according to a 2012 article on Slate.com, seasonal birth-rate studies show births tend to decrease in spring in southern and tropical climates, indicating conception was less common the previous summer, whereas folks in cooler northern climes show the opposite pattern, with peak birth rates in the spring — nine months after summertime.

The question is: do some like it hot? Apparently, it depends. A 2013 report in Britain’s Daily Mail noted: “Men want sex more in the winter, according to new research. Scientists found men were more aroused by revealing pictures of women during colder months than they were during the summer.”

We feel compelled to point out hockey isn’t a big deal in Britain.

 

1) ‘Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be CEOs’

Speaking of sex, if you’re counting on the fruit of your loins growing up to be the head of a major corporation, you may want to avoid giving birth in the summer.

According to a 2012 study at the University of British Columbia, babies born in the summer are less likely to become CEOs. Researchers at UBC’s Sauder School of Business looked at a sample of CEOs at some of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S. to study the so-called birth-date effect. They found nearly one-quarter were born in spring — 12.53 per cent in March, 10.67 per cent in April — whereas just 12 per cent of 375 CEOs at Standard & Poor’s 500 companies were born in summer (6.13 per cent in June and 5.87 per cent in July).

The study says summer babies have trouble climbing the corporate ladder because of the way schools group children by age, meaning June and July babies are the youngest in their respective classes. The early success of older kids in a grade leads to greater opportunities and gives them an advantage.

“Older children within the same grade tend to do better than the youngest, who are less intellectually developed,” said Sauder finance Prof. Maurice Levi, co-author of the study. “Early success is often rewarded with leadership roles and enriched learning opportunities, leading to future advantages that are magnified throughout life… We could be excluding some of the business world’s best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early.”

Other studies have suggested babies born in the fall become better athletes than summer tots, whereas, thanks to the abundance of sunshine, summer-born folks are reportedly less depressed, so they make excellent newspaper columnists.

 

We have lots more to say on this seasonal topic, but instead of droning on we’ve decided to give the last word to the band Mungo Jerry, that summarized our summery feelings with the following legendary lyric: “Dah dah-dah/ Dee-dah-do dee-dah-do dah-do-dah / Dah-do-dah-dah-dah.” And they really meant it.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca