Up and autumn — fall’s a season to embrace

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/09/2017 (3250 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prepare to crack open the champagne, kids, because fall is finally here.

That means it’s time to pack away your Bermuda shorts, sunscreen and Frisbees, bundle up in down-filled parkas and prepare to spend the next nine months hiding in the den, watching professional hockey on your big-screen TV.

The arrival of fall can be a tad confusing. For professional weather prognosticators, who believe in a strictly meteorological perspective, fall in the northern hemisphere arrived about three weeks ago on Sept. 1.

From an astronomical perspective, however, the first day of fall arrived in Winnipeg on Friday at precisely 3:02 p.m., the moment the September equinox rolled into town.

That was the exact moment the sun (you remember the sun, don’t you?) crossed the celestial equator — the imaginary line in the sky above the Earth’s equator — from north to south and vice versa in March.

Fun astronomical fact: The equinox marks the two times each year (spring and fall) when day and night are roughly the same length because the sun shines directly on the equator.

Whatever your perspective, the point is fall is here, which means it’s time to celebrate, because this is a traditional time for feasting in many cultures around the world, especially the culture that lives in my house.

In case you can’t tell, I love fall. It is a season designed for big, husky folks of my particular gender, guys who are the size of convenience stores and who do not feel comfortable cavorting in Speedo swimming suits during the scorching days of summer.

In a sincere and humanitarian effort to help you transition to our new season (I’m told we have four of them, but it’s hard to tell), here’s five of the major reasons I am so fond of fall:

Heavy sweaters. And when I say heavy sweaters, I am not referring to guys who sweat like Mike Tyson at a Grade 5 spelling bee. No, I am talking about bulky wool sweaters, which are the key fashion statement for autumn.

Like a lot of guys my size, I love hiding my ever-expanding belly under multiple layers of wool. The best thing about sweaters is that you don’t have to tuck them in, which would only accentuate the girth of the wearer.

Best of all, when me and one of my big buddies — such as the famously rotund Winnipeg comedian Big Daddy Tazz — get together, we can slip on huge fuzzy sweaters, then rub against each other and produce enough static electricity to power a small northern Manitoba town for an entire winter.

Tiny chocolate bars. For those of you totally out of touch with popular culture, Halloween falls in fall, and with legions of ghosties and goblins pounding on our doors, we are legally required to stock up on several thousand kilograms of miniature candy bars.

Speaking as someone who is medically required to watch his waistline, I am pretty sure tiny chocolate bars do not have anywhere near the same amount of sugar and other bad things found in the standard treats. Which means, scientifically speaking, you can eat as many of them as you want without gaining a pound or getting cavities.

After Halloween, when I am sitting at my home computer trying to come up with professionally amusing thoughts, I can hear the leftover miniature chocolate bars calling to me from the kitchen.

“Eat us, Doug!” they cry out, like sirens luring sailors to their doom in the days of myth. “We are tiny and delicious and, apparently, we contain no calories at all. Trust us.”

Pumpkin spice. Unless you have been living in a drainpipe for several years, you will know that fall has come to be defined by two simple words — pumpkin spice. I’m talking pumpkin-spice lattes, pumpkin-spice Oreo cookies, pumpkin-spice doughnuts, pumpkin-spice soda pop, pumpkin-spice low-fat yogurt, pumpkin-spice chewing gum, pumpkin-spice aftershave, pumpkin-spice underarm deodorant and, well, you get the general pumpkin-spice picture.

It’s only a matter of time before we are asking clerks at McDonald’s drive-thrus what toy comes with the McPumpkin meal. I’m fine with that.

My birthday. My birthday is in fall. I’m not telling you this because I want you to send me presents, although single-malt Scotch and foreign sports cars are always welcome. No, I’m telling you this to explain why I am such a (bad word) genius.

It turns out, according to actual scientific studies, that babies born in September are smarter than babies born at other times of the year, which explains why I am such a whiz with the semicolon. Also, September babies are less likely to grow up to be juvenile delinquents or criminals and, best of all, fall babies are far more likely to live to be 100 than tots who pop out in other months. We fall babies are also better athletes, which you would know if you’d ever seen me on the bocce court.

When it comes to lovin’. Fall is a (bad word) oven, by which we mean it is considered the sexiest time of the year. And that has nothing to do with folks wandering around in sexy wool sweaters. No, it’s because science tells us levels of testosterone in both men and women are at their highest in the fall. Also — and do not read this next bit if you are having breakfast — sperm concentrations rebound in late autumn in what is known as the “overshoot phenomenon.”

Consider the Siberian hamster, if you will. LiveScience.com tells us that, in the fall, this hamster’s testes “swell up to 17 times their size from short days to long; the swelling allows, in part, the animals to time reproduction properly.”

There are many more reasons to love the fall (jumping in crunchy piles of leaves, for example), but I don’t have time to share them with you right now, because I need to help my pet Siberian hamster, Rupert, get up the stairs. He keeps tripping over himself for some reason.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca