I took this picture today in our garden:
The white caterpillar in the middle is a row of the big marshmallows they use to make silage.
Any time after the middle of August in Norway can be reckoned as autumn. The schools go back and the weather begins to hint that the summer is over. My wife even went mushroom hunting today and found a few chanterelles (about five, actually), and we had soup for dinner. I think it’s peculiar, but there’s not much I can do about it.
Most of the apples in the garden still aren’t ripe — excuse the blur, but it was raining.
A Bad Guide 
“the middle of August …The schools go back”: in Scotland too. It’s being Northern, isn’t it?
It feels like the start of autumn in London at the moment. A friend said recently that when you study the solstices, August never should have been a summer month anyway.
It ought to be May, June and July. August does have warmer weather than May, there’s never snow in August.
I’m glad to know Scotland and Norway have another thing in common, dearie. Thanks.
At least over here, people have long since taken to calling the solstices and equinoxes “the first day of …” There are many who will tell you, in a know-it-all way, that it’s still summer because it’s the middle of September, or it’s not winter yet because it’s the middle of December. I like pointing out to them that Midsummer Night’s Dream refers to what they would call the very beginning of summer.
An older dictionary that I looked at took the sensible view that summer is roughly June through August and so on, but this idea is not popular in the US.
this idea is not popular in the US
I find that hard to believe. It was a common idea in Texas 40 years ago. I’ve never heard or read of an alternative viewpoint – except from those self-appointed experts on solstices that you mention.
There are a few weirdoes here who, on a Sunday, will unexpectedly refer to the week after next as “next week”, as if that Sunday were the first day of the current week. I have done some fieldwork on this matter. These people seem to be in a kind of trance on the subject of “the first day of the week”. When you subject them to questions, they tend to become uncertain and back down. But none has yet been able to tell me where they got their idea. It’s there and persists, but does not hold up to examination. Is it of Jewish origin ?
What I mean is, the secular definition of a week – the one used in counting KWs (Kalendarwoche [week of the year]), for instance – starts with Monday and ends with Sunday. On radio and tv, you hear little jokes about “the first day of the week being the hardest” (i.e. Monday, when work starts again).
I just found this confusing exposition in the WiPe on Sabbath:
Since Puritan times, most English-speaking Christian denominations equate the “Lord’s Day” with the “Sabbath”, a position also held by most Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths. The “Lord’s Day” is kept in commemoration of the resurrection of Christ and is observed on the first day of the week instead of the day declared as the “Sabbath Day” in the Bible (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown). The first day of the week historically has been a day of worship for those of the pagan faith – a day to worship the sun – hence the name of the day “Sunday”. This practice of first day or to some Christians “Lord’s Day” worship is generally not confused with the biblical sabbath by most non-English-speaking European countries where the word “Sabbath” is the name for “Saturday” – for example, in Serbo-Croatian the name for “Saturday” is “Subota” – “Sabbath”.
Sunday is chosen by many to be their day of rest, and of communal worship. It is considered both the first day and the “eighth day” of the seven-day week. Some calendars have been altered and replace Saturday with Sunday. Sunday on those calendars would then be the designated “seventh day of the week” ISO 8601 standard).
Look, God started creating the world of Adam and Eve on a Monday morning around about eight or nine am (most probably), and on the seventh day he rested. That would be the following Sunday. What’s good enough for God is good enough for me: Sunday is the last day of the week and Monday is the first.
One thing about the Kalendarukene: they don’t use it in the US — or at least, they never used to. So if you talk about taking a holiday in “Week 34”, no one knows when that is. I think it’s a good system, although I still don’t really have the same feeling for Week 34 as I do for “the middle of August”.
“So if you talk about taking a holiday in “Week 34″, ….”: in Cambridge weeks of the academic term are numbered including, inevitably, “week zero”.
Stu, I swear I’m not making this up. This crazy solstice/equinox = change of season idea has totally taken over. I do think that the change has been mostly in the last 40 years or so, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it took root more slowly in places like the wilder parts of Texas.
dearieme: good for them for starting with zero.
The ambiguity of “next Wednesday” or “this Wednesday” never goes away. Some people use the former to mean the next Wednesday coming up; some use it to mean Wednesday of next week (for some meaning of next week) and use the latter to mean Wednesday of this week, even if it’s now Thursday. One hears praises for the UK expression “Wednesday week” as an unambiguous alternative, but I wish I knew the rest of that story — like, if it’s now Tuesday [or Thursday], is tomorrow [or yesterday] “this Wednesday” or “next Wednesday” or both? And what about last Wednesday? It seems to me that that could mean the most recent Wednesday or the Wednesday of the week now ended.
By the way, on a Sunday I might say “this Wednesday” meaning the Wednesday three days hence; but that doesn’t mean that I think the week has already begun on Sunday. I can’t explain it.
“this Wednesday” is “Wednesday coming”, isn’t it? “next Wednesday” is hopelessly ambiguous unless you happen to know the use that is meant by some other clue; I’ve never understood “Wednesday week” at all. I don’t understand “Wednesday next” either. But then when I moved to Cambridge nearly thirty years ago I spent many weeks going down two flights of stairs to pee because I hadn’t understood that a door marked “Private” meant that behind it was a loo reserved for male members of the officer class. Awfully exotic, the English.
These people seem to be in a kind of trance on the subject of “the first day of the week”.
At least one branch of the US government seems to be in a kind of trance on the subject of the beginnings, middles, and ends of the seasons. Here the National Aeronautics and Space Administration explains it all to young people.
empty, at that link the sentences
mark the point where aliens take over the thought processes. They think they’re so smart, but I can do’em one better.
I suppose there would be agreement that the days where it is hottest are somethere around the middle of “summer”. The hottest days are not usually in June in the norther hemisphere, but severak weeks later. The (atmosphere of) the hemisphere in question takes weeks to warm up gradually, as a result of being exposed to the sun’s heat for ever longer periods of daytime. Thus the “middle of summer” is not the sommer solstice. QED.
The aliens got at my spelling.
The Argument From Design is a traditional argument intended to show that God exists. Here, I am using the Argument From Wackiness in support of my claim that aliens exist.
Stu, it’s OK with me if they choose to call the solstice the middle of summer. It was called Midsummer in days of yore, presumably on the grounds that summer is the time of the longest days, the most light. If people want to go on from there to declare that summer is the quarter of the year centered on that date, so that it begins and ends on definite days in early May and early August, they have my blessing, although it sounds a little fussy.
I’m one of those who think of summer as June, July, and August. That means emphasizing heat over light, as you remind us. I don’t need summer to be defined with definite start and end date, though, or to be precisely a quarter of the year.
I find either of these systems preferable to the wacky one that has taken over in the US.
What gets me about this lesson from the Space people is that they have mixed up the latter wacky system with the first-named system. They have the June solstice as the middle of summer and the September equinox as the beginning of autumn, therefore presumably the end of summer — which makes the March equinox the beginning of summer even though it is also according to them the beginning of spring. This makes spring zero days long; autumn, too. They can’t have thought it through.
These are the same people who once failed to reach Mars because of some confusion between metric and English units.
Suppose they didn’t “fail to reach Mars”, but arranged for the foop-up to happen !? Because the aliens are on Mars, and don’t want to be discovered.
It’s still hitting 100 here. We won’t see Autumn until close to the end of October. But I’m ready for the cool.
I’m one of those who think of summer as June, July, and August.
Same here.
I’m ready for the cool.
Same here, in spades.
You must be crazy… summer is December, January and February.
¿En qué mundo viven? ;-)
>A. J. P. Crown (29 August; 4:56 pm)
The names of days in Portugal give an idea about the first and the last days according the Catholic Church: “ Segunda feira, terça feira, quarta feira, quinta feira, sexta feira, sábado, domingo”. The last was “sábado”.
Wow, that’s interesting, Jesús. I had no idea the Portuguese named the days like that. Do they do the months the same way?
>A. J. P. Crown
No, the months are similar: “Janeiro, Fevereiro, Março, Abril…”
Regarding the name of days, when I was a child I couldn’t understand how the first day of week in that langue was “second” (segunda [feira]). I confess it took me too time because of lack of inquiries. Only in Portugal the Catholic Church “won” the latin (pagan according to it) names.
When I was in Berkeley a few weeks ago it was rather cool – misty in the mornings, sun in the afternoon, cooler in the evening – unlike last year when July was very hot. The cool was fine with me, last year I found the hills hard to climb in the heat. Now that I am back in Halifax is it warmer, we had just a few drops of rain a few days ago, and yesterday and today it was definitely HOT. I think it is because of the approaching hurricane: Earl is likely to hit us by the weekend, and in anticipation we are getting not only hot air but hot wind. It is very unusual here to open the door to the outside and feel you are opening an oven.
Vietnamese does Portuguese one better. Saturday is ngày thứ bảy ‘day #7’. Only Sunday is chủ nhật ‘master’s day’.
At least in San Francisco (which is a lot chillier than Berkeley and Oakland), August is supposed to be the foggiest month (and hence the saying, “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in SF”).
Only Sunday is chủ nhật ‘master’s day’.
Is that a synonym for ‘Lord’s day’; is it of Christian origin?
Saturday is ngày thứ bảy ‘day #7′
So they too must have no Day #1.
The Master is always Number One, within and without Christian tradition.
You just like the Master because he drinks margaritas.
>A. J. P. Crown
Oh yes! The “Magister” had talked about “margaritas” (LOL); so, as you know, these are pearls.
I prefer the Doctor.
Martha Jones.
So they watch Dr Who in Buenos Aires. Well, I’m dumfounded.
Is that a synonym for ‘Lord’s day’; is it of Christian origin?
Yes. Also chúa nhật ‘Lord’s day’. From Portuguese missionaries I’m pretty sure. Bathrobe has an old page on this.
No, AJP, they don’t, it’s a pity. But a happy few induced by this wise man are (is?) absolutely contaminated by the Doctor’s charm. (It makes me so happy!!)
In the Netherlands it is irrelevant whether August is part of summer or not, since everyone knows it will rain the whole month anyway.
At least one of our newspapers has remarked that the (local, wild) mushrooms are very early this year; perhaps it is Europe-wide?
We have lots of toadstools.
For the past two weeks mushrooms have been extremely cheap at my local supermarket – and they don’t come from the Netherlands for a change !! They seem to be German ones grown on Netherlandic principles, e.g. battery champignons.
We are sitting here on the southern coast of Massachusetts waiting to find out how big a deal Hurricane Earl will be. He won’t be a hurricane by the time he gets here, but he may bring enough wind and rain to do some damage.
Dearieme, do you use “toadstool” to mean “any fungus shaped like a mushroom but not good to eat”?
We here in inland Massachusetts are expecting Earl to expend his energy on you coastal types and just bring us a little rain, which we can use. Thanks for absorbing the shock!
I remember driving up Cape Cod, the day after a hurricane, and there were lots of trees blown down and lying across the roads. That was sometime in the late ‘eighties or early ‘nineties.
In Halifax we had hurricane Juan in 2003, and hundreds of trees were uprooted, making many streets impassable. My neighbourhood was without water and electricity for about 10 days. Right now we are waiting to see if we will get a repeat with hurricane Earl, which is due to arrive on Saturday – that is tomorrow morning. It is supposed to have calmed down some by now, but the unusually warm seawater might make it pick up more speed.
I like the sound of “unusually warm seawater”, though.
I use “toadstool” to mean any fungus shaped like a mushroom but not known to be safe to eat. I envy a friend of mine who used to live in Basle/Basel where, he said, you could go mushroom-picking and then carry your harvest to the municipal mushroom inspector who’d pick out the unsafe ones for you.
(I also envied him his salary; at the end of the month they’d see how much salary was left over then jump in the Porsche and zoom down to Milan to watch the opera.)
You may call it whatever season you want, but I still have to cut the grass tomorrow.
There’s an old Norwegian word for mushrooms, paddehatter “toad hats”, now only in the expression skyte opp som paddehatter “shoot up like mushrooms”, used e.g. for explosive growth of expensive cafés in a newly fashionable neighbourhood. I wonder if they are the same idea, distorted by some folk etymology.
Oh, Julia, I feel obliged to push my wife’s blog again. Meet Dr. Whatson.
Thank you, Trond, I love the SARDIS!!
(I will go back there, now)
Calling mushrooms “(something’s) hats” is quite widespread. Even in English, the top part of a typical mushroom is called “cap”.
Here is a giant mushroom hat, and a smaller one. These are all examples of Pilzhut. A Filzhut is a felt hat, a Falzhut is a napkin folded like a pointed hat, a Pfalzhut is a hat as worn in the Palatinate. A Pelzhut is a fur hat.
Finally, we have a quilted mushroom cape.
We marked a sunny Autumn afternoon yesterday by the Festival of the Cropping of the Morello Cherries. Our small, fan-trained tree on the garage wall yielded 16 lbs, which equates to an awful lot of ice-cream with cherries-in-brandy over the winter.
How do you get it to give you big cherries? Our morellos were so small this year they weren’t worth eating (although I forced myself to eat quite a lot).
Here is a Pilshut of sorts.
I think we were lucky with the Spring – even if we got no fruit, the blossom would justify the space the tree takes up – and then June was lovely and July really hot. August was cooler and wet: we put off picking the crop until we’d had a good, dry, sunny day and then grabbed the chance. It’s a lovely job for two to do, since I can reach the top of the crop without a ladder, but I toil if I have to bend much. Otherwise our only trick is to feed the tree with ash from garden fires, in the vague belief that fruit “like” potash.
Well we’ve got plenty of ash. It’s probably all in the weather.
Where do you find those things, Grumbly!
The first giant Pilzhut does not make me think of a mushroom at all. It looks like someone emptied a giant pot of spaghetti on the lady’s head, but somehow the spaghetti clung to the outside of the pot instead of the inside.
Now I don’t have to tell you that I survived the passage of hurricane Earl. It was quite well-behaved by hurricane standards, much less strong than the previous one (Juan, in 2003, which had destroyed so many trees) and it hit the shore and crossed the province in the time-frame expected. My neighbourhood only had about 24 hours without electricity, so no big deal. Almost everything was closed yesterday (Saturday), but my friends and I went to a neighbourhood bar where there was candlelight. The good thing is that the hurricane made the air temperature much more pleasant than during the days leading to its arrival. But this won’t last: we are promised two days’ rain later this week.
One thing that happened in New York City when they expected a hurricane to hit the city (this was sometime in the late eighties) was that everyone put masking tape on their windows to stop shards of glass blowing around. Then, being New York, a lot of people didn’t bother to take it off again afterwards. In the sunshine over the years it formed yellowish crystalline stripes (often they were in the pattern of a union jack) on the glass. They became very hard to remove; sometimes occasionally you can see them still, twenty years later. New York’s a funny place; the people who live there spend enormous amounts of money on what some things look like and then just totally ignore other things.
I wonder if that’s the nonhurricane I remember so fondly. They actually closed the office I worked in and told everybody to go home at lunchtime. I shrugged, walked outside, looked at the blue cloudless sky, and strolled around Manhattan (one of my favorite activities). There wasn’t even a drop of rain, let alone a hurricane.
I gather that hurricane predictions have become a lot more accurate since then. With this one, the predictions were right on, at least in this part of the continent.
There wasn’t even a drop of rain, let alone a hurricane.
We had about the same thing some years ago. To explain that blunder the Martian Meteorological Services then invented the new concept of “minicyclone”.
Here we had very little rain, but (before the hurricane hit) strong warm winds, and (during it) very strong winds (temperature undetermined as I stayed indoors with windows closed, watching the trees get buffeted). We usually get warm winds when there is a hurricane farther South, but it is usually spent before it gets here. Juan in 2003 was a wake-up call, so this time most people were better prepared, and Earl was not as strong as Juan.