By RAY WYCHE
Staff writer

The evidence is all around us. The weather is hotter and more humid than we remember its being last summer. Tempers rise with the thermometer and civility seems to be on vacation.

The sultriness of the stagnant air is inescapable. Activities we once considered enjoyable have become uninviting. A general malaise appears to have fallen upon the land.

There are indicators that nature is playing rough with us. Our energy has become a far-away memory.

Even animals seem to have slipped into an indifferent, lazier mode; dogs seldom move from their flopped, recumbent positions.
The stock market has turned lackadaisical as traders appear to have lost their old zeal to frantically buy and sell securities. With the exception of major league baseball, sports have ceased to be interesting. Television’s offerings consist mostly of stupefying re-runs.

In short, life, beginning around July 3 and lasting through approximately Aug. 11, has gone sour.
There’s a reason for this widespread misery: it’s dog days.
Dog days are not a local or new phenomenon. It was probably the ancient Egyptians who noticed a change in their world in mid-summer, when the Nile flooded and temperatures and humidity rose. These occurrences came when the star Sirius rose and set at the same time as the sun.

The Egyptians figured that Sirius, being the brightest star in the sky (after the sun) and known as the dog star, was bound to generate heat, and that this heat combined with that of the sun when the two were in conjunction caused the elevated heat levels that brought about all these unpleasant changes on earth.

The time of the conjunction varies with latitude and with the gradual movement of the constellations , so to be on the safe side, the ancients decreed that dog days begin 20 days before the conjunction and last until 20 days afterwards

The Greeks and the Romans later adopted this theory that held that Sirius was the cause of the added hot weather, erroneous as it was; the heat generated by Sirius is insignificant by the time it reaches the earth, about 8.6 light years distant.

Sirius is part of the constellation canis major, or big dog, and with a little imagination, the stars’ positions in the constellation could be said to resemble the outline of a dog. The Romans named this unpleasant period canisculares dies, days of the dog.

We have to agree with the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans on one thing: mid-summer does bring higher temperatures and more humid weather. And this period has been blamed for a number of unpleasant situations that people, particularly older people, say is the result of dog days.

Dogs go mad in dog days; hens will not set (incubate eggs); snakes become blind; milk will curdle (when it wouldn’t in hot temperatures in other days of summer); if it rains on the first day of dog days, it will rain on the other 39 days; “scum” (algae) appears on the surface of ponds when it does not occur at other times; people fall victim to “fevers” not present at any other time of the year. (This last may have some basis in fact; Rome was surrounded by swamps, perfect breeding places for malaria-bearing mosquitoes that needed the moisture and heat of dog days to reproduce).

The term dog days has been credited with lending its name to several unsavory situations in our present-day vocabulary. A poorly performing stock is called a dog (as is a repulsively ugly girl). Sick as a dog describes a generally lousy feeling.

Some say the expression dog-tired came about from the habit of dogs be listless during this uncomfortable period. (However, the Oxford English Dictionary says the term dog-tired was spawned in early England to describe the condition of hounds after a long chase after game.) The mild expression, “dog-gone,” has no relation to canisculares dies, but rather is a euphemistic rendering of a stronger profanity.

If you find dog days to be intolerable, despite air conditioning and perhaps a new, enticing pastime, there is some hope for you. You can move to the Southern Hemisphere, where the appearance of Sirius is brief.

Or you can relocate your suffering self to the far north, at least as far as North Latitude 74 degrees, in line with the northern half of Greenland and the northern tip of Russia, where Sirius remains below the horizon and, therefore, is unable to add its heat to that of the sun to bring us a time of a misery.