merican analysts keep trying to fit the country into familiar patterns—ignoring the many ways in which it’s an exception.
Good morning! Happy Flag Day 🇺🇸! I have my stars and stripes flying today. I’m just hoping we don’t get bad weather and it blows loose. Three weeks to Dog Days 🐶 of Summer 🌻. Partly cloudy with some more clouds and possibly rain showers pushing in and 61 degrees in Delmar, NY. ⛅ I didn’t bring an umbrella but I caught the earlier bus in to hopefully avoid the rain. ☔ Plus, I need to find room in the other unit’s refrigerator because ours is broken to keep lunch and dinner cold on this most long of work days. Summer is coming. There is a south-southwest breeze at 8 mph. 🍃. The dew point is 52 degrees. The skies will clear around 5 pm.
Today will have a chance of showers, mainly between 10am and 2pm. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 67 degrees at 3pm. 11 degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around May 9th. Maximum dew point of 52 at 8am. South wind 8 to 16 mph becoming west in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 28 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Another cool day on tap. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 73 degrees. The record high of 96 was set in 1892.
It should be a busy day at work 💼 but hopefully this will make the day go by quickly as it often does and the weekend will arrive. Then one more week of session and then hopefully it will be summertime and I can spend a bunch of nights in the wilderness and by the pool. 🏊
The sun will set at 8:34 pm with dusk around 9:09 pm, which is 26 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for partly clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around 61 degrees. The dew point will be 50 degrees. There will be a west breeze at 9 mph. Today will have 15 hours and 17 minutes of daytime, an increase of 27 seconds over yesterday.
Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 54 degrees at 3am. Three degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical night around June 8th. Maximum dew point of 50 at 8pm. Southwest wind 5 to 9 mph. In 2018, we had partly cloudy skies. It got down to 56 degrees. The record low of 42 occurred back in 1985.
As previously noted, there are 3 weeks until Dog Days of Summer 🌻 when the sun will be setting at 8:36 pm with dusk at 9:10 pm. On that day in 2018, we had hot, humid, mostly sunny, thunderstorm and temperatures between 92 and 75 degrees. What do you expect for the Dog Days of Summer? 🐶 Typically, the high temperature is 82 degrees. We hit a record high of 99 back in 1919.
And if that’s not enough – that’s when I’m planning to start the summer vacation – Labor Day Weekend is only 11 weeks away. ⛵ Summer comes and goes so quickly but I expect a relatively quiet autumn, and in recent years autumn had been quite mild. But first I’m looking forward to some hot summer days at the beach.
The Great Depression had instilled a sense of frugality and reuse into the populace. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, advertisements for plastic products focused on their design and durability. Dow’s “Styron” added “new color, beauty, and serviceability” to kitchenware and toys, and Monsanto’s “Lustrex Styrene” made “cheerful, convenient, and practical picnicwares” that were easy to clean. Disposability wasn’t yet a selling point, because it was more desirable to have a product that lasted.
Monsanto lifestyle ad from 1952, featuring a dinner table full of plastic dishes and silverware. The ad copy includes the tagline "Plastics make perfect gifts — for every occasion!"
That changed, however, in the ’50s. A now-infamous Life magazine spread in 1955 welcomed the new era of “Throwaway Living” with a photo of a family gleefully tossing their disposable napkins, plates, and utensils into the air, rejoicing in the reduced cleaning time. The move toward single-use plastics wasn’t a random occurrence. It was a calculated strategy by the industry in the interest of protecting its bottom line.
