"'The 'never go outside without S.P.F. 50' approach treated sun exposure as if it were universally harmful,' said Dr. Lucy McBride..."

"... an internal medicine physician in Washington, D.C.... Research has found that spending more time in the sun is associated with lower blood pressure....Sunlight may also help support the immune system by controlling inflammation and immune cells.... A well-known benefit of sun exposure is that it triggers the body to produce vitamin D.... The research on sunshine’s potential benefits is still quite limited, so it’s hard to know how to interpret or apply it, or how to square it with the risks for skin cancer, Dr. McBride said. And you shouldn’t stop using sun protection altogether, she said.... Ultimately, it may make sense to consider sunlight's potential benefits along with its harms, Dr. McBride said. 'Skin cancer remains a serious threat,' she said. 'But it is about moving beyond fear-based, one-size-fits-all messaging.'"

From "What are the Health Benefits of Sunshine? We’ve been taught to avoid the sun at all costs. Is that right?" (NYT).

Missing from the article is anything about the chemicals in sunscreen we've been urged to slather on repeatedly and excessively. Personally, despite being at great risk for skin cancer, I don't use the stuff. I go out in the very early morning or I use clothing for protection or I try to stay mostly in the shade. Here I am a year ago, in the semi-shade, interacting with a mushroom...

... and if you're inclined to say Althouse, you need to get that spot on your back checked out, let me assure you, I have!

Did you notice?

The Biocore — at 1:45.

Photo by Meade.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments. And support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"There are, like, 8 people down there today. Is that normal?"

Said a woman returning from what is my sunrise vantage point.

My answer: "Maybe after the eclipse, there's more interest in the sun."

We experienced the longest darkness in Indiana...

... in Vincennes, Indiana (a place named after François-Marie Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, who was burned at the stake in 1736, "during the French war with the Chickasaw nation").

His name glows on a vibrant mural:

I don't know if this is the town's official motto, but we talked a lot about it: "Where everyone fulfills their God-given purpose!"

It seemed to be a grandiose claim, but I said maybe the people interpret God's requirements narrowly, so that it's not understood to be terribly difficult. My son Chris, texting, said, maybe God does not give them any particularly challenging purpose. I contemplated whether Chris was saying something different from what I'd just said and decided he certainly was. My idea was that people are self-serving, and his idea was that God was easy-going and pretty darned nice. Hearing that, Meade noted that "fulfills" could mean that citizens are simply wherever they are in a process of fulfilling.

We walked through the festival atmosphere on historic Main Street, by the Wabash River, but given the hubbub and live, loud rock music, we kept moving until we arrived at the memorial for the men who died in the War of the Union....

We set up on the lush grass by the county courthouse, which looked like this at 3:01:51 — 3 minutes before the beginning of the total eclipse:

And here it is, at the very beginning of the totality:

Thanks to Vincennes for hosting us and many others. The show was free and the number of dollars we spent was equal to the number of minutes of the totality of the eclipse. Meade bought a pulled pork sandwich at a food truck:

The text at the pig silhouette in the lower right corner of the truck deserves contemplative comparison to the aforementioned "Where everyone fulfills their God-given purpose!" It says: "Every butt loves a rub."

Where were you when the light went out?

Did you experience the totality? We did. But there's been so much driving that I'm not in the state of mind to discuss whether it was life-changing and so forth. I have some more pictures, not serious pictures of the actual corona, which I leave to professional photographers with special equipment. This is just a picture I happened to take where we were. Tomorrow, I’ll show you the cool little town where we witnessed the celestial spectacle. Now is the time to cuddle up and watch Purdue beat UConn.

"She was hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest, four hours from the summit. The night was frozen...."

"She focused on exactly where to put her foot, her hand, alongside her fellow climbers. Then, peripherally to her right, she saw an orange flash. 'I see this sunrise that I will never forget as long as I live,' she reflected. 'The colors — it is just red, and then it is orange, and then it is yellow, and then the blue is coming. It was so incredibly spiritual for me, and beautiful.'"

So begins a NYT article that is not about going all the way to the top of Mount Everest or about taking the tiny trouble of gazing at a sunrise. It's about tomorrow's solar eclipse and the elusive human capacity to achieve awe:

“The whole thing is very awe-ful. A-w-e,” she said, meaning full of awe.

Ah, yes. Thanks for the sledgehammering. We might not have figured it out, just as we might not have experienced the spiritual dimension of the sunrise unless we were hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest.

The article must mean for us to laugh at her, no? Or is it sincerely attempting to maximize the deeper benefits of tomorrow's celestial event? Here's the article — by Elizabeth Dias, the NYT religion correspondent: "Gazing Skyward, and Awaiting a Moment of Awe/Millions of people making plans to be in the path of the solar eclipse on Monday know it will be awe-inspiring. What is that feeling?"

"To see what happens at totality, how cold it gets, what the birds do, you know, if everyone gets hushed, and just kind of a surreal experience...."

Says a woman, anticipating the solar eclipse, quoted in "2024 solar eclipse preparations in home stretch in Carbondale" (ABC7Chicago).

That's a big if.

If everyone gets hushed, you may have a peak spiritual experience. 

But if you're in any kind of crowd, your shot at hearing a hush are approximately zero. Look at the videos from the 2017 eclipse and you will see how Americans respond. They scream:

 

LOOK AT IT JUSTIN!!!!

Every mom within earshot will be yelling her own kid's name, insisting that he look at this thing. And that was 7 years ago. These days, the kids will probably be staring into smart phones and the moms and dads will need to scold them. I can't believe we came all this way and you'd rather look at that fucking phone!  NOAH! Look at the fucking sun!!! And all the little Noahs and Liams will respond in variations of Mom! I told you I didn't give a shit about the sun!

Oh, yes, there will be some lovely children too and maybe some of them will even respond with hushed awe. But those are not the ones you will hear. Maybe someone will attempt crowd control, screaming, "Everyone shut the fuck up!" Or, less likely, Please honor those of us who have traveled here to experience the eclipse in a state of hushed awe.

Maybe you think you'll find the ideal secluded place....

"Look! Look up there!" someone will surely scream, as if it's tricky to find where the sun is. What are the chances you won't hear the phrase "Oh, my God!" at least a hundred times? Well, who going to count? Some blogger who wastes the hushed-awe opportunity to count the annoying things other people shouted?

I'm suddenly torn from my reverie by Meade, who has been reading something and decides to read this aloud: "It will be remarkably awesome for a few life-altering minutes."

My response: "I'm writing a poem about that.... I mean... where did that come from? I'm writing a post."

"Inmates in New York are suing to be allowed to see the solar eclipse."

WaPo reports.

The six plaintiffs in the class-action suit filed Friday, who are Christian, Muslim, Santerian and atheist, are... arguing it has religious significance. Some said it is critical to their practice of their faith — because the Bible describes the sun going dark during the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; because Muslims perform a special prayer upon the eclipse; and because it is important in the Santeria faith to make a spiritual offering.

“Watching the eclipse with the people I know here is a way for me to feel closer to God,” wrote Travis Hudson, a Protestant Baptist....

"As the sky darkens, light-sensitive cells in human eyes become more sensitive to blue and green hues than to reds and oranges."

"This shift in color perception is known as the Purkinje effect, after a 19th-century Czech scientist, and is typically seen at twilight. To take advantage of the Purkinje effect, wear green clothes or a contrasting combination of greens and reds. Blue-green colors (shorter wavelengths) will appear brighter, while red colors (longer wavelengths) will appear to recede into the darkness."

From a NYT article about the solar eclipse, coming to a city near you on April 8th.

Do you have plans to locate yourself appropriately? Had you thought about what to wear? The pleasing coordination with the Purkinje effect is to wear red and to go dark along with the sun, but the NYT is prompting you to steal focus from the sun by wearing green. I hope I'm nowhere near anyone attempting to take photos to be captioned, "Me and the solar eclipse."

"Summer travel cuts across social class; whether you go to a state fair or Sardinia, you cash in precious vacation days. You suntan, you eat more indulgently..."

"... and reach for your wallet with less angst. Travel helps you hide from reality, or at least pause it for a bit. But even if the idea of a summer getaway remains culturally resilient, is it still practical?...... 'Everything has been geared for that desire to seek the sun'.... Think of the airports, accommodations and other capital-intensive projects erected to serve the visitors of historically sunny places.... Now Italy offers nearly 1.1 million hotel rooms; Finland has fewer than 65,000. Decades of predictable travel have dug deep grooves to popular hubs, complicating the most intuitive solution to a changing climate: simply going somewhere else...."

I'm reading "Is This the End of the Summer Vacation as We Know It? This year, everything from scorching heat to fires, floods, tornadoes and hail storms driven by climate change have disrupted the plans of travelers around the world. A summer getaway remains a powerful desire, but it’s at a tipping point" (NYT).

In honor of his 80th birthday: 80 things about Mick Jagger.

At The Guardian.

A few that struck me the right way:

10. “You do tend to present a yobbish image.” One interviewer suggested this to him as the Stones were breaking through. “Moronic, I think, is a better word,” he replied, deliciously....

15. Great rock stars project vanity. And you don’t get more magnificently vain than Jagger singing “Tell me a story about how you adore me,” on Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?...

25. Jagger is the only middle-class Englishman from Kent who could sing “I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis / She tried to take me upstairs for a ride” without it sounding like cosplay....

"Seems like you're avoiding me."

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A post shared by Nathan W Pyle (@nathanwpyle)

The long day.

Daylight hours on the Summer Solstice. 😎 pic.twitter.com/ih3j6EZYOe

— Brian Brettschneider (@Climatologist49) June 20, 2023

"The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it."

"Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colors in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, 'It’s too bright for me to tell you what color it is.' That’s why the sun looks white to us... 'Essentially, it’s a green star that looks white because it’s too bright, and it can also appear yellow, orange or red because of how our atmosphere works.... 'The sun is at its midlife, and it still has quite a lot of years before it changes colors.... It still hasn’t dimmed out one bit.... When astronomers say color, they really mean temperature.... But to anyone in the public, color just means the color you see and how you make sense of the world."

Said W. Dean Pesnell, project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, quoted in "Is the sun white or yellow? It’s a hot debate, and everyone’s wrong. Plot twist: It’s green" (WaPo).

According to the article, some people on social media are discussing whether the sun used to be yellow and now it's gone white.

"President Biden... traveling under a cloak of secrecy into a war zone..."

"... to demonstrate what he called America’s 'unwavering support' of the effort to beat back Russian forces nearly a year after they invaded the country. Mr. Biden arrived unannounced early Monday morning to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the two stepped out into the streets of Kyiv even as an air-raid siren sounded...."

NYT reports. 

"Mr. Biden joined Mr. Zelensky for a visit to St. Michael’s monastery in downtown Kyiv, where the sun glittered off the golden domes as the air-raid alarm wailed...."

Biden wore sunglasses, not mentioned in the text of the article, which does say that Zelensky wore "his signature black sweatshirt with dark green pants and beige boots." Are not the sunglasses Biden's signature sunglasses? Or were they not particularly wanted but especially needed because the sun glittered off the golden domes.

"Talk about Polar Vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating..."

"... in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star. Implications for understanding the Sun’s atmospheric dynamics above 55° here cannot be overstated!"

Said Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster, quoted in "Piece of sun breaks off, stuns scientists: ‘Very curious'" (NY Post).

Did you feel it?

 

ADDED: Thanks to everyone in the comments who let me know I was displaying the 2024 solstice info. I've swapped in the right image. I don't think you could feel last night's event any more than you could feel the event that's 2 years in the future, but I'm not sorry I asked "Did you feel it?"

PLUS: It's still in the future. I'm only now seeing the "PM." For all my tracking of the sun and frequent thinking about the darkest day, I don't understand the concept that the solstice is at a particular minute. And why is it in the afternoon? I'd never noticed until now.

"For the whole time I’ve worked on this, it’s been like nuclear fusion—always a few decades away no matter when you ask."

"But there are going to be events in the next decade or so that will sharpen people’s minds. When temperatures approach and then cross 1.5 centigrade, that will be a non-arbitrary moment. That’s the first globally agreed climate target we’re on course to break. Unless we find a way to remove carbon in quantities not imaginable presently, this would be the only way to stop or reverse rapidly rising temperature.... The idea is outlandish." 

Said climate researcher Andy Parker, quoted in "Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It/The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely," by Bill McKibben (The New Yorker).

These are all headlines on the front page of the Washington Post website right now. Did I put them in the right order?

"Craving brains and hangry: Zombie behavior demystified by scientists."

"The sun was ‘smiling’ in a NASA photo. It might be a warning for Earth."

"Don’t blame ‘both sides.’ The right is driving political violence."

"Assault of Paul Pelosi was attack on democracy. The risks keep growing."