Word: mooning
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...almost none of tomorrow's holidays actually follows that calendar. All Muslim holy days, for instance, are calculated on a lunar system. Keyed to the phases of the moon, Islam's 12 months are each 29 and a half days long, for a total of 354 days a year, or 11 days fewer than on ours. That means the holidays rotate backward around the Gregorian calendar, occurring 11 days earlier each year. That is why you can have an "easy Ramadan" in the spring, when going without water all day is relatively easy, or a hard one in the summer...
Then there is the Jewish calendar, which determines the placement of Purim. It is "lunisolar," which means that holidays wander with the moon until they reach the end of what might be thought of as a month-long tether, which has the effect of maintaining them in the same season every year...
...important Christian holidays, is a set number of days before Easter. The only problem is that the date of Easter is probably the most complicated celebratory calculation this side of Hinduism, which has a number of competing religious calendars. The standard rule is "the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox." But in fact, the actual divination of the date is so involved that it has its own offical name: "computus." And so challenging that Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of history's greatest mathematicians, devoted the time to create an algorithm...
...Stephen KingThe cover of Stephen King’s “DumaKey” can’t be more clear. There is abeach. I think we can assume it’s thebeach of a key. Tsunami-sized waves totallydefy the tidal pull of the moon anda hot pink house miraculously survivesboth the waves and the lightning directlystriking it. The pink of the house evenmatches the pink in the sunset going onbehind the storm. The house may survivethis tempest, but no such luck forStephen King’s name, written in a shinytypeface—it seems...
...they build up in the still, warm waters of the Gulf, they in turn feed excess growth of algae. When algae dies and decomposes, the process sucks much of the oxygen out of the water. A sea without oxygen is little different from the surface of the moon - nothing can live there. Fish and other sea life flee, or suffocate. That's the Gulf's dead zone, and last year it reached 7,915 sq. mi (20,500 sq. km) - nearly the size of the New Jersey. Worse, the dead zone is getting bigger, with last year's bloom...