Sitting outside in the warmth of an unusually warm September, beneath a brilliant moon shaved by a slight eclipse: glorious abnormalities.

Earlier today I was outside having a break, and a co-worker hewed up - former colleague, in the sense that she’s still a columnist. We were talking about how everyone gets the columnist label these days. Once a month is not a column. I said, as I usually do, with tiresome boastfulness, that if you’re going to call yourself a columnist you should be able to turn out 750 words in 90 minutes, every day.

Later today, at 5:35, I got an email wondering where my piece was. I had misread the deadline date. The publication was going to print tomorrow.

Well, then I guess we’d better turn out 750 words in 90 minutes, then.

I was slightly relieved to know I had one in the drawer I could use if I came up short, but we weren’t going to get out that crutch, not while I’d been bragging earlier about how well I could run. I looked at Birch, sitting on the bench in the gazebo, the scars on his nose standing out in fresh pink, and thought “politics. Fighting. Rules. Nature. But funny! GO.”

And I did! It took me 35 minutes. Well, write in haste, repent in leisure, but I liked it. Sometimes the faster you write, the more you know about what you’re really feeling, and I was surprised where the piece went. The last paragraph took a swipe at George F. Will and made up a quote by Cicero, so there’s that.

Earlier earlier: Back to the vet for the gammy leg. Can’t do the next round of NSAIDs until they look at the blood work. As usual he’s thrilled to go in the car, excited when it gets out, and then AWWW GOT-DANG when we’re inside. There was a squinty little mastiff who yelled at him as soon as we entered, just an absolute scowling bastard of a dog. The intake person was nice and wanted all the details about Birch’s condition, and I noted that he’d seemed to be better, what with the meds and rest, but then the epic fight with the raccoon. Ah: well, let’s boost up that rabies shot, eh? Good idea. Also, check for neurological symptoms in the next 40 days, like listlessness and lack of balance and maybe biting. I’ll add that to my listeria watch.

A vet checked his wounds, all healing well. We had washed and disinfected, and none of them were deep, so I wasn’t worried. Big pink lines on his nose from the raccoon’s claws. A booster, then the blood draw. He bore it well, and got a steady supply of good things to eat. The vet wanted a urine sample as well, and I said I doubted there was anything in the tank, but we can try. Outside to the patch of mulch where every dog who has ever been here has peed prior and after, and Birch lifted a leg to add his remarks to the record - whereupon the vet used a cup on a stick to get a few splashes of the precious fluid. Not a lot, but it would have to do.

Back home, where the STRANGE MAN was fixing the shed door, finally, and this of course produced growls and barks. Shots, Blood draw, vet anxiety, a stranger - this was the worst day ever. Or so he might have thought, if dogs thought in those terms.

The moon has now risen above the trees. The blurry disc of the eclipse reminds me of the effect that converted Jupiter into a star in 2010. I stared at it so long that when I turned my gaze back to this page, an inverted moon, black, burned into the white empty space of the document. That’s a bright moon. I wonder what the ancients thought when they stared at the sun and saw its image when they looked away - that they’d been touched by a deity, perhaps. Sol Invictus, pressing his mark upon you.

Like Spock in “Bread and Circuses,” I never quite understood why the Romans went in for a Sun God when they had the old pantheon hanging around.

According to the Historia Augusta, Elagabalus, the teenaged Severan heir, adopted the name of his deity and brought his cult image from Emesa to Rome. Once installed as emperor, he neglected Rome's traditional State deities and promoted his own as Rome's most powerful deity. This ended with his murder in 222.

Well, you’d expect that of Elagabalus. But it was revived later under Aurelian, who had an interesting idea:

Aurelian strengthened the position of the Sun god Sol Invictus as the main divinity of the Roman pantheon. His intention was to give to all the peoples of the Empire, civilian or soldiers, easterners or westerners, a single god they could believe in without betraying their own gods.

Good politics. Who cares, what does it matter? Well, we have a city in the US named after him. New Orleans.

It’s 1922.

Says who?

Daughery was the Attorney General, so this was a big deal. The attorney making the accusation probably thought Daughery was vulnerable, what with that whole Teapot Dome thing.

“Dry Head.” That would be the chief prohibition officer.

No jokes about the law!

Sound familiar?

		These miserable people. Of course, this was just a voluntary ban, and the good American inclination to humiliate the puffed-up and the censorious would assert itself anew.

Not just an artist - but pretty!

Daily Cartoonist has more on the search for this woman - she left behind a few strips and fewer clues to how she spent most of her life.

I have a few, and will run them in the Obscurities section of Comic Sins some day. It's standard fare. This is about the only time she gets off an actual punchline:

Cartoon forecast. The first one - Uncle Sam scanning “Doctor’s Report” - may refer to the front page story about Mrs. Harding’s operation, which said she had been “lingering between life and death.”

Wiki:

By September 11 her condition had worsened that, as she later related, she had a near death experience seeing two figures at the end of her bed. Florence insisted she would not die because her husband needed her. As she fought back from what she called the "Valley of Death", Florence spontaneously relieved an obstruction and required bed care from the nurses. Her condition gradually improved to the point that Dr. Mayo did not feel his service was necessary.

That’s Charlie Mayo, Peg Lynch’s mother’s boss.

Salute to the guys what keep things hot:

Good PR for the paper, and you can just imagine the middle-class housewives saying they should do something on you Henry and the husband, buried in the Morning Tribune, nodding yes dear, not realizing she was being sarcastic, because nothing Henry did was like these men at all.

MURDER URGE

		We have to keep learning the same damned thing over and over again.

In a similar vein: the more things change, etc.

		A hundred years later people are making the exact same complaints.

And don’t you try to tell her otherwise:

I believe she was this woman, MILDRED WELCH CRANSTON. Married a preacher man, had a career as a public intellectual, died in 1984. One son, who died without issue. And there it ends.

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That'll do. Next for you: The end of gas!