Fourteen years?!?!?! Wow! I didn’t realize you guys had been doing this that long. I first heard about it from one of Gene’s columns in the WaPo when you first launched.
For the last 5+ months, I’ve been hitting the Random button every day, so I can see all the ones I never saw before. (I only started reading this strip about 2 years before they retired.) I think today is the first time I’ve landed on one I remember.
I remember my elementary school doing that. But looking back, turning off the lights might have been purely psychological, because we had florescent lights which don’t really get hot.
I’m not familiar with the poem, but I do know that meteorologists count seasons as starting at the beginning of the months containing solstices and equinoxes. So, to them northern hemisphere summer starts on June 1. (Sources: a friend who is a professional meteorologist, and the most respected t.v. meteorologists in my city.)
I remember ads for those watches. I’m old.