Don't Miss It Daisy

So what to write about on this warm Wednesday?

TigerBlog will start with "The Great Gatsby," and specifically this quote from Daisy:
“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!” 

Ah, that Daisy. She had so little to actually do in her life.

Back in Mr. Ridley's American Literature class sophomore year of high school, that quote sparked considerable discussion about the characters and themes of the book. Also back in Mr. Ridley's class, there was the incident surrounding "The Catcher In The Rye,"

TigerBlog told you this story before. Perhaps you remember it, from Feb. 1, 2010:
There is one part of the book where our protagonist, Holden Caufield, is just starting to feel good about life when he walks outside the museum and sees a profanity (the big one) scribbled on the side of the building. For Holden, this led back to total disillusionment. It's one of the most important passages in the book.

When Mr. Ridley called on one of TB's friends to read this part, he told him to read the obsenity as "the profanity." TB remembers thinking that Mr. Ridley meant to read it as it was written and not censor it, but what he actually meant was to substitute the actual profanity with the words "the profanity." Unfortunately for TB's friend, he thought the same as TB.

So yeah, there was a f-bomb, rolling all over a high school English class. In the 1970s. To this day, all these decades later, TB is positive he would have read it as the curse itself had he been the one called on.

Meanwhile, back at Daisy, the longest day of the year is either today or tomorrow. Either way, it'll be light out until after 9.

And it'll actually be summer, which starts tomorrow at 6:07 AM. Why 6:07? Who figured that out? Why not 5:38 or 6:25?

Anyway, the temperature the last few days has been near 100, with fairly high humidity, which is a proper ending to this spring.

If you define a nice spring day as temps between 62-72 with sunshine and no humidity, then maybe there were, what, five of those around here this spring? There were way more days either below 50 or over 80 or rainy than there there were nice ones in the last three months around here, or at least it seems that way.

Little by little, it'll get dark out earlier and earlier, all the way til when the clocks "fall back" on Nov. 4.

The time change will come a few hours after Princeton's eighth football game of the 2018 season, by the way. The Tigers will play Dartmouth in Week 8 this year, which marks a radical change for the Tigers.

Princeton and Dartmouth have played in each other in the final game of the season every year since 1990. You think that was a long time ago?

From 1976 through 1990, Princeton would open its season at Cornell and finish it home against Dartmouth one year and then the next open at Dartmouth and finish home against Cornell.

For a long time before that, Princeton would open with Rutgers and open its Ivy season with Columbia but would still play either Cornell or Dartmouth on the road early in the season and then finish at home against other, switching the next year. Penn would do the same to keep the league schedule balanced.

Presumably the reason was weather and the fear of playing a game in the snow and cold of mid-November in Ithaca and Hanover. That's what TB has always figured anyway. Why else would the schedule have worked that way?

Anyway, you know how far you have to go back to find a year when Princeton finished the season against a team other than Cornell or Dartmouth? All the way back to Yale, in 1945.

If you go all the way back to 1876, Princeton ended its season against Yale every year from that point through 1945 with only a handful of exceptions.

There was 1917 and 1918, the two World War I seasons during which Princeton played four total games, none against college teams. There was also 10 times in the 1930s and 1940s where Princeton ended the season against either Dartmouth, Army or Navy.

And there was one other exception. It was back in 1885, when the season ended against Penn. Now, 133 years later, Princeton will, for the second time ever, end the season against Penn.

Would the Tigers sign up now for a repeat of the way that year went? Well, Princeton went 9-0 that year, finishing the year with a 57-0 victory over the Quakers.

Princeton actually played Penn three times that year, winning all three by a combined 213-20. TigerBlog will go out on a limb and say Princeton will not beat Penn 57-0 this year.

He'll also go out on a limb and say that there's a better chance that somewhere this year in college football there will be a 57-0 game than there is that there be a game with the score of Princeton's win over Yale in 1885. That one was 6-5 Tigers.

Anyway, all that is weeks away now.

First up is summer, which starts tomorrow. And it'll also be the longest day of the year.

Don't miss it this time, Daisy.