Dog Days and the Star Called Sirius

Heat, humidity and the stars in the sky...

The “Dog Days of Summer” is a phrase I’ve been hearing all my life, always thinking it was some colloquial term used here in the United States. This period of each year is widely loathed, and characterized, at least here in the South, by a genteel sloth. Only lately have I learned that this phrase is not American at all, but dates to the Egyptians, Gree…