There is a day each spring or early summer; it’s not on the calendar but you know it when you see it. You go out on GMD and there is nobody there. It is grand.

The seminal work of this commission has now been completed. I must commend them all and the staff, which pulled this off for them, for their determination and singleness of purpose. These are formidable adversaries to be taken seriously by all.

The town of Longboat Key apparently ignored veterans again this Memorial Day. The three-day weekend passed without ceremony or symbolism in our small island community. Six months ago the town skipped Veterans Day. Now it followed up by skipping any attention to Memorial Day, thought by many to be our nation’s most important secular holiday. [...]

That’s the slogan for Arizona, which is celebrating 100 years of statehood this year.

Others more learned and receptive to verse than I may have found the white rose to represent innocence and even vulnerability. Offering it to both friend and foe is a courageous thing to do.

It is confirmed that a memorial service for Police Chief Al Hogle will be conducted next Thursday, May 24, at 1 p.m. at Robarts Arena and Sarasota National Cemetery (9810 State Road 72) at 3 pm. Carpooling is advisable; there will be limited parking.

As we approach the winter season the topic of sunshine comes up again in local news. Just to get you up to speed; the winter solstice in our northern hemisphere occurred this year at 0530 (UTC), Dec. 22. At that time the sun reached its most southerly declination — the North Pole was tilted 23.5 degrees away from the sun. In the northern hemisphere the December solstice marks the day of the year with the least hours of daylight (north of the Tropic of Cancer). You knew that.

This column should reach you, our loyal readers, a day or two before Christmas. That means we might depart from the usual opinion, to concentrate on well wishing. I’d like to do that as I approach my 75th Christmas.

I’ve been reading of late a lot of correspondence from almost all quarters about dogs, dogs on beaches, our beaches, use of beaches, etc. It all reminds me of controversy along the Jersey Shore some years ago over just who could venture onto the beaches of the many shore towns there. They used bathing suit patches to identify suitable bathers; one town even proposed a small tattoo to the exposed skin of honest and true residents. Here it sounds like some locals or wannabes desire to identify or maybe ban all canines from the shore.

There seems to be an awful lot of discourse on cell phones and their maybe necessary cell towers around here of late. That is for a technology that has been around for almost 30 years. Maybe we just discovered it. I’m no ‘techy’ but I am an engineer and I think I understand the basics of the technology. I’ll suggest that we should start with the basics, so I offer the definition following.