Kage Baker advocated pizza as the meal of choice for Lammas: which today, August 1st, is generally accepted to be. Happy and profitable Lammas to all of you!

Pizza was the closest Kage could come up with for a sun-wheel image, and it also fulfills most of the qualifications for a Loaf-Mass meal. I mean, you can screw around with the sauce and the toppings, but if you leave off that bread dough crust, you don’t have pizza – all you have is a feral stew.

She also liked a good copper beer to celebrate, though my perennial suggestion of whiskey chasers was well-received as well. Grain, that was the main emphasis. One of the many, many things Lammas celebrates is grain – the harvest thereof, and the promise of eating something through the winter and getting a new crop in the ground come spring.

It’s a hopeful holiday, Lammas. Bonfires are always fun, and staying up late with food and drink in the summer night – dancing, running, praising the good gods that give us so much to enjoy in this little world. Sometimes a few early Perseids will show up, though the majority of that glorious meteor shower won’t arrive for another fortnight.

The first sliver of a new moon will be visible tonight, a slender brooch of pearl above the sunset. In hot weather like this, one can often see the old moon in the new moon’s arms, as well – the phantom maria stretched like a figured veil between the horns of the new crescent, revealed before their proper time by the reflection of sleeping sunlight. Kage loved that phase of the moon best of all.

Elsewhere …  well, it’s an especially rotten Monday for me. Frankly, Dear Readers, I am depressed. Discouraged. I’d crawl under the bed, except I have a captain’s bed with no underneath available for hiding …  My car battery is dead, and the resuscitation process has revealed that my alternator is on its way out, as well. My limbs are inflating in the heat; my feet are rising like cheap frozen bread dough and are both uncomfortable and repulsive. I can’t get any rings on or off because my fingers have metamorphosed into kielbasa.

The news from the world in general simply sucks: more ugliness and hate spreading out from the mass murders in Norway. The US Congress has lost its aggregate mind up its aggregate rectum. Africa is drowning in so much blood no one even bothers to report it anymore. China, not sated with its fake Apple stores, is now opening fake Ikea stores as well. What does it say about the once-Celestial Empire that they view copying mass-produced Scandinavian furniture as a cultural advance? The mandate of heaven now comes ready to assemble …

Grain. The cycle of life, the Green God always rising and falling for our salvation, your basic, beloved vegetative deity leaping up with open arms to welcome us to joy and fulfillment! That is Lammas!

John Barlecorn is king of all the fields, and is standing tall and golden in his kingdom today. He is ready to give his life, as always, to the thirst and hunger of the world. And the world looks at his holiday gift and sniffs, “I’m gluten-intolerant, you know.”