Dog Days of Summer

     The dog days, I always thought, were those summer days so devastatingly hot that even dogs would lie around on the asphalt panting.  Many people today use the phrase to mean something like that- but originally, the phrase actually had nothing to do with dogs.  It had nothing to do with the lazy days of summer.  Instead, it turns out, the dog days refer to the dog star, Sirius, and its position in the heavens. To the Greeks and Romans, the dog days occurred around the day when Sirius appeared to rise just before the sun, in late July.  They referred to these days as the hottest time of the year.  It was a period that could bring fever, or even catastrophes.  Who knew?