Happy Solstice

Here’s a question to which I haven’t been able to find the answer after extensive research efforts, aka three minutes of googling: If the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, why does it feature neither the latest sunrise nor the earliest sunset?

Here in Boulder we enjoy the mild thrill of living exactly on the 40th parallel of latitude (the road outside my window is called Baseline, which I assume means it was the surveyor’s baseline that took advantage of this fact), but the earliest sunset around these parts is on about December 6th and the latest sunrise takes place on about January 4th.

I’m very poor at understanding spatial relations so please speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever.

Speaking of monuments of religious significance, here’s Joel Osteen’s house: (There’s also a private landing strip for a jet just off camera. Osteen owns — or more probably his church owns — an $80 million Airbus 319).

Osteen doesn’t pay taxes because he’s a Man of God. A made man you might say.