June is the month of the sol- stice, or as people with less education and more time on their hands say: the first day of summer. It makes a good time to understand, if not celebrate, the fact that Mazatlán is located in the tropics. So the topic of tropic is: what exactly IS a tropic, what does it have to do with the solstice, and what’s in it for us? Well, as the earth does its annual pas de due around the sun, it wobbles back and forth so it can alternately bake one hemisphere while letting the other one freeze. This creates the seasons (if you are dumb enough to live up there where they have seasons.) But fortunately, when the northern hemisphere tips towards the sun, it doesn’t roll all the way over, it just goes so far then wobbles away in the opposite direction. Much like my last couple of dates. The furthest point of wobble is the longest day of the year, called the solstice (from the word “sol” meaning “a local beer” and “slice” meaning “an obvious misspelling”.) And if you were to draw a line from the sun to the center of the earth, it would pass through the earth’s surface at a certain point. On the Spring and Fall equinoxes, when nights are of equal length, your line would pass through the Equator (probably creating an earthquake in Central America.) When the northern hemisphere reaches its farthest tilt towards the sun, then stops and tips back, that line will make a (fortunately imaginary) circle around the earth called the Tropic of Cancer. Since there are two tropics, one here for summer and one in the Southern hemisphere for winter, why call the one we live near “Cancer? ” Well, a quick look at all the sun-smitten tourists out collecting carcinomas ought to make that clear. No, seriously, it’s because the solstice occurs in June, during the zodiacal sign of Cancer. The Ancients (who have a lot of popular misconceptions to answer for, by the way) were so obsessed with the tropic that they did things like digging wells right on the tropic (in Egypt, not Somalia) so that the sun would only shine on the bottom at the solstice.