It's hot

We need the sun.

My deranged colleague is arguing against the necessity of our friendly neighborhood star, but he’s dead wrong, or will be soon, literally. Sunshine is a critical part of photosynthesis, the biological process that powers a plethora of the planet’s plants. Let’s think about this logically.

Animals eat plants. We eat animals (or at least some of us do, and the rest eat plants). Therefore, we need the sun. So to argue “against” the sun is to argue in favor of a slow death by starvation, or, perhaps, a slow death by starvation and cold.

I say my comrade should pack up and move to Pluto where he belongs. He’ll be pretty safe from the sun from an average of 3,660 million miles away. Of course, he may or may not be on a planet (as that’s still being debated), but at least he’ll be far away from the “giant thing in the sky,” as he calls it.

We need more sunshine, if anything. We don’t get enough in Seattle, leading to deficiencies of vitamin D, a vitamin that protect people against lymphoma, colon, prostate, lung and even skin cancer (yes, skin cancer). Vitamin D, or the “sunshine vitamin,” is manufactured after skin is exposed to ultraviolet rays from the sun.

In fact, the sunshine vitamin helps with immunity, producing the antimicrobial agents (for example, natural antibiotics) that keep us from getting sick during the winter. That’s one of the reasons why the flu season rages in the winter and not the summer.

The lack of sunshine also has psychological effects: seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is real enough that the UW Counseling Center offers light therapy for sufferers. People with SAD — and that’s pretty much everyone — need more sun.

In fact, we should move our planet closer to the sun, as soon as possible. I’m not sure how we’d do that, but I’m sure there’s a way. Or we could colonize Mercury, which is only 43 million miles to the sun at its closest point. Sure, we might get vaporized, but at least we’d have enough vitamin D. I’d rather fry healthy than die sickly — I’d rather not die deficient in vitamin D.

Another solution would be to set up a system of giant windmills to blow the clouds away from Seattle. Let’s make Seattle sunny year-round. Of course, we need the rain, but we can schedule it. We can get it over and done with on Mondays, for example.

Either way, we need the sun, and we need more of it, more often. If it’s out right now, you should get out there, too. Drop whatever you’re doing. Soak it up.

[Reach columnist Will Mari at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]

No, it's not

There I was walking downtown, watching people pass by as I made my way to Pike Place Market. This giant thing in the sky was burning down on me, with its blinding light and mild heat, and the only thing I could think about was, “When the heck is someone going to turn that stupid thing off?”

You see, I didn’t choose to live in Seattle for sunshine and happiness. I live here so I can be depressed year-round and surrounded by different shades of gray. So you can understand my contempt for what people have been calling “lovely weather.”

People don’t realize how much the sun ruins one’s day. I wake up every morning ready to destroy something cute and go through the same monotonous routine that has slowly numbed me into a coma, and then I open up my shades to this thing that gets my mouth muscles curling. I think it’s called a smile. And it scares me.

Just seeing everyone walking around with a smile is enough to make me run to my medicine cabinet. Don’t people realize that there’s nothing to be happy about, considering thousands of people are dying in impoverished countries around the world while our government is being run into the ground, and you sit there smiling because you’re getting a tan?

Yeah, have fun with cancer.

What’s really ironic is that we’ve become so obsessed with “saving” the planet and the various endangered species we keep locked up in confined “wildernesses” that we forgot who the biggest perpetrator is when it comes to heating up the planet. That’s right: the sun.

That big stupid thing has been heating our planet for probably hundreds of years, and not one person has ever thought about putting it on stand-by mode for just 10 freakin’ minutes.

“But Eric, that’s what night is for,” you’re probably saying. Yeah, but if you knew anything about astrology, then you’d know that while it’s night here, it’s day somewhere else in the world. Basically, the sun is the STD of the stars. No matter how much you wish it to be gone, it just keeps coming back to ruin the morning after a one-night stand.

And the worst part is that the sun lovers proliferate this problem by giving us daylight-saving time. Which is just what I wanted: another hour of having to hear people complain about how they wish they could be somewhere it was sunny all the time.

Well, you know what? God didn’t invent California for nothing. So take your sandals, vitamin D and the color blue and go south already.

[Reach columnist Eric Uthus at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]