fine whine

I'm not sure I can ever trust somebody capable of making "Hi" a polysyllabic word. Why is that?

So there's this trick I learned in a 'lots of things to do when you're bored' (or whatever) book by Shari Lewis for remembering the lengths of the months of the year. In a nutshell it allows you to know which months have thirty one days and the ones that don't.

It's an easy trick. Make a fist, with the back of your hand toward you. Whichever hand you use is irrelevant, unless you are particular about handedness and pointing and whatnot. With your other hand, point to (or tap) your leftmost knuckle* and say (or think) "January".

Between your first and second knuckles is a little dip. Point to it and say "February", and then to the second knuckle, "March", and then to the second dip, "April" and so on and so forth until you run out of knuckles at "July".

Point to that same knuckle again, say "August", and continue backward on the same hand for September through December. Alternately you can switch hands here, but that could be too confusing.

More so than these instructions, at least.

The point of all of this is that any month that is a knuckle has thirty-one days. The dips are thirty (except February which is never more than twenty-nine, of course) day months.

So for the title of this to be "on the other hand", I mean that we have passed from July to August, and that, therefore, is a new knuckle. Make sense?

* Well, you could use your rightmost knuckle if need be, as this trick is geared to the left-to-right mindset so prevalent in the English-reading-world. Do what you want; it's just a children's trick anyway. But it does work.