Bi-Annual June Magazine

Welcome to the Bumbastories Bi-annual June Magazine. This post will be a salute to the number six. After all, June is the sixth month, and it appears that I have an obsession with the number six. I confess. I’m a sixist. I have six on my mind!

After all, the world was created in six days. And six is the atomic number of the element carbon, the basis of life on earth, including yours and everybody else’s lives. Unless, of course, you’re “six feet under”. Yikes! To continue, there’s the six-shooter, the six-pack, six degrees of separation, the Moon and Sixpence, and the Six Flags amusement park. You can get your kicks on Rte 66, gas up at a Phillips 66, or at a couple of six-dollar hamburgers, and you can always stay at a Motel 6, where a light will always be on for you.

Six was the uniform number for the great Bill Russell, arguably the greatest basketball player ever, also Dr. Julius Erving, arguably the most exciting. Baseball’s Al Kaline of the Detroit Tigers, and “Stan the Man” Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals wore the number six. The best reserve player on a five-person basketball team is called the sixth man. Here’s a tip of the hat to former Clipper Jamal Crawford who won the “Sixth Man of the Year Award” three times. Plus another tip of the hat to another of the Clippers’ greats: Lou Williams, another three-time sixth man of the year winner! hurray for the six and for Jamal Crossover and Sweet Lou Williams. Someone complained to me the other day. They said: “Six, six, six! That’s all you ever talk about, Bumba. What are you, some kind of six maniac?

Guilty as charged.

The six sided figure is the hexagon, a favorite shape for bees and people alike. Bees also like fives and anything symmetrical, but any bee will wax (sorry) nostalgic and tell you that hexagons are wonderfully stable, and make a honey (not sorry anymore) of an apartment complex.

Six tesselates so easily. Six conveys completeness and order. The Star of David has six points.

Escher, like the great artists who designed the Alhambra palace in Granada, often used hexagons to plot his magnificent geometrical drawings.

The radius of a circle circumscribes exactly six times in a circle! Try it: take a compass, draw a circle, and then start marking off lengths of that radius. It fits exactly six times! Why this is so is a mystery, or maybe a coincidence. Mathematics has a number of these “coincidences”. And, as the great post-modern, American, philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “there’s too many coincidences for it to be a coincidence”.
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On L.A. weather and a song or two:

I don’t know why, but the term “June Gloom” is an actual Southern California expression. True, it’s often a bit hazy and cloudy in the spring out here in LA. Not very sunny untyil later in the afternoon. People feel gloomy, or disappointed or something. But, gee whiz, it ain’t the end of the world. A couple of cloudy days are no cause to get gloomy. Ya can’t complain about the weather anywaze. That’s what I say.

OK. I was going to play something gloomy and sad. instead, here’s something more cheerful. It’s Irene Goodnight, Leadbelly’ great song, played by Bumba and Maybank the other day. Maybe it will cheer you to sing along and not be gloomy – even if it is June.

Happy June