The Sunday Funday Blues:

February 24, 2002 6:22 AM

The Sunday Funday Blues: This is supposed to be on of the worst Nintendo games ever. Heh. No wonder. Yet it seems appropriate. As does Storman' Norman's Sunday Blues radio programme. What is it about Sundays anyway? And what's the best way to survive them? What are the local traditions? Here in Portugal, it's the Sunday papers; not going to Church; feeling guilty; drinking too many Bloody Marys; late, enormous lunches; lazy love-making, listening to football on the radio and naps...
posted by MiguelCardoso (27 comments total)

In Britain it goes somewhat like this: Eating bacon sandwiches, sitting in your darkened bedroom all day, watching the new episode of The Simpsons at 6pm on Sky One, playing Quake 3 or Wolfenstein.
posted by wackybrit at 6:39 AM on February 24, 2002

Is this a "Which Sunday Blues are You?" test masquerading as a post?

If it is, I'm Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Perhaps it's just a call to see how many ways the word Sunday is used.

Even better. Can we list the days of the week in song?

Joe Jackson - Sunday papers
The Bangles - Manic Monday
Lynyrd Skynard - Tuesday's Gone
Simon & Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning 3A.M.
Th Orb - Thursday Teatime
Joe Jackson - Friday
Chicago - Saturday in the Park

Wasn't that fun? I'm so not bored now.
posted by mikhail at 6:52 AM on February 24, 2002

Not all Sundays are bad, after all they did a nice cover of The Rolling Stone's Wild Horses.
posted by m@ at 7:28 AM on February 24, 2002

I find there's a European/North American divide between the bleakness of Morrissey's sublime "Every Day Is Like Sunday" and the Velvet Underground's wistful, almost hopeful "Sunday Morning".

The Sundays I've spent in the U.S. or Canada(Brunch! Mimosas!) seem much more cheerful than European ones. Perhaps it's a cultural thing. Sundays in Portugal are mostly about shopping(the busiest day of the week), eating and sex. Not so bad, come to think of it - but no real joy; more of a hankering for a little something extra.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:35 AM on February 24, 2002

it's amazing how similar are the sundays in latin cultures… i live in mexico and i do almost the same that you miguelcardoso; instead of drinking bloody marys i drink tequila
posted by trismegisto at 7:55 AM on February 24, 2002

Every Day is Like Sunday - Morrissey
Blue Monday - New Order
Ruby Tuesday - Rolling Stones
Waiting For Wednesday - Lisa Loeb
Thursday's Child - David Bowie
Friday I'm in Love - The Cure
Saturday's All Right for Fighting - Elton John
posted by jpoulos at 9:11 AM on February 24, 2002

I open every Sunday with the Velvet Underground and Nico. Sunday morning is the perfect end to a Saturday all-nighter.
posted by Fahrenheit at 9:17 AM on February 24, 2002

If Sudnays are annoying or boring, move to Israel or Muslim countries and substitute Saturday for Sunday. Or better, fly back and forth between Christian Sunday and non-Christian Saturdays on weekend and make 7days great. It is all part of the good Lord's grand design.
posted by Postroad at 9:18 AM on February 24, 2002

Jpoulos - Bowie's Thursday's Child! I wish I could listen to it now. What album is it on?

Monday's Child is fair of face
Tuesday's Child is full of grace
Wednesday's Child is full of woe
Thursday's Child has far to go
Friday's Child is loving and giving
Saturday's Child must work hard for a living
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

Postroad: I'm Jewish so the Sabbath(fun!)ends at sundown on Saturday. We Portuguese probably have the only Jewish-inspired weekday names. Sunday is day One(Domingo) and Monday is Segunda-Feira, meaning Second Day of Work. Same for Tuesday(Terça; third), Wednesday(Quarta; fourth), Thursday(Quinta; fifth)and Friday(Sexta; sixth). Then comes Saturday( quite appropriately Sábado).

English weekday names are based on Norse mythology...for...well not for Christ's sake...

Here's a quick way of finding out what day of the week you were born on. I myself am "fair of face". ;)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:32 AM on February 24, 2002

I usually spend Sundays dreading Monday.

Sunday is either a day to do laundry (if you have your own washing machine) or a day not to do laundry (to avoid the biggest crowd of the week at the laundromat). I live in a neighborhood with very limited parking, and Sunday is when I can park wherever I like without fear of being ticketed. Sunday is when I sit frustrated because I finally have plenty of time to make a lot of calls which I cannot make because the places I would be calling are not open on Sunday. It's that day when, on the one hand, I feel I should be getting a lot done because soon I won't have time; on the other hand, it's the day when I feel I should get absolutely nothing done, because soon I won't have a choice. There is the huge Sunday paper that fascinated me as a kid but annoys me as an adult. As a jew who grew up in Kansas City, where there seems to be a church every three blocks, I still sometimes think of Sunday as the day when I go to a movie in jeans and a t-shirt and feel strangely guilty as I drive or walk past families dressed up in their Sunday best. And of course, in Kansas there is no beer sold on Sundays, unless you want to actually go to a bar with a special license. And yes, of course, when possible, sleeping late and sex, followed usually by NPR listening, most notably the Prairie Home Companion and This American Life (which, disturbingly, seems to air on Saturday afternoons here in Los Angeles).
posted by bingo at 9:45 AM on February 24, 2002

English weekday names are based on Norse mythology...

Not all norse, tuesday(tyr),wednesday(woden), thursdays(thor),friday(frigga)... but saturday is surely roman (saturn), and sunday and monday seem more immediately anglo-saxon (sun and moon, right?).

Found plenty of links describing these connections but NONE explaining the WHY, why norse? why not ALL norse? odd.
posted by malphigian at 9:49 AM on February 24, 2002

We Portuguese probably have the only Jewish-inspired weekday names.

Miguel, not to be pedantic, but don't forget the obvious. In Hebrew, the days, starting with Sunday, are simply numbered ordinally, with Saturday being "Shabbat" instead of "Seventh." Some interesting information about this and other linguistic traditions relating to the week here.
posted by bingo at 9:53 AM on February 24, 2002

WHY, why norse? why not ALL norse? odd.

Come to think of it, malphigian, yes it is. This Norwegian explanation too, seems oddly confident. Could it be we have uncomfortably pagan, if not outright Heavy Metal names?

Bingo: cheers for that. It's just the Spaniards, French and Italians have an entirely different, Roman naming system. As we were(because of the evil Spanish influence!)the last European country to stupidly and shamefully expel the Jews(in 1497, assuring Holland and other countries of a wonderful future) it seems we hung on to some of their traditions. It's estimated that 30 to 50% of all Portuguese have Jewish forefathers.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:07 AM on February 24, 2002

WKCR's Moonshine and Tennessee Border Shows are a good accompaniment to a hangover, I find. (Live streaming for these and countless other shows can be reached through the awesome publicradiofan.com).

"Sunday Morning, Coming Down", by Kris Kristofferson or Johnny Cash, is a very great song.
posted by liam at 10:08 AM on February 24, 2002

I spend Sundays listening to obnoxious music at 11 and drinking enough espresso to make my eyes stay open when I sneeze, which is just like every other day, except on Sundays I tend do it whilst driving at about 50 mph in the 30 limit zone around the local church, which always seems to be spewing forth multitudes of the faithful.

You'd think for a bunch of people convinced they're going to go heaven, they'd have more of a sense of humor about it.
posted by dong_resin at 10:12 AM on February 24, 2002 [1 favorite]

MiguelCardoso - Bowie's Thursday's Child! I wish I could listen to it now. What album is it on?

It's from Hours. For a limited time you can snag it here - Thursday's Child (6.4MB)
posted by mikhail at 10:18 AM on February 24, 2002

Who cares where the names of the days come from -- why seven days? It pretty obvious that other periods of time are astronomical: days, months, years... But "seven days" and "24 hours" have always baffled me.
posted by Eamon at 3:00 PM on February 24, 2002

I don't think it's so much "7 days in a week" as it is "28 days in a lunar cycle". Was it divided by four to match the lunar phases (new, waxing, full, waning)? I'm pulling this out of my ass--someone help.
posted by jpoulos at 5:36 PM on February 24, 2002

Sunday's I spend working so you lucky 9-to-5 bastards can go shopping.
posted by jonmc at 6:38 PM on February 24, 2002

1 off in 3 jonmc
We still get double $ for Sundays here so gimme Monday free anytime
posted by johnny7 at 9:49 PM on February 24, 2002

The seven days in a week originated with a matriarchal myth of an immortal goddess connected to the moon, and a king connected to the sun. The king would die in the middle of the summer (i.e. July, the seventh moon-cycle of the year), in the sense that the sun's power to grow crops starts to diminish around then (or so it does in the European regions where this idea originated). So, with this idea that the moon was more important than the sun, it was natural to then take the lunar month, 28 days, and divide it evenly into parts of seven, which happens to match the number of cycles of the king/sun's life. Each day in the week is supposed to be a sort of microcosm of one of the first seven months of the year, and in some languages there is apparently a connection between the two.
posted by bingo at 9:52 PM on February 24, 2002

What do we usually do? As little as possible.

Spent the afternoon with friends sitting in the afternoon sunshine outside a small café at the waters edge, drinking white wine and watching the crew of the “Young Endeavour” climb the rigging.

http://www.youngendeavour.gov.au/media2.html
posted by Tarrama at 9:53 PM on February 24, 2002

Slacker sundays are a thing of the past for me. Through marriage, home ownership and fatherhood, I have been transformed into a Minor God of Home Improvement.

A few of my tasks this weekend - clean the gutters (in Miami, gutters are like ecosystems), chop and remove ficus tree roots from back yard, transplant 3 shrubs, continue longterm playset construction project (all done except for finish sanding - took about 4 weekends to complete), purchase hardware for next week's patio dog door project, replace patio light fixture...

I'm such a suburbanite - but I enjoy it.
posted by groundhog at 6:27 AM on February 25, 2002

My mother usually has the family over for dinner on Sunday. Nobody really drinks and we all sit around, watch TV, joke, laugh...great fun for me in the US.

The Sundays I've spent in the U.S. or Canada(Brunch! Mimosas!) seem much more cheerful than European ones. Perhaps it's a cultural thing.

That's fascinating. I wonder why that is. What are your Saturdays like? I suspect that people universally dig Saturday more than Sunday.
posted by Modem Ovary at 2:21 PM on February 25, 2002

So do I. Universal is probably right. Saturdays are very good, Modem Ovary. Early but very long faraway lunches, if possible alfresco, 1pm to 5pm, magazine-buying, late dinners with friends, video rentals, getting slightly drunk, talking about everything and staying up till dawn.

Sunday is a sort of penalty after that...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:03 PM on February 25, 2002

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

--Douglas Adams, 'Life, The Universe and Everything'

posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:21 PM on February 26, 2002

Thanks for that true tidbit, obiwanwasabi!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 6:49 PM on February 26, 2002