From the Is it true summer in Ireland starts May 1? column:
Underlining added
…being very closely [WHAT] to the weather statistics???
(I’m guessing ‘tied’, but Kevin Trenberth once beat me savagely for implying that sun-earth geometry was not clearly the origin of the seasons on earth and so I prefer not to offend him.)
I’ll try to find out what’s missing. Thanks for calling this to our attention.
Maybe it’s supposed to be “hewing” instead of “being”.
I never would have thought of that. Although I suspect it is easier to drop a word accidentally than to mistake hewing for being.
Sometimes people will substitute a more common or more familiar word when confronted with an unknown word or usage (I was not familiar with that sense of the word hewing) but with these particular hoof beats, I’m going with horses.
Probably this is intended to work like the American rule for national elections being held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. That is, it’s the third Sunday, unless the first day in April is a Sunday, in which case it’s the fourth Sunday.