While the latest studies pooh-pooh the effect of the moon on human behavior, others swear that there is a correlation between moon phases and employee problems, calls to 911, emergency room visits, crime and suicide. And at least one study has shown that we're more likely to have an avalanche during full moon cycles.
Try as the skeptics will to dissuade us, as soon as we see people driving erratically, we seem to remark, if only privately, that there must be a full moon. I do it constantly. A single drive to school brings me one car turning left in front of me from the right-hand lane. Another cruises happily along at 7 m.p.h., daintily driving around potholes and talking or singing to himself, holding up traffic. Another, on foot, wanders heedlessly down the white line between lanes, also singing. I would say that the moon seems to cause a happy lunacy in these people until I look at the unusual amount of drivers honking and swearing and shaking fists and giving the finger to these people. I say it to myself. There must be a full moon. And in 18 years of making that drive, I can honestly say that every time I have mentally remarked on this, the moon has indeed been full.
I had one professor in grad school - quite a renowned academic, actually. He had to be to get away with his most evident quirk. When the moon was full he refused to leave the house. When the full moon conicided with Friday the 13th he simply refused to even get out of bed, convinced that he would somehow meet with doom if so much as one pudgy foot touched the ground.
Others, luckily, find happier influences under a full moon. For some, it signals a night for love, or an auspicious time for a a wedding. Others believe that the full moon is the time when extra money comes to us more readily.
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