Suggest we upgrade our calendars
While going through some family tree notes earlier today, I was struck by the citation of a birth date from February 29th. I had to seek a calculator and also find the odd algorithm that decides if any given year has that date. Validity testing. It goes beyond the usual little memory aid acquired in elementary school and still not transferred to my second language. It struck me a second time. We’re due for a calendar revision, since the last major one took place about four centuries and a bit. Give or take a few years. For the interested, here is a link to Inter Gravissimas. Let’s move on now, shall we.
I saw my first pair of robins for this year while putting the dog outside this morning. Only ten days since the “official arrival” of spring. One more thing to be improved in our new calendar. I find that 365 doesn’t make sense, so we should move, with as much timeliness as possible, to a calendar based on the four hundred day cycle.
In the new scheme, seasons will last exactly one hundred days each. I foresee a lot of pressure in changing the week to ten days, because the week already seems very long, but if we can negotiate a five day weekend, the unions will go along. Printing the revised calendar should be easily accomplished, since the computer easily handles the decimal system.
I see no reason to modify the names for the various weekdays; we’ll just add two more Saturdays (Sat II and Sat III) and an extra Sunday. I’m sure that those in the Orthodox communities will adjust without too much stress. Here is a sample month:
With the new calendar, each season will last two months, and the year will have four hundred days. Winter will seem shorter. For those who have trepidations about playing with such a familiar concept as the length of the week, month, or year, I submit that we have already successfully modified the concept of Daylight Saving Time, so why not go the whole nine ten yards?
