raffertyesque

So I always thought it took the Earth 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. Hence every four years those .25 days add up to an extra day and we get a leap year. Turns out I was wrong, though. Turns out, it takes Earth 365.242374 days to orbit the Sun. I know. I feel so foolish now.

It was Pope Gregory the XIII (P. Greggy Gregg as he was known back in the 1500s) who first noticed this. Well, probably a member of his entourage noticed it. Turtle, in all likelihood. So in 1582 Greg did what any Pope would do, he emerged from his hole, saw his shadow and decreed that three out of four centennials would not be leap years. Holy crap. Emphasis on the holy.

The new Gregorian Calendar would replace the existing Julian Calendar. Under the new system, those .007626 extra days (11 minutes) every year would get set aside one hundred years at a time until they added up to a full day. So, long story short, people born on February 29th would get extra screwed by missing their birthday for eight years straight once every century. Well, most centuries. Goddammit, Greg.

(Technically, even this new-and-improved Gregorian system is still imprecise, in that every few millennia we’ll be off by a day… but by the time that happens, we’ll all be living in the Matrix and the animal kingdom doesn’t give two shits about February 29th.)

It took a few centuries for the Gregorian calendar to really take off. Julius Caesar did a pretty good job with his calendar and salad dressing, and no one likes chiseling a new calendar unless you absolutely have to. Still, Greg’s was more accurate, so eventually people converted. Just in time for more people to start monkeying with new calendars of their own.

While the new Gregorian calendar was pretty precise, it was still sort of random. School children needed to count on their knuckles to figure out which months has which number of days. Accountants were dealing with uneven quarters (no doubt billing extra in the process). The Moon was feeling left out because its phases didn’t match our months. (Sorry Moon… hey, if it’s any consolation, women have been dealing with Aunt Flow’s unpredictable not-quite-month-long visits this whole time as well.)

As a result of this randomness, other would-be calendar reformers have being tinkering since 1582, each with their own ideas for fixing the deficiencies of the Gregorian Calendar. These ideas range from “hey, that’s a pretty good idea” to “how did you get past security?”

Many of the proposed calendar reforms over the years have shared similar traits:

• Most of them retain the current months and days of the week. Although others just throw everything out and start over. (In the Positivist Calendar, September is known as Gutenberg! How awesome is that?)
• Many of them are perpetual; meaning one calendar will work forever. Finally, that Justin Bieber wall calendar will last for all eternity! Well, not that Justin Bieber wall calendar. You’d need to buy a new one. But that one would last forever. Just like your love of Justin Bieber! (Well, maybe not forever, I mean, unless you laminated it.) (The calendar, not your love.) (Ahem. Moving on.)
• Fixed dates are common. Meaning every holiday is always on the same day and date every year. New Year’s Day is always on a Sunday. Halloween is always on a Friday. Oh, by the way, Halloween is now on October 3rd. Which is always on a Wedhursday. Which is a new day we had to invent. Don’t worry, this new calendar is really simple. Honest.

One proposed calendar reform I particularly enjoy is the Symmetry454 Calendar created by my favorite mensch, Dr. Irv Bromberg. Admittedly, the main reason I like it is because the slogan on the Symmetry454 website is “Don’t be Anti-Symmetric!” and I love a good pun. More calendars need marketing departments like Dr. Irv.

Symmetry454 gets its name from its four quarters, each containing three months consisting of 4, 5, and 4 weeks. It’s “openly documented, and royalty-free” so were it to be adopted, we wouldn’t have to pay Dr. Irv to keep track of time? I guess? I don’t know what that means. What I do know, however, is that there will never be a Friday the 13th under Symmetry454. Therefore, I am not interested.

One of the weirdest calendar reforms is the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. As you may have guessed from its name, the HHPC is the same every year. Meaning your birthday would be on the same day of the week every year. That is, unless you happen to be born during “Xtr.” What’s “Xtr” you ask? Xtr is the week-long “month” that’s added after December every five or six years, depending on whether or not that year either begins or ends in a Thursday on the corresponding Gregorian calendar, of course!

Wait, so we need to keep using the old calendar to use the new calendar? Instafail.

I think my favorite calendar of these wacky calendar proposals is the “International Fixed Calendar.” It’s kind of awesome, actually, and it’s pretty simple.

First off, every month is 28 days. So the ladies and the Moon are both into that. Secondly, there are 13 months. Admittedly, this is a bit odd. But, wait, get this: 28 multiplied by 13 = 364. Not bad, right? So at the end of the year, we get one extra day (“Year Day”) that doesn’t exist as a day of the week. It just sort of hangs out there.

Apparently, in the 1920s, this calendar actually had some traction. In 1923, the “International Fixed Calendar League” was founded. Besides sounding like the worst superhero team of all time, the IFCL was dedicated to spreading the International Fixed Calendar love throughout the world. And spread it did. Sort of. Okay, not really. But it did spread to the Eastman Kodak Company.

Get this: from 1928 until 1989, the International Fixed Calendar was the official calendar of the Eastman Kodak Company. Crazy. So for 61 years, if you worked for Kodak, you worked 13 months a year, 28 days a month. And the month of “Sol” existed between June and July. And every four years, there was a “Leap Day” between June 28th and Sol 1st. Sure, why not.

Point is, this coming leap day, February 29th, think of all the other calendars that could have been. Yeah, the current system doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s our system, dammit. And it’s been doing the trick for quite a few centuries now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

(Okay, yeah, it’s a little broke. But if it’s only a little broke, still don’t fix it.)

(And don’t even get me started on leap seconds. That’s another story about time for another time.)