Our Mister Calendar

by Horace J. Digby

    Ever wonder why May first often falls on a Saturday?  It all began about 4,000 years ago with the ancient Egyptians.  They were building a calendar to divide the year into shorter periods.

    Because they had 365 days (and nights), it seemed natural to divide the days up into weeks that were seven days long.  After a year passed, some one probably noticed that the weeks seemed to run on and on, and that there was a part of one (about a seventh of a week) left over.

    To solve this problem, the Egyptians decided to divide the fifty-two plus weeks up into what they called months (believed to be an Egyptian word meaning, "something to put weeks in").  Since there were about fifty-two weeks, the Egyptian mathematicians decided to divide them into twelve months so that each month would have exactly 4 weeks (with two or three extra days left over sometimes).  This ability to create an eloquent, unequivocal solution to the month problem is perhaps why, even in modern times, we marvel at the ancient Egyptians gift for mathematics.

    But after a few years the Egyptians had more than enough parts of weeks pile up to start an extra month.  Since they had run out of names for months, they toyed with the idea of a month called "Oatmeal," but it didn’t catch on, so instead they began shoving extra days into the existing months, and soon, a convention was reached, which school children learn to this day:

        "Thirty days hath November, April, May and no wonder, all the rest have thirty-        one, except Aunt Martha who is a Protestant."

    Things went along smoothly until the Romans got involved.  It began with emperor Julian who wanted a month named after him, and he wanted his month to be the longest month, so he came up with July which to this day is 31 days long (except in parts of North Dakota).

    Soon emperor Augustus wanted 31 days in his month.  There were not going to be enough days to go around.  So someone thought up February.  Which was a pretty good idea.  The Romans just took a few extra days out of February and put them where ever the Emperor said, and things were fine.

    But there was trouble on the horizon.  A British scientist named Newton was doing experiments on something he called "leap year."

    Newton’s discovery of leap year is one of those little known facts of chronological history that will make you popular at parties, among all but your most honest friends.  So, I won’t tell the whole story here.  Suffice it to say, the story involves a drinking game played with margaritas and a chess board. 

    Leap year resulted in there being an extra day every four years.  Again February came to the rescue.  The chronologists simply crammed the extra day there, and once again all was right with the world and the calendar, until Newton’s next discovery.

    Daylight Savings Time is a system of operating clocks which requires people to begin falling backward and springing forward, so that there is no way to keep track of what time it actually is, which somehow creates more daylight.  Before daylight savings time, people used to leave their watch five minutes fast all the time.  That worked for them, until Newton started messing around with daylight savings time, and after that everyone found themselves fifty-five minutes late for everything.

    As a part time astrophysicist I am still disturbed by the question of where we get that extra day every four years.  Does it come from the gradual slowing of the earth in its orbit?  Or is it, as Newton thought, the result of a minor miscalculation of the time it takes for your annual medical checkup (including the waiting room)?

    It seems like only yesterday that we were all worried about Y2K when our computers were supposed to get confused.  But they were already dealing with a 365.25 day year, composed of 52.14, seven day weeks, all crammed into 12 months of what ever length the happened to be.  If it weren’t for February, this mess would have come unglued years ago.  The computers were already used to the way humans we kept time.  Why should Y2K make them nervous?

    The real problem will come in Y10K.  And we have only EIGHT-THOUSAND YEARS to get ready.  Fortunately I have a plan.  All we do is create an extra year.  Call it "Februyear", and we can just keep adding days, weeks and months until we get the whole mess figured out.