History of the calendar

Thank God It's Floobong - A Brief History of the Calender Among the greatest inventions ever discovered is one that you may not think of unless you're trying to mail a letter and the post office is closed: the calendar. This simple but brilliant device gives us a tremendous amount of useful information (What month is it? What phase is the moon currently in? Is it Nixon's birthday already?) and, unlike us, never takes a day off! But was the calendar first built by the government, as 65 percent of people surveyed in a recent poll believe? The answer may surprise you. The Pre-history of the Calendar Ancient people had a lot of problems: predators were abundant, diseases were common, parking was practically non-existent. Among the most severe problems they faced was an elementary one: they never knew what day or year it was. Consequently, they never knew how old people were, which made it extremely difficult to make sure that only people 18 and older voted in presidential elections. It also made it virtually impossible to make and keep appointments, which led to frustration and warfare. Historians now believe the Trojan War was originally fought over a broken lunch date. Some ancient peoples tried to find ways around this problem. The ancient inhabitants of the British Aisles devised an incredibly complex and sophisticated method of time measurement involving the placement of huge rocks and "reading" how shadows were cast by different places of the sun. The problem with this method was that it was not very portable. Early British civilization was probably destroyed in part by attempts to hang stonehenge knockoffs on people's walls. It was clear another method would be needed. Enter: The Romans People today tend to look back on the Romans as being the ambitious dullards of the ancient world, not nearly as brilliant at inventing things as their Greek counterparts. Interesting: the Romans invented highways and sewer systems, while the Greeks invented a way of thinking about music. Who looks better today? Hint: the Romans. Among their greatest inventions was the year. Prior to the Romans' arbitrarily sectioning off time into repeating periods of time, people could only express age in terms of physical features: one didn't say "I'm 70 years old" so much as "I am covered in wrinkles and no longer wish to have sex." We have the Romans to thank for simplifying this process, while their chums in Athens were busy thinking up rules for how many parent-child sex scenes should go into plays. Advantage: Rome. But now that mankind had years, what was he to do with them? An answer to that burning question was soon to arrive. Enter: Romans Again, But Slightly More Recent Romans It was Julius "Sid" Caesar who created the prototype of the modern calendar by suggesting that a "year" should be based on the behavior of the sun. That "year" should be divided into an even number of "months"; when the course of months was completed, it was time to begin a new "year." For this insane blasphemy, he was immediately put to death by the Senate. Eventually, though, the idea caught on, and they even named one of the so-called "months" after Caesar (Juliusember, later renamed March). This first calendar (from the Latin "calends," meaning "pictures of days") located New Year's Day in March (later renamed Tostitos Presents March Madness), located Christmas in July, and located New Year's II in April. This was unworkable, and there were many wars. Meanwhile, the Greeks invented boredom. It Took a Pope Because of lasting esteem for his delicious cheesebread, the Western World kept Caesar's calendar long after his death, even though it had some significant problems. For example: because he forgot to carry the 4 during a complex astronomical calculation, Caesar created a calendar with a minor inaccuracy that meant it was always 10 years later than you thought. While this was a boon for people seeking early retirement, it contributed to a severe Social Security crisis since so many more people were older than 65 than would have been the case otherwise. Luckily, the pope at the time (the time being the 16th century, the pope being Arlo) had nothing better to do, so he fixed Caesar's calendar. To do so, he had to mandate that October 7, 1582 was really October 17, 1582, which was fine in those parts of the world where people loved the pope so much they named all their children and pets "pope." But in other parts of the world - Germany, England, the American colonies, Fraggle Rock - people did not like the pope, and regarded his calendar as a terrible insult to the famous Roman who wore branches in his hair and slept with Egypt Lady. So it took those places many years to adopt the Poparian Calendar; the United States, in fact, adopted it in 1903, only after losing in an international rugby game to Italy. From Then to Wow! The modern era has seen many attempts to improve on the pope's invention. During the French Revolution, Girondin radicals proposed adopting a 10-month calendar with new names for the months, to indicate a break with the past. Going further in their radicalism, the Jacobins suggested one month, and retaining the old names, but deliberately misspelling them. This dispute has never been resolved, and as a result there is no time in France. In the United States, presidents have shown a seemingly insatiable thirst for monkeying with the calendar. President Franklin Roosevelt changed the date of Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the third Thursday; he also tried to add three months to the calendar to be spent playing organized sports and building roads, but was thwarted by the Supreme Court. It was for this reason he had the Pentagon built on top of the justices' childhood homes. His successors showed similar willingness to experiment; Richard Nixon tried to institute a three-day week to save electricity, while Lyndon Johnson briefly declared that Otis Redding was Christmas. Jimmy Carter suggested adding an eighth day to the week called "Floobong," which he proposed would fall between Monday and Friday. He believed this was essential to overcoming the Soviet Union's expansionist tendencies in Central Asia. Few of these reforms caught on, but if history is any guide, it shows that before long, people will once again begin tinkering with that wonderful, overlooked invention called the calendar.