By Bill Derby
Whew… June flew by again this year. Seems like one of my favorite months goes by faster and faster each year. June has only 30 days.
Do you know who is responsible for making June go by so fast? Julius Caesar, a Roman politician, is the culprit. I’m not sure if he did it or one of his stargazers but he declared it so, based on the average time between two new moons at 29.5 days, thus the lunar calendar. Julius said, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
After creating the calendar he uttered thusly, “We have not to fear anything, except fear itself.” Which has absolutely nothing to do with how many days are in a month but did have a lasting effect on Shakespeare’s play.
The Gregorian calendar is the most widely used today replacing Caesar’s Julian calendar.
This is not a recent historical event. It happened way back in 45 BC. I wonder why we are stuck on such an ancient determination. They were only using their eyeballs and counting cumquats to determine time between new moons. Caesar was a powerful ruler and what he said usually rang true throughout his kingdom.
His final decree, “What happens in Rome, stays in Rome!” That worked until a group of Germanic tribes swept into Rome a few hundred years later and committed a sack. That ‘sack’ term is used to this very day in the game of football.
Since the barbarian Huns never did know what day it was or didn’t care, they had no reason to adjust the calendar. Every day was ‘sack’ day to them.
Personally, I would like to see someone make a change, maybe Congress can do it. No, wait, they can’t do anything. Possibly we could create a new Calendar Committee who can make quick decisions like the guys who came up with Lebron James’ new LA Lakers contract.
My new calendar
proposals are:
1. Take away days in January that fall below 15 degrees and add those days to June creating more lovely June days to enjoy.
2. Take one more day away from February too, however if you were born in a Leap year you couldn’t get your Social Security because you would only be 22-years-old while all your friends would be 88.
3. Make Christmas a full five-day holiday because it is so nice and the food is delicious.
4. Make all national holiday celebrations a two-day event.
5. Since all the dentists in America take Friday off anyway, re-name the day ‘Dentalday’, the start of the weekend. That eliminates all Friday the 13ths too!
6. Also, Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life, change that to Tuesday.
7. Give all Americans the same number of vacation days as Congress. Not sure what this has to do with changing the calendar but would be nice to share time off with elected officials.
8. Make New Year’s Eve a four-night celebration thus an extra four days of vacation on top of the full week of Christmas.
9. Change Thanksgiving to a day in late September since Thanksgiving and Christmas are too close together allowing more time to enjoy leftover turkey dinners and more time to shop.
10. For individuals, change Labor Day to your actual birthday and combine it with Mother’s Day since it really was labor day.
11. If your birthday falls on one of the eliminated calendar days, join with the folks in list item number (2.) above. Determine how old you would like to be and celebrate.
In 2011 researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland said they developed a better way to mark time with an updated calendar system but were shot down. Maybe it’s time to revisit Julius Caesar’s 2,000 year-old calendar. If you took Latin in school you should remember one of his quotes…. “Experience is the teacher of all things!”
Happy 4th of July friends.
