28 November 2009 A stitch in thyme saves nein

This is one of those weeks when it is easy to lose track of what day it is.


The things that normally clue us as to time slip a bit on long weekends. No mail usually means it is Sunday. Lots of unwanted and unread advertising inserts in the newspaper usually indicate Sunday. Our trash pickup normally occurs on Thursday.

So given no mail and an extremely fat newspaper on Thursday make Thursday Sunday. Mail yesterday makes Friday Monday. A fat newspaper yesterday makes Friday Sunday. Mail today makes Saturday Saturday, or Monday. Another fat newspaper makes today Sunday. The trash was picked up this morning so that makes today Thursday.

The calendar, arbiter of time in space tells me that under the Gregorian system imposed upon the Western World by one of the Popes, Gregory, today is Saturday, 28 November, 2009. Well and good if you or I are willing to accept Gregory as the authority of matters temporal. We’ll not delve into accepting his authority on spiritual matters as his Canonical authority was presumed to give him sway over temporal and civil concerns as well. Gregory XIII left the Western world using a solar arithmetic calendar derived by modifying the previously used Julian calendar. This is the important component of the Gregorian update: “Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 is not a leap year; the year 2000 is a leap year.

The Julian calendar, named for its most famous proponent, Julius Caesar was phased out of existence as the civil and canonical authority on 24 February 1582 by the papal bull Inter gravissimas. A handful of countries accepted it that year with others adopting it over the next several centuries. The Julian calendar still remains the official liturgical calendar for many of the various Orthodox Catholic churches and was in use in Imperial Russia as late as 1917, explaining why the Great October Revolution (большая революция октября) took place on 7 November everywhere but Russia, where it happened on the 17th of October. The Julian calendar had been put into use in order to correct for human meddling with the astronomical realities of a solar year. It eliminated a transient leap month and instituted a leap year presence involving adding one day/4 years to correct for Terran circum-solar transit time.

Walking into the kitchen and glancing at our home’s master calendar, I find that today is the 11th day of Kislev and not Saturday but Yom Shabbat (שַׁבָּת יוֹם). The Jewish or Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar system predominantly used for religious observances and by all official institutions in the State of Israel, as well as by Jewish farmers in Israel as an agricultural framework. Years in the Hebrew calendar are labeled with the era designation Anno Mundi (Latin for "in the year of the world"), abbreviated AM and A.M., (Hebrew: לבריאת העולם‎), and are numbered from the epoch that, by Rabbinical reckoning, is the date of the birth of Adam. 30 September 2008 through 18 September 2009 corresponded to Hebrew year 5769; the Hebrew year 5770 began at sundown on the evening of 18 September 2009 and will end on 8 September 2010. Under the codified rules, the Jewish calendar is based on the metonic cycle of 19 years, of which 12 are common years (12 months) and 7 leap years (13 months). The leap years are years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 of the Metonic cycle. Year 19 (there is no year 0) of the Metonic cycle is a year exactly divisible by 19 (when the Jewish year number, when divided by 19, has no remainder). In the same manner, the remainder of the division indicates the year in the Metonic cycle (years 1 to 18) the year is in

Other cultures use other calendars for their purposes. The Chinese have their own reckoning of years which total as 4705, 4706, or 4645 (depending on the epoch used) on their Xia calendar. This lunisolar calendar was believed to have been codified about 500 BCE. The discrepancy between the running total years and that of the Jewish calendar has spawned far too many jokes dealing with lack of Chinese food on Christmas Eve.

There are probably as many different calendars as there are cultures with unique written languages. But we won’t investigate those.

Among a subset of the new age folks there is a great deal of concern regarding the soon-to-run-out-of-days Mayan calendar. According to the current legend the world will end 21 December 2012. The latest new age fantasy involves the instantaneous occurrence of polar shifts, probable opening of tectonic plate junctions around the world followed by volcanic eruptions, pieces of the sky falling, and all manner of other cataclysmic planetary disasters which will destroy the planet and end all life on Earth.

There is a great deal of money to be made selling freeze-dried survival foods, dehydrated water, weapons, ammunition, and other survivalist gear. So when the invisible comet re-appears, or the frozen aliens thaw from the South Polar snow pack, the survivalists who meet them will have enough to eat and enough bullets to discover that bullets are useless against freeze-dried and reconstituted aliens.

As for the validity of the Mayan legends and the likelihood of the world ending in 2012, I don’t buy into it. All the predicted geologic horrors are possible. But with the exception of a comet/meteor strike, they all happen in periods of thousands of years, not hours. The legend may give rise to many poorly-scripted movies but it does not predict the end of the world reliably.

Of course, if the world did come to an end in 2012, it would solve the problem of Sarah Palin running for President. Not even the end of the world happens without some good aspects.