A Modest Proposal — New Calendar
New Year’s Day should be a date without a day of the week assigned to it.
Imagine being able to re-use your favourite calendar, Railroad Cars of the South Pacific. What makes this modest proposal even more appealing is that it is an easy shift to make.
As it is, a given day this year may fall on a Wednesday, but next year, it will fall on a Thursday. The reason is that 365 days in a year cannot be divided evenly by 7, the number of days in a week. Help is at hand, though. Subtract one. 364 can be divided evenly by 7, 52 times to be exact. That means that if just one day of the year has no day of the week associated with it, then things work out perfectly. If the fifth of November falls on a Friday in 2010, it will fall on a Friday in 2011.
That is a big win for all of us in saved calendars alone. No more need to ask for forgiveness from the spirit of Ansel Adams or furry puppies who will grow into toothsome, drooling hounds. Realise, as well, that your effort to write important birthdays into your diary (for those of us still limping along without iPhones) is not for naught. Your diary no longer needs to go into the bin in January. In fact, by using the diary year after year, you can fill the blank spaces on each page that were not occupied by appointments in previous years. Imagine the number of trees that will be saved.
We can also sort out which will be the long weekends due to holidays. No more guesswork. Your spouse will have two reasons to recall your anniversary, date and day of the week. Plus, most anniversaries will fall on weekends, thankfully when we are more likely to have a moment to the rush shops to buy that last minute present. And, when it comes to birthdays, we will all know who Wednesday’s child is.
School students can be given an exercise to learn what days of the week each day of the year lands on. That can be done by making up a rhyme with 365 lines in it; no more stuffing around with state capitals or river names. 365 lines represents just the sort of memory challenge that today’s youth are lacking.
There will be resistance, though. Memory gurus will no longer be able to impress us with their ability to recall the day of the week for any date in any year. Rain man is out of a job. Calendar makers will be apoplectic. Figure that every Australian over the age of 12 receives three calendars per year, mainly as gifts from people who lack creative ideas about gift giving and just pause at those temporary stalls in multi-story shopping centres. Figure that each calendar sells for $20 and that 17 million Australians are of calendar-receiving age. That is $340 million per year in calendar sales!
Expect a major backlash from the calendar industry – an onslaught of television advertisements, angry letters to the editor written by the fearful spouses of potentially unemployed photographers, street protests from proprietors of souvenir shops, and long queues at Centrelink made up of people in every shape and size who had counted on posing nude to support their cause or their career.
Ours is not to resist progress, though. It is time to make New Year’s Day a date without a day of the week attached.
Stay tuned for my next ‘modest proposal’.
What are they really saying? 