I can now revise my country list from the other day. The “one or two African countries” i mentioned are Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda. And quite probably one or two more still (there’s one guy working at the airport who’s Croatian and another one who’s a cop who is from Denmark, and yesterday i saw two guys from Moçambique i haven’t seen before! soon, i’ll be up to “round numbers”, 2^5 :)Speaking of 28, where did February go?! I was supposed to get another few things done in February, but suddenly i look at my pocket watch (i.e. my cell phone or PDA) and it’s March. Rats.

This reminds me of this exceptionally great idea that the roman scientists had to bury some 2000 years ago with the introduction of the Julian calendar. Even they must have realized that 365 = 13 * 28 + 1, and that 28 = 4 * 7. Or on less numerical terms, a year can be divided into thirteen equally long months, and then you get one extra day (two, every four years) you can recover from the New Year’s celebration. Call it Day Zero. But the buerocrats or priests or whoever suspicious figures were in power, shuddered at the number 13 because even then, thirteen was an unlucky number. So while Julius Caesar might have devised a much more regular calendar than what was before, the solution is one of irrationality. Heck, even the Mayans had a calendar of thirteen months (ok, so they’ve had over seventeen different calendars over the ages so it’s not a surprise that at least one of them would have had thirteen months) but us westerners gave the mayans a hard time and their 13 month calendar pretty much fell into oblivion to the outside world. Incas and Druids had the same idea. And it being that the moon (hence, month, or as they say it in the more druidic language of Swedish: månad. Or Finnish: kuukausi — moon period) goes around the Earth approximately thirteen times a year it should be pretty obvious that there are 13 months to the year.

I hereby declare that while there are 12 months to the year, there are 13 moonths yearly. There. That should rid us from some confusion.

There are numerous reform proposals to our current, logically flawed gregorian calendar. The two most logical schools of thought is the 13 month “Natural” calendar and a modified or “frozen” variant of the Gregorian calendar. While it would be a Truly Nifty thing to have thirteen months of 28 days, or four seven-day weeks, it might be that the world is not ready for this kind of progression, and won’t be for some time, so there is another, even simpler solution. Keep the twelve months, and thus, the four quarters of the year that businesspeople can’t live without. But make the first month of the quarter to be 31 days and the other ones to be 30 days. And reserve one day for “New Year’s Day” (and then a leap day every four years or so). 8*30 + 4*31 + 1 = 365 days. It’s such an obvious solution, that the fact that we are using the scheme of 31/30 days alternating, except February, and then a hop after July so August also has 31 days is truly mind-boggling in its complexity and irrationality!