It would also be a good thing if each year started on the same day of the week. A Sunday, say. That would make it a perpetual calendar, never changing from one year to the next. You wouldn’t have to throw out your old calendars each year, and more importantly, schools and other organizations wouldn’t have to go to all that trouble planning schedules months or even years in advance: They could use the same schedule over and over, year after year. But that’s not possible either, because 365 isn’t evenly divisible by seven, the number of days in the week. Divide 365 by 7 and you get 52 with a remainder of 1, meaning that there are 52 weeks in a year…plus one extra day. If you’re reading this in a year that began on a Monday, that extra day means next year will begin on a Tuesday (or if this is a leap year, on a Wednesday).
Our calendar is based on a solar year. It takes the Earth exactly 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds to orbit the sun, and any calendar that doesn’t take this into account isn’t much good to anyone. Plenty of calendars have been proposed as improvements on the Gregorian calendar. For example…
“Blue Galactic Monkey” is a date on the Dreamspell Calendar, created in 1987. So is “White Self-Existing Wizard.” The calendar’s creator says he got the names from a UFO.
THE POSITIVIST CALENDAR (1849)
Improvement: A perpetual calendar with 28 days in each month
Background: The Positivist Calender, invented by a 19th-century French philosopher named Auguste Comte, had 13 months instead of 12, with four 7-day weeks in each month. That adds up to 364 days. To stay synchronized with the solar year, a 365th “blank” day was added at the end of the year. During leap years, two blank days were added. Keeping those days blank—not part of any week, and not part of any month—made it possible to start every week, month, and year on the same day of the week (Monday).
What Happened: As if a calendar with 13 months and one or two blank days a year wasn’t strange enough, Comte renamed all the months after historical figures, starting with Moses and working chronologically forward to Marie François Bichat, a pioneering 18th-century French surgeon. The calendar never caught on.
THE INTERNATIONAL FIXED CALENDAR (1894)
Improvement: A perpetual calendar with 28 days in each month
Background: Created by an Englishman named Moses Cotsworth, this 13-month calendar was a little more palatable: Instead of renaming the original 12 months, as the Positivist Calendar had done, Cotsworth left them alone. He inserted a 13th month, called Sol, between June and July, added a blank 365th day at the end of the year, and during leap years added a second blank day between June and July. Cotworth’s calendar generated a lot of interest at the League of Nations, which considered it the best of the 130 proposals submitted to a calendar reform committee in 1923. Its biggest fan in the United States: George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. He adopted it for Kodak’s internal business and helped fund the International Fixed Calendar League, which lobbied for the calendar’s adoption worldwide.
What Happened: Inserting Sol between June and July may have doomed the calendar’s chances for success in the United States. Independence Day fell on Sol 17, which didn’t have quite the same ring to it as July 4th. Another problem: Because each month began on a Sunday, the calendar had 13 Friday the 13ths—one every month. But for all its flaws, George Eastman never wavered. He used the International Fixed Calendar until his death in 1932, and Kodak continued to use it internally until 1989.
THE SOVIET CALENDAR (1929)
Improvement: Five days in a week
Background: In 1929 the USSR introduced a calendar with 72 five-day weeks, for a total of 360 days, plus five holidays on important Communist Party anniversaries, for 365 days in all. The calendar’s purpose: to squeeze more work out of the Worker’s Paradise. Instead of having two days off every seven days (28.6 percent of the time), workers got one day off every five days (20 percent). On calendars, the five days of the week were printed in different colors, and each worker was assigned one of the colors to indicate which day was the day of rest. The new calendar eliminated the idea of one common weekend for everyone, and made it easier for factories to remain in operation every day of the week. It also furthered the ideological goal of de-emphasizing the importance of Sunday as the biblically ordained day of rest.
What Happened: The new system didn’t increase productivity as much as hoped. Machinery that runs every day (often 24 hours a day) never stops long enough to receive proper maintenance, so under the new calendar, breakdowns were more frequent. In 1931 the five-day week was scrapped in favor of a six-day week with a single, common rest day for everyone. That lasted only until 1940, when the Soviets went back to the seven-day week.
THE WORLD CALENDAR (1930)
Improvement: A 12-month perpetual calendar
Background: In 1929 a rubber-manufacturing heiress named Elisabeth Achelis attended a lecture given by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey decimal system. Dewey spoke in favor of the 13-month International Fixed Calendar, but Achelis thought it was impractical. Two weeks later, she read a letter in The New York Times that proposed a system for a 12-month perpetual calendar and was inspired to create the World Calendar. Achelis’s calendar doesn’t have months of equal length—it has quarters of equal length. Each quarter begins with a 31-day month and is followed by two months of 30 days each, giving each quarter 91 days, or 364 days for the year. A blank day called “Worldsday” (W for short) was added after December 30 to give the calendar 365 days. During leap years, a blank “Leapyear Day” (also W for short) was inserted between June and July.
People who are depressed eat about 55% more chocolate than people who aren’t.
What Happened: Achelis founded and bankrolled the World Calendar Association, which lobbied for the calendar’s adoption worldwide. In 1931 she gave a presentation to the League of Nations that prompted the League to drop its support for the International Fixed Calendar in favor of the World Calendar. That was as far as it ever got. Religious groups objected on the grounds that weeks with W days were in effect eight-day weeks, which disrupted the biblical commandment to observe every seventh day as the Sabbath. The W days caused the obligatory day of rest to drift one day earlier in each regular year and two days per leap year; on most years the Sabbath wouldn’t even fall on a weekend. The United Nations shelved the World Calendar in 1955, but the World Calendar Association continues to lobby for it to this day.
THE PAX CALENDAR (1930)
Improvement: A 13-month perpetual calendar that preserves the seven-day Sabbath cycle
Background: Invented in 1930 by James A. Colligan, a member of the Jesuit religious order, the Pax Calendar addressed religious concerns about the Sabbath by creating a calendar with 13 months of 28 days each, for a total of 364 days. (The new 13th month, called Columbus, is inserted between November and December.) Instead of inserting a 365th blank day, the calendar is allowed to drift until it is seven days out of synch with the solar year; then a special seven-day “month” called Pax is inserted between Columbus and December.
What Happened: The Pax Calendar didn’t disrupt the Sabbath cycle, but it did interfere with the way the Roman Catholic Church sets the date for Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, and that was enough to kill it.
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“The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.”—Bill Cosby
The Great Sphinx’s name in Arabic: Abu al Hul, “The Terrifying One.”
PRINCE IS 2 WEIRD
Over a 30-year music career, Prince has had 19 top-20 hits and five #1s. He’s sold 80 million albums, starred in three movies, and written dozens of songs for other artists. But he’s also known for his eccentricity. For example…
KEEPING A MUSIC VAULT
The guitarist reportedly has a vault filled with dozens of unreleased albums, films, and music videos. Fans have long speculated about it, but Prince won’t reveal the vault’s contents. Over time, though, several items have been identi
fied by his collaborators or in press releases for projects that were later nixed. Among them: Dream Factory, a double album recorded in 1986 with his backup band, the Revolution; a children’s album called Happy Tears recorded in the mid-90s; and an album called Camille with all of Prince’s vocals sped-up to make him sound like a woman.
BEING A BAD TENANT
In the mid-2000s, Prince leased the Hollywood home of NBA star Carlos Boozer for a staggering $70,000 a month. Despite the high rent, Boozer was enraged when he discovered that the pop star had redecorated the $11.9 million mansion. He’d had the “Prince symbol” and purple stripes painted on the exterior, added the symbol to the front gates, dyed the water in an outdoor pond purple, and installed a hair salon and a monogrammed carpet in the master bedroom. Boozer tried to sue, but when Prince handed over a check for $1 million to cover the cost of removing his alterations, the lawsuit was dismissed.
BRAWLING WITH SINEAD O’CONNOR
O’Connor had a smash hit in 1991 with “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a song Prince wrote and produced in 1984 for the Family, a funk band he managed. When their record flopped, Prince planned to remake the song with a female singer…until O’Connor recorded it. Prince invited O’Connor to his Los Angeles home to discuss the controversy. Instead, O’Connor told an interviewer, he criticized her for using foul language in front of reporters. She fired back, and the argument led to blows. According to O’Connor, the pint-sized singer (he’s 5'2") was no match for her, although she did admit that “he can pack a punch.”
Life was the first magazine to make $100 million per year selling ad space in its pages.
OPENING FOR THE ROLLING STONES
Prince’s first big shot at stardom came when he opened for the Rolling Stones on their “American Tour 1981.” Rather than tone down his racy live act, the relatively unknown musician did the exact opposite. He went out on stage each night wearing just a trench coat and a pair of bikini briefs. The Stones’ fans didn’t know what to make of it. At the Los Angeles Coliseum, Prince was pelted with garbage. At another gig, he was booed off stage after only two songs.
THE PRINCE VS. THE KING
The only male pop star bigger than Prince in the ’80s was Michael Jackson. That could explain why Prince engaged in a bitter—and one-sided—rivalry with the King of Pop. In 1986 the stars met at a Los Angeles studio, where Prince was working on audio for his film Under the Cherry Moon, and Jackson was working on his Disneyland movie Captain EO. Jackson started flirting with Prince’s girlfriend, Sherilyn Fenn, so Prince challenged him to a game of ping-pong in front of their respective entourages. Jackson lightly hit the ball, until Prince egged him on, taunting, “Come on Michael, get into it! You want me to slam it?” according to Prince’s drummer Bobby Z’s account. As Prince moved to hit the ball, Jackson raised his hands to cover his face…and Prince hit the ball as hard as he could, right into Jackson’s crotch. Declaring himself the victor, Prince pranced around, shouting, “Did you see that? He played like Helen Keller!” Jackson apparently held no ill will: A year later, when Jackson was recording Bad, the follow-up to his monster hit Thriller, he asked Prince to sing a duet with him on the proposed first single, “I’m Bad.” But when Quincy Jones played a demo for Prince, the singer balked at the first line, “Your butt is mine.” Meant to sound threatening, Prince thought it sounded too much like a come-on. “Now who’s gonna sing that to who?” he reportedly said to Jones. “’Cause you sure ain’t singing it to me. And I sure ain’t singing it to you.” Jackson recorded the song alone, and it was a #1 hit.
Herbert Hoover was an orphan.
JUST PLANE WEIRD
If you happen to be reading this on an airplane, you might want to save it for when you’re back on the ground.
WHEEL MAN
In October 2011, the fun at a small-town carnival in Taree, Australia, came to a sudden halt when a man named Paul Cox accidentally flew his ultralight airplane straight into the Ferris wheel. Cox, 53, had just taken off from an adjacent airstrip. He said he didn’t see the giant wheel and at first didn’t know why “everything stopped” when he slammed into it. “I just went to take off, do a go-around…and next thing I know I was stuck inside the Ferris wheel,” he told the Courier Mail newspaper.
Two children were on the Ferris wheel at the time. Neither was injured, but it took rescuers 90 minutes to get them down. Cox and his son-in-law, both also unharmed, were stuck in their airplane, still wedged in the Ferris wheel, for three hours. A subsequent investigation revealed that Cox had falsified his flight-training experience when applying for his pilot’s license and did not have permission to use the airstrip. Investigators are looking into “why a Ferris wheel was installed alongside an airstrip.”
GAS MONEY
Not long after a Comtel Air flight touched down in Birmingham, England, in November 2011, a woman locked herself in the airplane’s restroom and called 999 (the U.K. equivalent of 911) for help. “A planeload of passengers has just arrived from Vienna,” she told the emergency operator. “We were held there against our will and we’ve just had to hand over 24,000 euros [$31,600]!”
The plane was immediately surrounded by airport police, who soon learned that it was the airline, not hijackers, that held the passengers against their will and demanded money. According to Comtel, the trouble started when a British tour organizer sold tickets for airline flights but did not forward the money to the airline. When the jet landed in Vienna to refuel, it couldn’t pay its fuel and airport fees, so the airline forced the passengers to come up with the money (about $175 each) instead. Anyone who refused was threatened with arrest.
The average depth of San Francisco Bay is 14 feet—just a few feet deeper than the average swimming pool.
The frightened passengers ponied up. Those who didn’t have cash on hand were escorted under armed guard to an ATM—and when the ATM ran out of cash, to the airport’s currency exchange desk. After the money was collected (and counted by the pilot in the cockpit), the flight continued on to Birmingham. At least three other Comtel flights were cancelled for the same reason. The airline is now defunct.
JUVENILE BEHAVIOR
Shortly after audio recordings of a child directing planes from the control tower of New York’s JFK International Airport were posted on an aviation website in 2010, the Federal Aviation Administration launched an investigation to determine if they were authentic. They were. One evening in February 2010, a controller named Glenn Duffy brought his nine-year-old son into the control tower of America’s sixth-busiest airport and let him give instructions to departing flights. “Here’s what you get when the kids are out of school,” the proud papa joked to pilots over the air.
A few days later, after Duffy and his supervisor were suspended and facing dismissal, recordings of a little girl directing flights from JFK appeared on the same website. It turns out that Duffy has twins: He brought his nine-year-old daughter to work the day after his son. Both the FAA and the air traffic controllers’ union condemned Duffy’s actions, but his family is sticking by him. “We all bring our kids to work. This just happens to be his profession,” Duffy’s sister-in-law told the New York Daily News.
ONE-WAY TRIP
In August 2008, four Air Canada flight attendants, including attendant-in-charge Hugh Bouchard, arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport to work their scheduled flight to Paris. But when they saw who the captain was, they refused to board the plane. Replacement attendants were found and the plane continued on to Paris without incident. A federal health and safety officer later investigated and concluded that because the flight attendants’ grievance with the pilot was a “normal working condition of employment,” they had insufficient grounds to walk off the job. So what was their grievance? As the flight attendants explained in a statement, they were afraid the pilot might commit suicide during the flight. “Bouchard advised us that he had an inflight incident where the captain had threatened to ditch the plane in the Atlantic. Hugh said that the captain ha
d said he had nothing to lose as he was being fired, anyway.”
The flight attendants appealed the ruling and won. “The court recognized that threats of ditching a plane in the ocean are not a normal working experience,” employment lawyer Stacey Ball told the National Post. Air Canada claims it investigated the earlier incident cited by Bouchard and does not believe the pilot really threatened to kill himself. The flight attendants were “reacting to comments that were never made, as far as we can tell,” an spokesperson told the Post. The unnamed pilot was never reprimanded or fired, and at last report was still flying for Air Canada.
LOOK—UP IN THE SKY!
In October 2011, a Southern California skydiving instructor named Alex Torres was fired from the Skydive Taft company for mixing his skydiving work with his other profession: starring in adult films. Torres, who goes by the name “Voodoo” at his other job, filmed a scene with the Skydive receptionist, Hope Howell. They began in the back of one of the company’s planes as it flew toward the jump site, then bailed out of the plane nude (except for their parachutes) and finished their scene in midair.
Company owner Dave Chrouch says he didn’t learn of the stunt until the footage began circulating at a nearby high school and he was contacted by police. He fired Torres and Howell, but they don’t have to worry about going to jail, because none of the authorities could think of any criminal charges that would stick. They were consenting adults, after all, and because no one on the ground reported seeing their amorous airborne antics, they could not be charged with public nudity, lewd behavior, or anything else. The FAA concluded that their activity was not distracting to the pilot. “He was in complete control of the plane at all times,” Chrouch told the International Business Times. “I mean, he looked back a couple of times—the same thing he does if there are other skydivers in the plane. He is going to look back, he’s going to look around to see what everyone is doing.”
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