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Year Zip
Happy New Year to all of you from the Lawless Partnership! This is a landmark year, since the calendar, as we have known it, effective today, will radically change. First a brief history of the calendar.
In prehistoric times there functionally was no calendar. Given the barbaric conditions and lack of technology (for you kids out there, imagine this, no cell phones, internet, or texting!!!!) not too surprisingly, the calendar was unsophisticated. In fact all they had invented was Thursday. The upside was that you always know what day it was (Thursday) but which Thursday was the issue.
The next key event in the history of the calendar was Stonehenge, a group of huge rocks created by the Druids in early Briton, that could forecast when a solar eclipse would take place (Thursday). While progress, real estate agents, who even back then gave calendars for marketing purposes, found it impractical to give 83 thousand tons of rocks to each client. Something had to change, and change it did.
During the reformation, scientists discovered the approximate age of the earth, and decided to accurately date their calendars starting from the first day the earth was in existence. While factually accurate, writing checks was a real problem, since a date would be written as: Thursday, January 6th, in the year of our Lord, Forty Four Billion, Three Hundred Ninety Seven Million, Eight Hundred Twelve Thousand, One Hundred Nine.
Finally, the Gregorian Calendar was created, obviously by someone named Gregory, which pretty much is the calendar we still use today. And though it is becoming unwieldy, and has generated such things as the Y2K scare, and though no one can remember that rhyme, "30 days hath September, all the rest I can't remember", and though leap year makes no sense to anyone, any more than daylight savings time, we continue to use that calendar. Until Today!
Since my name is also Gregory, I believe that it gives me the supreme authority to change the calendar, and I have done so. We are going to start over, and this is the year Zip. Next year will be year one. I won’t tell you what comes after that, you'll have to buy one of my calendars to find out.
Oh sure there will be some whining, people that have already purchased "Fabulous Monkeys of 2011" type calendars will have to toss them. But look at the bright side. Instead of messing up the date for the next two months by writing down the wrong year, it should be easy to remember Zip.
In addition, since our culture is now dominated by huge corporate sponsors, I have put out to bid what we call the days and the months. Instead of Monday, we’ll probably have something like Metemusal Day, instead of January, we’ll probably have something like Tidy Bowluary. While at first is may seem not quite right, let's face it, we have no idea what the origins of things like "February" are, but when it becomes Cokeuary, we'll know its origins exactly.
These changes should get us through the next two thousand years. Then hopefully another Gregory will emerge.
