Yesterday I said it was October 18, too. But really, it was October 17. Today is October 18. OR IS IT?

Calendars and dates and stuff are all just constructs made up by the Egyptians, Greeks, Mayans, Aztecs (not AzteX), Hebrews, Muslims, Chinese, Romans, Masons, North Koreans and Catholics as a way to a) record history and b) figure out a good way to determine how much people owed in taxes. Most of the Western world, indeed most of the world, period, follows the Gregorian Calendar, introduced in 1582, a date determined by the date Jesus Christ was born, which is a date that no one in 1582 actually knew, nor was it a date that nearly alive during Jesus’s life knew, either. Using the date of Christ’s birth, which is more or less unknowable, didn’t even start until more than six hundred years after his death.

The point is, starting dates for ANY calendar more than a couple thousand years old are probably made up. Our Gregorian Calendar ironically takes into account the amount of time it takes the earth to circumnavigate the sun. I say it’s ironic because Galileo was thrown into prison by the Inquisition fifty years after this calendar was adopted for…defending the principles of heliocentrism. Ugh.

Anyway, the really funny thing about the Gregorian calendar is…it skipped ten days when it started. The old calendar that Julis Caesar had made up had a problem in that every year of its existence as .0075 days too long, so the endings and beginnings of years would slide all over the place, prompting the need for a leap year every three years instead of every four. Pope Gregory XIII “handled” that problem by declaring that the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th of October, 1582, did not exist, and throwing in a leap year every four years. He literally (with the help of a lot of people, of course) instituted a new calendar that put October 15 right after October 4, 1582, and we’ve been living that way ever since.

LINKS!