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Time Waits For No One: A rant about the calendar
Décade I, Nonidi de Vendémiaire de l'Année CCIX de la Revolution
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Dear Reader:
Hey, let's get specific:
The "Christian" calendar is one screwed up piece of crap. Even the name "Christian calendar" is a misnomer, as it was invented six hundred years after Christ, and wasn't accepted in many areas of Christendom until the middle of the Renaissance. The majority of time since Christ, it hasn't been the calendar used by Christians and has nothing to do with either Christ or his apostles; THEY never used it.
I give you the entire ridiculous debate about "we're not in the 21st Century now," as just ONE au courant example of what a piece of crap this thing is, when it's obvious to ANYONE with half a brain that we clearly ARE in Century 21 (hey, no one runs out and drives their car around the block to watch the odometer roll over from 100000 to 100001, so SHUT UP, it's the 21st Century, and if you don't like it, DIE!), which comes from the fact that we had a Scythian dwarf named Dennis the Short revise the perfectly good calendar that calculated dates AB URBE CONDITA from the founding of the city of Rome, and the stupid munchkin, growing up as he did with a lousy Dark Ages clerical education, had to use the mathematically impossible Roman numerals MCXIV III XII blah blah blah, not being blessed with exposure to superior Arabic numerals that had the concept of zero, and thusly he didn't put in a year "zero" into the "Christian" calendar, which was a HUGE mistake. Well, at least he could read what year old movies were copyrighted, though.
This lack of a Year Zero not only keeps people busy flappin' their jibber-jabber jaws every time a century clicks over about what century it IS and on which New Year's Eve they have to go to an office party and drink too many vodka martinis and get stinking drunk and finally get a chance to impotently grope that hot little number from down in Accounting, the one that wears the short skirts (hey, I solved the problem: the first century had only 99 years in it!), but it also means that calculating dates across the B.C./A.D. calendaric Great Divide is COUNTER-INTUITIVE, go ahead, try it, I dare you: A guy is born in January 10 B.C. and dies in January 10 A.D. How long did he live? Does the number "19" just scream out in your head like a song by the Clash, or do you have to fight to make your brain believe that it's the correct answer? (Which it is.) As I said, this calendar is a piece of crap.
And then let's throw in the fact that Jesus was clearly born YEARS back in the "B.C" period, because the Gospel of Matthew states that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod The Great, and ol' Herod died in 4 B.C. Look, maybe Jesus COULD walk on water without styrofoam shoes, but there's not one freakin' word in the Bible about him having a Time Machine. Dennis the Short clearly screwed up BIG TIME when counting backwards trying to figure out when he ought to fix the year of Jesus's birth, which is not surprising when you figure that the diminutive Dennis was calculating with equations like XXVII x XIV=LLXXVVV - XXVII + CCLXX=CCCLXXVIII.
And while I'm at it, I'll point out that while the Latin "Anno Domine" was popularly used across Europe, the term "B.C." is an English invention of recent 17th century development and is as arcane to the majority of Christians on Planet Earth as any Latin term, as the majority of Christians don't speak English.
No, this is one piece o' crap calendar, and the chances of actually fixing it and replacing it with something that WORKS as far as picking a correct date from which we date the modern era is nigh unto impossible these days, because people would prefer to suffer the cognitive dissonance of "Jesus Christ, born, 4 years Before Christ" than have to reprint all the history books and memorize that they were born in a different year, MUCH LESS GO THROUGH ALL THAT Y2K CRAP again in four years. Just look at the trouble everyone had when they adjusted all those days completely out of the calendar during the Julian/Gregorian calendaric reform: How many of you want to go through THAT mess again?
Đ®ĺf+ęrvŐˇ: Time Waits For No One
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