How About Leaping into a New Time?

It's a pity I already have a husband because today is the traditional day when women ask men to marry them.  Yes, one of the many bizarre things spawned by February 29th is the idea if the world is going to hell in the proverbial hand basket, as evidenced by the newfangled Gregorian  Calendar adopted in 1582 with its extra added day every four years, well, then women might as well behave like men!  This was the premise of a popular British play poking fun at the new calendar adoption.  The idea took hold in Britain evolving into Bachelor's Day in England and Sadie Hawkin's Day in the United States.  In actuality, February 29th was added to the Gregorian calendar to keep the calendar synchronized with the solar seasons.

You have a 1 in 1461 chance of becoming a leapling:  the name for babies born on February 29th, and, therefore, have a birthday only once every four years.  We actually have a friend who has a due date of today.  I'm pretty sure the baby is going to pass this day by as a birthday since the mom's mother was 'late' with both her kiddos.  Generally speaking, you bake babies about in the same fashion and amount of time as your mother.  Forty weeks is just an average.

Much more interesting to me is the idea the Gregorian Calendar has served its purpose. Lots has happened in world since 1582.  The most significant is the world is now completely and virtually instantaneously connected.  Al Gore's information highway is a monster freeway of astounding proportions upon which zooms mankind at a rate unable to even be conceived by Pope Gregory XIII.

Seizing upon that fact, two scientists, Richard Henry and Stephen Hanke, professors at John Hopkins University, have decided the early Renaissance calendar we all operate under needs to be consigned to the rubbish heap.  They have designed the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.  (Frankly, I think 'permanent' is a little arrogant.  I'm sure Julius Caesar thought HIS calendar was permanent too.)

Here are the H/H calendar highlights:  January, February, April, May, July, August, October and November all have 30 days.  March, June, September, and December all have 31 days.  While the length of certain months change, the days of the week stay exactly the same - from year to year.  Thus, all the three holy days of the week (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) all occur in the same place as always.

Furthermore, each date falls exactly on the same day of the week every year.  For example, in the H/H calendar, Christmas Day and New Year's Day are always on Sunday.  Every five or six years there's an 'Xtra Week' added to the calendar - again that pesky solar synchronization - beginning the end of December.  Jackpot!  An extra week of holiday festivities works for me.  Institutional and business scheduling is consistent from one year to the next since each year the days all fall on the same date.  Countless man hours re-calculating everything from year to year to set schedules would vanish.  Mortgage and interest calculations just got simpler and more fair.  So far, so good.  The H/H calendar sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Wait a minute!  What happens if you have a May 31st birthday!  Well, according to H/H, get over it and change your birthday to May 30th.  Boy, are these guys naive. Have you ever tried to change the date of your birthday?  I tried when I was 19 just for fun and because I wanted the opal to be my birthstone.  I decided I wanted my birthday to be October 2nd instead of September 25th.  People like my parents and my friends were outraged!  How dare I!  My birthday was my birthday, and I was stuck with it.  What I wanted didn't matter.  Additionally, I've never understood why those folks born on Christmas Day or Thanksgiving Day don't just change their birthday to a nice day in May or June, however; I've never met a person with a Christmas birthday who did it.  Oh, and I won't even mention Halloween, which under H/H no longer exists.

For me the real problem facing the adoption of this calendar is the elimination of 'Time Zones' around the world. That's the adjunct proposal for the adoption of the H/H Permanent Calendar.  By abolishing Time Zones and adopting UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), it would be the same time everywhere on the globe.  Thus, if you work in California and do lots of business in New York, you don't have to arrive at work at 6:00 am Pacific Time to reach people who have just started their work day at 9:00 am Eastern Time.  Imagine the boon for people who do business, have family, or need to communicate in real time with people on the other side of the globe if it was the same time everywhere.

Let me give you a glimpse of life on UTC.  It's currently 3:00 pm in the afternoon, Mountain Standard Time (or Arizona [we don't believe in Daylight Savings] Time).  It's also 10:00 pm. Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) which is seven hours later than Mountain Standard Time.  Now, remember, a 'clock' as well as the system of Time Zones are artificial means to measure time.  So, if I'm using Universal Coordinated Time where the time for everyone all over the world is the same, the sun rose in Arizona this morning at approximately 2:00 pm.   Hmmm.  I'd be getting up at 2:30 pm, headed for my workday which starts at 4pm and quitting time, after an eight hour day, would be midnight.  I think we'd have to redefine what hours constitute morning, afternoon and evening and definitely use a clock based on 24 hours instead of 12 eliminating AM and PM.

Obviously, to reap the rewards of UTC everywhere, we'd definitely need an International Conference to hammer out the details like the International Conference on Time in 1884 did.  As time keeping became more standardized and based on longitude and latitude, the International Conference on Time in 1884 adopted the Greenwich Observatory outside of London as the site of the prime meridian (the zero degree longitude) - the line upon which all time around the world would be calculated - and thus, the time zones around the world were created. Each time zone is plus or minus so many hours from the Greenwich Observatory.    (I always wondered exactly what the prime meridian was, didn't you?)

This place was chosen to designate the zero longitude for time calculation because the Greenwich Observatory was acknowledged world wide as being the most accurate at keeping exact time, and also because the British were doing the most world wide commerce.  Today, the UTC is calculated from the Greenwich Observatory (0 degree longitude) using some atomic calculation.  (I'm done - the nutshell is you can figure your UTC time based on Greenwich Time - in Arizona, I'm seven hours earlier than UTC.)  

What would an International Time Conference in 2016 have to work out?  First, are we going to adopt the H/H Calendar world wide.  There's a growing movement to do just that.  Second, we'd have to jettison the idea the clock is tied to the sun.  We'd still want to work during daylight hours and sleep during the dark, but our notion of what clock time constitutes morning, afternoon and evening would be radically different.

It all sounds really strange, doesn't it?  However, did you know several institutions are already using UTC?  All aviators use UTC to avoid the problem of is it AM or PM as well as eliminating those time zones they whiz through.  They call UTC 'Zulu Time' which is much more catchy, don't you think?  The national weather service uses UTC as well as world wide computer systems.

This is all just too much for me.  I think I'll just have a Leap Year cocktail invented by Harry Craddock, renowned bartender, at the London Savoy Hotel in 1928, and go internet shopping for Leap Year deals offered only on the 29th of February.  Perhaps Jet Blue will reinstate it's February 29th special fare of $29 again.  Happy Leap Year Day!