Turning Back the Hands of Time

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2004

 

Well, I've gone and done it yet again. Once again, I forgot my anniversary! I once again had to go home and face the music – and what a sad song it was! Not that my wife hit me on the head with a frying pan or any such thing – but it was extremely embarrassing, and she really is good to me. I just felt awful.

 

Oh, if I could only turn back the hands of time, as the saying goes. I would seize the moment and make my anniversary something to really remember. But who was I kidding? Greater minds than mine had tried to build a time machine to go back and explore the eons; but all the inventors of history's various wayback machines was a stint in a "home," until such time that a nice man in a clean white coat said they were all better. All I needed was a week, but in terms of time travel, a week is no different than a month.

 

But then I remembered a little historical tidbit: Dates on the Julian calendar run about two weeks before the Gregorian calendar, the general secular calendar in use today. In order to resolve an ecclesiastical problem, the church – and eventually, Europe – changed the method of calculating dates and reordered the calendar, deleting about 10 days from the calendar in 1524. October 4, 1582 was followed by October 15, 1582,  and thus was a dating dilemma that had plagued the church for centuries solved. Besides being a safe choice for multiple choice elimination on history tests on the subject of events that happened in the fall of 1582, it could also give me the time I needed to make up for my forgetfulness. All I had to do was get rid of all the Gregorian calendars in the house and replace them with Julian calendars?

 

As I discovered, though, Julian calendars are not popular items at the calendar store. All the calendars in stock were "regular" ones – the kind that had gotten me in trouble in the first place! Frantic phone calls to bookstores, even shopping at on-line emporiums specializing in esoterica yielded the same results: There were just no commercially available Julian calendars out there.

 

So much for that, I thought; once again, I was going to have to don the dunce cap. I was about to leave the office to go home and face the music, when I thought of an idea: Maybe the solution lay Out There, in the great ether of cyberspace, where, experience has shown me, virtually anything is virtually possible.

 

And discover a solution I did, one that, in this season of the New Year, will give you an instant Hebrew, Julian, Gregorian or virtually any other calendar now in general use, besides supplying you with a whole slew of date tools, such as figuring out the number of days between dates, converting dates between calendars, supplying you with a worldwide list of holidays and observances, creating reminders and alarms, and even telling you how many days you have to live and the date of your birth in Afghanistan, Armenia, Persia, Thailand, Vietnam, and India, among dozens of other useful tools.

 

All these great calendar tricks come from a great free calendar program, Calendar Magic, which will help you avoid missing appointments, forgetting when holidays occur, and having to be nice to your insurance agent just to get a free calendar. 

Rosh Hashana starts tomorrow, on Tishrei 1 in the Hebrew calendar, so if you haven't gotten hold of one yet, you could use Calendar Magic to find out what the Hebrew year is going to look like. You can review the calendar itself or compare it to the Gregorian or Julian calendar – as well as display and/or compare other calendar systems covered by Calendar Magic, including Afghan, Armenian, Bahai, Chinese, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian, Persian, and many others. The On This Day button will tell you what's happening on a particular date in various locales around the world; besides being Rosh Hashana, tomorrow is Independence Day in Mexico and Papua New Guinea, Martyr's Day on the Maldives, Stepfamily Day in the United States, and Ozone Preservation Day in places where they care about the ozone layer. The Compare Calendar feature will show you the moth/date in the various calendar systems; here you learn that 1 Tishrei is not only September 18 this year, but also 2 Rajab (Islamic Civil calendar), 3 Bhadon (Sikh), 12 Nahase (Ethiopic), and Day 3 of Month 7 (in the Vietnamese calendar). Clicking on the Date Conversion button will give you the equivalent date in any other calendar system, as well.

 

October 15, 1582 is significant not only as the day the Gregorian calendar came into effect, but as the first day – in all calendar systems – that Calendar Magic can handle (the last day is in CE 9999). From that date until today, according to the program's Day's Apart function, 154,103 days have passed. And the This Is Your Life Button will pull off a similar trick, except it will tell you how many days have elapsed since your birth, and when you will have lived 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 days, whichever milestone you are approaching. This function will also tell you your Chinese age and which Chinese year you were born in (my mother was not shocked to learn that I was born in a Year of the Pig). It also told me that I was born on "Luang, Pepet, Beteng, Menala, Paing, Aryang, Sukra, Uma, Tulus, Manuh in the Balinese Pawukon calendar," a statement I am still trying to decipher! There is also a very complete list of holidays, both legal and religious, as celebrated almost everywhere in the world, with their Gregorian calendar date. The list also includes those interesting days and celebrations proclaimed by various countries to commemorate heroes or, more likely, special interest political voting blocs, like World Teachers' Day (Tue, Oct  5), International Lefthanders Day (Fri, Aug 13), and International Elephant Day (Sat, Mar 13). Dates and times of equinoxes, solstices, and moon phases, as well as solar and lunar eclipses, and sunrise and sunset information for 2,200 locations around the world, are all available at the click of a button.

 

1752, by the way, is another significant calendrical landmark, as the year the British Empire switched from the Julian to Gregorian system. In September of that year, Sept. 3 through 13 was eliminated, which no doubt completely messed up the Jewish calendar industry that year, as Rosh Hashana was on September 29 Julian, which no longer existed, and September 9 Gregorian, which didn't exist yet! All is resolved, though, with the special 1752 calendar supplied by the program.

 

Along with all this, you get a unit converter, a geometric calculator and a scientific calculator. Scientific calculators, as you know, can be used for all sorts of complicated arithmetic operations required in engineering, physics, chemistry, and other hard sciences. And scientific calculators can be expensive. Not the one in Calendar Magic, though – it's as free as the rest of the program!

 

And then there are the alarms, which you can set to go at specific time and dates. If you run Calendar Magic as one of your startup programs, it will bring up your reminders when you open your computer. And if you're planning a second honeymoon, you can determine just how far you will have to travel using the program's Global Distance function, which lists locations in 230 countries around the world.

 

Which is what I ended up having to do in order to make up for my forgetfulness. That Julian calendar idea didn't work, and after a couple of hours dodging a frying pan, Calendar Magic gave me the idea for a nice, long second honeymoon. Tuvalu in the South Pacific sounds nice, and it's only 9,600 miles away – and if a 10,000 mile/$10,000 honeymoon isn't love, what is?

 

ds@newzgeek.com