Turning Back the Hands of
Time
By David Shamah, The
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,
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
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.
ds@newzgeek.com