Since it’s February 29 and I don’t much care for leap years, it’s the ideal time to propose a fix for the oft inconsistent Gregorian calendar.
For starters, leap years ruin the simple symmetry of figuring out the day when your next year’s birthday’s going to fall (one day later or two?). Also, I’m not crazy about the whole ‘Thirty days hath September…’ mode of keeping track of the months.
If it were up to me, I’d steal one day each from December and January, make those 30-day months and add the remainder to February, so that it, too, would have 30 days. Then even those deemed not ‘smarter than a fifth grader’ could confidently recite the length of each month.
Sure, we’d have to get used to Christmas coming six days before New Year’s. And some people’s birthdays would suddenly disappear. (If that’s you, I apologize in advance.) Of course, there would be no major celebrities born on February 30th for at least 20 years.
But so what? I think all these obstacles could easily be overcome in favour of a greater scheduling consistency.
There you have it. I now leave it up to the astronomers and PDA programmers to sort out the details.
