Hanke-Henry Calendar Won’t Be Adopted
Two Johns Hopkins professors, Steve H. Hanke and Richard C. Henry, recently proposed a new calendar. It goes something like this:
The first month of the year, January, has thirty days, and runs from Sunday the 1st to Monday the 30th.
The second month of the year, February, has thirty days, and runs from Tuesday the 1st to Wednesday the 30th.
The third month of the year, March, has thirty-one days, and runs from Thursday the 1st to Saturday the 31st.
The next three months follow the same pattern: April has thirty days, May has thirty, and June has 31.
Then the same thing for the next three months (July, August, and September) and again for the last three (October, November, and December).
Every five or six years according to some adjustable schedule, there will be an extra week (Sunday through Saturday) between December and January.
This calendar has the following interesting characteristics:
Every date falls on the same day of the week every year.
Weekday-specific holidays (e.g. Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving Thursday, daylight savings time change in the spring and fall) would be (or could be) on the same date every year.
Calendar are reusable; you don’t need to buy a new calendar each year.
As with our current calendar, the seven day week is never broken — every new sunrise advances one day of the week, without exception.
Cool, huh? But I see several problems:
Most people don’t want to re-use calendars even if they could. If they really use a calendar, they’ve probably written all over it, and if they haven’t, then it was mainly a decoration, in which case they probably want a new set of pretty graphics each year anyway.
Though not a state or religious holiday, Halloween is nevertheless one of the most popular special days in the USA. It falls on October 31, which doesn’t exist in the new calendar. It could be moved to October 30, but that day always falls on Monday. Perhaps it would have to be moved to October 28 (Saturday).
People with birthdays on dates that no longer exist (e.g. January 31) would have to change their birthdate, which could cause problems with identification by birthdate.
Seven-day week continuity is something we already have. No improvement there.
Computer date-handling everywhere would have to be radically changed; it would be like Y2K all over again, but much harder to fix this time.
Having an extra day every four years seems easy enough to handle — but an extra week? I’m not saying we couldn’t do it, but the difference is seven times as great: seven extra days versus one extra day.
The same guys (I read) are suggesting that we also get rid of time zones and have everyone in the world on the same 24-hour clock. So... depending on where you live, when the sun’s at it highest in the sky, it might be 9:00 P.M.? Yeah. That’ll fly. Logically separable from the calendar idea, but if it’s promoted by the same guys — that’s gonna be a problem.
Some people would find the new calendar to be no better, on the whole, than the old. And if it’s a lot of trouble to switch to a new calendar, shouldn’t it at least be better? And maybe a lot better?
Cool idea. But I really don’t think it will happen.
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