Calendar Blues

   So how come there are 12 months in the year but the last four carry the Latin names for seven, eight, nine and ten -- September, October, November and December?
   Perhaps because the Romans, with their penchant for groups of ten, divided the year into 10 months of 36 days each, with five days left over for a celebration week.
   But if you base a month on the number of days in a lunar cycle (28) and divide that into 365, the number of days in a yearly solar cycle, you get 13 months with only one leftover day.
   Do you suppose they rejected that plan because 13 is unlucky?
   I don't know. But the 10-month plan wasn't working, either, so the Emperor Augustus told his Roman calendar experts to fix it, which they did by adding two months and naming them after the emperor and his predecessor, Julius. That's why we have July and August.
   But if we give each of the 12 months 30 days, we still have five days left over, and that doesn't work, either.
   Moreover, if we start each month on a Sunday, based on a 28-day lunar month, we get a Friday the 13th every month in the year.
   Oops.
   So all the calendar proposals also relied on the theological concept of perfect circles, but the real universe doesn't work that way. That's the problem astronomer Copernicus faced in trying to describe how the Earth circled the Sun and not the other way around.
   His successor Galileo, however, figured that if the circle was an ellipse and not a perfect circle, things worked out better.
   But that theory was based on the idea that that the Sun was the center of the universe, not the Earth, and the Earth revolved around the Sun.
   Blasphemy! Heresy! cried Vatican officials, and the astronomer was ordered to recant or be branded a heretic and banished.
   He took it back, but is rumored to have muttered on the way out of the room, "Nevertheless, it moves."
   So because of the oddity of various days in each month, we're stuck with the grade school chant, "30 days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31, save February, which has 28."
   Logical? No, but there is very little perfection in planetary or even human behavior.
   And that's one reason why life is so interesting. It's not perfect. Live with it.
   By the way, February has 29 days this year, to make up for the imbalance of the elliptical circle the Moon makes around the Earth.