Today I read an article at Miller-McCune on an astronomer and an economist who want to dump the calendar we all use (Gregorian) in favor of something completely new.
It reminded me of my late friend Doc Howe, who was commissioner of education under Lyndon Johnson and who often spoke of an idea for a calendar that he learned about in his Ford Foundation days. (It might have been the World Calendar seen here, but I’m not sure. Like invented languages, new calendar systems keep popping up.)
Writes Emily Badger at Miller-McCune, “The ever-changing calendar, with its periodic leap years and mouthful of monthly mnemonic devices, has irked timekeepers almost since the system was introduced in the 1500s.
“ ‘It’s a very accurate calendar,’ says Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. …
“That said, he wants to get rid of the thing. He and Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke are now lobbying to replace it with their invention, the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. In the long tradition of calendar reformers, they believe they’ve settled on the elusive solution to the Gregorian calendar’s floating days of the week: one calendar that remains constant every year, where New Year’s Day falls without fail on, say, Sunday every single time.
“The big advantage to such a system is that nobody — businesses, the NFL, universities, beleaguered governments — would have to go through the exercise every year of rewriting holiday schedules, course calendars or sports seasons.”
Henry and Hanke believe it preferable to insert “an entire extra week onto the end of December every five or six years. … The rest of the calendar would remain constant with four equal quarters of 91 days each, with two months of 30 days and a third month of 31.”
Does this solution speak to you?
Read more on the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar here.
(Read more about Doc Howe in the Cincinnati Enquirer obit.)
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Not until reading this did I realize how much I **like** floating days of the week–how I’d feel somehow chained if Christmas fell without fail on the same day. Our calendar requires only one intercalary day every four years, but other calendars require whole intercalary months from time to time, and in (for example) the Islamic calendar, you get important observances like Ramadan moving through the seasons from year to year. It makes me wonder if people with calendars that require intercalary months or with observances that move through the seasons would feel the same way about switching to the Gregorian calendar–as if it’s too rigid.
That said, having an entire extra week every few years might be fun, provided it could be a whole week of celebrations and not just work.
Yes, the more I thought about it, the more I thought the Gregorian calendar is OK. I mean, any new version would just have new anomalies.