Bigger and Better

Just in Time for New Year's: A Proposal for a Better Calendar

Perhaps you recall my twice-yearly notion that we should turn the changing of the clocks into a mini-holiday, giving workers an hour off with pay on the day we push time forward while continuing to turn them back in the middle of the night. Richard Conn Henry has a better idea: Let's change the whole calendar so that every year has exactly 52 7-day weeks in it, turn all the clocks in the world to the same time, and insert a "leap week" (he calls it Newton in honor of his favorite physicist) every five or six years to correct for the missing days. Henry proposes that this leap week would be vacation time for all. While that is, of course, a logistical impossibility (someone has to man the tills and stock the food at grocery stores, after all), the idea of some sort of worldwide, weeklong celebration has some appeal, no?

Add to that the fact that dates and days would forever remain fixed and I think this is a great idea. What day is Christmas? Sunday, December 25. What day is your birthday? Saturday, February 18. (Sorry to all of you whose birthdays would remain forever fixed on Monday.)

Henry wants to see this happen by January 1, 2006, which is something more than a long shot. But read through his logic, linked above, and then tell me: Why not?