When is it anyway? ~

[soothsayer]

This is from a book by George Carlin. The book is called Napalm & Silly Putty.

It's about time how messed up it really is. Enjoy.

You see there is no time. I dont mean, "We're late, there's no time for that."

I mean, there is no time. After all, when is it? Do you know? No one really

knows what time it is. We made the whole thing up. It's a human invention.

You see, sometimes we think we know where we are, but we really don't know

when we are. The time zones are also no help; they're all different. In fact,

in parts of India the time zones actually run on the half hour instead of the

hour. Does anybody really know what time it is?

And never mind a piddly half hour difference in India, how about thousands

of years? The major calandars disagree by thousands of years. To the Chinese,

this is 4699; the Hebrews think it's 5762; the Muslims swear it's 1422. No

telling what the Mayans and the Aztecs would say if they were still around. I

guess their time ran out.

Remember folks, these are calalndars we're talking about, instruments

specifically designed to keep track of time. And they're all different. And

they're not off by a couple of weeks, this is thousands of years we're talking

about. How did that happen? Our current (Gregorian) calandar is such an

amateur show that every four years we have to cram in an extra day just to

make the whole thing work. We call it February 29. Personally, I don't believe

that. Deep down, I know it's March 1. I mean, it just feels like March 1.

But even that simple quadrennial adjustment doesn't fix things, so every 100

years we suspend that rule and dispense with the extra day. But that's still

not quite enough, so every 400 years we suspend that rule too, and back

comes February 29. Here's how we got to this sorry state.

The Julian calandar was introduced in 46 B.C., the Roman year 709,

but it was off by 11 minutes a year, so by 1582 there was an accumulated

error of ten days. Accordingly, that year Pope Gregory XIII decreed that

he day following October 4 would be called October 15. They just skipped

ten days. Threw them out. Officially, in 1582, no one was born in France,

Italy, Spain or Portugal during the period October 5

through October 14. Weird huh?

Even weirder, Britian didn't adopt the Gregorian calandar till 1752, when they

dropped 11 days out of September. Since this also applied to the American

colonies, officially, no one was born here from September 3 through September

13, 1752. Except Indians. By the way, during that same year New Years Day

was moved from March 25 to January 1. The way it had been handled before, for

example, was that March 24, 1750, would be followed by March 25, 1751.

Pretty fucked up, huh? And you thought that millennium party you went to was

being held right on time.

[lullaby1031]

:laughing I love George