Revison

Except that of course trying to equate whatever it was that "September 27" indicated in the Julian Calendar of 1066 with what passes for September 27 in the current Gregorian one is an effort bound to fail. They can't help but mean different places.

William, having gathered his forces at the mouth of the Somme, set sail. This was all some time ago, and the rest is history.

Catching Up

Happy New Year!

A Note on the Calendar Year

The ball dropping in Times Square is meant to signal the moment 2016 officially begins in America, though those of us on the West Coast remain unconvinced. We're partial to a later midnight unqualified by the ghost of Dick Clark. That midnight, the one going on in New York when the ball drops, the one sanctified by Dick Clark's ghost for the benefit of a grateful nation, is a fine midnight, having now passed, and cause for a certain kind of person to celebrate, I warrant, but fundamentally unpersuasive. We have it down as still to come at this point around here.

Happy New Year Alleged, Details At 11.

The Romans foisted their calendar on all of us so long ago that it's barely worth arguing over anymore, so this must be the day we agree it's all reset, begun again with the counting out of the precessional motion of what we have for a planet around its sustaining sun from this the first day, labelled with the initiatory month of the incrementally advanced year of it, all the way through to the death of it in the last counted day of December next complementing the planet's passage to the same spot beside our sun it holds just now for all of us. It's not that the Romans have the last word on when the calendar's first day may fall. There are any number of calendars that track the motions of our sun and its planets as well or better than the Roman calendar can, and arguments for them are neverending. But there you go. The Roman standard got taken up and here we are dealing with the first day of the next year in a indeterminate number of succeeding years left as the rest of it for any of us.

Go for it, eh?

Happy Computus

Putting Easter where it belongs was as grave and momentous a battle as the Roman-inspired calendar has ever experienced, with the class of those who cared to note the event eventually splintered into factions which continue to this day to maintain their own prescription for dating each year's Easter.

To say "Happy Easter" today of all days perhaps inadvertently endorses an argument that had them shouting from the lecterns all over Christendom some time ago and hasn't ended yet. To say "Happy Computus" is much more even-handed.

Twenty-Ten

Implacably reliable sources reveal that the new year is to be referred to as Twenty Ten, not Two Thousand Ten or Two Thousand and Ten, as some might have it. It's not too early to fall in with the crowd on this, is what I'm saying.