An alternate calendar system briefly used by republican France. It had 360 days per year with 5 or 6 “intercalary” or leap days between years. It had 12 months of 30 days, which were comprised by 3 weeks of 10 days. Every day of the year had a unique name: a common plant, animal, mineral, or tool/equipment (ie January 31 was “Broccoli” and May 4 was “Silkworm”).
YSK because it’s an interesting alternative to the Gregorian calendar and the occasionally-proposed 13 month calendar.
Though it did have some problems such as starting in late September (very unusual for a calendar) and not having a robust leap-year system.
They also had metric clocks.
But in any case, I’m more intrigued by the idea of the calendar with thirteen 28-day months. Too many religions are invested in the question of what day of the week it is to move away from a seven-day week.
13! A prime number indivisible into anything. Ugh!
I’ve seen people object to a 13 month calendar based solely on the idea that you can’t divide the year into quarters. But it’s actually really easy to remember. A quarter is 13 weeks, or 3 months and 1 week. So Q1 ends a week after month three, Q2 ends 2 weeks after month six, Q3 ends 3 weeks after month nine, and q4 ends after month 13 aka the end of the year. And since the calendar doesn’t change, you don’t even need to remember it, just mark the quarter ends once and you’re done forever.
Just compare that to the unnecessary complexity of the Gregorian calendar and the effort it takes to remember basically anything that changes from year to year, or what day of the week any given date or holiday falls on, or even just which months have 30 days and which have 31.
13! is definitely not a prime number, but it’s too large to be useful in this context (I know, I know, you didn’t actually MEAN 13-factorial, but I’ve studied enough maths that I couldn’t help it).
Fine! Four months of thirteen weeks, and no more complaining!
Yes, they also decided to change the time to decimal time.
The day was divided into 10 hours, each hour was 100 minutes …
Alternatively 8 months of 5 weeks of 9 days with 5 days spread between them. 3 days off each week. Each month begins on a solstice, equinox, or halfway between them.
We can go as crazy as we’d like
Eh fuck religions, they can keep their old antiquated calenders.
12 months of 30 days
January 31
You can only pick one of these.
Starting the year in January sucks. Ancient civilizations had it right with a start of the year at the Spring equinox. The original design by Sylvain Marechal, right before the Revolution started, did start in March…
I don’t see why it sucks, it just makes sense to start it on the winter solstice as the days start to get longer and longer / shorter and shorter depending on the hemisphere you are in
Starting a new year in the dead middle of Winter doesn’t make sense to me. Spring is when trees and flowers start blooming, hence the choice of March for the first month by Antique civilizations (also the start of their military campaigns which, although convenient, is not something I get behind really)
That’s completely irrelevant to my point, which was that in a calendar of 12 30-day months you can’t have a 31st day of any month.
They did not have a 31st day and neither did they have a January. Rather, the day that we call January 31 was the 12th day of Pluviôse and also had its own name “Broccoli”
As I recall, a major reason it didn’t take off was very simple: the new “Sunday” only came every 10 days instead of 7!
The best bit about it was definitely the evocative month names.
Thermidor > July ×10
I would like this calender but we would need to adjust it so that new years falls on the winter solstice.
Plus the 5 leap days would need to be a global celebration / holiday period, and the 6th day every 4 years a massive holiday.
School year starts around September so that’s kind of nice but what did it in, or so I have heard, was the 10 day workweek, just too long.
I wouldn’t mind a 10 day week if it meant work 6 and then get a 4 day weekend.
But who am I kidding our corporate overlords would expect at least 8 on and 2 off
