It is now 2007, soon to be the year of the pig (Feb 18), 1428 (as of Jan 19) in the Islamic calendar, 5768 (Apr 6) of the Hebrew calendar, and 1414 of the Hindu calendar (Apr 8 ).
Ok, so it’s really all just a bunch of arbitrarily assigned numbers used for keeping track of what day it is, how old we are, and when it is time to pay our water bill or taxes. Really, with the increase in international trade and the spread of the idea of a truly global economy, it seems to me that we should adopt a new calendar for official functions while leaving the old calendars alone for marking festivals and such.
My lowly proposal: a calendar based solely on a solar year of 365.2425 days, beginning at the start of the Unix “epoch” (1/1/1970) and continuing as follows:
A 7-day week seen as starting on Monday and ending on Sunday (c’mon – that’s how we do business, right?)
13 months of 28 days (4 weeks) – yes I know that’s only 364 days – keep reading:
A hollow-day (yes, as in empty) which falls between the end of one year and the start of the next – no need to make it a national holiday – since it is kind of a non-day and would not even fall within a normal week – just call it Hollowday.
A leap-day calculated as per the Gregorian – as an extra Hollowday.
Since this calendar does not take into consideration the moon phases and run the alternating 29-30 day cycle for months with all the contortionistic math required to make it work, this is not a lunisolar calendar, but is solar in the sense that the seasonal changes will always fall very close to the same day (no “seasonal creep”).
As far as naming the months go I leave that as an excercise for someone else, I am satisfied to simply refer to them as roman numerals. It would also mean you could write a date as Month-Week-Day like VIII-2-3 and know that it is referring to the second Wednesday in the eighth month. The long decimal form, of course, would be YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss.ms.
I will name name the calendar though, and I think it should be a simple name – and keeping with the UTC model of time zones (where GMT = Z) I will call it the Z calendar.
Edit: I just realized – if we adopt this calendar right now we’ll be right on track – since the 2nd day of any month in the Z Calendar is a Tuesday!