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From Inverse, originally published in 2018:

A CALENDAR WHERE EVERY MONTH IS 28 DAYS WOULD ACTUALLY MAKE A TON OF SENSE

Wednesday marks the last day of February, the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar. It doesn’t have to be this way, according to some advocates who propose a calendar where every year is 13 months and every month is 28 days. It sounds like a drastic change to a calendar that’s been in use since 1582, but dig a little deeper and the idea makes a lot of sense.

The idea is simple. Each month has four, seven-day weeks, making a total of 28 days. There are 13 months in a year, totaling 364 days, with a new month in between June and July called “Sol” to mark the summer solstice. The leftover day is a special Year Day, with two such days every four years.

The idea was first proposed by British railway worker Moses B. Cotsworth, who devised it in 1902 as a way of making his job easier. George Eastman, head of Kodak, used the calendar in his company from 1924 to 1989, but employees didn’t live their lives by the strange structure and stuck to Gregorian outside of work. A proposal put forth to the League of Nations attracted a great deal of interest, but that too fell by the wayside as World War II disbanded the league.

The design has a number of advantages. It means the 8th is always a Sunday no matter the month, and the same applies to every other day. Holidays like Thanksgiving wouldn’t move around the calendar anymore. Monthly and quarterly data becomes easier to compare, with both measurements an equal number of days. It also means never checking when the month ends.

The idea has since occasionally come up in fiction. The Simpsons lampooned the idea during a Treehouse of Horror Halloween special, where a particularly spooky segment takes place on the 13th day of the 13th month. Marge explains that the school calendars were misprinted, and Homer can be heard complaining about the “lousy Smarch weather.”

The Simpsons episode actually raises one of the downsides of the calendar. It would mean having a 13th month every year, and also means every month would contain a Friday the 13th. It may sound like a small detail to some, but don’t forget that Microsoft never released a version 13 of Office, and data from 2015 showed 574 Manhattan condos lack a 13th floor. Don’t underestimate the power of superstition.

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Vintage Audio Pr0n

Technics SA-5470 Receiver (1977-1978)

I found this on Tumblr (or maybe it was Instagram) and it immediately sent me to eBay to see if any were available for sale. This is another piece of equipment that immediately conjures up memories of the Labelle’s audio showroom of the mid-to-late 1970s for me.

These were impressive receivers when they arrived on the scene, but like I’ve written about before, I was too enamored of the shiny new Sony V-FET amps to pay anything else much mind. The original lighting of the dial and meters on these receivers had a very subtle greenish glow (something not easily restored unless you can source the special green-tinted incandescent bulbs these shipped with) that illuminated the dial itself and not the just the numbers; something that set Technics apart from the black-out dials of Marantz, Pioneer, and Sansui.

There are several currently available on eBay at very reasonable prices, but the absolute last thing I need right now is another receiver, so it wasn’t a huge effort to eschew pressing the “Buy It Now” button.

But damn…it sure was tempting.

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It’s Obviously All Made Up

“This is actually the first time that tropical storm watches have been issued on the West Coast of the United States,” said Elizabeth Adams, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Diego. Typically, when a tropical storm makes its way to the southwestern U.S., it has severely dissipated, weakening to a depression or storm remnants, she said. The only tropical cyclone to actually make landfall in Southern California was in 1939.

Hurricane Hilary: SoCal on its first tropical storm warning

But I heard that climate change wasn’t real because one time it was moderately warm in Virginia. And that guy from Oklahoma threw a snowball in the House of Representatives.

Someone needs to tell this storm to turn around because obviously it’s all made up.

Source: Los Angeles Times
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Do You Remember?

The 70s were wild. I remember the fixtures (Kohler) and the color, but I’d completely forgotten the fad of sunken tubs…

I remember back when I was a young thing designing dream houses that I always used the Kohler fixture template—vs. American Standard (manual drafting y’know)—because it seemed their designs were so avant garde in comparison…and available in colors American Standard could only dream of.