doodledee

I stumbled on this time and date site the other day while trying to find out what number day of the year it was. Talk about date geek heaven. Tons of cool stuff there.

While browsing through some of the links, I learned about how/why Europe switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar way back in 1582. Turns out that after 1500 years of using the Julian calendar - which was just a few minutes off per year - the whole of Europe was 12 days behind schedule. It was crazy... People were shoveling their driveways in June and carving pumpkins for Christmas. Complete and total chaos.

To fix the problem, when the switch was made to the Gregorian calendar, October was changed to jump from the 4th to the 15th, skipping 10 days. Presto chango, all fixed up.

If you're up for it, read more about it in this article.

On a unilateral note, another reason I was looking for calendar stuff was to find out the phases of the moon. For a few months now I've been predicting that we'd attack Iraq on the night of the first new moon in March. After listening to Bush tonight, I knew I was right.

Now it turns out that the new moon was last Monday or something.

So much for that theory, then.