Wednesday 1 January 2003

Pic of the day: What day will the new year begin on Mars? (Just an excuse for another screenshot from Civilization II, the Mars Now scenario. My New Year tradition, it seems.)

New Years – who cares?

It takes an awesome authority to decide the calendar. At the dawn of civilization, two different calendar systems had emerged: The solar and the lunar calendar. The solar consisted of the day and the year, the lunar of the month and - in our culture - the week. (There were other weeks, but the 7-day week had a subtle backing by the moon. If it was new moon on a Monday, then you could reasonably expect the moon to be half on the next Monday, and full on the second Monday. The match was not quite exact, but good enough to hold for a month or so.)

Sadly, the solar and the lunar calendar were not compatible. It would have been nifty if, for instance, the winter solstice always came with a new moon, and the summer solstice with a full moon. But God, having already made the sun and the moon of exactly the same shape and same size as seen from Earth, looked at his work and said it was fine as it was. So the reconciliation of the calendar was left to the theologians. It did not help that, at the dawn of civilization, Sun and Moon was usually assigned separate deities. The rescue came from the emerging science of mathematics, originally invented to keep track of the tithes and the orbits of the celestial bodies. The ancient Sumerians fell in love with the number 360, which was divisible by such a multitude of small cute numbers. You could divide it by 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, as well as various combinations thereof. 12 was another such wonder number, only smaller. So reasonably the year must be comprised of 360 days, divided into 12 months. Each month was roughly the length of a lunar cycle, another proof that maths was indeed the way to go.

The Egyptians would probably also have liked the year to be 360 days, but sadly they depended entirely on the Nile. The flooding of the Nile was a serious business, a matter of life and death; and it was also a rather regular event. A year that drifted too much off, would let the flood take people by surprise. Quite apart from the risk of drowning, there was the planting to think of. So a bit more exactitude was called for. The priests eventually decided that the year was 365 days and a bit.

Julius Caesar brought the Egyptian calendar to Rome and improved it just slightly, or at least so they say. The Julian calendar had the current months, though his heir Augustus snuck in his name in it. It even had a leap day every fourth year, which kept the year on track for more than a human lifetime. Consequently, it was not revised for many centuries, until the Pope Gregory cleaned up the errant days and declared that henceforth there would not be a leap year on years ending in 00, unless the century itself was divisible by 4. So 2000 was a leap year, but neither 1900 nor 2100. Not that I assume you will find this information useful for your day planner.

The French revolution was followed by a brave attempt to create a whole new calendar. The French revolution was a very French thing, with lots of loud talk and hot blood, some of which was spilled in public. The revolution ate its own children, and along with them the new calendar. The Gregorian calendar has nibbled away on the continents and is now pretty much universally accepted, even though some cultures have their own calendars in addition, typically for religious reasons. (It is considered uncool to admit that your religion was ever wrong on something, even such a thing as the length of the year. If people cannot believe in the calendar of their bronze axe wielding, malnourished and largely illiterate ancestors, what can then be believed in at all?)

***

So through a series of coincidences and intelligences, our calendar begins on January 1st, which on the northern hemisphere tends to be a bitterly cold day not far after winter solstice, but for some reason not on the actual solstice itself (which would at least have made some sense). In honor of this coincidence, millions (or perhaps a couple billions) of people celebrate, drink, make a lot of noise and sometimes love, and start fires or suddenly and unexpectedly amputate fingers or eyes. And if not, at least make promises.

The promises, especially when given to oneself, are often called resolutions. But they rarely ever resolve anything. Or if they do, they do it only in the most literal sense, re-solving problems that were solved in the same way the year before.

I would venture that New Years night is a weird choice to make such decisions. Not just because it is drunk, but because it has so little authority. Now if you made Christmas promises or Easter vows, you could at least suspect that God was looking over your shoulder. Much like a chain letter, breaking the thing would be a dangerous act and bad thing just might have happened to someone in West Virginia who did that when your grandfather was young. (Of course there are some wild cards who don't believe in God or at least not in Christ, but that's their problem, right?)

Or at the very least, you could make your decisions on solstices or equinoxes, which are special days in nature and not decided by some Latino emperor who slept around way too much and probably was gay too, or at least bi. But nooo, people must absolutely stop smoking and eating on the night between December (which means "the tenth" in Latin) and January (which means "month of the god with two faces" in Latin). No wonder it doesn't last very long.

***

Contrary to your judgement (if you have even read this far) I am actually not drunk. But chances are better that I'll be so in the new year. Here in Norway for the very first time it will now be possible to buy soda with alcohol in ordinary shops. The alcohol content is approximately the same as in beer, but unlike beer it doesn't taste horrible. For this reason, the Norwegian government has tried to keep the stuff hidden away so the kids won't drink it. The kids will still not be allowed to buy it, but this has never stopped them from getting beer. In fact, the only thing that has kept children from drinking beer is the sad fact that, alone among commonly sold fluids without a printed skull on the label, beer tastes worse than plain water.

The European Union, of which Norway is not a part, but with which it trades a lot, has decided that Norway is playing favorites with beer (which we make) compared to alcoholic soda (which we don't make yet, or at least not in quantity). They don't understand that it's because beer tastes so bad. Then again, the European Union is not exactly the smartest of creatures.

Life is too short to drink disgusting stuff, and so I have mostly been spared the lure of alcohol. (As you can see from this entry, I don't actually need it for its temporary debilitating effect on the human brain.) But soda with alcohol, that's something I just might try. Not that I couldn't have mixed it myself if I really wanted to. Lots of people already do that, not least on New Years.

Oh, and my actual New Years resolution is the same as usual: If I see something that needs to change in my life, I resolve not to wait until some arbitrary date set by dead people.