It's time to adjust

Time is relative, and relatively religious.

One of those goofy pseudo-holidays for tomorrow, Sept. 1, is "calendar adjustment day." Sorry, but that elicits more curiosity than "bison-ten yell day" (bicentennial, lol) and "chicken boy's day" (a Los Angeles restaurant mascot).

So what's calendar adjustment day, and why in September? The Church.

Some readers may remember past columns about the development of our current Gregorian calendar, and why it changed from the Julian. Astronomy buffs also know how imperfect the calendar remains. Leap year doesn't do the trick; we're still not perfectly in line with Time itself, nor can we be under this system.

We used to be even more out of time.

Back to Gregory XIII and the 16th century:

When they changed systems they had to make up for a lack of lost time. In other words, things were so out of whack under the old calendar that when they tried to adjust it, they had to skip 10 days in October. Folks in the Middle Ages went to sleep on Oct. 4, 1582, and woke up the next morning to find it was Oct. 15. That was just in Roman Catholic countries, which didn't include our Protestant English ancestors. They didn't want to follow a pope.

Religious differences aside, science couldn't be denied.

Finally by September 1752, England and the American colonies caught up, literally. We dropped 11 days from September that year. We needed one more day because nearly two centuries later with the Julian calendar our time was even farther behind, well, time. Sept. 2, 1752, was followed 24 hours later by Sept. 14. For a while to avoid confusion we had to use double dating - the old, Julian date followed by a backslash/and the new Gregorian date.

Does this mean we can still call it summer vacation? Happy Aug. 20/Sept. 1.

Sholeh Patrick, J.D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who doesn't give a fig what date it is as long as it's below 90 degrees outside. E-mail sholehjo@hotmail.com