Thursday 30 December 2021

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Naturally calendars are cyclical and there are surprisingly few iterations of the Gregorian, civil almanac with just fourteen possible variants and happily one can recycle one’s 2011 calendar for 2022. I wonder if any correspondence is in store with the Arab Spring igniting in Tunis and spreading across the region, a catastrophic earthquake in Christchurch, Wikileaks publishing documents and dossiers on Guantanamo Bay detainees, the death of Osama bin Laden, the arrest of Ratko Mladiฤ‡ for war crimes during the Serbian conflict, the massacre in Utรธya, the European sovereign debt crisis, water on Mars, Occupy Wall Street, the death of Muammar Gaddafi and the world population reaching seven billion souls—just to name a few events of note. Interestingly, this day was skipped—advancing from 29 December to the thirty-first by polities in Samoa and Tokelau moving from east to west of the International Date Line, aligning their time zones better with their chief trading partners, reversing a move undertaken in 1892, celebrating US independence day (4 July) twice and match clocks in California, the source of dominant commercial activity back then.