Images: This one goes to ELEVEN

[Labster]

So a while back there was a series of posts over on the fediverse regarding the insanity that is the history of our calendar. A subject that often starts with, "Why isn't DECember the tenth month?" I'm sure you've seen, "Why is the calendar weird this way?" posts before, but I have rarely seen any that went into this much detail. I screen captured the posts and got approval to bash them together into a single image or two, only the poster has gone ahead and compiled the whole thing and a little more into a gist over on github under the title, Why isn't the New Year on the Winter Solstice? So I'll just paste that here...

Why isn't the New Year on Winter Solstice?

The one thing not mentioned there is that the current pontifex maximus got to determine when, and how long, the intercalary month of Mercedonius would be.  You know, because the chief bridge builder would be best at astronomy.  But what really happened is that if a guy he liked was in office as consul, add a month, otherwise, don't.

This meant that out in the colonies, they would literally not know what day it was until a ship from Rome came in and told them whether a month was added or not.  Since the various days of the months, and the ides affected when taxes were collected, this got to be more and more annoying as the empire grew.  It's not much of a wonder that as soon as the the political power of the republic was cut that Rome moved to something more sane pretty much immediately.

(Incidentally the title pontifex maximus went to the Emperors of Rome, but was lost when the Western Empire fell.  Popes picked it up later because they liked the symbolism of building bridges.)

I can think of a few Tropers who I'd like to be able to send the rightmost message to... but I think temporarily turning off anon posting caught most of them.

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Spoiler

A mix of the two is even worse: 'Thanks for unsubscribing and helping us pare this list down to reliable supporters.'

As required by the re-use license, acknowledgment of source.

When that comic was the newest xkcd, I was basically implementing this very comic at work -- a way to show different messages to people as they left, based on their personal information.  Hopefully, we get to use all five.

Doesn't even need the second image, "Star Wars" and "Cats" being "New This Week" is a big enough joke.