September 1752, The Month That Wasn’t
Want to see a cool trick and learn some history? Go into terminal (if you are using UNIX or Mac OS X) and type in “cal 9 1752″ at the prompt. What will be displayed is a calendar of September 1752. The odd thing is that there is an entire 11 days missing from the month (Sept. 3rd-13th), as seen here:
Hit the jump for an explanation.
Apparently, England needed to switch over from the Roman Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and George II was the only one who could do it. (Seems a little late in the game to me) All this culminated in was a standard calendar to be used across Europe and a small anecdote to share with the rest of the cubefarm.
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Neat.
These were actually known as the ‘11 Day Riots’ – caused by debtors attempting to reneg on contractual liabilities, claiming that the due date never occurred. Nothing changes – now mortgagors are using a modern variation along the lines of “I can’t read English” to default on their home debt.
Dude… I would give my left… kidney to have those eleven days removed this year. Staying home and waiting for college is like being a soul in purgatory.
Shouldn’t there be at least one Windows-Linux-OSX comment here??