I know I said I was done with calendars, but…

I love the French Republican calendar. It has (well, had, since Napoleon abolished it in 1806) ten months with seasonal names, like Snowy, Rainy, Windy (but in French, they have the same endings: Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse). Right now we’re in the month of Vendémiaire (Grape Harvest); Brumaire (Fog) and Frimaire (Frost) will follow. And you just can’t beat Thermidor, which starts in those dog days at the end of July.

Plus it’s all very metric: each of the twelve months had three ten-day weeks; each day ten hours; each hour 100 minutes; each minute – well, you can guess. Unfortunately, the solar system isn’t at all metric, so they had the same old problem of intercalculary days, added at the end of the year, and leap years, but they managed this fine for the twelve orderly years the calendar lasted.

What I love about it is that each day has its own name, but the logic breaks down here – or at least I can’t figure out why they chose the names that they did. For some reason, days ending in five are named for animals, those ending in zero for tools, and all the rest for plants or minerals. Today is Tomate, tomorrow is Orge, and Wednesday is Tonneau.
Tomato Day, Barley Day, Barrel Day.

Order descending into randomness. At least all the saints actually died on their days in the Roman Catholic calendar – well, except for the apocryphal ones, and the Gregorian conversion, and the unreliability of history, and…

Newt gets religion

So Newt Gingrich has converted to Catholicism. Now why do you think he picked that particular religion? And does 2012 have anything to do with it? No, according to erudite Newt:

When you have 2,000 years of intellectual depth surrounding you, it’s comforting.

Well I’m happy for you, Newt, that you find it comforting to debate whether the pope’s infallible, or whether Jesus had separate or combined god-man natures. But it might have helped if you’d had your comforting Catholic beliefs before you divorced your first wife as she was struggling with uterine cancer, or before you condemned Bill Clinton while you were committing adultery with your Catholic now-third-wife.

And don’t you have to get that infallible pope to annul your first two marriages so you’re not living in mortal sin for the rest of your life?

Faith and falling in love

My true-atheist friend and I were talking the other day, believe it or not, about how faith is a gift. It would be so great, we both agreed, to think you’d be reunited with your family when you died (assuming you liked your family, of course. And I wonder what you’d do about that, if you didn’t. But I guess in heaven all the bad stuff in people’s personalities goes away, and you’re just left with the real lovely essence of the person. And the really bad people, who don’t have too much of that lovely essence, would all be in hell anyway.).

She said at least I had a head start, being brought up in a religion. But then it didn’t feel like a gift, it felt like an order. And maybe that’s why now, I just can’t do it. I can’t get there anymore.

I think it must be like falling in love – it’s not a rational process.

Supremes court Jesus

Jesus is the son of God; his body is actually there in that Communion wafer; and, forty days after coming back to life after his crucifixion, that whole body of his ascended into heaven. Not to mention that the Pope is infallible.

Soon we will have six out of nine Supreme Court justices who believe these things, in a country that, at least according to President Obama, doesn’t consider itself a “Christian nation.”

Next time, please, an atheist or an agnostic. And maybe make them have a law degree from a non-ivy-league law school, to keep poor John Paul Stevens (who is now also the only Protestant) company.