A calendar with 13 months?

by Dave Warner

It might not be as crazy as it sounds because, according to The Human Calculator, Scott Flansburg, our current twelve-month calendar doesn’t even make any sense.

He found a book in the West Palm Beach library that showed a formula that allowed you to find out what day of the week a day falls on for the Gregorian Calendar.

“I wrote it down on an index card and got on a plane the next day. When I got off the plane, somebody gave me their birth date and year, and I could calculate what day of the week it was on,” he said.

As he traveled around the country giving shows and performances, he would get kids to write down their name and birthdate on a card, and he could look at it and calculate in a second what day of the week it was.

“I would just circle whichever day of the week they were born and then sign it. The kids would go home and say hey, mom, was I born on a Saturday, and the parents would either know or not and have to look it up. Then they’d ask why it changed each year,” he said.

“It really personalized my message to the kids. That’s how it started.”

Flansburg realized how complex the calculation was and started thinking about why we used such a problematic calendar.

He said, “Have you ever really wondered why the calendar is the way it is?”

Why are there 24 hours a day and 365 days a year? Why are there 28, 30, or 31 days in a month? “These are questions kids ask when they start to learn the calendar.”

“I felt like a kid just looking at the calendar and going, wow, why is this then?”

Flansburg points out the names of the months. January represents a Norse/Roman god named Janus – a two-headed person that looks into the past and future. “February, nobody can even spell it,” he stated.

“March, April, May, and June are Norse gods. You get into July, and that was named after Julius Ceasar, and August was after Augustus Ceasar. September – Sep – is a Latin term that means seven, but September is the ninth month. October is eight, but it’s our tenth month; Nov means nine, but it’s our eleventh month. And Dec means ten, but it’s our twelfth month.”

All the names are off by two, so Flansburg wanted to know what happened. “The year used to only have ten months and start in March. Nobody really cared about counting time during the winter, they just checked in, but after Julius Ceasar dated Cleopatra, who was using 365, brought it back to Rome,” he said.

He said that they stuck January and February in and never got around to fixing the rest.

“When you say September 11th, you’re thinking 9/11, but it’s really 7/11. It just doesn’t capture what it is and that made me start questioning everything about the calendar. You get into it all, and it’s quite a show,” he stated.

Flansburg said that they were coming up on Y2K, and he was freaking out a bit because he’d been a computer programmer for a couple of years in the Air Force. “I was visiting a school on May 5, 1999, and a little girl asked me to do my Guinness World Record where I count by a number, so she picked 28.”

“I heard myself saying 364 as I was counting, and I was like, holy cow, that’s a year. Why aren’t we using a thirteen-month calendar with 28 days except for the one extra day?”

He was driving home thinking about it, Y2K, and the fact that everybody was going to die in a few months (if you went through that experience, you know there were some crazy things said), and nobody had thought about it.

Flansburg quit working on everything else and dove deep into calendars and what Y2K meant. While watching a sunset, he finally got the idea of what to do with the extra day.

“I teach kids not to count from 1-10, but from 0-9. That’s when it hit me – start the months with 0 instead of 1.  So, it’s a 0-based thirteen-month calendar. That’s 364 days, but where do you sneak in the 365th day? That’s the first day of the year, which is the zero-day,” he said.

All of the work led him to recognize the importance of the number nine. Here’s a video where he explains how that works.

Flansburg said that no matter what numbers you use, it always comes out to nine. “That freaked me out.”

“I’m in the Guinness Book of World Records, and I didn’t know about this pattern?” He felt that the calendar study led him to the importance of 9, and that revelation changed his life. “I noticed that pattern on 9-9-1999. It hit me hard.”

Since then, he’s been trying to convince people about the importance of 9 and what the 13-month calendar could do for everyone.

“For the whole year, every month, every number is the same day of the week, for the whole year. That only happens when January 1st is on a Sunday. That happens this coming year in 2023. The last time that happened was in 2017, and before that was in 2006. It only happens once in a while, and it’s a weird pattern,” he stated.

“The calendar story is crazy, but all I want to do is offer people a way to keep track of time next year to show them how much easier life could be.”

Flansburg said that he wants people to download his calendar, print it out, and then put it next to their traditional calendar for 2023.

“All I ask you to do is put your life on that calendar, with all of your stuff you have to keep track of. For example, your bills. When is your power bill due, cable bill, mortgage, etc.? Put all those on there and find the same date on my calendar and put them on there,” he said.

“When you get them all in there, because it has the same number of days for each month, these patterns erupt off the page that will show you rhythms and patterns in your life that will help you tune in to things and make sense of things.”

He said he wants people to experience the same kind of order that he has for the last 23 years, to see how much simpler life can line up.

“Everythings Circadian (circadian rhythm – a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours) with this calendar. Pregnancy is not nine months, but 280 days. On my calendar, if a pregnancy began on the 5th, every 28 days, it would be the 5th, and you could easily see these cycles.”

“You can also see the full moon float through the month in a very simple pattern instead of just jumping around,” he said.

He calls it the Human Calculator Calendar because it makes sense to our brain and our body. “For the body, it rhymes with our biorhythms of 28-day cycles. So it allows us to tune into our financial cycles, our personal cycles, hobbies, and all these different arenas,” Flansburg stated.

“We can make better decisions based on that. This calendar that we currently use doesn’t make sense. You don’t know what day Christmas is on until you look it up,” he said.

You can get a free copy of the 2022 and 2023 calendars by visiting https://scottflansburg.com/ and scrolling down to the ‘GET SCOTT FLANSBURG’S HUMAN CALCULATOR CALENDAR 2022 AND 2023 EDITION’ section.