What Did You and Your WifeDo on Monday? (a poem)

Near Southport's Provision Company

10 Anniversaries
Ago Tomorrow, 

Again Celebrated
in Sestina

By Moristotle

[I wrote the sestina below to commemorate my wife’s and my 47th wedding anniversary. In the form of an interview, it was published on April 17, 2013, under the heading “Ask Wednesday: A husband on what he and his wife did Monday.”
    According to one of the 14 comments on the original post, this sestina was nearly the 10^th I had written in the short time since I discovered the form.]

Goines On: For the whiz-kids

Click image for more vignettes

A not-so-simple formula…

Even after Goines realized that he had been drawing figures and assembling tables of yearly cyclical calendar patterns only to satisfy some obsession or compulsion within his own self, he continued working at it. But when he got done – or done enough, because more could be done – he decided to set that aside and be done with it. He’d wrap it all up by specifying the steps that a computer program could take to find the day of the week for any given date within the period covered by the Gregorian Calendar.

439 Years Ago Today was NOT October 14

Pope Gregory XIII

It was October 4
(by the Julian Calendar)

By Moristotle

Tomorrow will be the 439th birthday of the Gregorian Calendar, which was adopted in October 1582, in order to correct a problem with the Julian Calendar’s calculation of the average year as having 365.25 days.The Wikipedia entry on the Julian Calendar explains the problem:

Goines On: Raging

Click image for more vignettes

Goines’ bedtime thoughts for two nights were topsy-turvy and frustrating, owing mainly to his inability to hold intermediary thoughts in short-term memory.

    “Frustrating” hardly captured it. During the second night (after the incident of the empty sheriff’s car with its engine running) he groggily thought he had pieced together the characteristics of the 2200 bumped cycle, but he wasn’t sure, because it apparently wasn’t 40 years long (like the 2100 bump). 

    The morning after that second night, now awake and able to jot done stuff, he went over (and over) his nighttime finding for the 2200 bumped cycle and found that it was 28 years long, which seemed odd, because that was the same number of years as the standard 28-year cycle. Goines slogged on to the end of the 2001–2400 calendar period, taking notes as he went.

Goines On: 2021 or 2001?

Click image for more vignettes

Goines thought he should first explain to the prospective 12-year-old programming whiz that his personal mnemonic

        “Mi Ki Ko Ranch” rattles Miquel

had been chosen for practical reasons, because it represented Goines’ present year, 2021. The kid might think it made more sense for a program to use the year 2001 – it seemed cleaner somehow... unless he or she chose to use 2021 as a way of attributing Goines – which Goines would have to agree would be nice.

Goines On: The bumps

Click image for more vignettes

Over several days, Goines further cogitated the “bump problem” that arose when a 00 non-leap year came along and interrupted the standard 28-year cycle, with its pattern of 6₁-11-6₂-5 sub-cycles. He believed he could specify a pattern for the 400-year stretches as well, each one comprising three 00-years that aren’t leap years.
    He had already traced the 6₁-11-6₂-5 sub-cycles back to 1909, within 8 years of the 1900 non-leap year, and up to 2099, where the 6₁-11-6₂ portion of 28-year cycle butted up against the 2100 non-leap year. He now needed to examine that bump at 2100, and the bumps at 2200 & 2300 as well.

Goines On: Before 1901, after 2099?

Click image for more vignettes

Goines looked at his archives and discovered that he had years ago pieced together more about calendar recycling than he was currently re-piecing together. He had tackled the subject in some depth eight years earlier, even written a sestina about it for the Goineses’ 47^th wedding anniversary.
    While he didn’t think he still had the brain power those earlier investigations required, he was pleased that he was managing to re-tool a thing or two for his “parlor trick.”

Goines On: Shortcut to 1976

Click image for more vignettes

The night following Goines’ successful experiments with shifting to past years from the 2021 calendar, his thoughts were troubled. Why was he even thinking about this? What did it gain him – or anyone else? As a painter had said to him when he touted his calendar mnemonic to her, “Just consult a calendar for the year in question!”
    And anyway, when did anyone even need to know what day of the week a date in some other year fell on? Wasn’t this mnemonic thing just a parlor trick? Poets – like that painter who hadn’t been impressed – concerned themselves with trees and flowers, light and shade, human and geological history, man’s failings and successes, life and death. 

Goines On: Those elusive leap years

Click image for more vignettes

In the few days remaining before their flight to California, Goines wondered whether the solution to the problem of calculating the day of the week for dates in past or future years might be a lot simpler than he had been imagining. What if he just used his mnemonic for the current year (“Mi Ki Ko Ranch” rattles Miquel) and then “shifted” to the year of the date in question?
    The calendar for next year varies from this year’s calendar by starting either 1 day or 2 days later in January, depending on whether this year is, or is not, a leap year (2021 is not). Leap years have 366 days, or 35 weeks plus 2 days. Last year’s calendar starts a day or two earlier in the week for the same reasons. Goines wasn’t going to solve this before they left, so he tried to stop thinking about it and finish packing.

Goines On: Stress junkie

Click image for more vignettes

Goines told Bic he needed to finish the flyer that he was helping Bic with because the Goineses were going out of town for a week. Bic told him not to “stress himself” – if he didn’t finish before they left, it was okay. But the phrase brought Goines the realization that he wanted to get the job done before they left. Bic had just triggered the insight that when it comes to positive, creative stress, Goines was a junkie. He loved creative stress, he needed it!

Ask Wednesday: The husband yet again on the calendar

Fourteen calendars in sestina

By Morris Dean

The last time we interviewed the husband who last month with his wife celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary, he explained why a particular date recurs on the same day of the week according to a pattern, using for example the date April 29, which occurred on Monday this year (see calendar above right). As you may recall from that interview, April 29 falls on Monday again in the years 2019, 2024, 2030, and 2041. Note the number of intervening years, or intervals:

2013 [6 yrs] 2019 [5 yrs] 2024 [6 yrs] 2030 [11 yrs] 2041

Ask Wednesday: The husband again on when a date repeats on the same day of the week

Leaping calendar in sestina

By Morris Dean

We wanted to follow up today with the husband interviewed last week (in "Anniversary in sestina"). That interview mentioned that the couple's wedding anniversary follows a pattern in the day of the week on which it recurs year after year. We realized that the same applies to all other dates: they'll recur in certain future years on the same day of the week. By what pattern will they recur? [Our questions are in italics, but the interviewee starts talking first.]

Ask Wednesday: A husband on what he and his wife did Monday

Near Southport's Provision Company

Anniversary in sestina

By Morris Dean

What did you and your wife do on Monday?
We drove over to Southport, on the coast,
To spend a night away to celebrate
This year's marking of all our married time
Together. Not to approach platitude,
But the day was our anniversary.

Have a light Ten Days of Newton

In her Wild Side column yesterday in The New York Times, evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson pointed out that:

Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born on Christmas Day.
    ...Newton was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar...But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.

Ms. Judson suggests that an alternative reason for our annual winter holiday could be to have an extended festival in honor of Newton.

After all, the festival of Christmas properly continues for a further 12 days, until the feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So the festival of Newton could begin on Christmas Day and then continue for an extra 10 days, representing the interval between the calendars.

For an explanation of why the Julian calendar was supplanted, plus a summary of Newton's career (including his interest in religion and alchemy), I recommend Ms. Judson's column.

She even suggests a song in honor of Newton’s Birthday festival. The final verse begins:

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me...

For another article on Newton, you might consult Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.

Happy new year, those April Fools among you!

According to my old friend Pennell Rock (who was in the class ahead of me at Yale):

Did you know that before Pope Gregory in the sixteenth century, the new year used to begin on April 1? Those who did not get the message that the year now started on January 1 and continued to celebrate it with the arrival of spring came to be known as "April Fools."

And, as Pennell also says:

So all blessings and best wishes for the new year!

Learn more about Pennell and his life of sensitive reflection.