What if: Every month had 8 days?

Well, it's that time of year again.

No, not time to get back to work or to make/break resolutions or to write the wrong year on important documents.

It's time for calendar reform. Time to talk about changing that old standby, the Gregorian calendar (you know, 12 months in a year, 30 days hath September, Leap Day on Feb. 29) to a perennial calendar, one that never changes.

OK, one that changes very little.

Say, a calendar in which your birthday is always and forevermore on the same day of the week, a calendar that is used by everyone except farmers, a calendar that adds an extra week between Christmas and New Year's every so often.

It could be time for a change.

Or not.

"Strange business, time." - Doctor Who

Calendars have been around for as long as there have been astronomers watching the Earth circle the sun. But there are always shortcomings, so there also have always been attempts at calendar reform.

"There isn't a perfect calendar because of the way the solar system works," said Rick McCarty, a philosophy professor who discusses calendar reform in his classes at East Carolina University. "People have always tried to figure out a better way to solve the problem of the calendar."

Julius Caesar came up with a pretty good one about 45 B.C. His contribution is acknowledged even now by the word "July." But even though Caesar figured out the need for a leap year, he was 11 minutes off in calculating the length of a solar year.

"Over 128 years, an extra day would creep in," McCarty said.

That caused Easter, which is based on the lunar calendar, to shift out of place. So Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar, first cutting several days out of October 1582 to get everything back in place, then adjusting leap years to add the "divisible by 4 or 400 in years ending in 00" rule.

The Gregorian calendar respected the Christian sabbath, a seven-day week, but the months are all messed up. Some have 31 days, some only 30. February has 28 days, unless it has 29. Years and months can begin on any day of the week.

As early as 1745 someone proposed to fix the problems by adding a "blank day," a day without a name, to even out the solar year. Under that scenario, life would imitate the Beatles song "Eight Days a Week," but because the day wasn't named, it wouldn't interfere with the Sabbath being the seventh day of the week, or so the theory went.

In 1926, the president of the Eastman Kodak Co. supported, for business reasons, a calendar with 13 months, each with 28 days, plus one left over to be known as "Year Day" and tacked on where Dec. 29 ought to be. That, however, still interfered with certain religions.

McCarty proposed his own fix, which he called the Long-Sabbath Perennial Calendar, in 1996, which extended some Saturdays and Sundays to 36 hours each to retain the seven-day week. The idea went nowhere.

Since then there have been suggestions such as the Alphabetic Calendar, the Bonavian Calendar, the Ecliptic Calendar, the 30x11 Calendar, the Sexagesimal Calendar, the Double Leap Calendar, the Hermetic Lunar Week Calendar, the New Earth Calendar and the modestly named A Modern Calendar.

But the Gregorian calendar has stuck around. This is a boon to the calendar industry. If Jan. 1 did not fall on a different day of the week from one year to the next, there would be no need for a new cute-puppy calendar every 12 months.

But it is an inconvenience to many, such as college professors, who have to prepare a new calendar each semester for the same class they have been teaching for many years.

That is exactly what happened to Richard Conn Henry at Johns Hopkins University. But he is an astrophysicist, and he decided to do something about it.

"Always in motion is the future." - Yoda

In 2003, Henry proposed a Common Civil Calendar and for good measure tossed in the idea of everyone using a standard clock, too, set to Universal Time.

"I said, 'Wait a minute, I'm an astronomer,' " Henry recalled in a phone interview. Then second thoughts set in, and he said to himself, "Henry, you are not going to be such a fool as to get involved in something as hopeless as calendar reform." But, of course, he did.

His reformed calendar would have saved him from having to figure out each semester when assignments were due and tests given, as the dates from year to year would never change. For example, Jan. 1 would always be on a Sunday in Henry's calendar.

The idea got a lot of publicity but came no nearer adoption than the calendar mandated by invading space aliens in a promotional video for the young-adult novel "The True Meaning of Smek-day." The aliens' calendar had only three months, remembered by reciting, "329 days has Boovember, and every human should remember. All the rest have 31, except Humanuary, that has five. You are lucky we don't kill you."

That kind of all-or-nothing power isn't around to order calendar reform now, unlike in 45 B.C. and 1582.

"There's nobody powerful enough to say this is how it's going to be," McCarty said. "Julius Caesar had that power. The pope had that power. I don't think anybody can change the calendar these days."

In the 1950s, he said, India proposed to the United Nations that the World Calendar be adopted - a calendar that sometimes tossed in an eight-day week - but when the United States said it wasn't interested, the idea died.

Henry's 2003 proposal fixed the eight-day week but faced the same lack of interest. So in 2011, he picked up a partner and they added a powerful motivator - money.

"Time is money."- Ben Franklin

The latest proposal is called the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, after Henry and Johns Hopkins economist Steve H. Hanke. According to a news release from the university, the reformed calendar would streamline financial calculations, such as interest on mortgages.

The Permanent Calendar does not violate the Sabbath rule of seven-day weeks, but it does change the length of the months: March, June, September and December would have 31 days, the rest, 30. That makes each quarter of the year equal in length, and adds up to a 364-day year.

To keep Jan. 1 on Sunday every year, (which also fixes Christmas on a Sunday), every five or six years a leap week would be inserted at the end of December, which Henry and Hanke call "Xtr" or "Extra."

"There are enormous economic advantages to the proposed calendar," Henry wrote on his website http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendarDir/calendar.reform.html.

In addition, he and Hanke propose that the world adopt Universal Time so everyone's watch is synchronized everywhere.

The only problem that might arise, according to a Frequently Asked Questions page, is that farmers might need to consult the Gregorian calendar to make sure they don't miss planting on time.

Leap Day babies will age right along with the rest of us, having a birthday every year on Feb. 29, which will always be a Tuesday. In addition, there would be Feb. 30 birthdays for the first time.

But those born on what is now the 31st of January, May, July, August and October would find the Fountain of Youth, or at least the Fountain of No More Birthdays, because those months would each stop at 30 days.

"A mysterious thing, time; powerful, and when meddled with, dangerous."- Albus Dumbledore

This whole calendar reform thing is moot, according to doomsday theorists, who contend that nobody will need a calendar after Dec. 21, 2012, because the world is going to end.

They base that gloomy forecast on their interpretation of the Mayan calendar, although there are others who argue just as fiercely that the Mayans did not predict the end of the world, they simply intended to flip a page and start over from Day One, just as we do now when Dec. 31 morphs into the New Year.

The discussion is all about the Mayan Long-Count Calendar, which is good for 5,126 years, said by archaeologists to have been used to document past and future events, because the Mayans' other, 52-year calendar cycle wasn't long enough to cover everything.

Henry is in his own sort of moot place now.

"I'm 71 years old and, bless me, I am in a final-year sabbatical and I won't be teaching again," he said last week. "Now it's all academic to me. I don't know why I bother with it. Yes, I do know why I bother with it. It's crazy to have the system we have."

So here's a question to ponder on Sunday, Jan. 8, which happens to be the same in 2012 on both the Gregorian and Hanke-Henry Permanent calendars: Will the calendar ever be reformed?

Time will tell.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com