What's In A Name?

 My mother signed us up for AOL’s first dial-up service when I was fifteen. When it came to technology, my family was always years behind. Most of my friends got their first cell phones and computers when they were eleven or twelve, but for me, communication was still as primitive as ringing doorbells and biking around the block to see who was home.  So the first thing I did when we finally got our computer was think long and hard about a screen name. Who was I, in 16 characters or less? Or better yet, who might I be? Most of my friends identified themselves with song lyrics, movie quotes and favorite foods. I still remember some of them: xxdeadendconvoxx, ScreaminTamale, EvanescenceGIRLY. I chose MarshIACT87 (a horrible and disturbing mix of Eminem’s and Shia Labeouf’s first names fused with my theatrical aspirations and the year in which I was born).

High school pressed on. We dropped the X’s and the angst. We were falling in love all over the place, breaking hearts and getting ours broken in turn. Our screen names described our love, our tears, and our general appreciation for celestial bodies. I changed mine to starrlit71, and that’s who I was for a long time, long after everyone ditched their Dells for Macs and made the switch from AOL to IChat. I was starrlit71 when I met my first love and when I left him two years later; I was starrlit71 when my parents divorced; I was starrlit71 when I started college and moved two hundred miles away to a different state with a different name. 

I wish I could remember why I’d chosen that name in the first place, but I don’t. Like everything, it had its time and place. Now I’ve settled for GChat, where my name is just my name, but I miss it sometimes, the invention.

Amy Bernhard is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.

The Eastman Plan

Before it was the Eastman Plan, it was the International Fixed Calendar. And if it was not precisely Auguste Comte’s 1849 Positivist calendar, it derived from the same basic mathematical insight, the same fourth grade calculation: 365 days divides beautifully into 7 day weeks—plus a remainder of one little day. In fact, the division is so tidy that if you group four weeks together as a month, you can fit exactly 13 months into that one year. You still have that single remainder day hanging around, of course—that one weekless, monthless day sequestered at the end of the year—but, heck, why not give it a pardon and make it a holiday and call the whole thing done?

Moses B. Cotsworth presented just such a scheme in 1923 to no less than the League of Nations’ Special Committee on calendar reform. It was then sometimes known as the Cotsworth Plan, this system with every month starting on Sunday the first, every month arranged like the one before, your birthday always on Thursday if you were born on one. Think of it: that Twilight calendar you just got would be endlessly accurate, its days arranged the same every year, and replaced only because the images began to fade.

The benefits seemed obvious: there would be cost savings, ease of scheduling, clarity and efficiency all around! Perhaps it was the businessman in George Eastman that admired the 13-month calendar. Perhaps this inventor of roll film held a special affinity for the calendar’s smooth and regular progression of time. In any case, Eastman was so taken by the notion that he didn’t just join Cotsworth’s International Fixed Calendar League, in 1926 he ceded control of daily operations at the Eastman Kodak Company so that he might devote more time to the issue. The whole idea was known as the Eastman Plan in many quarters, so constant and compelling was its new champion.

Two years later George Eastman did an obvious thing: he stopped doing business by the capricious old Gregorian calendar and put the whole of Eastman Kodak on the 13-month calendar. Others seemed ready to follow suit. As of 1929 the League of Nations had scrapped 154 other calendar proposals, leaving Eastman’s pet project one of two finalists in contention for international adoption. The International Fixed Calendar was for a time poised to be the new calendar of a modern new world.

Then, in 1932, Eastman declared in a suicide note addressed to his friends, “My work is done. Why wait?” and killed himself.  The International Fixed Calendar League folded within five years. Three years later the League of Nations had forgotten the 13-month calendar, and by time the United Nations was the governing body convened to vote on international calendar reform, the Eastman Plan wasn’t worth mentioning.

If anyone still complained that under the 13-month calendar financial quarters don’t end when months do, if anyone minded that Friday the thirteenth came every month, or thought anything had to be a better name for the new 13^th month than “Sol”; if anyone cared about one day a year unaccounted for in God’s 7-day cycles of toil and Sabbath, it didn’t much matter anymore. The debate was over. Except for the employees of the Eastman Kodak Company, who may have watched their families grow up by the irregular jostle and sway of old Gregorian months but still clocked in every day to a calendar perfect in its repetition, elegant in its predictability, and divine in its perpetuity. Thousands and thousands of people did this, waking up under one calendar and going to work by another, for six decades, until the Eastman Plan was finally forsaken in 1989.

And who now is left even to say that this year, this 2012, with its January 1^st square on a Sunday, is exactly the kind of year Eastman was waiting for, a year to begin a new reckoning?

Kendra Greene is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.