I meant more like, 'give us back our eleven days!', or 'according to our calendar it's time to plant our crops, but alas the oxen keep falling into cravasses and being carried off by giant ravens'.
Part of what I was thinking was this: at the moment, each known calendar seems to be a 'perfect' fit to the year; whole numbers of days, week, months, and seasons to the year. Fair enough. But what if at some time such-and-such a culture had a different calendar, that for some reason didn't match the 'real' year? This would most obviously happen if Reality changed, and the calendar, due to blinding bureaucratic speed and suberb celestiological accuracy didn't, or did so only somewhat later?
> Some people will give
> you seriously weird answers on either side of the mark that makes
> Plentonius (Yelm rose in 221 ST) look reasonably credible. The
> offenders are all in the east, which makes me suspect that there's
> something funny in the water there.
Tsk, tsk, what a big fuss you Foreign Devils make of this 'Dawn' and 'Darkness' malarky. A little temporary local difficulty blown _way_ out of proportion... Well, either that or your collective self- delusion as to the events of moderately recent history are more deluded than seems usual for your benighted cultures. Our Uninterupted Solar Service merely demonstrates that our sky gods, despite their self-acknowledgement of their own inferiority to our true dragon way, are nevertheless greatly superior to your shoddy western product. Really, one wonders why you bother getting out of bed to worship at all. What you rashly believe to be the 'KraLor Dawn' is of course merely the wondrous event of the ascention of the Emperor Known Formerly as Yanoor, who -- [scribe chewed own leg off at this point]
> >A modest instance
> >is Nysalor, who as is now well-known, instantly corrupted the
> >Dara Happans into minions of chaos by his Seductively Simple
> >plan of giving them a calendar that had a whole number of weeks
> >in it! (28 weeks x 10 days, plus 1 Sacred Time light-fingeredly
> >appropriated from the Theyalans, reportedly too squiffy at the time
> >to be keeping a proper guard on it.)
> I really dislike the Stevemartinesque idea that before the
> Sunstop, the Dara Happans only had a year of 280 days.
Ugh, you had to remind me... This is coming back to me only in waves (of nausea), but I think this requires that the _actual_ solar year (solar in the astronomic sense, not the theological demarcation dispute meaning) be 280 days, which is just plain barking.
I could just about believe that before the 'Dawn' this was true, but I'd rather believe that in Dara Happa at least, it was some Better number: like 300, or something. Something very Orderly and Solar. (Not necessarily according to the _Buseri_; this may be a 'public' or 'popular' belief.)
> The Dara Happans may have decided to hallow fourteen days of their
> calender as a gesture of goodwill to the newfound Dorastran
> Unity and found that it actually made sense.
Right, that's what I was suggesting. (Indeed, that's what I was suggesting was already pretty much proto-Canon.) The calendar operating between "the Dawn" (OST or 111,221 YS, takeyerpick) and the Sunstop I presume had 'leap weeks', with some years having 29 weeks and some 28, or some such device to that effect. Pretty ugly stuff (though kinda funky from my own twisted perspective). How this might have come about is an interesting point: either the Buseri were very incompetent, or very perverse, or some some reason such a calender _used_ to make sense.
Cheers,
Alex.
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