The beginning of the year was originally set by custom after the date when the days started being longer than the nights. This is just past the Spring Equinox, when the day and night are now of equal length. In the Northern Hemisphere the Sun's rays march down to the Equator from here, but they mark it by when the Sun crosses the Equator. But most people live sompleplace else.

Even so, the custom became April First, about 7 or 8 days or so after the Equinox of what we now call March 22. (This is also why the Winter Solstice celebration is December 25 and not the 21st or 22nd. There is a time lag).

The Romans craved order, as all empires do. One thing the Romans left of abiding usefulness is a fairly cohesive calendar, which only needs a bit of tweaking every four years or so.

The Roman Empire fell from within and after continued southern attacks from CARTHAGE or northern Africa, near about where lies modern day Tunisia and Libya; as well as northern Barbarian attacks from the Germanic tribes of Saxony. The Germanic Saxons later invaded the old Angle-land, or England, and became the ANGLO-SAXONS, but that’s another article for the big pile.

When the new calendar was instituted by the Holy Roman Church, a couple of new months were kept that were added at the beginning of the year and the middle for a couple of emperors, which threw off the once neat Ten Month calendar.

But it worked out better this way anyway, unlike trying to squeeze in 365 days for 360 degrees, which already was tried by the BABYLONIANS who had a thing about circles, and Even Numbers.

Twelve months can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10, and 12. Not so for a Ten Month Calendar, which had to have many holidays to make the weeks come out straight, and a strong central authority to enforce universal compliance, which the Romans were and could.

Until their final fall in 476 CE, when they tired of the ceaseless barbarian onslaughts and relocated the Roman empire's capital east to CONSTANTINOPLE, on the opening of the Bosporus Sea, now Istanbul near the Caspian Sea in present day Turkey. This also meant the establishment of another competing church, the EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH, but that's another article. We're up to about a book's worth now I think.

This now meant that the date of the New Year had to be moved from the Spring Equinox time. It was relocated to the month of JANUS, who was a Greco-Roman god who had two faces. This was apropos, because he could look forward and backward, as his month of January does, back to the end of the year and forward to the beginning of the new one.

But there were holdovers who refused to give up their old ways, and they continued to celebrate the Old New Year of April First. They were ridiculed by the more modern people, and so they were called “APRIL FOOLS.” So now you know.

SHOW HOW ME THE 'INTELLIGENT DESIGN'?!

As an aside, and a foreshadowing of an upcoming article, this calls into question the idea that there is INTELLIGENT DESIGN. A super-powered Designer could have easily made planets have circular rather than elliptical orbits, and a 25 hour day, and a bunch of other nice things to have, like knees and backs that don't give us problems, and seedless watermelons, or avocado pits that aren't quite so large.

But that article will confront this wrong-headed backwards idea head-on. But with a particular caveat, and one that came from scientists themselves, together with the Quantum physicists.

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"Mr. Walker is a print journalist who often includes Science and Travel articles among his forays on political and societal observations. A past professor of Journalism at his Alma Mater of Marquette University, Walker has written extensively for several newspapers on urban issues, and is presently compiling his essays on the phenomenon of intractable trans-generational familial poverty into the book in progress "The Culture of Poverty."

"It is based on his observations on the effects of Welfare Reform in his hometown in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He often writes from an Undisclosed Location in the Hidden Valleys retreat inland from the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin, where he indulges in his first intellectual loves, amateur Astronomy and stargazing."

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