I’m going to make a plea for calendar sanity. It will fall on deaf ears because of (a) tradition and (b) inertia. In other words, because of the lamest excuse known to humanity: “We’ve always done it that way!” But here goes.

Why is the calendar for January one row longer than it needs to be? Yes, I know it’s a 31-day month beginning on a Friday and we need to make room for that last day. So we end up either splitting the Sunday between the 24th and the 31st – as if some of us work only a half day or have half as much to do on those Sundays (which looks like this)…

Or the 31st dangles like a drip at the end of the month, an orphan hanging on for dear life under four full rows of days (which looks like this)…

It could only be worse if it’s a 31-day month and begins on a Saturday: October 2016 will be such a travesty!

I’ve seen a simple and elegant solution only on a British calendar I stumbled across years ago. It makes perfect sense. It keeps the last day or two from looking like numerical outcasts. It still assigns the days to the correct day of the week. Better yet, it makes use of unused space! And it will never be adopted in the good ol’ US of A (NIH). It looks like this:

I understand that I’m shouting in the temporal wilderness here. But revolutions start that way. Remember, it’s been only 400 years since the West changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. It’s about time!