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Imagine a future in which you always know the date of baseball’s opening day. Or that your birthday is always on a Tuesday (sorry). Or that New Year’s Eve is always on a Saturday.

As the people of the world prepare to hang their 2012 calendars, two professors at Johns Hopkins University are proposing one you can keep forever, as each date falls on the same day of the week as it did the year before.

Christmas might always be celebrated on a Sunday, for instance, and Memorial Day Monday could always be on May 28.

Astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry and applied economist Steve Hanke devised the new calendar after years of research and planning. They say their calendar would make it easy to plan annual activities, from holidays to academic schedules to financial calculations.

“Think about how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world, and it becomes obvious that our calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits,” Henry said.

Every third month on the new calendar would have 31 days, with the rest of the months having 30, for a total of 364 days. They would drop the quadrennial 366-day leap years entirely in favor of an extra week at the end of December every five or six years.

The pair say their calendar is different from other alternative calendars proposed in the past because it keeps each week at seven days.

“All of the major (other calendars) have involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week, which is not acceptable to many people because it violates the Fourth Commandment about keeping the Sabbath Day,” Henry says. “Our version never breaks that cycle.”

The two men also propose eliminating time zones and adopting a universal time around the world to streamline international business.

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An Italian couple are to become the world’s oldest divorcees, after the 99-year-old husband found that his 96-year-old wife had an affair in the 1940s.

The Italian man, identified by lawyers in the case only as Antonio C, was rifling through an old chest of drawers when he made the discovery a few days before Christmas.

Notwithstanding the time that had elapsed since the betrayal, he was so upset that he immediately confronted his wife of 77 years, named as Rosa C, and demanded a divorce.
Guilt-stricken, she reportedly confessed everything but was unable to persuade her husband to reconsider his decision.

She wrote the letters to her lover during a secret affair in the 1940s, according to court papers released in Rome this week.

The couple are now preparing to split, despite the ties they forged over nearly eight decades – they have five children, a dozen grandchildren and one great-grand child.

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