Free Republic

A German Retirement Community Did A Calendar Where Seniors Amazingly Recreated Famous Movie Scenes. The Contilia Retirement Group in Essen, Germany, made what is probably the best calendar ever with a few of their seniors.According to German press, 5,000 calendars were printed. And, they were given out to residents of the senior center, along with relatives and staff.The calendar models were interviewed about the project and said it was a ton of fun to dress up as their favorite actors.The shoot was done with professional stylists and photographers to make sure everything looked as cool as possible.The oldest senior involved...

Saints on Calendar? Q. Why are some American saints on the liturgical calendar and others are not? How is that determined?Marty, Brooklyn, N.Y. A. It is true that not all American saints appear on the universal Church calendar (also referred to as the General Roman Calendar). St. Elizabeth Ann Seton does not appear on the liturgical calendar in Poland or France. However, St. Joan of Arc does not appear on the American liturgical calendar either.Many saints appear on the universal calendar, such as Sts. Peter and Paul, St. Gregory the Great, St. Monica and so forth. But other saints...

And why is Orthodox Easter on a different date than Catholic Easter? Easter Sunday, the greatest liturgical feast of the year, has been celebrated on various days throughout the Church’s 2,000 year history and the scheduling has provided more than its share of controversy.From the very beginning of the Church the feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord was celebrated in relation with the Jewish feast of Passover. Since the events of Christ’s Passion and resurrection occurred in that context, Christians have always felt that they should celebrate his resurrection in the same way, rather than a fixed date...

The Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has switched from the lunar-based Islamic calendar, which starts with the emigration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, to the "Western" Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII and based on Jesus Christ's birth.The decision, taken during a recent cabinet session chaired by King Salman Bin Abdul Aziz, is an austerity measure to deal with its budget deficit, according to reports, which say the drop in crude oil prices beginning 2014 has hit the world's top oil exporter hard.The Muslim calendar, also known as Hijri, loses some 11 days a year so that Islamic...

Saudi Arabia switched from the Islamic lunar Hijri to Gregorian calendar Sunday in a their latest austerity effort to curb spending amid bankruptcy rumors. Islamic lunar Hijri calendar: Year comprises of 12 months lasting 354 or 355 days, or 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar. Salaries are calculated on annual basis, so a longer year translates into less payment for the employees.

     According to the Church's calendar, developed during the Byzantine period and based on Biblical chronologies, September 1/14 marks the beginning of the ecclesiastical year. Specifically, September 1/14, 2016 marks the beginning of the year 7525 from the creation of the world, God having created 5509 years before the Nativity of Christ.The article below, originally appearing on OrthodoxWiki, offers a detailed look at the development of the Church's Byzantine Creation Era calendar, and several of its predecessing calendars.* * * The Byzantine Creation Era, also "Creation Era of Constantinople," or "Era of the World" (Greek: Έτη Γενέσεως Κόσμου κατά...

Just two weeks after we exposed the fact that Hillary Clinton's official calendar is "missing" a lot of entries, more 'illegal' allegations are being exposed from her reign as Secretary of State. In a deposition last week, NYPost reports that Hillary Clinton's cloests aide - Huma Abedin - revelaed that her boss destroyed at least some of her schedules as secretary of state — a revelation that could complicate matters for the presumptive Democratic nominee, who, along with the State Department she ran, is facing numerous lawsuits seeking those public records. Huma Abedin was deposed in connection with a Freedom...

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show...

The Philadelphia School District will add two Muslim holidays to its calendar, placing it among the first in the nation to do so. In what would be an even rarer step, Mayor Kenney said Tuesday he also hopes to adopt the holidays for city workers. He has created a task force to determine how the change can be accomplished. A spokesman from the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington said his group is not aware of any cities that have included the holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, in their municipal calendars. "Philadelphia's history is based on being a place...

Six months ago I wrote about Tu B'Av, a Yom Tov that brings hope after the terrible events of Tisha B'Av. There is something about the fifteenth day of the Jewish month that relates to redemption. The first day of Pesach and the first day of Sukkos, as well as Tu B'Shevat and Shushan Purim, all occur on the fifteenth of the month. As we approach Tu B'Shevat, an appropriate question would be: Why is the fifteenth so special that momentous days of redemption consistently fall upon that day? What sets it apart from all the other days of the...

ORIGINAL TITLE: IN 1844, THE PHILIPPINES SKIPPED A DAY, AND IT TOOK DECADES FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD TO NOTICE The southern Philippines, in an 1852 map (Image: Geographicus Rare Antique Maps/Wikimedia)One of the marvels of modern civilization is that, for the most part, humans all around the globe have agreed on one system for counting days and hours. This is a recent development. While people have generally relied on the cycles of the moon, Earth and sun to measure time, at least 80 different calendars have been used, some more closely aligned than others.And no system is perfect....

A detail on Pope Gregory XIII's tomb, carved by Camillo Rusconi, shows the Pope being presented with a plan for what would become the Gregorian Calendar. (Image: Terfili/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)The Pope tends to be a powerful guy. He can start global conversations, rock all kinds of colors, and sometimes perform miracles.But only once in history has a pope made time literally disappear.In 1582, thanks to then-Pope Gregory XIII, October 6th—along with the 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th—simply didn't exist. Ten days, gone.Why? Because of that perpetual thorn in Christianity's side: the Sun. In the 16th century, much...

Florida Gators fans who own the football team’s 2014 wall calendar received a surprise Tuesday when they turned the page from June to July. That’s because Aaron Hernandez is Mr. July. So how does an alleged murderer end up gracing the month of July in a football calendar? First of all, the Gators say they weren’t in charge of the calendar’s distribution, as it’s a licensed product from Turner Licensing. They also say the approval process for the calendar was during the spring of 2013 — a few months prior to Hernandez’s June arrest for the alleged murder of Odin...

On Tuesday 7 January, Coptic Orthodox Christians – who comprise 90 percent of Egypt's Christians – will break their 43-day fast and celebrate Christmas. The festival comes almost two weeks after most Western denominations, including Catholics and Protestants, held their celebrations on 25 December. Ahram Online asked Bishop Abram of the Fayoum Diocese to explain why there was a difference in the dates; he stressed that the difference in fact results from the use of different calendars, not from any underlying theological dispute. Although the exact date of Jesus' birth was -- and remains -- unknown, within the first few...

The world's oldest calendar has been discovered in a field in Scotland, a group of British archeologists believe. The twelve excavated pits in an Aberdeen field seem to mimic phases of the moon to track months over a year. "The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East," [the project leader Vince] Gaffney told various media.

After 63 years, U.S. Postal Service delivers calendar The 1950 Pennsylvania Railroad calendar never made it to James W. Flanagan, general manager of The Scranton Times. He would never need it: he died in December 1949. But on Friday, 63 years after his death, the U.S. Postal Service made a delivery. A mail carrier, with no explanation of where the package had been the last 63 years, handed it to Chris O'Hora at The Times-Tribune's front desk. The calendar, rolled in a long tube, soon made its way to the office of Bobby Lynett, a publisher of The Times-Tribune and...

t is Dec. 20, 2012 — and citizens of Earth are panicking, consumed by the idea that the world will end Friday, something they say was predicted by Mayan astronomers. Of course, most people are not panicking, and Maya expert David Stuart says no one should. The calendar, he says, has plenty of room to go. In an interview airing on Thursday's Morning Edition, David Greene asks archaeologist Stuart, who helped translate influential ancient Mayan hieroglyphs in 1996, if he thinks the world will end on Dec. 21. "Absolutely not," is Stuart's answer, dashing the hopes of students eyeing a...

For you Early Birds who simply MUST get a jump on everyone else, TODAY is your day (assuming you believe in Mayan prophecies, of course). And why not? As you can see, the eleventh-century Mayan Seer and Prophesizer Nostradam-itzalcoatl clearly predicted in this crucial passage of his autobiography (below), that sales of semi-automatic pistols would skyrocket in the last few days. (You do speak Mayanoglyph, don't you?) What more proof do you need than that? Note too his words regarding money being thrown down from high places, obviously a Fiscal Cliff reference.

On Halloween 10 years ago today, EgyptAir Flight 990 nose-dived into the ocean off Nantucket from 33,000 feet, leaving the families of 217 children, grandparents and lovers forever haunted by the question: Why? “You just wish you knew what the reason was. Some things break your heart so much,” said Bobbie Bergman of Colorado. Bergman’s sister Paula Barnes, a one-time Marblehead resident, perished with their parents William and Tamsin Barnes and several family friends about 1:52 a.m. on Oct. 31, 1999, a half hour into what was to be a 10-hour passage from New York to Cairo.