Satellite Television

– Often, it’s the case that the old ways become truly old and the new ways are truly the things to celebrate. And that’s why something like cable television — digital or otherwise — is quickly becoming anachronistic. Instead, people are increasingly seeking more freedom in their viewing habits than ever before, which is why something like DirectTV, which is satellite rather than cable-based, is such an exciting development.

– In the old days, those who wanted to receive multitudes of channels via satellite had to invest thousands of dollars in a lot of high-tech equipment and then construct a dish that looked like something NASA would use to get men to the moon. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case, and even the most technologically-illiterate among us knows enough to go online, find something like, for example, Directtv.com and order up any one of over a dozen different packages and specials.

– And you know what the beauty of it all is? The cost is a relative pittance, especially when one realizes how wide-ranging is the choice of entertainment, sports, commentary and even pay-per-view type programming choices really is. Most folks, if given the choice and an honest look at cable and DirecTV lineups, would most likely go for the satellite-based setup any day of the week.

– Additionally, with the advent of commonly-available (and very inexpensive) high definition (HD) capabilities, the video that comes through the satellite feed is as close as can be to what can be seen in a movie theater. Imagine watching something like the Transformers movie, at home, on a big-screen, full-on-loaded-with-surround-sound, flat-panel television set. It’s sure to be quite a sight, that’s for sure.

– When it comes time to chuck the cable box and get with the 21st century, the choice is clear: Satellite-based entertainment packages like what can be found through some sort of Direct T V offering, of course. That is, if you really want crystal-clear video. If not, there’s probably some dusty old cable box somewhere in a bargain bin at a big-box department store; it’s up to you.

Shia on Fire and on a Calendar

– The current crop of 2009 movie star calendars, and our favorite actor (Shia Le Beouf), show a lot promise this year. Surely, one can’t dispute the star power of young Shia, and he’s starring in the hottest sequel of the year, so far (”Transformers, Revenge of the Fallen”). Best of the Best Awards of some type or another will probably be given to the movie and its stars (especially Le Beouf) and they’ll be well-deserved.

– It’s okay to admit to a little jealousy, though, because unlike the possibility of media accolades (and the calendars that movies and movie stars invariably have dedicated to them) a website such as Best Magnetic Calendars has nothing similar — like a Blog Awards – which it could one day hope to receive. Oh, well…that seems to be the Web’s one “but.” By that it’s meant that the Web can bring great recognition, BUT…don’t expect something resembling a movie or TV award.

– In actuality, that’s okay. It’s more fun showing off calendars, and the more and better they are the greater it is for the blog’s readers and visitors. Movie star calendars and Mr. Le Beouf — who combines humor, frantic anxiety and charming innocence and funny klutziness in many of his roles — are something that hasn’t been emphasized as of late, but that’s going to change mainly because it’s that time of year and all the big summer blockbusters are out and being watched by great numbers of people.

– BoB Awards (Best of the Best) like everything else we hope Le Beouf will one day win, aren’t gained easily, and sometimes they can come at a dear price. Just look at how many stars have burned out from exhaustion and the effort it takes to turn in truly great performances. Fortunately, somebody like Shia seems to act with a gracefulness and effortlessness that portends great things for him in the future.

– Now, speaking of a “Best of the Best Awards” type situation, there’s probably nobody more deserving when it comes direct satellite television than the guys at Direct Sat TV . In fact, there’s an award competition coming up so if you could please nominate them for the “Best of the Best” Awards for their industry, it’s a sure bet you’d be doing them, and this site, a great favor.

We love calendars of all types, and this is not under any serious dispute. Wall calendars — which aren’t normally given more than a passing thought by most people — have come a long way since the days of the bland and ‘blah’ wall hanging that we used to see hanging up in the school principal’s office. For instance, take a look at this item:

Does the Person Come with the Calendar?

–Pretty busy, right? And something that actually makes you use a little brainpower to figure it out, which is nothing but a good thing, especially considering how buzzed out our brains are becoming from an overdose of video games and Cheetohs, we’d say.

–Now, if you’re addicted to popping those little bubbles in the protective wrap that comes wrapped around many pieces of shipped merchandise this little beauty can go a long way towards salving your obsession. Try to keep your popping fetish down to a single bubble a day. Go ahead…we dare you:

Toxel.com

–Sleek design that looks both modern and yet also evocative of the early 70s is presented in the Nava International Wall Calendar for 2009. Hanging on a wall, it’s sure to get plenty of attention, though we don’t think that the dog comes with it. Or at least, the dog won’t come with it unless you’re willing to pay a little extra (just kidding!):

The Dog Costs Extra

–All in all, it seems a very exciting ‘time’ to keep track of the passage of time. And given that we all know “Time and tide waits for no man,” we at least are comforted by the fact that it can pass us by in so stylish and unusual a manner as what we see hanging on many a wall these days.

You Won't Believe What You'll Find

If you like calendars and like online shopping, we’ve found a nice way to do both that doesn’t involve just browsing around in an online calendar store. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be going to a store itself, per se , but rather a kind of web portal that’ll find you everything it can on calendars out there that are being sold online.

– This is quite a leap from the older way of going out and finding something like calendars, for example, and we wish we were getting a little of that affiliate action. Hey now…there’s a thought! We’re going to have to check and see if the folks from ShopWiki (that’s the site we hyperlinked to in the first paragraph above).

– Now, getting back to that whole “finding a calendar out there that I love” thing. We did just a cursory check and we found thousands (about 106,000) of calendars of every type available for sale out there online. We especially liked the Spanish Magnetic Calendar they located for us in about 1.5 seconds. Too, too cool we’d say.

A Magnetic Spanish Learning Calendar

– But there seems to be far more to this site than just calendars. There are also a number of filters that can be set for price, colors, brands…you name it. It almost put us in a cold sweat, so comprehensive were the choices (just kidding about the cold sweat…it was actually more like a hot sweat).

– And if calendars aren’t turning you on, at present, there are plenty of other things to look at. Some of us are road cyclists (we get on those Tour De France-type bikes) and more than a few ride mountain bikes, so we looked up “bike shoes” and found a ton of helpful information and hundreds of shoes to salivate over.

– We know, we know…bikes aren’t for everybody but that’s okay. Name your shoe. You like golf? Check these out and then go a little deeper, if you like.

– A few other types of shoes — just to name only one kind of item (besides those fantastic calendar sources we found) available over at the site — include running shoes (with a myriad of brands), so-called “sneakers” (and there are some cool canvas ones) and even wedding shoes (check these out, ladies).

Not Enough? Go Deeper into the Site

– Remember, ShopWiki itself isn’t a store. Rather, it uses new technology that allows it to seek out EVERY store selling goods on the Internet and then display it for you. We did some checking and found that the folks at the site don’t discriminate on the basis of paid placement or any of that “pay to play” stuff. You use those filters, find what you like and then follow the helpfully-provided links.

– To test it out just a little more (we admit we became fascinated with looking up just about everything we could think of), we typed in “flying kites” and found nearly a thousand examples of just about anything related to kites and kite flying. Quite an accomplishment in merchandise search engine technology, we’d say.

– Perhaps the best thing about a powerhouse version of a search engine like ShopWiki (”Wiki” means “quickly” in Hawaiian, by the way) is that it eliminates the need to go to one of the major search engines on the Net and wade through ads, spam links or hundreds and thousands of useless websites. Nope, you can get your shopping fix nearly straight from the proverbial fountain, and this is a good thing. Go try it out.

Omar Khayyam

Perhaps one of the most famous mathematicians and astronomers to ever come out of the Islamic world was Omar Khayyam (1048-1123). A Persian born in Neyshapur, Iran, he is probably most famous to the average person who’s studied poetry for his Rubaiyat, a work of four-line verses (or quatrains), of which there are about a thousand. Taken together, the name given to them was “Rubaiyat.” The late-19th Century scholar/poet Edward FitzGerald produced the most well-known version of Khayyam’s poems.

– What many don’t realize, however, is how truly vital his (Khayyam’s) work on the Persian calendar was back then, nor how widely appreciated it is in the Muslim world. Serving as part of a panel, he and several other scientists were able to produce quality reform of that calendar. These reforms largely came from the principles evident in the older Hindu calendar, which many scientists in that part of the world back then were intimately familiar with.

– The calendar (which was known as the Jalali, in honor of the Sultan who originally commissioned the panel) remained in use across a wide swath of area known as Greater Iran from the 11th through 20th centuries. Today, Khayyam’s calendar serves as the basis for the Iranian version which is used in both Iran and Afghanistan.

– The Jalali is more accurate than the commonly-used Gregorian calendar, though it is slightly more difficult to calculate. In fact, it has only a one-hour error every 5,500 years versus an error rate of 1 day every 3,330 years for the Gregorian, which was developed about 4 centuries later.

A Persian Calendar

– Based on actual solar (our sun) transit, the Persian calendar requires the use of an Ephemeris, which is a table of values that gives the position of various astronomical objects in the sky at any given time, to calculate the date. This is most likely one reason why Europe in Khayyam’s day — which was struggling to emerge from the Dark Ages, and hence had no wide facility at mathematics among its general population — did not embrace “Moorish” artifacts such as Khayyam’s calendar.

– The Jalali varied the length of its months anywhere from 29 to 32 days, the reason for which was that it depended upon the moment when our sun moved into what is called a new “zodiacal area” (an annual cycle of 12 stations, which is the path of the Sun across the planet’s heavens). Because of this, there were fewer seasonal errors than what is found in the Gregorian calendar.

– It may be that many people do not know how truly advanced were the astronomers and mathematicians of Khayyam’s day. Certainly, he was one of the greatest minds of the 11th and 12th centuries. A scientist and a poet, he was one of many who helped maintain science and learning while much of Europe was hammered by plagues, wars and a disinterest in much of scholarship, outside of certain Christian religious communities and a few large cities.

Unusual and interesting calendars can be a diverting way to keep track of the passage of time. They come in all sizes, shapes and colors and there’s sure to be one sort of calendar or another — magnetic calendar, wall calendar, giant wall calendar, etc. — pleasing in one way or another to most anybody.

– Check out the calendar below. It’s for those of us who never got over our fascination with Lego building bricks.

Lego Brick Inspired Calendar

– We don’t know about anybody else, but it’s fairly certain that Lego bricks could be used to build a real operating space shuttle or moon lander in a pinch, if NASA were so inclined.

– The next set of date and timekeepers are known as “key calendars.” They act not only to help you keep track of time (you move the keys in a pattern every day to stay up with the passing of days and months) but they also seem like a good form of therapy. In a way, they subtly allow us more control over time (at least, as it seems to exist within our minds) than just a paper word-a-day calendar. All that, plus they’re just cool to look at:

Takumi Key Calendar

– The last calendar is a classic one. From Seth Thomas and Ithaca clockmakers, they’re what’s called double-dial calendar wall clocks. We imagine that such devices were quite the hit in the days before computers or digital timekeeping devices came onto the scene. Nice specimens can be found at auctions for anywhere from 700 to 1500 dollars:

Double-Dial Calendar Wall Clocks

– Calendars and all they represent don’t have to be boring or dull. Certainly people like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have never found the way time interacts with us at all moments of our lives to be uninteresting. And there are also certainly more than a few ways show how it passes.

Below, an interesting pair of videos, one of which is about universal time and how it can be related to the ancient Mayan calendar. If you watch these videos, you’ll come to the inescapable conclusion that the Mayans really knew what they were talking about when it came to keeping track of time. Scroll down below the Calendars.com ad for a short History Channel video about the Mayan Calendar and the year 2012, which that particular calendar foretells is going to be “interesting.”

He Kept Time for Rome

**In the days of the Roman Republic, just prior to its transformation into an empire, Julius Caesar – the great Roman general (and no small shakes as a politician) had a problem and he knew it. No, I’m not talking about his relationship with Cleopatra or with his friend Brutus and the Roman Senate (“You too, Caesar?”), I’m talking about how confounded the Roman system of date keeping had become by the time Caesar became the de facto head of the Republic.

**Over the course of Roman history up until Caesar assumed control, the classic calendar in use at the time was subject to manipulation and at the mercy of the whims of various corrupt politicians and other leaders from within the republic. The reason the calendar had become so completely inadequate had its roots in how it was originally set up to keep track of the passing of days and months. It used the phases of the moon rather than the passing of the earth through an orbit around the sun, in other words.

**Called the “semi-lunar” calendar, one can recognize that the genesis for the word “month” comes from the word “moon.” In fact, our 12 months of the year followed the actual lunar movement, keeping to 29 or 30 days in a month on an alternating basis. Unfortunately, this led to a year of only 354 days, which was fine as far as the moon went, but it came in well behind the 365-day solar year, which our planet adhered to, Roman or other ancient civilization meddling to the contrary.

**For this reason, a special month (called an “intercalary” month) was added to the calendar about every 2 to 3 years to get the calendar back on track. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat inelegant way to round out the true solar year and keep the four seasons in their order. Humans being humans, however, a way was soon found to profit from the intercalary month.

**Roman politicians and high priests (being the smart people they were) soon came up with a way to use that extra month to put a little coin in their pockets or togas or whatever it was they chose to wear back then. Called “pontifex” or “pontiff,” these gentlemen were the deciders of just when the intercalary month was to be added.

**Roman consuls (the republic and later empire’s chief civil and military magistrates) who happened to enjoy the favor of these pontiffs could expect to enjoy an extra month in office, after payment of a suitable honorarium, of course, through the declaration and imposition of an intercalary month by the Pontiff in office at that time.

**Those who didn’t enjoy pontifical support would find themselves out of office a month earlier than planned, even though at some points the intercalary month was sorely needed in order to keep the four seasons from going totally out of order. This little bit of corruption had gotten so out of hand by the time Julius Caesar made his return to Rome from Egypt in 45 BCE the Spring Equinox was occurring in real winter.

**This, naturally, couldn’t be tolerated and so Caesar — to kick off the great reordering – extended 45 BCE out to a full 445 days, adding the months of “Unidecember” and Duodecember” in order to sort things out. Naturally enough, historians of the day called what went on “the Year of Confusion.” It’s easy to see why that would’ve been so.

**Next, Caesar took the advice of Cleopatra’s astrologer Sosiegenes and revised the Roman semi-lunar calendar to one that fit the Egyptian calendar, called “Thoth.” This necessitated a change in the number of days in the month to reflect the new year, which gave the revised calendar 365 days, with an extra day (called, naturally enough, an “intercalary day”) added every 4 years.

**Because of these changes, 44 BCE and all years thereafter would begin on January 1st, which was the first new moon after the Winter Solstice. Not content with totally reordering the manner in which Rome kept track of the passage of time, Caesar ordered a change to the name of the month of Quintilis (which means “five” in Latin) to Julius, which of course we now know as July.

**One might ask why this new intercalary day we now call “leap day” – and the year in which we observe it as “Leap Year” – wasn’t put into a day the Romans might have called December 32nd rather than in February, but even Caesar didn’t feel he had the power to go against the pontiffs of the day, who’d traditionally observed that time as the point in which intercalary months had been added.

**In closing, there is solid historical evidence and scholarly thinking that says Caesar’s reordering of the calendar led him to proclaim himself “Dictatus Perpetuus,” or “Dictator for Life.” It was only one month later – in what is known as the Ides of March – that members of the Roman Senate assassinated him for his temerity in usurping not only the calendar but their own republican ideal of rule.

There are many different versions of calendars in the world. One we’ve recently seen — it’s actually a software program — combines the best features of a classic calendar but with a twist. This one can be set up to handle all the standard date keeping and time tracking functions of a calendar while also making available a side-by-side astrology companion. You have your choice of two views, and the astrological one will divide the calendar according to signs of the zodiac. Pretty trick, we’d say.

You can find it here, if you’re of a mind to look at one in a more in-depth fashion. Here’s an image:

Leo is Coming!

Click on the links to get best offers on a number of deals from Calendars.com, Priceline.com and Motel 6/Studio 6: