Swing Banned [annotated lyrics and chords]
Bb F C Dm Gm7 A7
Dm Bm7b5 Bb Am7
The Roman Inquisition said the earth can’t go around the sun. [1]
Gm7 Am7 Bb Bb6 A
There’s an asbestos-bound edition of Fahrenheit 451. [2]
Bdim Dm Bdim Dm
They anonymized Jane Austen. [3] Barred Huckleberry Finn. [4]
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Books were banned in Boston, [5] and they burned them in Berlin. [6]
Bb F C Dm Bb F C Dm
Retro-futuristic paleo-Nazis said the Swing Kids danced to degenerate jazz. [7]
Bb F C Dm Gm E A
They blocked the publication of a history of prisons by the Birdman of Alcatraz. [8]
Dm Bm7b5 Bb Am7
Voltaire was locked in the Bastille. [9] They stoned Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [10]
Gm7 Am7 Bb Bb6 A
Dostoyevsky went to jail. [11] They pilloried Daniel Defoe. [12]
Bdim Dm Bdim Dm
South Africa banned Sophie’s Choice. [13] Bulfinch censored Shakespeare’s “damned”. [14]
Bdim Dm Gm7 A7
The USA outlawed James Joyce. [15] Did China ban Green Eggs and Ham? [16]
Bb F C Dm Bb F C Dm
They banned the bikini and they banned the burka on the beaches of Spain and the beaches of France. [17]
Bb F C Dm Gm E A
Back when pole dancing meant a mazurka the can-can was a scandalous dance. [18]
Dm Bm7b5 Bb Am7
Gm7 Am7 Bb Bb6 A
Bdim Dm Bdim Dm
Bdim Dm Gm7 A7
Bb F C Dm Bb F C Dm
Retro-futuristic paleo-Nazis said the Swing Kids danced to degenerate jazz.
Bb F C Dm Gm E A
They blocked the publication of a history of prisons by the Birdman of Alcatraz
Dm Bm7b5 Bb Am7
Masterpieces of fine arts were neutered when those priggish prudes
Gm7 Am7 Bb Bb6 A
glued fig leaves on the private parts of Michelangelo’s nudes. [19]
Bdim Dm Bdim Dm
The Hays code censored Hollywood and chastened Betty Boop. [20]
Bdim Dm Gm7 A7
They couldn’t kiss in Bollywood, [21] and Mussolini banned Duck Soup. [22]
Bb F C Dm Bb F C Dm
They banned the bikini and they banned the burka on the beaches of Spain and the beaches of France.
Bb F C Dm Gm E A
Back when pole dancing meant a mazurka the can-can was a scandalous dance.
Bb F C Dm Bb C Fmaj7…
Footnotes
[1] In 1663 the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was tried by the Roman Inquisition for supporting the “heliocentric heresy”, the Copernican theory that the earth orbited the sun, which was deemed by the Church to be contrary to Holy Scripture. Under threat of torture and death, Galileo was made to recant. Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was banned, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
[2] Fahrenheit 451 is a novel by Ray Bradbury published in 1953. The protagonist is a “fireman” in a dystopian society, whose job is to burn the belongings of people who read outlawed books. The title is meant to be the temperature at which paper catches fire. There was a limited edition release of around 200 numbered and signed copies of the book bound in Johns-Manville Quinterra, “an asbestos material with exceptional resistance to pyrolysis”.
[3] In the early 19th century, it was widely viewed as immodest or unseemly for a woman to publish a novel. Many female authors published anonymously or under male pseudonyms. All of Jane Austen’s novels that were published during her lifetime were published anonymously. Sense and Sensibility was “by a lady”, and the subsequent novels were “by the author of Sense and Sensibility”.
[4] Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn, was published in 1884, and was first banned by the Concord Public Library in 1885 for being “absolutely immoral in its tone”. Twain wrote in response, couched in the form of a letter expressing his gratitude for having “been made an honorary member of the Free Trade Club of Concord, Massachusetts” that “... a committee of the public library of your town have condemned and excommunicated my last book and doubled its sale. This generous action of theirs must necessarily benefit me in one or two additional ways. For instance, it will deter other libraries from buying the book; and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And, secondly, it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so, after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book after all.”
[5] The list of authors whose works were banned in Boston includes Walt Whitman, Aldous Huxley, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Ernest Hemingway.
[6] On May 10, 1933, around 40,000 students and storm troopers gathered in the Opera Square in Berlin to burn over 20,000 “un-German” books, including books by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, and Ernest Hemingway.
[7] The Swing Kids (Swingjugend) were a group of young jazz and swing aficionados in Germany in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. The name was coined as a parody of the Nazi youth groups (Hitlerjugend). Jazz was considered by the Nazis to be “degenerate music” (entartete musik), that derived from blacks and Jews. Jazz was banned from German national radio as of October 12, 1935. The Swing Kids would listen and dance to the forbidden music in private clubs and cafes. On August 18, 1941 over 300 Swing Kids were arrested, and in subsequent crackdowns their ringleaders were sent to concentration camps.
[8] Robert Stroud, known as “the Birdman of Alcatraz” was a two-time murderer and amateur ornithologist, who raised canaries and wrote 2 books on avian diseases while imprisoned at Leavenworth. He was transferred from Leavenworth to Alcatraz in 1942, after it was discovered that he was using equipment he had requested for his bird lab to distill alcohol. He was not allowed to keep birds at Alcatraz. While an Alcatraz, he wrote Looking Outward: A History of the U.S. Prison System from Colonial Times to the Formation of the Bureau of Prisons. However, he was forbidden from publishing his manuscript while remaining in prison for the rest of his life. Volume 1 of this book was finally published in 2014.
[9] Voltaire was actually imprisoned twice in the Bastille. He was arrested in 1717 for writing satirical poetry that was deemed to be libelous, and spent 11 months in prison. He had another brief sojourn in the Bastille in 1726 after quarreling with a French nobleman, before being exiled to England for 2-1/2 years.
[10] After publishing Emile in 1762, managing to offend both Catholics and Protestants by arguing that all religions are of equal merit, Rousseau was denounced by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were burned, and a warrant for his arrest was issued by the French parliament. Rousseau fled France and returned to Switzerland. In 1765, when his local pastor publicly called him the Antichrist, the parishioners threw stones at Rousseau when he went out, and threw so many stones at his residence one night that a local official commented, “My God, it’s a quarry!”
[11] Fyodor Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849 and convicted of ''having taken part in criminal plans, having circulated the letter of Belinsky [a letter written by the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky in 1847 to Nikolai Gogol, which had been banned from distribution] full of insolent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the Supreme Power, and of having attempted, together with others, to circulate anti-Government writings with the aid of a private printing press.'' He was sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was commuted to 4 years of hard labor at a prison camp in Siberia.
[12] In 1702 (17 years before the publication of Robinson Crusoe), Daniel Defoe wrote an anonymous satirical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The dissenters were protestants who separated from the Church of England, and the pamphlet mocked Anglican zealotry by facetiously proposing that dissenters should be deported and their preachers hanged. Neither the authorities nor the dissenters were amused. The identity of the author was rapidly discovered, and a reward was offered for his arrest. The House of Commons had the pamphlet burned. Defoe pled guilty to seditious libel, was placed in the pillory for 3 days, and spent several months in Newgate prison because he could not afford to pay his fine. (Of note, Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders was barred from distribution in the U.S. by the federal Comstock law of 1873.)
[13] The apartheid government of South Africa banned William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice in 1979. In response, Styron said that although the ban “rather surprises me, in a curious way I like being banned in South Africa because I think it's a country of enormous repressiveness. I admit to feeling some satisfaction in joining Joseph Heller, Nadine Gordimer and so many other distinguished writers who have been similarly excluded from South Africa.”
[14] In their 1865 bowdlerization, Shakespeare Adapted for Reading Classes, and for the Family Circle, Thomas and Stephen Bulfinch changed Lady Macbeth’s famous line from “Out, damned spot!” to “Out, crimson spot!” This edit has sometimes been misattributed to the eponymous Thomas Bowdler, an English physician who published The Family Shakspeare, an expurgated version of Shakespeare’s plays intended to make them more suitable for women and children. Bowdler, for example, changed Mercutio’s line in Romeo and Juliet from “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon” to “the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon”, but he let Lady Macbeth’s line stand.
[15] James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Prior to the publication of the book, it was serialized in a literary magazine, The Little Review. The Manhattan District Attorney prosecuted the publishers of the periodical on grounds of obscenity, and they were convicted and fined. A judge in the trial opined that the novel seemed “like the work of a disordered mind”. Ulysses was effectively banned in the US for the next 12 years. The US Post Office seized and burned around 500 copies of the novel. Ulysses was also banned in England, Ireland, Australia, and Canada, prompting Joyce to proclaim that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for uniting the entire English-speaking world. On December 6, 1933, in the case of United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”, Judge John M. Woolsey ruled as follows: “I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.” The decision was upheld on appeal by a 2 to 1 vote.
[16] Although Wikipedia, the Huffington Post, and other internet sites have reported that Green Eggs and Ham, a children’s book by Theodor Geisel (nom de plume Dr. Seuss) containing only 50 different words, was banned in the People’s Republic of China from 1965 to 1991, one of the references originally cited by Wikipedia was subsequently withdrawn by the author “due to a lack of corroborating sources”.
[17] The modern bikini, named after the atoll where the U.S. tested the atomic bomb after W.W. II, was introduced in France by Louis Réard in 1946. It was declared to be sinful by Pope Pius XII, and was prohibited along the French Atlantic coastline, and in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, and some US states. It gained popularity after Brigitte Bardot was photographed wearing a bikini on the beach at the Cannes film festival in 1953. The burkini, a swimsuit covering the entire body except the face, hands and feet, designed to conform to Islamic traditions of modest dress, was banned by the mayor of Cannes in 2016, on the premise that it was “beachwear ostentatiously showing a religious affiliation while France and places of religious significance are the target of terror attacks”. Many other towns along the French Riviera followed suit (so to speak). The burkini ban was overturned by the Council of State (the highest administrative court in France).
[18] The can-can became popular in Parisian dance halls in the 1830’s, and was considered to be risqué. It literally means gossip in French.
[19] In the book of Genesis (3:7), after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve “realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves”. Whereas classical Greek and Roman art often depicted nude figures, the “fig-leaf campaign” in 16th Century Italy placed metal fig leaves or painted fig leaves to cover genitalia in sculptures and paintings. Daniele de Volterra was hired to paint over the buttocks and genitals in Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel, which earned him the nickname “Il Braghettone” (the breeches-maker). A plaster cast of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David was given to Queen Victoria by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1857. Shortly after its arrival, a removable plaster cast of a fig leaf was commissioned to “spare the blushes of visiting female dignitaries”. The sculpture and the plaster fig leaf are on display next to each other at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
[20] The Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the Hays code (after Will H. Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America), was a set of moral guidelines adopted in 1930 and enforced by the motion picture industry after 1934. The extensive list of items specifically forbidden by the Code included obscenity, profanity, nudity, suggestive dancing, excessive and lustful kissing, sex perversion or any reference to it, miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races), and ridicule of religion. Even Betty Boop, Max Fleischer’s animated cartoon character, came under the scrutiny of the Hays code. Winking and shaking her hips were felt to be “suggestive of immorality”, and after 1934 she was transformed from a scantily clad flapper wearing a garter belt to a demurely dressed housewife or career woman.
[21] India produces almost twice as many movies per year than Hollywood. Although the 1933 film Karma contained a 4-minute-long kissing scene, the Cinematograph Act of 1952 in India ruled that on-screen kissing was “indecent”. Classic Bollywood movies resorted to cutaway shots of flowers touching or smoldering fires. Kissing reappeared in Bollywood movies in the 1990s.
[22] The 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup featured Groucho as Rufus T. Firefly, the leader of Freedonia, who goes to war against neighboring Sylvania. Benito Mussolini took the caricature of dictators as a personal insult, and banned the film in Italy.
Potemkin Villages [annotated lyrics and chords]
F Gdim Eb F Gdim Eb
F Gdim Eb Ebm Bbm
Db Bbm Db Bbm
In a Potemkin Village [1] at the dawn of day for night, [2]
Db Ab Fm Bbm
filled with human phantoms [3] in the grayscale rainbow light.
Db Bbm Db Bbm
Living on a trap street [4] in a paper town [5]
Db Ab Fm Bbm
there’s a false messiah who wears a tinsel crown.
Gdim F Gdim F
From Argleton [6] to Agloe [7], Cockaigne [8] to Erewhon, [9]
Ebm Bbm Cdim F
Goblu to Beatosu [10] and Lake Wobegon. [11]
Bbm Db Gb F7
In our desolate utopia we still have time to wait
Ebm Gb A Bbm
for an empty cornucopia. …It’s getting early late.
Db Bbm Db Bbm
Lillian Virginia Mountweazel and her mailbox photographs [12]
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was a nihilartikel, [13] inserted just for laughs.
Db Bbm Db Bbm
The ghost words [14] in the glossary. The copyrighters trap.
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The nonexistent islands on the Zeno map. [15]
Gdim F Gdim F
Pinocchio’s Podesta [16] and Peary’s Crocker Land [17]
Ebm Bbm Cdim F
were only phantom islands, lost when they began.
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The petrophagic stone louse devoured the Berlin Wall. [18]
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Fake news isn’t new… False Islands are true. [19]
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An ellipsis in our history, jump cutting through
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the lost 11 days of 1752.
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Julius and Gregory oblige us to remember
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that the date of Red October was the 7th of November. [20]
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A countable infinity is less than aleph-one. [21]
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The mortal and divinity, the Father and the Son.
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Time is the commodity. [22] Unreal estate is space.
Ebm Gb A Bbm Eb
Reality’s an oddity… and nothing’s commonplace.
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Footnotes
[1] Grigory Potemkin, one of the lovers of the Empress Catherine the Great, was appointed governor of Crimea after it was annexed by Russia from the Ottoman Empire. One of his tasks was to bring in Russian settlers to rebuild the region. It was purported that he built facades of fake settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the Empress and her entourage during her visit to Crimea in 1787. The story goes that Potemkin’s men posed as peasants to populate the village, and once the barge carrying the Empress moved on, the village would be dismantled and reassembled overnight further downstream. The veracity of this account has been called into question. Alternatively, Potemkin may have decorated existing villages or built models to illustrate what the region would look like in the future, but there was no deception. Nonetheless, the term “Potemkin Village” has come to mean any impressive facade designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition.
[2] A cinematic technique to simulate night scenes that are actually filmed in daylight, either by underexposing the film in the camera, or darkening and tinting during post-production. The French call this “la nuit americaine” (literally American night). La Nuit Americaine (English title Day for Night) was a film by François Truffaut.
[3] An MRI phantom is an object designed to calibrate and standardize different MRI machines. When we had to switch MRI machines in the middle of a study, I and some of my colleagues volunteered to be “human phantoms”, in order to adjust sequences from one machine to the other.
[4] A trap street is fictitious street included on a map for the purpose of trapping copyright violators who reproduce the map.
[5] Similarly, a paper town is a fictitious town included on a map, usually as a copyright trap.
[6] Argleton is a phantom village in West Lancashire, England that had appeared on Google Maps, but did not exist. It was located in empty fields. Since other online information services use data from Google, additional online listings about Argleton appeared, such as weather reports. When this anomaly garnered media attention, a spoof website was created describing the history of Argleton and famous Argletonians. Argleton was subsequently removed from Google Maps.
[7] Agloe, NY was a paper town invented as a copyright trap in the 1930s by Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers of General Drafting Corporation. The name Agloe was an anagram of their initials. It was located at an intersection of dirt roads in the Catskills. General Drafting was the exclusive road map publisher for Standard Oil of New Jersey (which used the brand name Esso and later became Exxon). (Perhaps you are old enough to remember that gas stations used to give out road maps.) In the 1950’s, the Agloe General Store was built at that intersection, taking its name from the Esso maps. When Agloe later appeared on a Rand McNally map, Esso threatened to sue for copyright infringement, but Rand McNally argued that the place had now become real. Agloe appears as a key plot device in John Green’s novel Paper Towns.
[8] Cockaigne was a legendary Medieval utopia, a land of luxury and idleness.
[9] Erewhon is a novel by Samuel Butler, published in 1872, about a fictional country discovered by the narrator. Apart from the transposition of the “w” and the “h”, Erewhon spelled backwards is nowhere, the literal translation of utopia. In Erewhonian society, crimes are considered illnesses, while physical illnesses are regarded as immoral and criminal. Machines have been banned in Erewhon, out of concern that they would develop consciousness through Darwinian evolution, reproduce themselves, and ultimately supplant the human race. (Butler thereby anticipated the premise of the Terminator franchise by 112 years.)
[10] Goblu and Beatosu are two nonexistent towns in Ohio that appeared in the 1978–1979 edition of the official state of Michigan map. (For the geographically challenged, the eastern half of Michigan is bordered to the South by Ohio.) Peter Fletcher, the chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission, and an alumnus of the University of Michigan, had been teased by a fellow Michigan alumnus because, in compliance with federal highway regulations, the Mackinac Bridge connecting the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan was displayed in the colors green and white, which are the school colors for intrastate rival Michigan State University. The school colors for the University of Michigan are blue and maize (a yellowish corn-like color). When rooting for their Michigan Wolverine teams, fans will chant “Go Blue”. (Go maize just didn’t have the same panache.) Arguably the biggest rivalry in college football is between the Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State University Buckeyes. Fletcher ordered the inclusion of the fake towns Goblu (Go Blue) and Beatosu (Beat Ohio State University) on the map.
[11] A fictional rural town in central Minnesota created by Garrison Keillor of the Prairie Home Companion radio show.
[12] The 4th edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia, published in 1975 under the title The New Columbia Encyclopedia, included this fictitious entry, cited here in full: “Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972) Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.” (Bangs, Ohio is an actual place.) The (eponymous?) term mountweazel is now used to refer to any bogus entry deliberately placed in a reference work.
[13] Nihilartikel is another word, borrowed from German (literally meaning nothing article), used to refer to a deliberately fictitious entry in a reference work.
[14] Ghost words are words that appeared in dictionaries, usually due to error, that were never actually used. The term was coined by Professor Walter William Skeat. One of the examples he mentioned in his annual presidential address to the London Philological Society in 1886 was the verb “morse” which turned out to be a misprint of “nurse” in a passage from a novel by Sir Walter Scott. (Currently, the eponymous verb “Morse” does appear in the dictionary, meaning to signal using Morse code.) Another famous example of a ghost word was “dord”, with the definition “density”, which appeared in the 1934 edition of Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary. This was the result of a misinterpretation of a slip submitted by Webster’s chemistry editor, indicating that the uppercase or lowercase letter D (“D or d”) was an abbreviation for density. “Dord” appeared in reprints of the dictionary until 1947.
[15] The Zeno map was a map of the North Atlantic published in 1558 along with some letters, purportedly describing a long voyage undertaken by two Venetian noblemen, Nicolo and Antonio Zeno, in the latter part of 14th century. The map and letters were published by a descendant of Nicolo, also named Nicolo Zeno, who claimed to have discovered them in a storeroom in his family’s house. Historical evidence indicates that both the map and the narrative were a hoax. The map included several phantom islands that do not in fact exist, but were copied onto many subsequent maps.
[16] (I am not referring to Geppetto’s puppet.) Captain Pinocchio of the ship Barone Podesta reported this island 900 miles west of Chile in 1879. It has not been found since then, and was removed from nautical maps in 1935.
[17] Rear Admiral Robert Peary is credited as having reached the geographic North Pole in 1909 (although there has been some controversy about this). Peary made an earlier Arctic expedition in 1905-1906, funded by a $50,000 gift from the banker George Crocker, and claimed to have come within 175 miles the North Pole on that attempt. Peary published a book in 1907, Nearest the Pole, in which he also claimed that he had seen a previously undiscovered large land mass north of Ellesmere Island, which he named Crocker Land after his benefactor. Beyond fundraising, the supposed existence of Crocker Land became a pivotal issue in the controversy between Peary and Frederick Cook, who claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908, one year before Peary. Cook’s route traversed the area where Crocker Land was supposed to be, but Cook did not report having seen any such land mass. Donald MacMillan, one of Peary’s assistants on the 1909 expedition, organized The Crocker Land Expedition in 1913 to confirm and map the position of Crocker Land, which in turn would discredit Cook. In advance of the expedition to Crocker Land, MacMillan said, “Its boundaries and extent can only be guessed at, but I am certain that strange animals will be found there, and I hope to discover a new race of men." Four years later, after an arduous ordeal that included the murder of an Inuit guide by one of the members of his party, MacMillan was left to conclude that, “My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams; my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment.” It was postulated that Peary may have seen a fata morgana (a kind of mirage that appears above the horizon) that he mistook for a land mass. However, there is no mention of Crocker Land in Peary’s expedition notes from 1906, in the diaries of his crewmembers, or in the early typed drafts of the manuscript for Nearest the Pole, suggesting that Crocker Land was a complete fabrication. For more on this subject, see David Welky’s book A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier. (If I had not already used Precarious as the title song of my first album, I would have been tempted to borrow this title for a song.)
[18] The stone louse (steinlaus) was the subject of a 1976 parody of a nature documentary by the German comedian, cartoonist, and filmmaker Loriot (the pseudonym for Bernhard-Victor Christoph-Carl von Bülow). The stone louse was supposed to consume about 28 kg of stone per day (depending on the density and tastiness of the stone). The stone louse was included in the 1983 edition of the popular German medical dictionary Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch, with elaboration on its utility in treating gallstones and kidney stones. When this whimsical entry was removed in the 1996 edition, readers complained, and it was reinstated in 1997, with further speculation that the stone louse may have been implicated in the fall of the Berlin wall. The entry for the stone louse can still be found in the online version of Pschyrembel. Here is the link:
http://www.pschyrembel.de/Steinlaus/K0LHT/doc/
[19] There are several real islands named False Island (in Alaska, Australia, and near Antarctica).
[20] The original Roman calendar was a lunar calendar consisting of 304 days divided into 10 months. The legacy of this calendar persists in our current names for some months. (September was originally the 7th month, October was the 8th month, November was the 9th month, and December was the 10th month.) January and February were added later, at what was then the end of the year. The revised Roman calendar year was 354 days long, and there was a complicated process to determine when to add extra months to try to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons. Julius Caesar ordered the calendar to be reformed in 46 BC, establishing a solar calendar with 365 days, and a leap year of 366 days every 4 years, when the 24th of February lasted 2 days. The average length of the year according to the Julian calendar was therefore 365.25 days. However, the average tropical year (the amount of time it takes the earth to complete a full orbit around the sun) is 365.24219 days. That might seem like a negligible difference, but it adds up over time, resulting in a drift of about 3 days every 400 years. This was a matter of importance for the Catholic Church, since the date of Easter was supposed to be linked to the vernal equinox. Gregorian reform was a modification of the Julian calendar, instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 by papal bull. The Gregorian calendar omits 3 leap years every 400 years, resulting in an average year length of 365.2425 days (a closer approximation to the average tropical year). The Gregorian calendar was immediately adopted in Catholic countries such as Spain and Portugal. However, Protestant countries were initially reluctant to accede to a reform dictated by the Pope. England and the British colonies did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. In order to align the British calendar with the calendar in use on the European continent, 11 days were removed. (September 3 through September 13, 1752 did not exist.) The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in Russia until 1918, after the Russian revolution. By then, the drift had expanded to 13 days. The Bolshevik revolution, commonly known as Red October, took place on October 25, 1917 of the Julian calendar in use at that time, but the anniversary was therefore celebrated as a national holiday in the Soviet Union on November 7th.
[21] To briefly recapitulate the work of the mathematician Georg Cantor, not all infinite sets of numbers have the same number of elements. Some are larger than others. A countably infinite set can be put in one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.). You could theoretically count the elements of the set if you had an infinite amount of time. The cardinality (number of elements) of a countably infinite set is represented by the mathematical symbol ℵ 0 (aleph-null). An uncountably infinite set, such as the set of real numbers (all the points along the number line continuum, including rational and irrational numbers), has too many elements to be counted. That is, it has more elements than the set of natural numbers, and cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence. The cardinality (number of elements) of the set of real numbers is represented by the symbol ℵ 1 (aleph-one), which is a larger infinite number than ℵ 0. For much more on this topic, I recommend Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace (who was even more enamored of digressive footnotes than I am).
[22] A quote from Rochelle Jacobs.