RIVER CITY JOURNAL: CALENDAR BUSINESS NEEDS SOME SERIOUS ATTENTION RIGHT AWAY

* We figured out minutes, hours and weeks, but we sure made a mess out of months. And then there are all those Monday holidays.

I don't know if it was Governor Bradford or President Washington or FDR or who, but putting a holiday with the biggest meal of the year on a Thursday wasn't a great idea.

As you know, I'm a big fan of highly scientific surveys. I think the right question asked at the right time always gives you the right answer.

So I asked several folks who happened to be handy if they thought you ought to have to go back to work on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day.

Here are the results of my highly scientific survey.

Favor working on Friday: 0 percentFavor taking Friday off: 100 percentThere you have it. I can't argue with statistics.

Oh. Did I mention I asked my question right after Thanksgiving dinner? I'm pretty sure most of the people I asked were still awake. And I'm also pretty sure the ones I know for sure were awake were listening to me and not the football game.

Like all good pollsters, I don't want my highly scientific surveys to be skewed.

Thanksgiving is the only holiday we have on Thursday every year.

We used to have a lot of Thursday holidays until the government came up with the idea of observing all the major holidays on Mondays.

Holidays that aren't on Mondays are the exceptions. We'd be celebrating the Fourth of July on Mondays if the people in charge of holidays hadn't goofed and put the date in the name of the holiday. Let that be a lesson. Don't name a holiday after the date it commemorates. Veterans Day is one of those exceptions. Don't mess with Nov. 11. Not unless you want a fight on your hands, and that would kind of defeat the purpose of the holiday. And then there's Christmas and New Year's Day. They would be on Mondays every year too if we could just figure out a good way to do it.

One way would be to change the calendar.

That's been done before, of course, but that was long before I started having so many doggone good ideas.

The way the calendar is now, some holidays can fall on any day of the week, while all the rest are on Mondays. Except in leap years, when you have to scoot things up or back a day, and then only the Monday holidays stay the same.

Which goes to show what good government can do for you.

And look at the months. They don't all have the same number of days. Every minute has 60 seconds. Every hour has 60 minutes. Every day has 24 hours. Every week has seven days. But months have 30 days except for the ones with 31 days and February's 28 or 29 days depending on whether there is a presidential election.

I think there has to be a better way.

What we need is a calendar with 365 1/4 days in every year. Let's start there. That's 525,960 minutes. So all we have to do is find some numbers that divide evenly into 525,960.

OK, mathematicians. Go for it.

According to my rudimentary -- and, again, highly scientific -- calculations, there is no quick solution. Remember, however, that I'm writing this column because I can't do long division.

I contend there is a way to do this right. If we can pull it all together, every holiday will be on Saturday, except, of course, for Veterans Day.

Christmas, New Year's Day, Ingrown Toenail Day -- put them all on Saturday.

And Thanksgiving. Put it on Saturday too.

Get rid of the Monday holidays. Instead of Monday holidays, give government workers August. The whole month. No mail. No international summits. No Congress. No IRS. No government.

We could even give August a new name. Something like: America the Way It Was Supposed to Be Month. We could make every day in August a Monday.

If we did that, we would all look forward to the fourth Saturday of November. We would really have something to be thankful for.

Just a thought.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.