Why do you care so much about lunar phase, anyway?
December 21, 2016 10:03 AM   Subscribe

Do you have a sweet 1989 ST:TNG calendar in your attic? Good news: it will totally work in 2017, except for Riker looking really strange without the beard. Or if your grandma's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore calendar from 1922 is still hanging in the kitchen, you're in luck. Check what other old calendars are still useful at WhenCanIReuseThisCalendar.com.
posted by Etrigan (13 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
I am just now completing a two-year streak of reusing old Krazy Kat kalendars I'd saved for just this purpose. The 1988 one I'm using right now is still in near mint condition, too, despite its extensive service record.

I have nothing lined up for next year, though, so if anyone wants to gouge me on something compatible, I am panicky and ripe for exploitation.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:26 AM on December 21, 2016


Why do you care so much about lunar phase, anyway?

One year I had an official calendar based on the fantasy manga/anime Inuyasha, the titular protagonist of which is a badass half-demon who turns into a weaksauce full-human for the night on the new moon. So it was mildly pleasing that my calendar marked each new moon with a tiny graphic of human!Inuyasha looking annoyed. "Ah yes, somewhere in the fictional multiverse, right now Inuyasha is half as dangerous and twice as grumpy as usual."

If I could reuse tiny grouchy new moon Inuyasha as an icon for all my future calendars, I would.
posted by nicebookrack at 10:30 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Apparently eBay is a great source of calendars from past years, if you can get past the NFSW ones.

Where else can you find a 1950s Meat calendar? (note: no 5th meat featured).
posted by blue_beetle at 11:13 AM on December 21, 2016


Do you have a sweet 1989 ST:TNG calendar in your attic?

No, because I cut all the pictures out so I could hang them on my bedroom wall because I was awesome.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:28 AM on December 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


This looks like it is also great for debunking all those "January won't have 5 Mondays again for 488 years; according to the Chinese that is a sign of great fortune!" posts that show up on facebook from time to time.
posted by TedW at 11:29 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


OK, who else went immediately to their birth year to see when it can be reused? Also, Rush fans might find some significance in the fact that 2016, with its bad reputation, matches up with 2112. (As an aside, when did we start talking about how bad 2016 was? This comment from February was the earliest I've come across. I wonder if Joey Michaels still feels that Abe Vigoda's death was the low point of the year.)
posted by TedW at 11:35 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


TedW beat me to it but it was the first thing I thought too when I noticed 2112. This calendar has two correct years on the front.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 12:04 PM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


2112 was Rush's best album.
posted by ovvl at 5:25 PM on December 21, 2016


I used to have a mechanical multi-year calendar on my keychain. It was a two-bronze-disc computer, like a decoder ring. On the top half it had
  M  T  W Th  F Sa Su
  1  2  3  4  5  6  7
  8  9 10 11 12 13 14
 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
 29 30 31
where the dates were on the front disc and the days of the week were on the back disc, visible through a window. So if you slid the back disc to the left one notch then the first would become "a Tuesday" and another "M" would appear over the seventh.

On the bottom half were the names of the months on the front disc, and years through another window, like this:
  May | *Feb |  Feb |  Jun |  Sep | *Jan |  Jan
      |  Aug |  Mar |      |  Dec |  Apr |  Oct
      |      |  Nov |      |      |  Jul |
      | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 |      | 2015
 2025 | 2024 |      | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020

That particular setting put the first on Thursday, as it was in September and December 2016, and will be in Feb/March/Nov 2018. To see January 2017 you'd tick the wheel three spaces counterclockwise, which puts the fourth on Thursday and the first on Monday. The extra Jan/Feb account those months starting a day earlier in leap years, pushed earlier relative to the other months by the insertion of Feb 29.

I think it got lost or destroyed after I'd carried it around for two or three years, which was annoying since that was 10% of its expected useful lifespan.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:22 PM on December 21, 2016


Related: the Doomsday algorithm.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:24 PM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I just put up (yes, 10 days early) my 1978 Star Wars and 1978 Star Trek calendars in anticipation of using them again starting January 1st. 39 years of hoarding my childhood paper ephemera finally pays off... woo hoo!
posted by acroyear at 9:25 PM on December 21, 2016


Fantabulous timewaster, is this your calendar?
posted by TedW at 12:14 PM on December 22, 2016


Mine was brass and the art was different, but that's totally the design.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:05 AM on January 10, 2017


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