Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 February 1918 — CALENDAR IN HEM [ARTICLE]

CALENDAR IN HEM

Good Method Now That So Few Are Being Printed. Little Mental Arithmetic Required by System Which Is Explained HereLittle Rhyme to Be Committed to Memory. • Calendars for 1918 are going to be scarce, partly on account of the paper shortage and partly because advertisers are cutting down expenses, the large insurance companies, for instance, having made it a rule that their agents will have to print their own calendars. It used to be that one was flooded with calendars of all sorts and shapes about the first of the year; now one has to buy them. Why buy a calendar if one can carry the whole thing in one’s head? There are several ways in which one can figure out the day of the week upon which any day of the month will fall, but the majority of them require an amount of mental arithmetic that is beyond the powers of the man in a hurry, or the woman arranging for a party. Here is a simple calendar arranged by a memory expert. It consists of twelve words arranged as a rhyme. These twelve words are indexes for the twelve months, and they are three in a line, so as to make it easier to get at the months by taking them three at a time:

: Time Flies Fast, : : Men Wisely Say; : : Men Think, Alas! : ; , , Time’s Fooled Away. : The initials of these words give us the day of the week upon which the first of the months will fall in 1918, taking them in order. T stands for Tuesday, Th for Thursday. S is for Saturday and A for Sunday. M and W are for Monday and Wednesday respectively. It is obvious that if. one knows upon what day of the week the first day of any month will fall, one has only to add sevens to it to discover the dates of all similar days of the week in that month. If the Ist of August falls on a Thursday, the Bth, 15th, 22d and 29th must all be Thursdays. Now suppose you have committed this little rhyme to memory and wish to know upon what day of the week the Fourth of July will fall in 1918. July is the seventh month and the seventh word in our couplet, beginning the third line, is Men. As M stands for Monday, the Ist of July must be a Monday, so the 4th will be a Thursday. Let us suppose your birthday is March 23. As March is the third month the word is at the end of the first line, and the initial F shows that the Ist of March will be a Friday. If the following Fridays are the Sth, 15th and 22d your birthday will be on a Saturday in 1918. Suppose it is Christmas day you are looking forward to. December is the last of the twelve months and the initial of the last word in our little rhyme is A, which stands for Sunday. Then the Sundays in December will be the Ist, Bth, 15th and 22d, and Christmas day will be three days after Sunday, or "Wednesday.