National Boss Day - good or bad? by J.C. Kavanagh

 

The Twisted Climb 

Book 1 of the award-winning Twisted Climb series

I read on my calendar that today is National Boss Day. I live in Canada and have never heard of this 'national' day, promoted by Hallmark and of course, bosses. I had to chuckle. Boss Day?

And then I had to wonder...  how did National Boss Day come about? I found the answer courtesy of Google and Wikipedia. 

In 1958, a woman by the name of Patricia Bays Haroski from Deerfield, Illinois, wanted to show appreciation for her boss in a special way. It just happens that Patricia's boss was her father and his birthday was October 16, thus Boss Day. Being his daughter and aware of the trials and tribulations of being boss-man and perhaps, a maligned boss-man, she wanted her colleagues to better understand and appreciate the work, dedication and challenges faced by her dad - their boss. The idea must have gone over well because it slowly gained butt-kissing traction, and in 1962, the Illinois Governor officially proclaimed October 16 as National Boss Day.

Now I'm all for a national day - more so when it's a national 'holiday' - but Boss Day? Truly, isn't every day 'Boss Day' when the employee does their job and makes their boss, and therefore the company, look good? Greeting card company Hallmark encourages workers to buy a National Boss Day card (which Hallmark started printing in 1979) so the worker can extol the generosity and fairness of their boss, via the honey-tones of the adjective-laden, bleeding-heart cards.

Let's not destroy the concept, though. Perhaps a reversal? Instead of the employee thanking the boss for being kind and fair, the boss should thank the employee for making his/her job less challenging. I mean, what goes around, comes around - right?

Here's what Mark Stevens, president of the marketing firm MSCO and author of Your Marketing Sucks, says about National Boss Day.

"The dumbest idea I have ever heard of."

Uh huh. I've been my own 'boss' as an author since 2014 when I lost my career job due to business restructuring. Say no more? 

Question for readers: is being bossy the same as being 'bully?' Check out Jayden's character from the award-winning Twisted Climb series and decide if her view of life and her sassy approach to all things not going her way, is bully or bossy. 

Cheers... Happy National Boss Day to me!

J.C. Kavanagh, author of

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2)

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada

AND

The Twisted Climb,

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll

Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart

Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com

www.facebook.com/J.C.Kavanagh

www.amazon.com/author/jckavanagh

Twitter @JCKavanagh1 (Author J.C. Kavanagh)

The Evolution of Calendars

 

 

Calendars are intimately tied to the human observation of the Sun and the Moon.  Thus, the universality of calendars is no surprise, appearing in almost every human society, going back to pre-Bronze age cultures. The development of calendars spurred many related disciplines, such as mathematics, religion, astrology and astronomy.

The ancients’ observation of the sun, in relation to the various constellations, gave us the solar year. They noticed that the sun returned to the same position every three hundred and sixty-five (plus a fraction) days. Archeologists believe many Neolithic structures around the world, such as the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, Stonehenge in England and several sites in Ancient Egypt to serve this function. “Calendar circles” are remarkable for their profusion: they are found all over Africa, China, India and the Americas.

The other large, observable, heavenly body is the moon. Humans noticed that the moon also appeared at regular intervals; two weeks in a waxing phase and two weeks in a waning one. But a problem arose. The moon took twelve cycles of two-week periods to complete a year—that is, 354 days, while the sun took 365 days. Another problem is that the solar year is roughly 365.25 days long, and this one-quarter day needed accounting. Finally, both the earth’s and the moon’s orbits have been decaying imperceptibly over time, as both are slowly moving away from each other and from the sun.

These issues have dogged societies, affecting things like calculating days of worship, the time to plant crops, and to today’s problems of space flight and satellite positioning.

Early societies arrived at various solutions to these issues. The Hindu calendar, known as Panchanga, combined the lunar and solar calendar, adding an extra month called the Purushottam mas every 32-33 months, based on a complex series of calculations, to align the sun and the moon, and to account for the fractional days in a solar year. Unsurprisingly, many Eastern countries such as Cambodia, Thailand and Sri Lanka follow this luni-solar method. The only differences between these various calendars is their start date. The original Hindu calendar has a starting date of 6,676 BC, corresponding to the start of the current cycle of time known as Kali yuga. In Buddhist countries, the calendar starts at the birth of the Buddha, in 563 BC.

The Persian calendar, introduced by Omar Khayyam in the eleventh century, calculated the length of the year with astonishing precision, as 365.24219858156 days.

The Roman empire used to have a ten-month year, but when Julius Caesar came to power, introduced the Julian calendar, which introduced the leap year, without reference to the moon. While it lead to a more accurate solar calendar, it completely disassociated the moon from calendar-keeping.

The calendar currently used, called the Gregorian calendar, is a version of the Julian calendar, introduced in 1582, and has as its start date the birth of Jesus Christ.

The calendar’s original function was to determine religious observances. Indeed, the word is derived from the Latin ‘calends’ meaning ‘to call out,’ referring to the practice of announcing that a new moon had been sighted. In various cultures, the Islamic, Hindu and the Chinese, the sighting of the moon has religious significance. From the sighting of the moon, in relation to the constellations, came astrology, which posited the influence of these constellations (or spiritual beings associated with them) on human beings and societies. This record of the movement of the heavenly bodies led to the science of astronomy.

The accuracy of calendars are important, not for recording of past, but for projection of future events. The recent use of atomic clocks, which record the passage of time with astonishing precision, are an absolute necessity in today’s life, necessitated by inventions such as cell-phones, satellite communication and interplanetary travel.

This blog started as an exploration of Daylight Savings Time, but deviated into a far more interesting discussion. By the way, remember to put your clocks back by an hour this November 1^st!

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of 'The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

Sheila Claydon Cover Changes Through the Ages

 

Click here for my BWL page

 

Once, long ago, I wrote under the pen name Anne Beverley, and Golden Girl was my first published book. Then I wrote more books, still as Anne Beverley, until my family eventually persuaded me to stop hiding behind a pseudonym and write under my real name. That earlier book was still out there though, and to say the cover looks dated is an understatement!

Original cover

Then, many books later, the publishing house that owned it closed and the publishing rights returned to me. I sold it on to another publisher on the proviso that it would now be published under my real name. But in the field of publishing things are not always straightforward, so in the end I had to agree to Sheila Claydon writing as Anne Beverley, as well as a new cover. One that was certainly an improvement on the first.

Second edition cover

Then, a few years later, the same thing happened all over again. Another publisher, this time Books We Love, another cover and, finally, Golden Girl published under my own name. By then this book had been out there for a long time, so now it is a vintage romance with characters behaving a little differently than we expect them to in the twenty-first century. The heroine is still feisty though. It just takes her a little longer to get there!

Third edition cover

Now, thankfully, all my books bar one are with BWL Publishing, and I am very happy indeed about that.

In my next blog I will introduce another of those early books together with the covers they have had over the years. In the meantime, if you would like to have a taster of Golden Girl, then go to the Book Snippets page on my Website and let it take you back to what it was like to be a secretary in a large company in London and Paris in 1964. Manual typewriters, desk phones connected to a central switchboard, no screens, hardback dictionaries, shorthand dictation, blotting paper...I could go on. It was a different world except for one thing...people still liked to read romances. And if you would like to let me know which of these is your favourite cover, I'd love to know.