If you've learned the classic Day of the Week For Any Date feat, as
taught in sources such as the Roth Memory Course, The Magic of Memory,
Train Your Brain and Entertain and Zufall's Memory Trix, you already know how useful a perpetual calendar can be for verification of the date. Now, you can have a compact perpetual calendar as close as your iPod, iPhone, PDA or cell phone that easily allows you to access any
date in any year from 1800 through 2199!
"But wait," I can hear you say, "Don't iPods, iPhones, PDAs and most
cell phones already have built-in calendars?" Yes, they do. However,
most of these calendars are intended for appointments, and only handle
recent dates well. Often, if you're trying to look up a date farther
back than a few months ago, these calendars access these dates in an
agonizingly slow manner, if you can access them at all. For example my Palm III can only access dates ranging from 1904 to 2031. Even on my PC I can only access dates from 1980 to 2099.
This perpetual calendar is in the form of 176 JPEG files, that can be loaded onto any iPod, iPhone, PDA or cell phone that can handle images*. The first 8 images constitute an index that shows which calendars (denoted with the letters A through N) correspond to which years. The remaining 168 images show the months, from "January A" through "December N".
Imagine you're performing the classic Day of the Week For Any Date
feat, and you're given the date July 4th, 1976. After you give the
date as Sunday (using for example one of the methods explained in the ebooks listed above), you take out your iPod and scroll to the "1950-1999"
index, to show that the year 1976 corresponds to calendar "L". You
then scroll quickly through the images until you get to "July L",
which clearly shows that July 4th, 1976, was a Sunday. You've just
proved your prowess as a human calendar!
It's portable, easily accessible, inexpensive and helps make you look
amazing! What more could you ask? And since these are simple image files you can certainly also use them on your desktop or laptop computer.
(* Note: The images are 360 by 270 pixels each, and they may be
difficult to read on iPod nanos, as well as PDAs and cell phones with
smaller screens.)
1st edition 2007.
