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- Nominative determinism is the hypothesis
that a person's name can have a significant role
in deciding their fate.
It happens with a bunch of Batman villains.
But one of our favorite examples, here at Nerdsync
is Calendar Man,
whose real name is Julian Gregory Day.
So what does have to do with calendars?
Welcome to Alter Ego,
where we analyze the names inside of comic books
to uncover their hidden secrets.
I'm DK and and the Batman super villain Calendar Man
isn't terribly well known.
Except for some notable appearances
in the Batman video game, Batman Arkham City
and the mini series,
Batman: The Long Halloween.
Halloween.
Topical.
But he's actually been around for a while.
First appearing in Detective Comics number 259
back in 1958.
As you might expect, the Calendar Man commits crimes
that have a relationship to the date
that they are committed.
An anniversary, a holiday, a day of the week...
you know, the calendar.
The most obvious thing about
Calendar Man's real name
again, Julian Gregory Day is how on the nose
his last name is.
But his first and middle names
are also references to the calendar.
So let's start with his first name, Julian.
Yes, his first name sounds a whole lot like July,
which isn't technically wrong,
but there's a whole lot more to it than that.
The Roman calendar had at one point,
ten months in it with all of the Winter days
just not assigned to any month at all.
Then the second King of Rome Numa Pompilius,
reformed the calendar,
moved some days around and added two months.
What we now know as January and February,
which were then added to the beginning of the year,
which is why October,
a month whose name literally means eight,
is the tenth month of the year.
And for nearly 700 years,
that's how the calendar stayed.
Until Julius Caesar reformed the calendar
to account for every single day of the year.
The Roman calendar previously had
a variable period called Intercalaris
that happened at the end of the calendar.
And the length of the period
was decided by the Pontifex Maximus,
a religious and political position.
And when Julius Caesar held that position,
the year was somehow 445 days long.
But Julius then abolished Intercalaris,
instead opting to have the calendar
account for 365.25 days of the year.
After Caesar's death, the Romans
then changed the seventh and eighth months
of the calendar from Quintilis and Sextilis
to Iulius and Augustus, respectively.
That is July after Julius Caesar
and August after Julius's adopted son, Augustus.
And all of this is what we now know
as the Julian calendar.
And there is Calendar Man's first name.
For over 1600 years this is how the calendar was
in the western world.
Until in 1582, the Pope made some more changes.
See now, the Julian calendar makes years
exactly 365.25 days long.
And while this is a nice round number,
it's not quite accurate.
A solar year is technically about
365.2421897 days long, give or take.
So after hundreds and hundreds of years,
the calendar shifted a little,
which is not a super big deal,
it's actually kind of arbitrary.
Unless you're talking about holidays.
And this is why the Pope
wanted to make some changes.
The celebration of Easter is tied to the spring equinox.
and at this point, it had shifted by ten days
on the Julian calendar.
And the Church was none too happy about this.
So they sought to reform the calendar in two ways.
First change, leap years now occur every four years.
Unless that year is divisible by 100
and not divisible by 400.
I know that's confusing but what it means,
is that the year 2000 was a leap year
and that 1900, 1800, and 1700 weren't leap years
but 1600 was.
That's not even the weirdest change.
The second change was in 1582.
October 4th was followed by October 15th,
which sounds just absolutely chaotic.
Now the name of the pope in 1582
under who all these changes were made
Pope Gregory the 13th.
And there is Calendar Man's middle name.
So there's Julian and then there's Gregory
and then his last name is Day.
And I don't feel like I should have to explain that one.
Now we'd like to hear from you.
What other comic book names
do you feel like we should tackle on this show?
Leave it in the comments
and we'll try to make into an episode.
And if this your first time here with us at NerdSync,
we make several new videos every week
because we believe that asking questions
about the comics that we love so much
makes them that much more enjoyable.
So click that big old subscribe button
so you don't miss out on the next one.
Once again, I'm DK and you can follow me
on Twitter and pretty much every other
social media as DKlarations.
And if you happen to want more of me,
you can check me out at youtube.com/DKlarations.
And don't forget on Monday
there will be another episode
of the NerdSync podcast
available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
So be sure to check that out.
I'll see you guys next time.