This made me curious about how our current calendar came to be, so I visited The Source Of Alleged Truth (aka Wikipedia). I learned that messing with the calendar is a time-honored tradition with numerous prominent historical figures mucking things up.

Rumor has it Romulus established the first Roman calendar in 753 BC with 10 months of 304 days (March-Dec.). Being averse to the cold, since he wore a toga all year, Rommy decided to leave winter off the schedule. The peasants knew this was ridiculous, but kept their opinions to themselves, lest they be persecuted.

Fifty years later, Rome’s King Numa (Rome had kings?) decided to let winter-born people celebrate birthdays, so he tossed January and February into the calendar, with New Year’s Day on March 15 (later moved to Jan. 1). Numa used 354 days, but since Romans considered odd numbers lucky, he upped it to 355, just for kicks. Things still weren’t working, so he used two Wikipedia-paragraphs worth of calculations and a whole extra “leap month” during the occasional year to balance it out. Peasants reacted with the obligatory cheer, lest they be persecuted, and went on ignoring the calendar, farming in sync with the seasons.

Julius Caesar, feeling pretty smart after inventing the caesar salad, thought the Roman calendar wasn’t quite right — probably uneasy about a calendar that celebrated the ides of March. So, in 45 BC, he created a calendar with 12 months of 365 days and a leap day every fourth February. Jules was basing his calendar on a solar year, which meant it aligned with the seasons, so peasants gave it a resounding, “It’s about time, you idiots” (only in their heads, of course, lest they be persecuted).

Everyone lived happily by their Julian calendars for centuries, then scholars discovered a solar year is actually about 11 minutes shorter than the 365.25 days of the Julian calendar, causing it to gain three days every four centuries. The Vatican, knowing they’d be around for a while, figured they should probably fix things, or a future Pope would be celebrating his June birthday as snow fell. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull announcing his Gregorian calendar, which excluded years divisible by 100 from being leap years, unless the year was divisible by 400. The peasants, sick of the endless math, thought, “This is bull. Literally. A papal bull. We have to order new calendars. I want ‘Gruel of the Month’ this time.”

Countries were slow to adopt the Gregorian calendar, allegedly because they weren’t Catholic, but most likely because people were upset about their birthdays. In 1582, when Spain, Portugal and Italy implemented the new calendar, the peasants went to sleep on Oct. 15 and awoke back in time on Oct 4. This thrilled the peasant children who got two birthday parties that week, but angered peasant woman who gained two years (“I’d never guess you were 23. It seems like you just turned 22!”).

Sweden decided to take decades to convert by excluding leap days over 11 successive leap years, until they caught up. After a few years, King Charles XII realized his Official Calendar Guys forgot to exclude leap days in 1704 and 1708, so in a fit of rage, he switched Sweden back to the Julian calendar. Swedish peasants thought, “You have GOT to be kidding me,” but didn’t bother to protest since they’d been using black market Gregorian calendars for years.

Britain and the British Empire (including what is now the eastern U.S.) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. This allegedly caused some riots related to taxes, but since I’m an American working for a British firm, let’s just say, “everything went smoothly, and peasants throughout the British Empire were joyful.”

The last interesting conversion to note happened when people in Alaska went to bed as Russian citizens on Friday, Oct. 6, 1867, and awoke on Friday, Oct. 18, as American citizens. They got two consecutive Fridays because the International Date Line was shifted from Alaska’s eastern to western boundary in sync with the change to the Gregorian calendar, when the U.S. purchase of Alaska took effect. “You couldn’t make it two Saturdays?” Alaskans asked. “I have to work on Fridays!” This was the origin of the phrase, “Alaska is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”

All of this leads me to think that maybe Feb. 29 should be a legal holiday. After all, nobody (even Johns Hopkins researchers) would want to eliminate a free day off from work.

Since joining TheFrameworks, I’ve become more conscious of Detroit’s connection to France. One of our biggest clients is a French company, Dassault Systèmes. I even have the tremendous pleasure of working with two French colleagues here in the Detroit office.

Remembering some of my local history lessons, I hit Google to track down some more interesting connections:

• The city of Detroit was born from a French fort and missionary outpost called Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, founded in 1701. The original settlement was named after Riviere D’etroit, which means “River of The Strait” in French.

• During the late nineteenth century, Detroit was nicknamed the Paris of the West because of its architecture and open public spaces.

• One quadrant of the flag of Detroit honors France with gold fleurs-de-lis on a white field.

• Major streets in Metro Detroit carry French names like Dequindre, Beaubien, Cadillac and Lafayette.

• According to the French-American Chamber of Commerce, operations for about 300 French companies are located in Michigan. Additionally, other French companies do business in Michigan in industries such as automotive, aerospace, retail, luxury goods, food and wine products, high technology and medical products.

• French-American architect Paul Philippe Cret designed the Detroit Institute of Arts. One of the most renowned and respected art museums in the world, the DIA’s collection contains famous works by many French artists, including Monet, Degas and Matisse. Currently, through a partnership with the Musée du Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” is appearing at the Detroit Institute of Arts through 12 February. It demonstrates that in posing an ethnographically correct model and using a human face to depict Jesus, Rembrandt overturned the entire history of Christian art.

These artistic, cultural and industry connections to France are only a portion of the significant ties metro Detroit holds to Europe, so it’s no surprise TheFrameworks saw the area as a great place to open its U.S. office.

On a cold, blustery winter afternoon, three of our intrepid team braved the bitter wind and went to the local and wonderful Borough Market and bought TheFrameworks Christmas tree. The return journey saw the tree proudly carried atop the shoulders of two of our designers through More London, passed Tower Bridge and back to our office in Butlers Wharf.

As part of the tree decorations every member of TheFrameworks London team has decorated their own giant bauble with items as weird and wonderful as bubble wrap, skittles [the sweets, not the ones from the game that closely resembles ten-pin bowling] and a marble.

And so the countdown to Christmas begins. The tree is up, the gifts are arriving – though most of them seem to be online orders for other people – have the Christmas party booked and [Secret] Santa is also due to pay us a visit – we have been good all year after all!

My biggest challenge with board games is simply getting people to play with me, but the challenge in “Brand Memory” from BIS Publishers is to find matching pairs of a brand, based solely on their characteristic color/style elements and a short description of the brand. The game shows you can swap a company’s name or slogan with different text and people will still recognize a well-known brand, simply based on the design elements.

I could see this game inciting a good-natured “who’s more important” debate between the writing and design teams here at TheFrameworks. As a writer, I’ll lob a preemptive strike over the desk by mentioning the Comic Sans Project. Its contributors have taken Comic Sans — the font favored by creators of school projects and office posters — and recreated famous brands with it “because Helvetica is sooo 2011.” Do people still recognize McDonald’s when the golden arches are golden mountain peaks? Absolutely. So take that, designers. I fearfully await your retaliation.

Speaking of Helvetica, if you haven’t yet caught the wonderful documentary about the font, seek it out (I streamed it through Netflix). You’ll never look at your Word document the same way again. Because Arial is sooo 2001.

“Oh, no,” you say. “There couldn’t be anything less interesting than watching a documentary about a font.” Au contraire, mon ami. The same folks who bring you the “Brand Memory” game offer the “Typography Memory Game” in which players must find matching pairs of the letter A in one of 25 different fonts.  Your friends and family will experience minutes of enjoyment as they slowly realize they can’t tell the difference between Akzidenz Grotesk and Garamond, nor can they comprehend why you thought playing this game was a good idea.

Better yet, make your holiday celebration a theme night, by combining the two games and a viewing of the film. I guarantee you’ll never be asked to host another family gathering. On the other hand, I’d have a fabulous time.

Excuse me … I’ve got to tell Santa to add these games to my wish list.

Our latest event from the ‘in just 60 minutes’ series featured guest speaker Steve Cram discussing “Are you ready to compete in 2012? Knowing your competitors and having the strategies and skills to go the extra mile.”

Watch the video to see footage from this successful event where Steve Cram talks about the connections between sport and business.

For five seasons between 1982 and 1986, Steve Cram enjoyed a dazzling spell of competitive success – including the demolition of Ovett’s and Coe’s world records in 1985 – winning a world, two European and three Commonwealth gold medals. Short of full fitness, he had to settle for silver behind Coe in the Los Angeles Olympics 1,500m final, but he bounced back with three world records in 19 days the following year – including history’s first sub-three-and-half minute metric mile. Steve is now the main athletics presenter for the BBC.

When Steve Cram was in full cry, one commentator likened it to “watching a Greek god on the track”.