Thirteen

Here is the season finale twist, listeners: calendar reform is real. The 13-month International Fixed Calendar — thirteen identical 28-day months, every date on the same weekday forever, one bonus day outside time — was a genuine, serious movement. The League of Nations considered it. And the Eastman Kodak Company actually ran on it, internally, for sixty-one years. This is checkable. Dale has, one final time, wandered into the vicinity of a fact.

And so Bryce let himself hope. For eleven beautiful minutes, the show was two friends discussing the genuine history of calendar reform. Kodak used it until 1989, Bryce noted, and it was fine — payroll was tidy, the months behaved, nobody ascended to a higher vibrational state, and the company in perfect lunar-feminine synchronization still managed to miss the digital camera it invented. Rhythm, it turns out, is not foresight.

Then Dale said the word "Gregorian" the way he says "international bankers," and Bryce watched the season end in real time. In Dale’s telling, Pope Gregory XIII redesigned time in 1582 "at the behest of banking interests" who needed irregular months "to obscure interest calculations." The reform was about Easter, Dale. The documentation is exhaustive and extremely Catholic. The drift was astronomical — the actual sky was wrong — and the bankers of 1582, who could obscure interest just fine in any calendar, did not need the pope, because compound interest is already invisible to everyone, especially you, especially at 29% APR, especially on a jet ski.

Dale closed the season with his unified theory of thirteen: the missing month, Friday the 13th, hotels with no 13th floor — all suppression artifacts. Bryce pointed out that Dale is personally afraid of the number 13 and has been the entire episode; he is recording this from the hallway. "You’re the suppression, Dale. You are the demonization of 13. It’s coming from inside the episode."