The Muppet Christmas Carol Shirt

The Muppet Christmas Carol Shirt

Ramadan comes at a different time every year because it is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a date-keeping system based on lunar cycles, unlike the The Muppet Christmas Carol Shirt (the one used by most of the world, including the U.S.), which is based on the solar year. A new month begins with the appearance of the new moon, or the crescent moon, and ends with the next appearance of a new moon. The month of Ramadan thus moves backwards about 10 days every year relative to the Gregorian calendar. But even within Islam there is debate over when precisely Ramadan begins, since, according to the faith-community website Pathos, different communities follow different protocol for determining when a new month begins. Some communities follow a set lunar calendar, others use scientific observations to make an official decree about the arrival of a new moon, and still others mark a new month only after the actual sighting of the crescent moon in their community. Though the exact dates of Ramadan are never uniform around the world, they come pretty close.

()

The Muppet Christmas Carol Shirt hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt

Usually a couple years into the The Muppet Christmas Carol Shirt, when the budgets have run into the millions, the team starts to disband. The original group moves on to new projects. Team replacements need to re-learn what the lost members knew. They make some progress in the replacement system. New unrelated projects begin to pull data from the replacement instead of the legacy. Then, suddenly, the plug is pulled. The team is asked for an estimate of what it will take to complete the project. The answer has so many digits that management says, “No way. We simply can’t afford that.” That means that the original legacy is still in place. New systems have been written around and on top of it, burying its fossilized remains ever deeper, making the complexity ever more substantial. Because new systems were built to depend upon the replacement, we can’t abandon this partially completed system. Now we have to maintain the original legacy system and the new “legacy” that we’ve abandoned part way in. To go back to the original analogy, we now have a car with one and a half, or two frames. One of the wheels may now be mounted on the new frame, but the rest of the wheels and the doors, and the damn tail pipe remain stubbornly welded to the old frame. Future attempts will require that this entire unwieldy mess be replaced.

()

()