Hi,
 A few post back somebody asked if there's anybody who sees Sunday as the
first day of the week, and so on, So :
 In Israel ( a small country in the middle east of about 5-6 millions
people) , and for all the jewish people (about 20 million world wide) the
week starts on Sunday which is literaly the first day of the week
("Rishon") and so on until friday which is the sixsth day of the week
("Shishi") while saturday is "Shabbat" which means a rest day. This
follows the Bible in which God created the world in six days and on the
seventh day he rested.
 Now , the jewish day starts in the evening (and not at midnight) , and
this is significant at the weekends because you're not to do any work on
saturday (the seventh day) so , you have to prepare the shabbath on
friday before the evening - this makes the two days of weekend in Israel
to be Friday and Satutday.
 The seventh day ends on saturday night - and then starts a new week (of
course we go to work on sunday morning and not on saturday night), and
the first day of the week is Sunday. Now , although most of the people in
Israel are not religious, the buisiness week keeps this form of a week,
and the first buisiness day of the week is Sunday and the last is
Thursday, and the two weekend days are Friday and Saturday. (You might
want to consider that if you plan to visit Israel, or do buisness over
there).
 Another related topic is the jewish calendar, which is a moon based
calendar - that is the month begins when the moon starts filling , a full
moon appears always in the middle of the month and the month ends when
the moon is dark. (every month starts at the evening of the previous day
as explained above) Every month has 29-30 days, and every forth year or
so there is a "spare" month of 30 days. The jewish calendar and the
gregorian calendar match in a 19 years cycle. So the first month of the
jewish calendar is always around September-October.
 The Islamic Calendar is another moon based calendar , but does not tries
to match itself to the sun calendar , so their holidays can appear on
diffent time of the year (I think they lose a year every 65 years - that
is a 65 years old moslem is actually only 64 years old).

I hope I contibuted my little piece of knowledge, I'm sure a more
detailed and correct information is out there on the web.
BTW Emacs has a good calendar of all the forms you now (and more).

 And have a nice week, Doron