Take a flying Leap Day!

It seems my Tender Lumplings that another Leap Year has arrived and today, Leap Day, is what the fuss is all about.  So once every four years we get to have a February 29.  As if February wasn't a screwed up month already.  It usually only has 28 days while all other months have at least 30.  It is stuck in winter, in this hemisphere, and starts off with a holiday that nearly always predicts more winter.  I think they stuck Valentine's Day in February just so the month wouldn't be a complete waste. 

All of this fuss over Leap Year is due to one simple fact: the measuring of the passage of time is not an exact science.  The search for an accurate time measurement system has been going on since time began, or since time began to be noticed.  Early man realized the passage of time and has been trying to measure it ever since. Animals don't care about time and neither did the first vaguely humanoid things that fell out of the trees. After he stood upright and looked up at the sky he noticed something.  The first most obvious clue was the rising and setting of the sun.  Then there was the way the moon and stars didn't appear in the sky in the same place or for the same amount of time each night.  Of course all this was first attributed to the Gods and their whims.  But then patterns began to emerge and someone started taking notes.

Calenders began to appear pretty early on.  And through history there have been countless versions.  Lunar calendars and Lunisolar, Sidereal, forced synchronization called "intercalation".  There are Julian, Gregorian, Hebrew, Iranian, Islamic calenders.  And they are all different some how.  Some differ by thousands of years.  The comic Jackie Mason noted how the Hebrew calendar dated back nearly a thousand years further than the Chinese one.  Which made him ask the question: "How did the Jews survive a thousand years with out Chinese takeout?"

It is fairly widely recognized that some of these other old calendars are more accurate than today's.  Most of the world has now settled on using one calender, a modified Gregorian based system.  They figured out how many days each month should have and decided a year was 365 (ish) days.  And so we have to add one day every four years to make up for the math.  Leap Day.  Today. 

What does all this really mean.  Simple, once every four years we have to wait and extra day to get to Christmas.  Leap Year sucks.