Shouldn't February be over... by now?

By Jeff Hage (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, February 29, 2008

Ever wish you had more time on your hands? You know, an extra day to get that important job done or an extension on that ‘honey-do’ list sitting on the kitchen counter?

Well, consider this your day. Today’s a bonus day.

Happy Leap Day — an occasion that comes around once every four years, resulting in an extra day on the calendar.

Feb. 29 is a rarer occurrence than Christmas, Thanksgiving, Bastille Day or whatever your favorite holiday is — yet it hardly gets noticed simply because it’s seemingly just a random day added to the year, just so our calendar can realign with the earth’s rotation around the sun.

The Egyptians were the first to add an extra day to their calendar to stay in line with the solar year. And the Romans were the first to designate Feb. 29 as the extra day.

But like everything, having a Leap Day isn’t always as easy as it looks. It seems like we always have to complicate things with rules and regulations.

Leap Day is no different. Did you know century years are not Leap Years unless they can be evenly divided by 400?

For example, 1700, 1800, 1900 were not leap years. This rule helps compensate for some of the time that Leap Day overshoots because a solar year is 11 minutes and 14 seconds shy of being a quarter of a day off from the calendar year. The longest time between two leap years is eight years. The last time this happened was between 1896 and 1904. It won't happen again until 2096 to 2104. Whew! What a job it was sorting that one out!

This non-holiday gets celebrated by many. Take for example all those Leap-Day babies who get to celebrate growing old just every four years. Leap Day is a magic kind of medicine that makes someone born on Feb. 29, 1968 only 10 years old!

There are many famous people who celebrate Leap Day as their birthdays. The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Birthdays include William A. Wellman, who directed "Wings," the first film to win an Oscar in 1928; actor Dennis Farina of "Law and rapper Ja Rule.

Without Leap Day, we might have missed out on some important dates in history, too. Take for example, it was on Leap Day in 1504 when Christopher Columbus was stranded in Jamaica during his fourth voyage to the West and used a correctly predicted lunar eclipse to frighten hostile natives into providing food for his crew.

The movie “Gone with the Wind” won eight Emmys on Leap Day in 1940, while The Beatles’ "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." took top album honors at the 1968 Grammys.

You might want to cover your eyes for this one, but it was on Leap Day in 1960 that the first Playboy Club, featuring waitresses clad in "bunny" outfits, opened in Chicago.

It was Leap Day 2000 when George W. Bush won Republican presidential primaries in Virginia, Washington state and our neighboring state of North Dakota. Maybe the world would be a different place if we wouldn’t have had a Leap Day that year.

Enjoy your day and take a leap on the wild side. You won’t be able to do it for another four years.

Jeff Hage is the managing editor of the Daily Journal. He can be reached at jeff.hage@fergusfallsjournal.com.