Look Before You Leap
“Dot.calm” by Jane Silverman, Member Since 2012
This year is going to be longer than usual (and not just because of the long slow slog of this election season). It’s a leap year: a quirky quadrennial event meant to confuse people born on February 29 — and the rest of us. Hint: you know it’s a leap year if the Summer Olympic Games and US presidential election are taking place.
During non-leap years, friends and family of “Leaplings” can’t even list their birthdays on the calendar (since there is no February 29…); These leap-year-babies become one year older on the day before their actual birthday which means people born on February 29 or on March 1 should both celebrate their big day on February 28. Confused yet? I wonder if people ever marry on Leap Year? Imagine the repercussions of missing 3 out of 4 wedding anniversaries!
It’s Not Just About Time
Make yourself a Leap Year cocktail (2 oz. gin, ½ oz. Grand Marnier, ½ oz. sweet vermouth and ¼ oz. lemon juice) — which was invented at the bar at London’s Savoy Hotel on February 29, 1928 — and visit one of my favorite websites: timeanddate.com. According to this unassuming site with a million daily visitors, while our calendar has 365 days, it actually takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds for the earth to circle once around the sun. Those extra minutes add up to an extra day every four years.
Timeanddate.com brings out the nerd in me with an eclectic assortment of geeky attractions like calculators to round-up alternative age birthdays (in case you are wondering, I will turn 2,000,000,000 seconds old on Monday, November 13, 2023, at 8:53:20 p.m.) or a nifty date countdown (i.e. to calculate how many days to the presidential election). It lists over 6000 holidays, worldwide weather, and an assortment of nifty printable calendars you can download with personalized holidays, family birthdays, anniversaries or milestones. Its Fun Facts section is worth reading! I didn’t know, historically, women were allowed to propose to a man on Leap Day, while in some countries, if a man refuses a woman’s Leap Year proposal, he was required to buy her 12 pairs of gloves so she could hide the fact that her hand was not wearing a ring.
Good deal!
Find My Car
Timeanddate.com also has the time and date of meteor showers and planetary movements, but you will have to visit whereisroadster.com if you want to track Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster which he sent into space in February 2018 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket test flight. The 2008-model (which is way past its 36,000mile warranty) was previously used by Musk for commuting to work and is the only car in space, traveling farther than any other car in history. The Roadster and its driver – a dummy nicknamed Starman — will remain in its orbit around the sun for potentially hundreds of millions of years playing David Bowie’s songs Space Oddity and Life on Mars (or at least until the batteries die). Who doesn’t love a billionaire genius with a sense of humor??
Bissextile Year
I turned to the Thought & Co website to learn more about Leap Year on a site designed to surprise, entertain, inform, and well, be thoughtful. 13 million people each month read their in-depth articles on art, architecture, literature, military history, the animal kingdom and more, all written by experts in their fields.
Visit thoughtco.com and sign up their free newsletter “What I Learned About Today” where I learned that Leap Year was invented during Julius Caesar’s reign in 46BC. Back then, February was the last month and March was the first month of their calendar year with Leap Day falling on February 24 (which is why it doesn’t occur at the end of our year on December 31 which makes more sense).
Unfortunately, the Julian Calendar had miscalculated the length of the solar year by 11 minutes and was falling out of sync with the seasons so, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII created the updated Gregorian calendar we use today. All this without Google.
Surfing the Web Tree by Tree While researching Leap Year online, I planted over 100 trees by switching from Chrome to the search engine Ecosia ecosia.org which donates 80% of its profits from ad revenue to support tree planting programs around the world. Ecosia works just like Google (which processes an average of 3.5 billion searches per day) and turns your web searches into trees that are planted in environmentally at-risk regions around the world every 1.7 seconds. So far, they have planted over 30 million trees with a goal of 1 billion. If you have a favorite app or website you would like to share, please contact me at janes@janesilvermanpr.com.