It's such a rare opportunity.
This is only the second opportunity the Boidem has had to post a column on February
29, and since four more years into the future is too far for me to guess as to
the possible longevity of the Boidem, this well may be the last. That being the
case, I suppose that I should make the best of it. So, this columns date tie-in
is devoted to that only once every four years rarity - leap day.
As is to be expected, much more than we ever thought we wanted to know is available
on the web pertaining to February 29. As is fitting for this particular column,
the Wikipedia has an entry
on the subject. It's more than passable. The Britannica 2001 Deluxe Edition
CD-ROM refers numerous times to February 29, but has no specific entry on the
subject. It does, however, contain numerous discussions on the calendar, leap
years and the like.
The real fun starts when we leave aside the more conventional sources of information
and simply let the web lead us to interesting material. Of course numerous fully
passable explanations of why we calculate leap years can be readily found.
And there's always somebody out there who tells us that everything
that we know is wrong, and that we should calculate our birthdays by adding
365.25 days to our birthday every year. If this person started writing
entries for the Wikipedia we'd really be in trouble.
But factual explanations aside, from the web we learn that there is a quadrennial
World Wide Leap Year
Festival, held in the Leap Year Capital of the World, Anthony, Texas/New
Mexico. The promotional information informs us that we don't have to celebrate
our birthdays on February 29 to attend the festival.
People born on February 29 do, after all, have something special in common, so
it's perhaps logical that many sites are devoted to leap-people. (The Honor Society
of Leap Year Day Babies lists 3450 active members in its database.) On these sites
we can learn numerous fascinating, if hardly useful, tidbits of information. One
of them (which seems primarily concerned with making February 29 officially
Leap Year Day, though in this particular case the need for being official seems
a bit superfluous) informs us of three siblings from Norway born on consecutive
leap-days: 1960, 1964 and 1968. That certainly is quite an achievement, and next
to it my posting of this column on leap day pales considerably.
Go to: Too Common Knowledge.