The Real McCoy
One small step for mankind, a giant leap for February
By Brent E. McCoy thereal@adelphia.net

In case you might have missed it, we just passed through the extra day of another Leap Year.

Does Leap Year confuse any one other than me? Why do we even have a Leap Year? Why do we cheat people born on Leap Year out of every three of their four birthdays?

There is that old boring explanation that says we need to add a day every now and then because the real year is 365.2422 days long, not just the plain 365 days they told us it was.

Then there is the more accepted explanation that most of us learned as children. You may remember asking your parents why there was such a thing as a Leap Year and your parents drawing on their vast scientific knowledge would reply, "There just is."

But why insert it at the end of February? At the risk of making Leap Year complicated, I read that it is not actually inserted- it is "intercalated" at the end of February.

It's also very confusing to know when a Leap Year is coming. Here's how it works. Every year that is divisible by four is a Leap Year. But if the year in question can be divided by 100, it is not a Leap Year. But a year is still a Leap Year if it can be divided by 400, which interestingly enough is also divisible by 100 and that presents us with a conundrum which is similar to intercalated, but different.

It's quite simple once you understand provided you keep an adequate supply of headache medicine handy.

There are better places to put an extra day rather than just shoving it in at the end of a month. Instead of just a random extra day at the end of February, why not just pick a week and add an extra day?

No one would want an extra day in the middle of the week, so those are out. But why not have an extra Monday?

After the weekend, you could wander into work just like any other Monday and screw something up. But this time you wouldn't get yelled at on Tuesday because you could fix it tomorrow on Monday before anyone found out about it.

A lot of people might vote for an extra Friday. This sounds good, but what's the point of goofing off and quitting work early if you have to come back the next day just to goof off and quit work early again?

An extra Saturday might be a good choice. You could go to a ball game or a party on Friday and overindulge and you would have all day Saturday to recover and then you could wake up refreshed on Saturday. The same can be said for Sunday. But I think Saturday is better, because two Sundays during football season would be too much, but you can never have enough baseball on Saturday.

Either way, instead of cheating some people out of their birthdays, every one gets a birthday and some folks will get two. Maybe we could start a tradition where these people could receive a free cake unless, of course, their birthday is divisible by pi. We could have an extra Saturday and extra Sunday every eight years. This would give us twice the time off at one time and we'd only have to worry about half as often.

All in all, I think an extra Saturday and Sunday would do the trick. We could have two extra days in every year that was divisible by eight. That is unless the year was divisible by 100 then it wouldn't be a Leap Year, unless it was also divisible by 400 in which case it would be a Leap Year.

Maybe it's best we just keep everything the way it is. Besides, the pain killers are wearing off.

To all of those born on Feb. 29, I wish a belated "happy birthday"- you're another four years older.