일요일, 2월 29, 2004
i am a doofus.

well, let's not be so harsh. maybe i'm something slightly less worse than a doofus, seeing that i conveniently forgot to take my keys out of my room last night when i was leaving for faz's birthday party. for more shenanigans, please click here. anyway, bottom line was: i locked myself out, had to use my legs to walk over to get the spare key, and lo and behold, after trudging back to the house to get it, i open the door to my warm, welcoming room and there it is, nestled innocently on my table. why oh why is it that keys don't make a sound when you don't take them along with you? faz and i were just talking about it: keys should be attached to some sort of tracking device so that you can always locate them wherever you are, and they should ring as well to alarm you when you're about to step out of the door without them. that's the way things should be...

well, i can dream, can't i? i shudder to think how life is going to be when i live out next year. i'll have to stick a notice by the door going "have you taken your keys with you?", much like the signs on taxi car doors and random trains: "have you left anything behind?" they innocently ask, knowing that if you pass up this chance to take your belongings with you, they'll zoom off into the sunset with nary a backward glance, and that's the last you'll ever see of your gucci sunglasses/lv suitcase/versace wallet. yes, not even if you go to the taxi headquarters to lodge a report, not even then.

some 30 people (who are a bit cracked in the head, methinks) have gotten marriedtoday. a look up at the date at the beginning of the post (re: 29th february leap year comes once only every four years that sort of thing) will remind you why it just means that some people will try anything to get into the papers. too bad then, they are going to have to survive on 25% of wedding anniversaries that the sane people who decided to get married on the other 365 days of the year get to enjoy. not that i think the men will be peeved at the present state of affairs though. this reminds me of all the easily brainwashed geeks who struggled to procreate just 9 months before the dragon year/millennium/whatever else that gives them good reason to shag, rolled round, just so that someone, some lucky person, could be the first one to have a baby born in that year. yeah, so far, so barmy. please, i say, just chuck all these people off to the nut farm or something. quite frankly, whatever happened to low-key being i>le thing? now, apparently, it's all back to seeing whose child was born when. (makes me feel sorry for all your kids born in those years. not to mention the government, giving them false hopes about upping the birth rates. no way man, the next year it's back to the same ol' same ol'.)

just to be out of point here, a little bit about the leap year, in all its glory:

The Gregorian calendar year is intended to be of the same length as the cycle of the seasons. However, the cycle of the seasons, technically known as the tropical year, is approximately 365.2422 days. Since a calendar year consists of an integral number of whole days, a calendar year cannot exactly match the tropical year. If the calendar year always consisted of 365 days, it would be short of the tropical year by about 0.2422 days every year. Over a century, the calendar and the seasons would depart by about 24 days, so that the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere would shift from March 20 to April 13.

To synchronize the calendar and tropical years, leap days are periodically added to the calendar, forming leap years. If a leap day is added every fourth year, the average length of the calendar year is 365.25 days. This was the basis of the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. In this case the calendar year is longer than the tropical year by about 0.0078 days. Over a century this difference accumulates to a little over three quarters of a day. From the time of Julius Caesar to thesixteenth century A.D., the beginning of spring shifted from March 23 to March 11.

When Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the calendar was shifted to make the beginning of spring fall on March 21 and a new system of leap days was introduced. Instead of intercalating a leap day every fourth year, 97 leap days would be introduced every 400 years, according to the rule given above. Thus, the average Gregorian calendar year is 365.2425 days in length. This agrees to within a half a minute of the length of the tropical year. It will take about 3300 years before the Gregorian calendar is as much as one day out of step with the seasons.

i can hear the sounds of awe and wonder right now.