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 tell 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.