2020 is a leap year. If there were no leap years they say eventually February would be a summer month up here in the Northern Hemisphere. Hey, wait a minute! That sounds like a selfish if not slightly irrational good argument for eliminating leap years. We were taught way back in elementary school that a normal year of 365 days actually is 365 ¼ days so every 4 years we have to add a Leap Day to catch up. It’s a bummer if you were born on February 29th because you only have a birthday every 4 years, and accordingly you should expect really big, expensive gifts. One might ask why, when most months have either 30 or 31 days, February usually only has 28. Apparently the reason dates back to the time when Rome’s lunar calendar only had 10 months so, in order to lengthen the year, one month had to end up with 28 and they chose February. And here’s one more interesting bit of trivia about Leap Year and something I didn’t remember until now: Did you know that our calendar skips Leap Day every centurial year? That means in some years, 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, we actually go 8 years without a 29th of February. Notice I left out 2000 and that’s because we didn’t skip Leap Day 20 years ago. There was a February 29, 2000 because there is an exception to the rules of our Gregorian calendar and those are centurial years evenly divisible by 400. This has happened only twice, in 1600 and 2000. And so I end another week without having become unexpectedly rich.

That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.