Leap day

Damn! I am one day late.

Aman had a status message yesterday: savor the day!
And then he went on to write a blog post: http://yamuna-writings.blogspot.com/2008/02/29th-february.html

So i thought to pen some nice stories about it myself:

Last week my mom just joked with me and asked me to tell the name of my girlfriend. I also joked and replied that i will not tell you her name but her birthday is coming - its 29 feb. She laughed and said that then i cant marry her - she is still a minor!

Well thats the spirit of 29Feb - lucky enough to be the odd one and enjoy all the talk but unlucky enough for people to poke fun.

One thing that amazes me is that why do we have such a calendar system. How does it matter anyways. So if we have 365 days every year, ok then after some million years, we will have winter in june, summer in jan..so what. Global warming is doing worse than this. Whats wrong with the chinese calendar or the egyptian one. And who came with the idea of dividing the year in such an odd fashion, even the symmetry of alternating series is violated by july-aug, leave about feb.

The only reason that i can think at the top of my head is to make the life of amateur programmers hell.....ita a typical class XI computer science problem - Write a program to tell whether a year is leap year or not OR to write a program to convert a day to the date of year. Somehow the visionaries were able to guess that there will be computers in future, students will be forced to write stupid programs...lets screw them.

But here are some very interesting stories:

Tradition, Folklore and Superstition

A tradition was introduced many centuries ago to allow women to propose to men during a leap year. This privilege of proposing was restricted to leap day in some areas. Leap day was sometimes known as “Bachelors’ Day”. A man was expected to pay a penalty, such as a gown or money, if he refused a marriage offer from a woman.
The tradition’s origin stemmed from an old Irish tale referring to St Bridget striking a deal with St Patrick to allow women to propose to men every four years. This old custom was probably made to balance the traditional roles of men and women in a similar way to how the leap day balances the calendar.
It was also considered to be unlucky for someone to be born on a leap day in Scotland and for couples to marry on a leap year, including on a leap day, in Greece.

The above thing is taken from : http://laurenyoungfansite.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/today-is-leap-day-feb-29/

Another interesting post is : http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_02/013226.php
The post asks questions that when do people who are born on leap day celebrate their bday in a non-leap year.

One interesting answer posted there is :

My mother was a leap day baby and in off years always celebrated on Feb. 28. Her reasoning was it was bad enough to not celebrate on the right date so you may as well get the month right.