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February 29, 2016 is Leap Day!

Poor February 29th. It’s the only day of the year that gets added and then dropped. Every 4 years, we celebrate it; the years in between, we don’t. 2016 is a leap year so this year, February has 29 days instead of 28 days. We get an extra day, but next year, it’s back to 28 days in February. Crazy!

Leap days are added to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolution around the sun. It takes the Earth about 365.242199 days to circle the sun. Notice this is a little over 365. So if we didn’t add an extra day every 4 years, we’d lose some time. About 6 hours every year. After 100 years, our calendar would be off by 24 days!

Suspicious? You should be. Check out our Leap Year Trivia Quiz to investigate further.

1. How many days long is a leap year?
2. What year is the next leap year?
3. If you were born on February 29, on which day would you celebrate your birthday during a non-leap year when February only has 28 days?
4. If you were born in 2004, your actual age may be 12, but what is your leap year age?
5. The chance of being born on a leap day (February 29) are:
   A. 1 out of 24
   B. 1 out of 99
   C. 1 out of 1,461
   D. 1 out of 1 million
6. People born on leap days are called:
   A. Leapfrogs
   B. Weirdos
   C. Leaplings
   D. Leap-Lips
7. Which famous ancient Roman ruler introduced the first leap day back in 45 BCE?

Click here for the answers! It makes me wonder – why don’t we have a July 32nd? Or another month that gets tampered with? Why February 29th?

— Ratha, STACKS Writer

Happy Leap Day!

I’ve always had this fascination for a day that only chooses to show up every four years.  I think it has such flair, never wanting to over stay its welcome.  I’ve thought about people born on this day, are almost measured in dog years minus three.

Puppicasso doesn’t equate things in terms of age, but he has imagine if he himself was born on Leap Day, would he have to multiply his age by 11 years?  Oy, he feels old enough already.  Although this day is a celebration to him, of a little more time to play, so I give you Puppicasso-a-leaping.

http://youtu.be/G_4jESA4PRk

With all this celebration in the morning, we were saddened to find out that afternoon that Davy Jones from the Monkees had died suddenly.  Puppicasso and I are with heavy heart, because as we got an extra day, that day became his last.

Puppi dedicates his favorite Monkees song to him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBlitTE9kLk

Today, 29 February 2012, is a ‘leap day’. To understand more about the leap phenomenon, and the significance of 29 February in history, we turn to The Oxford Companion to the Year: an exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning.

29 February

Leap Day. In the modern form of the calendar, which dispenses with the Roman names of days, this is leap day, inserted every four years to make up the difference between the common year of 365 days and the solar year; by happy accident the sequence of leap years inherited from the Romans coincides with years AD divisible by 4. Since the true difference is some eleven minutes less than six hours, Pope Gregory XIII ordered in 1582 that leap day should be omitted when the year was divisible by 100 but not by 400; the years affected, in those countries that accepted the reform (which Great Britain did not till 1752), were 1700, 1800, and 1900. There was a 29 February again in 2000, but will not be in 2100.

Persons born on 29 February are humorously said to have a birthday only once in four years; on that basis Rossini, who was born on 29 February 1792, would have waited till 1804 for his second birthday, since 1800 was a common year. In practice, however, they have birthdays in common years on the 28^th. By the legal rule noted under the 22^nd, anyone born on either 29 February or 1 March 1948 in England (though not Scotland) came of age on 28 February 1969; but since the Act that abolished that rule also reduced the age of majority, persons born on 29 February 1952 came of age on 28 February 1970, but those born the next day not till 1 March.

Western saints such as Oswald of Worcester who died on 29 February used to be culted on that day in leap year and 28 February in common years; this was a last relic of the Roman reckoning, which made the last day of February pridi Kalendas Martias in either case. By contrast, the Orthodox church, which uses the forward count, celebrates John Cassian on 29 February in leap year and not at all in common years, reputedly as punishment for being last to arrive when the saints came to ask Christ for work. In Mytilene this is the shirkers’ feast, and Cassian holds the keys of idleness.

An old Scotswoman in the nineteenth century, asked by a small boy why this day occurred only once in four years, consulted the ‘funtin-heid’, her Bible, which fell open at Job 3: 3, ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born’, and deduced that Job had been born on 29 February; the Lord had not altogether abolished that day, but done what he could for his servant by suppressing it three years out of four. That was mere fancy, but we read in a near-contemporary that in the second century AD the Athenians gratified the multimillionaire Herodes Atticus – or rather yielded to his unrestrained emotionalism and much-resented power – by removing from the calendar the day on which his daughter died.

29^th February
A day added to the year,
laconic or luminous.
The extra day can be seen
and touched, like any other.
Its hours are not difficult to count,
the weather varies but is weather,
no alien manifestation.
Lovers who marry on this day
have the usual eggshell hearts,
the lewdness of fish.
Children born on this day
are as fierce as any others.
Those who die on this day
must find new ways of being,
and on this day
singing still builds
the upstairs room of the sky.
This is the day
the year keeps for herself
but offers to you,
her breath fo

by mattmangum www.flickr.com

We are lucky this February and have an extra day in the month. It’s a leap year, and we’ve got Leap Day. I am a member of the St. Louis Zoo, and they sent the cutest postcard with frogs on it to tell everyone about the leap day activities online. I never thought about dedicating the day to frogs when I was teaching in the classroom, but it is so clever and makes perfect sense.

The St. Louis Zoo actually had to send out these cute postcards because they left Feb. 29 off the February calendar. They remembered it on the top of the March page, but not February. So, they sent a Feb. 29 sticker with the cute frog postcard. At the same time, the zoo said that all over the world, people are celebrating the Amphibian Ark, which is a consortium of zoos and aquariums worldwide joining together to fight the disappearing amphibian species. Currently on their home page,you can find out information about FrogWatch USA. On the postcard, they state they will have frog activities and puzzles starting on Leap Day. So be sure to share these FREE resources with your children or students.

My daughter has a super cute frog picture book, perfect for preschoolers to second graders. Your hand can become the frog in the book–so there’s a hand puppet with it. It’s called Wendy the Wide-Mouthed Frog by Sam Lloyd. It’s perfect to share with kids to teach about manners, being a good friend, having humility, and just plain having fun. There’s a lot going on in this book–perfect for a fun day like Leap Day.

Do you have a favorite frog book? Are you celebrating Leap Day?

And remember. . .it’s not easy being green.

Happy Leap Year! We're sitting here with this extra day that we don't have every year. What are we supposed to do with it? Write.

You have one extra day to finish your novel this year, so here are a few inspirational links to get you writing again.

Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books on the joys of saving writers from obscurity and deletion on Wikipedia:

"But the work that really drew me in was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission. Here's how it happened. I read a short article on a post-Beat poet and small-press editor named Richard Denner, who had been a student in Berkeley in the Sixties and then, after some lost years, had published many chapbooks on a hand press in the Pacific Northwest." (Thanks, Ed!)

LitPark on why you need to keep writing despite rejection. 

Watch memorist Janice Erlbaum explain how keeping a journal can improve your writing in my web video feature. 

SciFiSignal on the R. Crumb and Philip K. Dick's religious experience.

Finally, our buddy Michael Calderone just landed a new blog over at Politico. Cruise his archives and spice up your novel with biting insights into election coverage in the age of reality television.

"Even though Barack Obama declined to answer the all-important "boxers or briefs" question — who says he's getting a free pass in the media? — the Senator's Us Weekly interview was a huge success, according to WWD.

Off the top of your head, name as many Caldecott Award winning picture books that have been turned into children's television shows starting . . . . NOW!

I thought of My Friend Rabbit which Nelvana tv is turning into a show. That's about it, though. Max and his Wild Things never got into syndication. Forget about the Flotsam show (though the movie potential is VAST). And what about the Smoky Night series? Yeah... maybe not.

In other news, there will also be a Mr. Men Show to boot:

Cartoon Network will be the US home for The Mr. Men Show (52x11'), a new sketch animated series From Chorion Ltd , which is slated to launch on the network in January 2008. Additionally, Cartoon Network is also co-producing the series with Chorion. The Mr. Men Show is based on the Mr. Men and Little Miss books created in the 1970s by Roger Hargreaves. The series is written and produced by Kate Boutilier and Eryk Casermiro and animated in the US by Renegade Animation .