Leap Year: The Best We can Do in Time Keeping

Tomorrow is a day that comes around only once every four years. It is leap day, February 29. Leap day, occurring in leap years, is a semi-permanent fix to a problem that has plagued official time keepers from the beginning of time.

There is really nothing natural about time keeping. And throughout history scholars have had a tough time figuring out exactly what time it was.

The word “month” is derived from “moon.” It was originally used to measure lunar cycles. One lunar cycle is about 28 days, which includes four phases of about seven days each.

Unfortunately, nature did not cooperate in synchronizing the lunar cycles with the seasons. Although lunar cycles were important to many cultures for religious reasons, the solar cycle and the seasons were important to most agricultural societies. People needed to know when spring arrived.

In addition, the early, overly-powerful, Roman Catholic Church had to have a fixed date for spring, because that is how they computed their holiest day of the year – Easter. Easter always occurs on the first Sunday following the first full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox, or first day of spring. So for Christians, the lunar cycle and solar cycle had to be intermingled, and it all had to fit with the changing of the seasons.

It was quite a task to come up with a suitable calendar. Caesar’s calendar, known as the Julian calendar, was pretty good, but it was out of synch with the sun by a factor of about seven days every 1000 years.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that ten days would be stripped from the current year, in order to bring the calendar in phase with the seasons. From then on, leap years, in which an extra day is added to February, would occur in all years divisible by 4 except in those century years that were not also divisible by 400. So the year 2000 was a leap year, but 1900 was not.

Pope Gregory’s calendar, called the Gregorian calendar, was much more accurate than Caesar’s, but it is still not perfect. It is off by a day or so every few thousand years. But we can live with that for now. It is the calendar we use today, because it is the best at keeping things straight, although it doesn’t even bother trying to fit the week in neatly.

There have been failed attempts at revising the calendar again. It would be nice, for example, to have a calendar in which every month began on a Sunday and ended on a Saturday, with the same number of days in each. All holidays would always fall on the same day of the week and date of the year. But creating such a calendar would mean several “leap days” would be left over at the end of every year. They would not be given dates or names, but would simply be extra days, probably designated as holidays.

As for now, leap year is as good as we can get at reconciling the differences between the sun cycles and moon cycles. Leap years are also good at keeping track of presidential election years and the Summer Olympics, both of which are events that happen only during a leap year.

And as far as calendar reform is concerned, don’t look for any such reform to happen soon. It took over 500 years for Pope Gregory’s reforms to be adopted by the whole world.

Food Doesn't Have to be Expensive to be Good

I’m sitting here browsing the Internet for the latest news, eating my typical weekend breakfast delicacy of biscuits and gravy. It’s my weakness. Every once in awhile, usually on weekends, I get a craving for sausage gravy and biscuits, although any creamy white gravy will do. I’m particularly fond of Cracker Barrel’s sawmill gravy or Bob Evan’s black pepper gravy.

On rarer occasions, I also get another biscuit-based craving for breakfast. When I was a kid, Mom called it sugar molasses. She made it herself, although the ingredients and cooking directions are not very complex. Basically, you get some water, some brown sugar, and then heat them to boiling. Boil for a few minutes and serve hot over a biscuit. Yummy!

I’ve written before about snacks I used to eat, thinking they were common for everyone. Yet they turned out to be almost uniquely ours. Gravy and biscuits are very common. Most restaurants that serve breakfast have the dish. But sugar molasses, I’ll bet, probably is one of those down-home items that most people who are not from your own down-home haven’t heard about.

I believe most of those menu items were developed more through necessity than good taste. I don’t think I’m revealing any family secrets when I say we were fairly poor when I was young. Both Mom and Dad worked at factories, and they held varying hours which left us kids at home with our aunt, Ruby, much of the time. I believe the sugar molasses and biscuit dish was probably her idea. And she used white sugar.

Anyway, when I was around five or six years old, dinnertime consisted of a meal of sausage gravy over white bread. Sometimes we would also get fried potatoes. So most of my preschool years were spent consuming a diet consisting mostly of starch and meat fat. Oh, we had canned veggies, too, but I didn’t like veggies.

The fact is, those meals were cheap to make. And halfway between paychecks, sometimes that’s all Mom could afford to feed us.

Back then, Mom also wasn’t the world’s best cook. I remember her fried chicken. The pieces were small, dripping with grease, and always burned on one side. Her hamburgers were like semi-flattened meatballs, cooked to a crisp. And spaghetti was what you might call extra al dente.

But, we never ate out, even though at one time Mom worked at a restaurant. A little later on, though, when my parents had started earning a little more money, we would have the occasional luxury of sharing a big bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The first time I had it was when I realized for certain what I had long suspected: Mom’s fried chicken had much more love in it than it did flavor.

I must add this disclaimer before I go further. Mom’s cooking improved greatly over the years. She is a good cook today, even contributing to a published cookbook and serving up entrees at church functions and family gatherings. There are no more burned meatball hamburgers or undercooked spaghetti.

I eat out a lot today. I can cook pretty well. There is not much to it. If you have a recipe, just follow it. If you don’t have a recipe, or if you’re missing ingredients, just improvise. It usually works out. But although I used to enjoy making up recipes, today I just like eating out.

But I still crave some of those cheap, making-ends-meet meals I had when I was a kid. I hated them back then. I love them today. Unfortunately for me, they are still little more than meat fat and starch.

Getting Up Close and Personal with Online Maps

Once upon a time, you could go into almost any local filling station and ask for a road map of the state. They were free for the taking. The maps depicted borders between counties and other states. They showed roads, of course. And you could get an estimate of the population of towns and cities by the size of the map symbols representing them.

What you couldn’t see on those maps, which are still available but are far from free anymore, were actual photographs of buildings, houses, people, and cars. They were simply line drawings, as most maps are.

These days, maps are changing. Download a program from the Internet called Google Earth to see a 3-dimensional rendering of the earth. Then zoom in on almost any place on the globe to see not only line drawings of the standard borders and labels of various places, but real photographic images, taken from space, of rivers, roads, buildings, homes, cars, even people. Granted, it’s not in real time. Most images are weeks to a couple of years old. But, still, they are real images.

Now for something completely different: Go online to Google Maps, type in your street address, and then click on the Street View icon. If you live in Indianapolis, Greenwood, Franklin, Columbus, or anywhere along U.S. 31 that connects these cities, you can see a close-up view of your house, your car, and even yourself if you happened to be outside when Google’s picture-taking vehicle passed by one day last summer or fall.

Then, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to take a virtual drive through your neighborhood. Again, it’s not live, but it’s the next best thing.

Maps have certainly come a long way from how they looked just 10 years ago. On Street View, you can turn your view 360 degrees to see in all directions. You can even point it up to see the sky or down to see the road.

Not only is it cool technology, it can also be very useful. Imagine you’re looking to buy a home. You can drive through the neighborhood in virtual reality before you decide to drive through it for real. If you don’t like what you see, you can save some gas.

Or what if you’re planning a trip to a city you’ve never been to before. You can spend some time in front of your computer screen driving through every street, looking at the landmarks, finding the restaurants or hotels, and getting to know the place before you depart.

Of course, it’s also fun just to browse through places you are familiar with just to see if you can get a glimpse of your friends or neighbors out mowing their lawns or maybe even sunbathing.

Of course, there are always the stick-in-the-mud disparagers who don’t like the new technology. Some claim it is an invasion of privacy. Others say it will become a tool for pedophiles.

Pedophiles can drive through the streets live looking for houses with kids. There is little added incentive to do it on the Internet, since the images are at least several months old. The kids may not even live at the same location anymore. And if people don’t want to be photographed while sunbathing, then don’t sunbathe in view of the public. If people don’t mind others seeing them on the street live, what difference does it make if their photo is snapped while they’re in public view?

It’s a fun, useful, and legal technology. Enjoy it. Go find yourself, and quit worrying about privacy issues. You have no expectation of privacy anyway when you’re in public, so get over it.