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It's February 29th -- Happy Leap Day! While others are pondering mysteries like "what happens to a baby born on February 29th?" and "Does this have anything to do with last night's episode of 'Lost'?", we're going to take the opportunity to teach you a shiny new word! It's called intercalation, and it's what Julius Caesar did back in the day to fix the wacky Roman calendar system: inserting extra units of time (in our case, one day at the end of February) into the regular calendar to make up for that 1/4 day imbalance in our time measurement system.
The Romans used to be very lazy about their time-keeping, and would stick a whole extra month into their calendar every so often to even things out. Then Julius Caesar starting running the show, and he was like "Whaaaaat up people, can't we be a little more precise here? We're freakin' Romans, for Jupiter's sake." So he and some astronomers put the calary-smack down, invented Leap Year, and in the process, named a month after himself (July).
In the spirit of being totally arbitrary, then, you can celebrate Leap Day by getting a free hot dog at Pink's this morning, starting at 9:30am. They're giving away a dog to the first 500 people today and tomorrow to promote the Farrelly Brothers' new TV show, so get down there and intercalate a hot dog into your day.
Learn more about Leap Year and the Julian Calendar at Wired Magazine.
