If it was not for our leap seconds—and, every four years, leap days—our clocks and calendars would slide and slip all over the place compared to what they are measuring; if not for leap days, eventually New Englanders would be confronted with a frigid July and the dog days of December, and vice versa for the Southern Hemisphere.
 
What our clocks and calendars are measuring is perfect: a year is X number of seconds, days, months, but not the same every year. The earth’s orbit is regular and perfect, but not 365 days every year. It is almost 365 days, and a day is almost exactly 24 hours in length, and we live with the compromise we call clocks and calendars. The ancients came as close to exactly right simply from observation as they could—to within seconds.—”Time’s Mulligan,” TGAT

Today is Leap Day. Every four years, Leap Day William (pictured above) travels from his home in the Mariana Trench to trade candy for children’s tears. It is a beloved national holiday honoring the taking of chances.

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Iraq President Saddam Hussein ordered his forces to retreat from Kuwait and U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared that nation liberated 25 years ago today.

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Five sections of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite “The Planets” were performed in public for the first time by the Royal Philharmonic Society conducted by Sir Adrian Boult on this date in 1919. The movements that were performed were Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter. This selection became a popular version of “The Planets,” even though Holst himself disdained performances that concluded with Jupiter. His daughter wrote that he “disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a ‘happy ending’, for, as he himself said, ‘in the real world the end is not happy at all.'”
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Jackie Gleason (above) was born 100 years ago today.

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Four hundred years ago today, astronomer Galileo Galilei was ordered by Cardinal Bellarmine—under the orders of Pope Paul V—”to abandon completely … the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Galileo was allowed to consider the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun as a philosophical idea, a metaphysical “what-if,” but he was prohibited from teaching it or writing anything that argued for its physical truth.

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Mutual Film Corporation and Charlie Chaplin signed a contract that would pay him $10,000 a week on this date 100 years ago.
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