Leap year must go

            So 2016 is a leap year.

Leap years are about as confusing as daylight saving time, a baffling concept for someone from Saskatchewan.

            Each year we have a leap year, humanity is reminded that it has not conquered the modern calendar.  The fact that we have a leap year is a testament to our ineptitude.  With all our scientific advancements, we still cannot figure out how to account for an extra quarter day every year.  Earth’s orbit around the sun refuses to give us our constitutional right to 365 days a year.

            To make matters worse, it’s not just a quarter day, it’s 0.242199 of a day.  It’s as bad as pi. 

            That’s why we don’t have leap years on years that are divisible by 100.  But we do have leap years on years that are divisible by 400, hence the leap year in 2000. Yes, it’s that complicated.

The Julian calendar, which our current calendar replaced, messed up royally by not accounting for the extra decimal places, resulting in Christmas being shifted to January 7^th.  Can you imagine waiting that long for Christmas??

            Even with all of the fine-tuning of our current calendar, we will still be off by one day every 3,236 years.  I’m sure there are some people who actually worry about this, like me.  They are at this moment trying to solve the riddle of our modern calendar, engineering a new system of time.

            My initial thought was to simply increase the length of our seconds.  Just by a fraction, so that 365 days equals one full orbit around the sun.  Then I realized that would put our days out of whack.  Eventually our days would turn to nights and nights to days, and well, I don’t know if society would welcome that. 

            So there’s no easy answer.  It makes daylight saving time look like a piece of cake.  You see, the answer to changing the clocks twice a year is to simply not do it.

            Saskatchewan and her sister-state, Arizona, have caught on.  Why won’t the rest of the world?  Why not just set our clocks to permanent daylight saving time?  Get the extra sunlight in the evening when it’s most useful.

            Saskatchewan couldn’t decide which time zone to join, so it decided to join both.  With Mountain Standard in the summer and Central Standard in the winter, Saskatchewanians hardly notice the difference until they watch a TV station from a different time zone. 

            President W. Bush did at least one good thing in his presidency by increasing the period of daylight saving time each year.  The summer hours now start in March and extend into November.  Why he didn’t go ahead with the full year is a mystery (as were many of his decisions).

            Now most of North America has to endure absurdly short evenings for only four months of the year.

            But back to the leap year...

            What to do with an extra day in 2016? 

Just think of all the people paid monthly salaries who have an additional day of expenses to deal with in February.

Just think about all the babies born on February 29^th, cheated out of a true birthday three out of every four years (seven straight years on those years divisible by 100 but not by 400).

            Poor kids.  They feel the pain the most.

For their sake, let all of the greatest minds of the earth come together and commit to ending the leap year once and for all.