Happy leap month! The normal thing is to call it leap year but February is the month that the leap takes place, so it is the leap month.  Fortunately it is also the month that we and most of the world celebrate Valentine’s Day.  I hope you had a wonderful leap of romance in your Valentine celebration this year.

Unfortunately this is also quite often the year we leap into actual presidential elections rather than presidential polls.  The polls of who should be President are yearly. It must be a good thing to try to figure out who the people will elect in the next Presidential election. They sure try it often enough.

The best thing about the primary elections that take place in the first part of the year is that they slowly replace the polls. Or at least the way it is going lately at election time in the primary phase we get to eliminate some of the “pretenders to the throne”  Apologies for that throne phrase it hails from the medieval times when relatives were vying for the kingships that come about when the old king dies.  We haven’t completely eliminated the relative part of the contentions.  However, nowadays it seems anybody can run. All they need is money.

Another good thing has happened is that we don’t have wars over who should be king.  We did have a Civil war when some folks didn’t like Lincoln.  Now that was not only those that came to be known as the Confederates, there were others. For instance the Copperheads in the North sure wanted someone to settle the war and have two countries instead of one.

I don’t expect that there will ever be some kind of universally acceptable form of government.  Unless, of course, it is one that completely agrees with me.  That is the question isn’t it?   As Frank Sinatra used to sing “Do it my way”.

Another interesting thing about this leap month is that we do all the leaping in just one day.  Oh, it is true that the scientists and the atomic clocks of current design slip in a leap second every so often.  They are not proud of it because they do it late at night. I guess no one is supposed to notice that one second out of 86,400 in the day.  Is it a big deal? Somewhere in the next 3 to 4 thousand years your clock would be about an hour late.  Heavens, my Cu-Koo clock loses at six minute a day rate.

The good thing about the leap day (Feb 29) is that those people who are born on that day only have a birthday every four years so they get to stay young. For instance, they have only twenty birthdays when someone like me is 80. In one first few years that might not be fun but nowadays I would enjoy it.
And that is to say once again, I wish you a very happy leap month.