By Beau Elliot
So there I was, minding my own business when a friend sauntered up (saunter alert) and asked me who invented leap years.Trick question, I figured. Kind of like asking who invented weather. (Safe answer: Ancient Egyptians after observing the Nile. Which of course makes them Nile-ists.)
So I said, God created leap years so U.S. presidential candidates would have an extra day to campaign.
And my friend, satisfied, went off to get another beer. When you’re profoundly discussing leap years, weather, or the status of the death penalty in Arkansas, beer helps. Especially in Arkansas.
And well, OK. God didn’t create leap years. He/She/It created the Big Bang (big news for our secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who is still learning how to take dictation), and then He/She/It sauntered away (as much as a nonentity entity can saunter), leaving leap years to the cardinals in the Vatican. Anyone who’s watched the Cardinals play this year knows how that works out.
Well, OK. The Vatican didn’t invent leap years, either. Not exactly, anyway. Julius Caesar invented leap years in the year 46 BCE. Or some neighborhood near 46 BCE. It’s a dangerous neighborhood (look what happened to Caesar), so don’t go there after dark. Et tu, Brute?
But don’t fret too much about neighborhoods after dark, because Pope Gregory (with a lot of Roman numerals after his name; only the Vatican would still use Roman numerals 1,100 years after the Roman Empire disappeared — well, and the Super Bowl) changed leap years in the 1580s. It involved years divisible by 100 but not by 400, and pretty soon, crickets are all you hear. Though crickets can leap. A bit. They’re never going to dunk.
Speaking of dunking, there’s a belief floating around conservative circles (that’s where conservative beliefs are, up in the air, circling and circling like planes around O’Hare, except O’Hare is always full, so they’re still circling) that new HUD Secretary Ben Carson found $500 billion in accounting errors in the department.
But it turns out that Carson, famous for reinventing the ancient Egyptian pyramids, did not find $500 billion in accounting errors at the agency (thanks to FactCheck). The Office of the Inspector General did before Carson took office (March 2, if you’re keeping score at home). Around $119 billion came in rounding-off errors, the office found; agency people were rounding off to the nearest $1 billion or nearest $100 billion; government regulations (OMB Circular A-136) require rounding off to the nearest $1 million, according to the inspector general’s report.
Doesn’t that make you feel better, knowing that the government rounds off to the nearest $1 million? And what’s with this rounding off to the nearest $100 billion?
Circular A-136 is a bit hard to follow, kind of like trying to read Hegel, but I figure that, by employing its rounding-off guidance, my financial assets are either $0 or $1 million. Hmm. Circular A-136 seems to get more and more like Hegel. Or maybe it’s Heidegger. I always get lost in German syntax. Kind of like Circular A-136, which couldn’t be more dense if it had been written in German.
Why don’t you ever talk about hockey? A reader phones in. More interesting than Circular whatever.
Hockey?
If God had meant us to play hockey, He/She/It would have given us skates instead of feet.
Might have made foraging for food perhaps a bit difficult in July and August, when foraging is good, I hear, but a small price to pay for the world’s dumbest sport, next to golf.
Speaking of crickets.
