Tuesday, February 29, 2000
Let's look at Leap Year by the numbers
We'll make today count with lots of extra pizzas, phone calls,diapers, weddings . . .
BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Let's get the Mr. Wizard stuff out of the way from the start: It takes the Earth 365.24219 days to travel around the Sun. The 365 stuff is simple. That .24219 is a problem.
Left unchecked, that extra quarter day would build and build and build until, say, 800 years from now when we'd be having snowball fights in July and Christmas shopping in flip-flops.
Which is to say something had to be done, and in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII took the calendar by the horns and did it: Leap year, or one extra day added to the calendar every fourth year.
That makes today bissextile, which sounds like a dirty Web site but is actually “the extra day (Feb. 29) of a leap year.” Thank you, Mr. Webster.
It's also a day when tradition allows women to propose to men and when people having birthdays get to say they're 29 instead of 116 and it's only a wee lie. (They also can buy cocktails when they're 51/4.)
Got all that? Good. You can take off that silly Mr. Wizard hat now and think about what Leap Year really means: Consumption. As in more of it.
How much more? Consider ...
Eating goetta while you read this at the breakfast table? Thanks to Leap Year's one extra day, the goetta gang at Gliers will have to fire up the burners on an extra 2,739 pounds of the stuff.
Good thing Cinergy will be there to supply the power: It will belch out an extra 69,000 megawatt hours of electricity and 499,500 mcs (an mcs is 1,000 cubic feet) of gas.
But not the kind of gas Queen City Metro will be running on when it gives a lift to 82,000 more riders. They'll bump 'n' bounce along 47,400 miles of route during 3,264 hours of extra service.
Some routes will pass the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, which will get an extra 3,561 visitors, many of whom will watch Baby Elephant Ganesh wolf down an extra meal:
Three quarts of grain and a wad of Timothy hay in the morning. In the evening, after a hard day lumbering around the yard, he gets three quarts grain, three apples, one orange, four bananas, a handful of grapes, two sweet potatoes, two carrots, six ribs celery, one head lettuce, a handful of green beans, an ear of corn, and more Timothy hay for a chaser.
Luckily for you, they'll be serving better food at any weddings you hit today: 15.8 people will say I do in Hamilton County, while 8.6 will say I used to but don't anymore and file for divorce.
As a byproduct of the abovesaid weddings, look for 52.6 babies to arrive in Hamilton County. On the flip side, look for 27.23 souls to go softly into the night.
Those new babies are going to need diapers. Enter Procter & Gamble, happily churning out extra Pampers and Luvs by the zillions. Today's 52.6 babies will need an extra 321 diapers because they, well, you know what babies do. And how often.
Meanwhile, out on the information highway, 23,770 households will gain Internet access for the first time, says Kelly Baker at Sharonville's Intelliseek. And if anyone were to count, they'd find 847,458 more Web pages than the day before.
Even more staggering, 6,712,241 will visit the nation's top five Web properties (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Lycos and Excite@Home). Whilst there, they'll shop their megabytes off, spending $437,158,470, and that's not a typo. It's the average daily take for online shopping.
Some people would rather reach out and touch someone the old-fashioned way, but some of them won't know the number, so Ma Bell's expecting an extra 85,000 befuddled calls to directory assistance. There's no way to track how many local calls will be made, but Ma does know there'll be 1.9 million long-distance calls.
Chances are, callers will munch while talking. Popcorn maybe? Based on the average of 356 cups of popped corn per man, woman and child per year, we'll all have one extra cup today.
Something sweet after all that salt? How about a Peep? Just Born, the Bethlehem, Pa., chick house, will hatch an extra 2 million, adding up to 70 million calories.
Off in America's chocolate vats, candy makers will brew up an extra 9 million pounds of chocolate — everything from high-end Godiva to low-rent candy bars.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. That's dessert. How about dinner? LaRosa's will whip up 15,714 extra pizzas today, topped with 9,857 pounds of provolone, 259,000 slices of pepperoni, 988 pounds of crumbled sausage and 554 pounds of sliced mushrooms.
Discarding all those chocolate wrappers and pizza boxes will add to the day's garbage haul: 6,500 extra tons will be collected by Rumpke alone — 7 pounds per person.
Oh, and discarded beer cans. An extra 172 million servings of beer — 16,212,000,000 calories if it's light beer — will be clinked, gulped and in many cases followed by a cigarette. Uh, 1.2 billion.
Lots of calories in all this food and drink, and plenty fat to suck away. Specifically, 597 people will have liposuction, says the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Another 115 will get tummies tucked instead of sucked.
What's even better, they're going to be wrinkle free: 1,077 will get a chemical peel to stomp out the crow's feet crawling across faces.
New face? Less weight? That calls for a toast. But Champagne's too festive and beer, well, it will bloat the newly tucked tummy.
Try a Leap Year Cocktail.
According to a 1935 Mr. Boston Bar Guide, the Leap Year Cocktail is:
11/4 ounce gin
1/2 ounce orange gin (or substitute Absolut Mandarin or Grand Marnier)
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
1/4 teaspoon lemon juice
Shaken not stirred with ice and served in a martini glass.
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