Hello 👋
People ask me and February the same question:
Why so short?
My answer for myself is genes. And that basketball goal that broke my back as a child may have something to do with it.
But this newsletter isn’t about my childhood trauma. It’s about February.
Here are two reasons February drew the short straw.
However, since you’re now wondering, I’m 5’ 7”, the same height as Messi, Bezos, and Beyoncé — people so big we know them by one name.
Superstition
Romans were spooked by even numbers. Aren’t we all?
Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, was especially irked by those pesky digits divisible by two.
Before Numa, Rome operated on a 10-month calendar that started in March and ended in December.
And those days between December and March?
Nobody cared.
People couldn’t farm and they were too busy trying to survive the winters of 715 BC. Think about a winter without heated seats on your horse.
Numa wanted to align the Roman calendar with the year’s 12 lunar cycles. So he created January and February to track those long, dark days.
Since Romans thought even numbers were unlucky, Numa made every month have 29 or 31 days.
Math riddle: If you add 12 months of odd days together, is your sum even or odd?
You’re no Einstein. (He was also 5’ 7” btw.)
The answer is even.
Numa couldn’t escape the curse of even numbers. So he picked one month to be even and carry the curse.
February.
Most likely because it was when the Romans honored the dead. Februare means "to purify."
Julius Caesar
He was more than a salad creator.
Julius Caesar fixed Numa’s flawed calendar.
Here was the problem: Numa’s calendar only accounted for 355 days.
Fast forward a few years and the months and seasons were out of whack like your back after gardening on the Spring equinox.
Numa tried to correct the wackiness by adding a leap month whenever he felt like it. He called it Mercedonius.
But nobody managed Mercedonius.
People forgot about the mystery month during wars. And the lack of social media made it hard for common folk to know if Mercedonius was in play or not.
The leap month was inconsistent and Romans got more confused about time than you after watching Tenet.
Enters the big man on campus: Julius Caesar. Actually, he was also estimated to be 5’ 7” because he was slightly taller than the average height of a Roman man before protein shakes.
Julius Caesar wanted to fix time. He started where all great leaders start: delegating.
Salad boy tapped someone to make a sun-based calendar like the Egyptians used. Makes sense. If you knew people had alien connections to build pyramids, you could trust them to solve a calendar snafu.
The crouton-carrying dictator defied the even number curse by adding a day to the months that previously had 29 days. As far as the cursed February, he left it untouched. Kind of.
To account for the full trip we take around the sun, which is 365.25 days, Mr. Parmesean added one day to February every four years.
Fun fact: We’re now on the Gregorian Calendar rather than the Julian Calendar. All was well until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII wanted in on the clock crisis. He won on a technicality by stating we don’t actually revolve around the sun for 365.25 days. We revolve around it in 365.2422 days. *enter eye roll here* To account for the teeny tiny change, he suggested this quirky rule of leap year most people don’t know:
Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.
✌️
— Luke
P.S. I share a birthday with Julius Caesar’s assassination. Beware the Ides of March.
P.P.S. Shoutout to recent UK subscribers 🇬🇧 (Thanks, Luke!)
My favourite thing from the UK as of late? This yuzu seltzer. I found it in NYC, then my fiancée found it online and shipped it to me for Valentine’s.