Don't let The Man tell you it's Tuesday

2006 will be one second longer than 2005. Did you know that? It’s a form of leap year that comes every seven years – adding one second to the clock. 12:00 to 12:01 am on January 1st will be 61 seconds long. One extra second to kiss, or fire guns in the air or go “Wooooooooooo!!” or to wonder if Dick Clark is going to die on the air. Who knew making a system of time was so complicated. Leap years, leap seconds, the bizarre and antiquated shifting of the clocks forward and back twice a year, all, I assume, taking into account the gradual slowing of the Earth’s rotation. Not that there’s much to take into account – it’ll be 200 million years before the days on Earth are 25 hours long – but still…I mean one second every seven years? That’s over twenty five thousand years before the clock are an hour off. At which time I don’t think anyone s going to be saying, “What the hell? Why is the sun setting at 7:00? When I was a kid, 23,000 years ago, the sun set at around 6:00 this time of year! Who designed our idiotic chronology system? Squirrels? And why won’t God let me die?”

It does have a certain bureaucratic appropriateness, though. People always complain how you can never get a group of people to agree on anything, but time is a good example of that. Because, of course, most time is a totally artificial construct – days, months, none of them actually mean anything. It’s Tuesday because we say it is, and for no other reason. If everyone got together and said, “Let’s make today Monday instead, so we can watch Arrested Development again”, it would now be Monday. So I guess it’s somewhat fitting that this incredible thing we’ve gotten most everyone to agree to has clauses and sub-clauses and points of contention. But hey, it’s a start right? Today days of the week, tomorrow world peace.