The Day That Never Comes

Leap Year! That's exciting, right? Who doesn't love the concept of an extra day? Once every four years, the Gregorian Calendar shoehorns another day into the ass-end of February to ensure that the entire system doesn't collapse. Without our Leap Day, everything would fall apart. And people didn't even get it right the first time.

The Julian Calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar (big fucking surprise) in 45 BC, as his own way of telling the old Roman Calendar to go fuck itself.

Hate-Fuck the Roman Calendar With Your Eyes.

Seriously, the Roman Calendar is just fucking weird, and it seems unnecessarily complicated. Hollow months, full months, the Nones, the Ides, the Kalends? Counting backwards?! It's also a lunar calendar, which is just unenlightened. The seasons don't even enter into it, which always seemed illogical to me.

The original Roman Calendar had 304 days, and the Numa reformation added 51. To compensate for the astronomical year, the Romans added an entire fucking month to the calendar every four years. An Intercalary month! This bloated your Roman Leap Year to a morbidly obese 378 days! To be fair, a lot of Romans didn't exactly find this concept terribly exciting, as it was a major cause for not one, but two wars.

There are numerous political explanations for this when one considers the role of pontifex maximus, the individual responsible for this extra month, but I don't want to get into politics. Not on this blog. I remain politically neutral, because I know where my bread is buttered.

But am I the only guy who gets a serious Greg Stillson vibe from this Rick Santorum fellow?

And not the cool Greg Stillson, either.

Am I alone, here?

Anyway, let's continue our scintillating discussion of calendars! After all, topics like this are the real reason why this amazing blog garners over 200 (!!!) unique views each and every month! Even more every Mercedonius! Oh wait, that stupid fucking month doesn't exist, anymore. And for good reason.

When Julius Caesar took the position of pontifex maximus, he flushed that worthless Intercalary month right down the toilet, because he took one look at the Roman Calendar and realized just how bonkers it truly was. He threw down the gauntlet with a streamlined solar calendar that gave us twelve months and a fucking Leap Day every four years. And all was right in the world.

So why do we as a modern civilization not follow the Julian Calendar? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Julius Caesar fucked up. the Julian Calendar assumes that the solar year is 365.25 days in length. In actuality, the solar year is 11 minutes shorter that this. That doesn't sound like a huge deal, right? Well it is.

The extra 11 minutes mean that every four hundred years the calendar gains an extra three days. This plays havoc with holidays observed on specific dates that coincide with astronomical events, like the seasonal equinoxes and solstices.

This wasn't alien knowledge in Julius Caesar's time, either. Greek astronomers had discovered this discrepancy nearly 2 centuries prior, and they weren't keeping this a secret. I personally believe that Julius Caesar simply ignored this fact because he thought Greeks were smug, and didn't take them seriously.

Hipparchus is too bearded to care.

At any rate, the Julian Calendar simply wasn't good enough. The Roman Catholic Church hated the Julian Calendar because it fucked with Easter, and they could not abide that. Back in the day, the observance of the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ was closely tied to the vernal equinox, and the old calendar kept moving the date because it failed to compensate for those missing 11 minutes.

So Pope Gregory XIII introduced (wait for it...) the Gregorian Calendar in 1582, which is incredibly similar to the Julian Calendar, aside from the all-too-important detail of taking into account those 11 calendar-raping minutes. Fair play to you, Christians.

Gregory dismisses the Julian Calendar with a wave of his infallible hand.

I have to be honest with you, here. I don't generally think about this shit when the inevitable Leap Year rears its ugly head. I think it's good to know these things, because I believe that history is important, but I'm clearly in the minority in this country. On this auspicious date, my mind tends to dwell on Gallagher.

Yes, Gallagher. You remember Gallagher, right? Wait, you don't? Shit.

These days, when your average person thinks of Gallagher (if they think of him at all), three things immediately enter their minds: smashing watermelons, jumping on a giant couch, and racism. He's fallen so low, he resorted to having a heart attack onstage to get a laugh.

This raises the question: is Gallagher worth remembering? I don't know. I certainly can't forget him. I blame my parents.

They controlled the TV in my youth, and I was forced to watch many programs I never would have considered. It was either that or go outside. And fuck the sun! Was Gallagher a bad comedian? I don't think so. He always seemed pretty harmless to me, just an old hippie prop comic with a gimmick.

That gimmick was the Sledge-O-Matic.



For a small child who was much more interested in loud noises and bright colors than anything substantial, the Sledge-O-Matic was like crack. This weird dude was smashing shit on stage with a giant hammer, splattering his audience with detritus, and they were loving every minute of it. People paid more to sit in the front row because they wanted this asshole to fuck up their clothes.

I found it hilarious. I'd never seen anything like it before. Admittedly, I had only recently graduated from wearing diapers, but that's not the point. Gallagher made me laugh. I watched all of his Showtime specials and ate them up like candy, which I was also eating while watching Gallagher's specials.

He obviously wasn't a children's comedian, which I understood when I realized I had no idea what he was talking about during the majority of his act when he wasn't swinging a hammer at unsuspecting fruit, but that didn't stop me from becoming a "melon-head".

That's what Gallagher fans call themselves. It still sounds more dignified than "cheese-head".

So much more dignified...

Because fuck football.

When I was 6 years old, I wrote a letter to Gallagher. I wrote that he was the funniest man in the whole entire world, and I wished he would come to my birthday party and smash a watermelon all over that mean bully Leslie's flat face, because he doesn't like watermelon, and it would be so cool. I would be the coolest kid in school if he did this, and because he's such a nice man I just knew he would swoop in on a helicopter and make my wildest dreams come true.

Unfortunately, I didn't know Gallagher's home address, but my mother assured me that the letter would get where it needed to go.
A week later, after the garbage was picked up, I found the letter by the curb, soggy with taco sauce and coffee grinds. My entire world collapsed in on itself like a supermassive star, coalescing into a black hole of rage, and not even light could escape its immeasurable gravity.

My power level is past 9000!!!!!

I dreamt of Gallagher hearing of this inexcusable slight and smashing my mother's head into a fine mist with his Sledge-O-Matic, before whisking me away to his mansion, where I would live happily ever after as Gallagher's adopted son and heir apparent, smashing shit across the country to the delight of millions.

That dream never came to pass. Instead, I seethed with rage until my birthday party arrived, when I unwrapped my Real Ghostbusters firehouse playset and all was forgiven.

But I never forgot that moment of complete, absolute heartbreak. I don't remember when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I remember the precise moment when I learned that my mother was a filthy liar. But that's okay, because I eventually realized that everybody is a filthy fucking liar, so I'm ultimately fine with it.

Besides, maybe she knew something I didn't. Maybe she'd heard rumors that Gallagher was a melon-smashing pedophile, and she was only trying to protect me from his sweaty charms.
I think I was building to a point. This little anecdote just made me relive some buried childhood trauma, and I'm having a hard time thinking straight.

Contractually obligated sex appeal!

Was I going to compare Julius Caesar to Gallagher? What's the similarity? Do they both hate Barack Obama?  I know Gallagher believes that "queerin'" don't make the world work. But that places him in the company of The Ultimate Warrior. I don't know Caesar's views on homosexuality. I know Octavian didn't truck with it, but he is not pertinent to this conversation.

The Ultimate Warrior is fucking insane, though.

Wow. That's another childhood hero that crashed and burned before my very eyes. I caught the pilot episode of his 'motivational show' on YouTube last night. I gazed on in horror as Warrior draped chains around the necks of a shitty rock band (so many chains...) and bellowed and spat at them for twenty seven minutes while they performed endless squat thrusts and prayed for death. It was amazing.



What the fuck just happened?! Oh my god, do you remember that time when Hollywood Hulk Hogan was feuding with The Ultimate Warrior and Warrior got into his head? Hogan was searching all over for the man before finally retiring to his dressing room, only to discover Warrior was living inside of the Hulkster's mirror, taunting him from some higher plane of existence? Eric Bischoff couldn't see him, but we could, and that blew minds all over the country!

Warrior wasn't just in Hulk Hogan's head, he was in OUR HEADS!!!

What the fuck is happening?!

My brain is self-destructing! This extra day is fucking with my vibe.

Oh! Now I remember! Gallagher hosted a Showtime marathon on February 29th, 1988. It was called "Gallagher's Leap Year Marathon", and I watched the whole thing. I think that was it.

Rather anti-climactic, I admit. But what else did you expect? This blog is a malfunctioning rocketship spiraling into the sun at an alarming rate.

I'm surprised I managed to remain coherent for more than three paragraphs. I suppose at this point I would normally present a brand-new podcast, but since I don't do that shit anymore, I don't exactly know how to end this.

Surprisingly, some anonymous individual posted a comment on my last podcast-related entry, and it wasn't filled with hate! And I quote: I actually like the podcast. It's kinda funny to listen to while I'm surfing the web. You guys are fucking weird, but I hope this isn't the last one.

That was nice. Thanks for trying, Mom! But I can never forgive you for shattering my faith in Gallagher!

He was totally going to humiliate that shithead Leslie in front of my two friends at my birthday party... AND YOU FUCKING RUINED IT!!!!

Luckily, my brother stepped in and jump-kicked Leslie in the face a few weeks later on the playground. It was absolutely fucking hilarious. Let this be a lesson to you, kids: just because a kid has Down's Syndrome doesn't mean he can't be a dick.

And since Davy Jones just died, allow me to present to you my favorite song from The Monkees, nevermind the fact that Davy didn't actually sing lead on this one. He caught that train!



He died on a day that only exists once every four years. Does that mean he's trapped in limbo?

With Gallagher?

What a terrible fate.