What are the odds of being a Leapy?

This February has five Fridays- -and what are the odds of that? It's actually not hard to figure, but people don't think much about calendar numbers unless they happen to be born on Feb. 29.

Adding a day to the calendar every four years brings it back in sync with the sun. The earth takes not a neat 365 24-hour days to circle the sun; it takes 365.2425, so the extra day gets the equinoxes back in order.

Anyone born on Feb. 29 is a leapling or Leapy. It's a very small club. What are the odds? People tend to say one in 366, but remember, leap year only happens once every four years. The odds are one in 1,461. Of six billion people on the planet, only four million were born Feb. 29, and only 200,000 live in the United States.

And where do Leapies congregate to celebrate? The small town of Anthony, which straddles the Texas- New Mexico line, is the Leap Year Capitol of the World, as proclaimed by the governors of both states after 1988.

The people of Anthony held the first Worldwide Leap Year birthday party in 1988, and drew a whopping nine people. But the next time Feb. 29 rolled around, they drew thousands (to a town half the size of Jasper) from two dozen states and Germany.

For 2004, their fifth Leapday party, they had a 10k race, a hot air balloon launch, a craft show and carnival, golf tournament, and several very, very large birthday cakes.

On non-leap years, when does a Leapy celebrate? Most people have their parties on Feb. 28, but for official use such as getting a drivers license or being old enough to drink, it's March 1. The reasoning? You are 16, or 21, or whatever, on the day that follows Feb. 28.

Leap years are always presidential election years, as though we needed one more day to hear political rhetoric.

So, back to calendar odds. When people discover an old calendar, they exclaim in great amazement if the days match the current year, "What are the odds of that?"

Actually, the odds are pretty good, close to one in seven, that an old calendar will match any other year. How is that possible? There are seven days of the week, and if that old calendar began on a Tuesday, then it will match every other calendar that begins on Tuesday, except for leap year.

So what are the odds you'll see five Fridays in February again? One in four of being a leap year times one in seven days of the week, equals one in 28. Where will you be in 2036?