Leap Year

Today is Ash Wednesday, and if the start of the Lenten season leading to Easter seems early this year, there's a reason: The last time Lent arrived this early was 1913. "Ash Wednesday already?" said the Rev. Ken Fong, senior pastor of Evergreen Baptist Church-L.A. "It just crept up on us." And it did so for many others, too. "It's a real switch," said the Rev. Guillermo Garcia, pastor of St. Gertrude Catholic Church in Bell Gardens, to go from December to Lent in such a compressed time.

There was supposed to be so much appeal, so much zing, when this game was plotted out on the NBA schedule. Instead, the Miami Heat merely became the latest statistic in the Lakers' 10-game winning streak. Shaquille O'Neal's relocation to Phoenix three weeks ago undercut his annual trip to play the Lakers at Staples Center, not that the home team seemed to mind in a 106-88 victory Thursday over the hapless Heat.

Over the years, readers have sent me ads with such spectacular malapropisms as "Chip and Dale" furniture, "Floor Shine" shoes, "Wayne's Coating," "Chester Drawers" and "Rod" Iron. (Translation: Chippendale, Florsheim, wainscoting, chest of drawers and wrought iron.) But until I received a note from David Montgomery of Buena Park, I'd never seen such a wild variation of "Douglas fir" (see accompanying).

Something is missing from your calendar this year. At least, that's the way many people born Feb. 29 see it. "Calendar companies don't recognize the day for what it is," said Raenell Dawn, an L.A. native born on leap year day 1960. For 16 years, she and other members of her club, the Honor Society of Leap Day Babies, have asked calendar manufacturers to include the words "Leap Year Day" on Feb. 29, "just like it says New Year's Day." So far, her efforts have been in vain.

Today is Feb. 29; therefore, the year 2000 must be a leap year, right? We have them every four years, and 1996 was one, so this year must be one too. Well, sort of. Yes, it is a leap year, but it is a special kind of leap year. Here's why. The calendar we use is based on Earth's orbit of the sun, which takes roughly 365 days. For this reason, a calendar year is based on 365 days. However, it actually takes Earth about a quarter of a day longer to make the trip.

Some automatic teller machines in Japan stopped working and the Meteorological Agency reported glitches in its computers today because of disruptions some computer programmers were attributing to the extra day in February this year. Japan's Ministry of Posts said that as many as 1,200 of its 25,000 ATM machines stopped working. The ministry, which is investigating, said it hasn't determined whether the stoppage was caused by the Feb. 29 critical date. The ministry said that as of 10:40 a.m.

You might not have noticed, but Tuesday was the rare among the rare: a leap day that occurs only once in 400 years. And it was exciting enough to a local schoolteacher that she held a bash Tuesday that drew more than 100 current and former students to Santiago Middle School in Orange. The statistical rarity of a leap year at the turn of the century caught the attention of science teacher Sue Baden, 49, of Long Beach, who started planning this party 27 years ago, when she first became a teacher.

In this age of the reluctant Olympic basketball player, consider Vince Carter. He leaped at the chance, which is saying something. Kangaroos don't have hops like his. Invincible? Who knows? But get ready for Vinsanity Down Under. So Shaquille O'Neal has enough gold medals and Kobe Bryant had other things to do. When Carter's rather belated invitation to join the U.S.

Jim Friedman is fond of saying he's the youngest person to ever serve on the Ventura City Council. Although he'll be celebrating his 41st birthday Saturday, technically Friedman has only had 10 birthdays, because of that quadrennial aberration known as leap year. "People kid me a lot for having accomplished so much at such a young age," he quipped. "Basically, it's just joke after joke after joke." Like all people born on Feb.

The Millennium Bug--the unpredictable collision of high technology and human shortsightedness--has been largely perceived as a single event that will occur Jan. 1, 2000. On that day, countless computers and electronic devices are expected to suffer a mental meltdown because of an obscure programming blunder in which two digits instead of four were used to represent years.