JUNE 30th - Chuck, it's Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Berry.

On this day in 1972 the first leap second was introduced. As best my case-of-the-Mondays brain can figure, basically there are a few different ways we record time on this planet. Of course for you philosophers out there, you may be of the school that time is a man-made construct and the manipulation of it may not concern you as you continue on your path to find nirvana. Or perhaps you’re of the Rust Cohle train of thought and believe that time is a flat circle that endlessly repeats itself. Or maybe you just don’t really care why Ptolemy came up with the mean solar day and the true solar day and his calculations were the basis for how tell time today. If that’s the case, then you probably have no interest in knowing that the leap second is added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time. So I guess there’s no need to go into how the placement and decision on whether or not to include this extra second depends on the Earth’s varying rotational speed due to climate and other geographical events. I’m not really concerned with any of that myself, so I won’t write about it. My concerns are with two aspects of this leap second or more accurately, my concerns based off my lack of knowledge of its existence. (Of course you may be a time nerd and know all about this leap second, in which case my two concerns really wouldn’t concern you. But I might drop in a thoughtful cultural reference somewhere so I encourage you to keep reading). My first concern is that since 1972 there have been 25 leap seconds. I’ve been alive for 14 of them. I know technically this changes nothing, because the leap second is a correcting measure making records accurate, but it’s also an added damn second, meaning I’m 14 seconds older than I thought I was. When I turned 21 (a year in which there was no leap second, mind you) I could have had my first sip of legal liquor a full 11 seconds before I actually did. True, this would only work if the whole world was willing to be off time only for me to approach milestone seconds sooner, but hey, they may have been. But even that doesn’t particularly concern me too much. The past is the past. Mainly I’m a bit upset that I didn’t know about this leap second, because it has robbed me of 14 extra seconds in which I could have done things differently. On December 31, 1987 I may have blinked one extra time to commemorate the occasion. Back on this day in 2012, I might have scratched an itch on my nose for one second longer with absolutely no time repercussions. The gift of time is an invaluable resource and while the recording of it may only be a man-made construct or it may merely be a flat circle that runs in an endless loop of infinity, I’d like to know when I get an extra second. Of course it’s not like this was some top-secret information that was covered up by some government conspiracy. No Area 51 here. I just didn’t know about it. I feel cheated. But again the past is the past. Nothing to do but make use of the seconds I know about (hopefully all of them know). Oh, and for you time-nerds out there: Don’t you find it odd that George doesn’t question that his second son looks exactly like the guy who was responsible for getting him together with his wife at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in good ole 1955? I mean it wasn’t like you would forget that dude. He freaking sang Johnny B. Goode to the whole school. Cultural Reference, done.

This day has been Marked.