February gets twenty-eight days. Every other month gets thirty or thirty-one. And every four years, February gets one bonus day as if that makes up for it.

Daniel thinks that's not fair. And honestly — he's not wrong.

But the reason February ended up this way is one of the strangest, most surprisingly funny stories in the history of the calendar. It involves a Roman king who skipped winter entirely, a superstition about even numbers, Julius Caesar, a Pope making corrections five hundred years later, and a month so associated with death and bad luck that nobody wanted extra days in it anyway.

Here's where it starts. The Earth doesn't take exactly 365 days to orbit the sun. It takes 365 days and almost six hours. Without correcting for that, the calendar slowly drifts away from the seasons. After enough centuries, harvest festival ...