SoManyThingz

Chapter 4

Pop singer Lady Gaga said in an interview on "The Howard Stern Show" that she was raped by a musical producer, an experience she turned into a song entitled "Swine," the U.S. press reported Wednesday.
The artist told the radio host that she was a very "naive" young woman educated in "a Catholic school" who, when she began to try and forge a career in the music business, encountered a man 20 years her senior who abused her.
"I went through some horrific things," said the 28yearold controversial singer, whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
The performer of "Monster" said that for "four or five years" she erased the incident from her mind, but then had to go through quite a lot of "mental, physical and emotional therapy" to overcome what had happened to her.
"I'm able to laugh now" because of that therapy, she said, adding that she never confronted her attacker after the incident, although "I saw him one time in a store, and I was paralyzed by fear."

#6. 12 Years A Slave: Shortly After Being Freed, Solomon Northup Suddenly Disappeared Forever

#5. The Theory Of Everything: Stephen Hawking Has A Bitter Divorce, Gets Abused

#4. Pocahontas: Pocahontas Was Kidnapped And Died In London At Age 21

#3. The Sound Of Music: The Von Trapp House Became A Nazi Headquarters

#2. Big Miracle: The Whales Probably Never Made It Out Of The Arctic

#1. Titanic: The Band's Families Were Billed For The Cost Of Their Uniforms (And Corpse Shipping)

1. Two women have given birth to three leap day babies, according to the New York Daily News. The Henriksen family from Norway had their children on leap days in 1960, 1964 and 1968. The most recent family to tie the record is the Estes family from Utah. Their children were born in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
2. Julius Caesear introduced the idea when he ordered his astronomer, Sosigenes, to simplify the calendar. Sosigenes opted for the 365-day year with an extra day every four years to scoop up the extra hours. But he created too many leap years. Every 400 years, there are an three extra days, so to compensate, centuries must be divisible by 400 to count as leap years. Years like 1700, 1800 and 1900 are only 365 days long, rather than 366.
3.  Leap years in history: During leap years, George Armstrong Custer fought the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), the Titanic sank (1912), Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is electricity (1752) and and gold was discovered in California (1848).
4.  The tradition of women proposing on leap day is thought to date back to 5th-century Ireland when St Bridget complained to St Patrick that women had to wait too long for suitors to propose. He then gave women a single day in a leap year to pop the question – the last day of the shortest month. Legend has it that Brigid then dropped to a knee and proposed to Patrick that instant, but he refused, kissing her on the cheek and offering a silk gown to soften the blow.
   
   
   
   
   

A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or a bissextile year) is a year containing one additional day (or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, a month) added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars that have the same number of days in each year drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track. By inserting (also called intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year that is not a leap year is called a common year.
For example, in the Gregorian calendar, each leap year has 366 days instead of the usual 365, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28. Similarly, in the lunisolar Hebrew calendar, Adar Aleph, a 13th lunar month, is added seven times every 19 years to the twelve lunar months in its common years to keep its calendar year from drifting through the seasons.

All the other months in the Julian calendar have 30 or 31 days, but February lost out to the ego of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus.
Under his predecessor Julius Caesar, February had 30 days and the month named after him - July - had 31. August had only 29 days.
When Caesar Augustus became Emperor he added two days to 'his' month to make August the same as July.
So February lost out to August in the battle of the extra days.

The Roman calendar did have 355 days with an extra 22-day month every two years, until Julius Caesar became emperor and ordered his astronomer Sosigenes to devise a better system in the 1st Century.
Sosigenes decided on a 365-day year with an extra day every four years to incorportate the extra hours, and so February 29th was born.
As an earth year is not exactly 365.25 days long Pope Gregory XIII's astronomers decided to lose three days every 400 years when they introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582. The maths has worked ever since but the system will need to be rethought in about 10,000 years' time.

Workers have realised that every leap year, they have to work one extra day for no extra pay.
If a person earns the national average salary of £26,500 a year, that works out at £2,208.33 per monthly payslip – which breaks down to £71.24 per day in a 31-day month but a daily wage of £78.87 in February.
This realisation prompted Karl Savage, who was a high school teacher from Maryland, to try and kick-start the “No Work on Leap Day Revolution” in 2008, when the extra day fell on a Friday.