EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT FREDERICK!

HIS BIRTHDAY ALWAYS FALLS ON LEAPYEAR.

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F rederick, the pea-brained Apprentice Pirate from "The Pirates of Penzance", is a very famous fellow indeed! We all know his story. When he was a little lad, he proved so brave and daring that his father thought to apprentice him to some career seafaring. So he sent the boy on his way in the company of his nursemaid, Ruth, who claims to have misunderstood her instructions, and got him on as apprentice to sea pirates rather than pilots. Frederick, honor bound by an obcessive sense of duty and loyalty, was to remain a pirate until his twenty-first birthday. However, his birthday happens to fall on LEAPYEAR! This means that...well, allow the Pirate King himself to explain it to you:

"For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I've no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don't know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and- twenty.
Through some singular coincidence-- I shouldn't be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy--
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you'll easily discover,
That though you've lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you're only five and a little bit over!"

... The Pirate King to Frederick

But do my ears deceive me? Can it be that Frederick has only had thirty-five birthdays? Yes indeed it does! And if you are as dense as frederick, you would have remained a pirate all eighty-four years that it took to reach the official age of twenty-one!
But there is a hitch, too, that only Gilbert & Sullivan would have appreciated! Not only is there a leap year, but there is a leap century as well. This means that he also had to skip over the year 2000 - the real Y2K problem! - and count a skip of eight years instead of just four.

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR YOU, just for coming to the party.
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