Why Easter came so early this year
A reader supplied me with the following information, concerning the timing of Easter, and why it is celebrated so early this year, which you might find interesting.
Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is March 20). This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar.
This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95-years-old or above!). None of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier.
Here's the facts:
*The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you're 95 or older, you are the only ones who were around for that).
*The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year!
Trivia
My cousin, Darleen, from Pittsburgh, shared the following trivia:
*'Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
*'Lollipop' is the longest word typed with your right hand. (Bet you tried this out mentally, didn't you?)
*No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
*'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'.
*Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
*The sentence: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' uses every letter of the alphabet.
*The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level ' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (they are called palindromes).
*There are only four words in the English language which end in 'dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
*There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: 'abstemious' and 'facetious.' (Yes, admit it, you are going to say, a-e-i-o-u.)
*'Typewriter' is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
*A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
*A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. How researchers came to this conclusion, I'm not sure, but I have to admit that some days that's about the same span as my memory!
*A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
*A shark the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
*A snail can sleep for three years.
*Almonds are a member of the peach family.
*An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
*Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches two to six years of age.
*February 1865, is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
*In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
*To me this is a very scary fact: If the population of China walked past you, eight abreast, the line would never end because of their rate or reproduction.
*Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
*Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!
*Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
*The average person's left hand does 56 percent of the typing.
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