Today is a leap day. There's one every four years, as you know. Some of you will know the rest of this as well, but when did that ever stop me?

Every 1461st day is a leap year, which means an estimated 273 Bristolians celebrate their birthday today. Like many things, it all goes back to Roman times.

Before Julius Caesar reorganised the Roman year, it was a right old mess. Months were originally lunar (the famous Ides, as in the Ides of March, were days with a full moon, whereas new moon days were called calends, giving us the word calendar), but by the time of written records they'd realised that lunar months and solar years didn't fit neatly together. They'd settled on ten months, with about sixty days that weren't in the official calendar at all. Because the precise details were controlled by the priests, and varied every year, there was confusion across the Empire.

Which was getting to be a big place. Caesar added Gaul (France and Belgium, roughly speaking), but even before that there was Italy, Spain, much of the north African coast, most of the Balkans, the whole of Greece and western Turkey. The Romans were changing from provincial warlords to imperial administrators, and they needed a better calendar.

It was also a religious problem. The Roman religion had nearly as many holy days as the Catholics, and each of them had set rites, and so on. Imagine not being quite sure if it was Christmas. If you ask me it goes on quite long enough as it is, without several weeks when it might be Christmas or it might not.

At least they didn't have to worry about the football. Which was a good thing, because if they'd had a Champions League in those days you'd have had hordes of Olympiakos fans turning up in Rome weeks late for the Lazio game. Or worse, weeks early, and hanging about round the Circus Maximus. looking for trade.

In the end they changed the number of months in the year to twelve. This is why September, October, November and December, the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth days in our calendar, have names originally derived from the Roman numbers seven to ten - septem, octo, novem and decem. They still had problems, though, because they only allowed for 355 days a year. The rest they just added in every few years whenever they felt they needed some. This meant that people far away from Rome often still thought it was an entirely different day from the day it was actually supposed to be. As well as religious rites, this affected taxation, and if there was one thing the Romans felt even more strongly about than properly ordered religious rites it was taxes.

So Julius Caesar decided it was time to sort it all out. The first thing he did was to make 46BC 445 days long, to make up for all the days they'd misplaced. Then he increased the length of some months to bring the whole thing up to 365 days, and added an extra day every four years.

After his death they honoured his memory by naming the seventh month Julius (July today, just as August was renamed for Augustus), but then unfortunately rather dishonoured it by bollocksing up the leap years. Because they misunderstood the concept of every four years, imagining that you counted from last leap year to this one inclusively, they ended up with one leap day every three years instead. It was put back to every fourth year in the reign of Augustus.

And for a while, everything was fine. Unfortunately, the year isn't exactly 365 1/4 days long. It's actually 365.2425 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds. This means that Caesar's years were all an average of 10 minutes and 48 seconds too long.

This may not seem like much, but it adds up over time. After 134 years, you've lost a day, and each 134 years after that you've lost another one. It's annoying for Catholics, who want to be sure that it really is the Sacred Rite of the Holy Motherlode after all, and not actually the Feast Day of the Blessed Twatface, Patron Saint of Ford Capris and Monopoly.

And you'd better believe it matters. When a seventh century Saxon king massacred hundreds of Celtic monks in the seventh century the Venerable Bede said that this was God's punishment for their refusal to submit to the authority of Rome. He called them faithless Britons, who had rejected the offer of eternal salvation and were incurring the punishment of temporal destruction.

Their crime? To celebrate Easter one day early.

As is almost a religious tradition, stupid reasons led to a useful innovation. In 1582, Pope Gregory acted to solve the problem. He introduced a new rule, according to which the leap year was skipped every 100 years, but not skipped every 400. That's why 1900 wasn't a leap year, but 2000 was.

Humanity gets there, in a roundabout kind of way, and Gregory's astronomers had done a remarkably good job. It's accurate to within 26 seconds a year, or 2  hours, 53 minutes and 23 seconds every four hundred years - a complete Gregorian cycle. Eventually we'll have to add on another day, but that won't be until the year 4904. Unfortunately, that's a leap year as well, so they'll have to add two extra days.

Two days in the same year? Really, they could have thought on.

I've been doing the pre-washing up. Not the washing up as such, but the stage before the washing up. If rinsing the suds off the bowl is like the last few steps up Kilimanjaro, then pre-washing up is like the initial trek through the fetid swamp at the bottom. Before you can even think about setting up base camp in the washing up bowl, there's the arduous journey through the rotting vegetation that may have been Friday's curry, and the worst of the pans have to be thrown into the back garden. I'm not discarding them completely, you understand. I'm putting them out in the hope that voles might take them and then they won't be my responsibility any more, or even that the worst of the cack might somehow osmose into the wind and the rain.

My kitchen has now improved to the point where it's actually possible to consider the washing up itself, but after all that I'm a little tired, and if it's going to be hard I shall just stop. It'll still be there tomorrow, and what's more it's pre-rinsed and neatly stacked, so it can't possibly go off again. I'm having a filling done in a bit, so I'm unlikely to be adding too much to the pile.

And now I'm back from the dentists, and my prediction about leaving the washing up until tomorrow turns out to be true. Instead, I'm going to talk about the football. Thanks to Logicel for this link (A European language, in Prospect magazine).

It's an interesting piece, arguing that because people's teams play in Europe, their fans are more likely to think of themselves as European, rather than just British. And it's certainly true that fans travel to games, where they pick up stuff like chants that wouldn't have been heard at Anfield or Old Trafford before the modern era. Also, the players and managers themselves come from so many different countries, and wearing a shirt with Drogba or Ronaldo on the back must change kids' sense of identity on some level.

I wouldn't ever want to underestimate the ability of football fans to be parochial, though. Every time a Welsh team comes to Ashton Gate, or for that matter any team from north of Birmingham, the chants start up. You dirty northern bastards, you'll hear, or Stand up, if you hate the Welsh. The fact that hardly any of Swansea or Cardiff's players are Welsh matters little.

And to judge by conversations with people who have been to the top teams with the European pedigree, the fans are no different. The anti-semitic taunts against Tottenham by Arsenal or Chelsea fans are one of the ugliest examples. It's been known for them to actually hiss in simulation of the gas chambers. Again, the mere fact that few if any of the players are Jewish cuts no ice.

Still, perhaps it's a mistake to focus on the visible few. We always hear about the fans who have (or cause) problems, but there must be many more who stay the weekend in Rome or Prague, see the sights, try the food, learn a few words, and so on. As I've said before, if you believe in pluralism you have to hope that it's contagious.

Seen on a sandwich box in my local cafe: dolphin, friendly tuna, lettuce and sweetcorn. The devil's in the detail, as usual. For a minute I thought the cafe had been taken over by the Duke of Edinburgh, but then I noticed it was still pleasant and well run.

I put the sandwich back, obviously. Who wants to eat boring old tuna? Especially if you can't be sure it's friendly. They can give you a nasty little nip, can tuna.

But it set me thinking. Have any of you actually eaten dolphin? What was it like? How about whale?

Please leave your  more outré carnivorous experiences in the comments box. Anonymity assured.

I've been writing a lot about Islam, mainly because of the Guardian Qur'an blog, but it's worth reminding ourselves that the world is full of religious nutters, and they aren't all Muslims. Also, they aren't always being vile to women. Sometimes they're being vile to gay people instead.

Here on the BBC news, for instance, is Shlomo Benizri of the Israeli Shas party (BBC news), which may or may not be an acronym (Stop Homoerotic Arse Shenanigans? Secretly Hankering After Sodomy?).

According to the BBC, he called on lawmakers to stop "passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes".

Earthquakes? I once recall a Chris Morris character denouncing gays in the military because they showed up on the enemy radar, but that was a joke.

Of course. It's the old divine vengeance. Israel's passed some fairly basic gay rights legislation, and the Orthodox (to think that in everyday parlance, orthodox means mainstream) are getting all up themselves over it. As it were.

Apparently the recent earthquakes in Israel were Jehovah's comment on the subject. All I can say is, he's not the vengeance machine he used to be. In the olden days entire cities came tumbling down. Now he just shakes the ground a bit. Oh yes, and makes a few puddles round Tewkesbury.

Of course, he knows where to come down hard. Pakistan. New Orleans. Sri Lanka. All the unreligious places.

There's a picture of a Shas demo on the BBC page, with one of their banners on it. Don't sodomize Jerusalem, it says. You know, before I saw that it hadn't even occurred to me to try, but now I think I might take some time off.

And did you spot the clue in the text? That's right, sodomize. With a Z. The American spelling. Because who are the real problem people in Israel? Messaianic Zionist Americans.

Which is great for all the other American Jews. Just imagine, being in a religion where all the firebreathing young militants are ideologically obliged to go and live somewhere else. What's that, God? You want all the true Christians to go and make Antarctica safe for Jesus? I'll let them know right away.

So as I said, it's not all Muslims. But just so they don't feel left out, here's something on Muslim homophobia from the Times, courtesy of the Grand Tufti. Given the War on Terror, it's worth making the point that the vast majority of victims of Islam are other Muslims.

I've written something on my Qur'an debate blog, explaining why I feel the need to be so rude about religion (Why the Scabrous tone?)

Why do you bother, I hear some of you cry. This is why.

Do you find yourself agreeing with me? Hang your heads in shame.

This isn't why, but it is funny.

Sorry. And sorry this one's a few days late. I've had a busy week, plus I wanted to give the whole thing a chance to die down before stirring it all up again.

I'm talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech on Sharia law, obviously. And don't worry, I'm not so deluded as to imagine that anything I have to say will have any significant impact on the wider world. Also, I'm actually not planning to write anything too inflamatory.

For what Rowan Williams said bears little resemblance to anything you may have heard about. Far from claiming any kind of religious immunity for criminal acts, his speech focuses mainly on family and in one case employment law. Also, he says that no religious law should be allowed to infringe on liberties guaranteed by British law, and specifically cites the rights of women as an example of this.

And when I think of the life I've led, I'm hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of undermining the nation's respect for the law. I've done plenty of illegal things. I've also done plenty of things I'm ashamed of, although strangely I've never done anything illegal I was ashamed of.

Having said all that, Williams does say one absolutely indefensible thing. He's talking about possible grounds for protecting individuals from having to act against their consciences, and he says this.

... any recognition of the need for such sensitivity must also have a recognised means of deciding the relative seriousness of conscience-related claims, a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription.

In other words, conscience only counts if it's religious. According to his vision, if I work in a newsagents, and I refuse to sell a copy of the Sun because the pictures in the Sun offend my religious beliefs, then I should be protected against disciplinary action. If I refuse to sell a copy of the Sun because I think it degrades women, I would receive no such protection.

Williams thinks he still lives in a theocracy, and that's because he does. This speech is about his desire to carry on doing so. Dismayed by the threat to the privileged status the Church of England still occupies in our political system, despite the increasingly secular views of the British people, he is seeking to protect it by inviting other religious groups to join him under the legal umbrella. Meanwhile the two thirds of the nation with no religious affiliation at all are left out in the rain.

I have an alternative suggestion for the legal status of religion. I think religions should be treated like any other pressure group. Like Greenpeace, or the National Viewers and Listeners Association. Or like any social or hobbyist group. The State should have no power to prevent Christians, communists or stamp collectors from self-organising, promoting their views and interests and so on, but should offer them no special protection either.

There should be no question of handing state schools over to the communist faith. Derogatory images of penny blacks should be allowed, however offended philatelists may be. David Bellamy should not automatically get seats in an unelected second assembly. And religions should fade into the realm of the private, where they belong.

There's a problem with drinking, which is that you can't start, stop, then start again. This simple biological fact can dictate the course of events for entire evenings of your life. For instance, it explains why I found myself in the Reckless Engineeer at ten o'clock on a Saturday night.

It all started wholesomely enough. It was such a lovely day, and so remarkably warm for February, I decided to walk to the football. This takes about an hour, and once you get past Barton Hill it's really quite pleasant.

6 minutes into his debut home game, new signing Dele Adebola scored his first goal for us. There were huge cheers, followed by the noise of fifteen thousand people all turning to their neighbours and saying that's what we've been missing. We won 2-1 in the end, after a solid, convincing performance.

After the game, we went to the pub, and had a couple of pints. Which was very nice, but did after all constitute starting, so I went to the Hen and Chickens for a quick pint before meeting Sean later. I had to, because otherwise the early drinking and the late drinking would have been out of phase with each other. Do you see?

On the way out, a man saw my Bristol City hat and asked how the game had gone. Normal people exchange a few polite words and walk away, but being me I immediately launched into a detailed analysis of the game, culminating in a eulogy along the lines of and we're doing so well, I'm so happy, every step I take in the rest of my life is like walking on inflated Reeboks, etc etc. He gave me the look that says you're middle class, aren't you? But then he gave me the second look, which says but you're a City fan, so I forgive you.

After that I went to the Coronation with Sean, which was fine except I was several pints further down the road than he was, poor sod, and headed off home to watch Match of the Day. Which is too far without a drinks break, unless you want to be out of phase again.

Halfway from the Coronation to my house is the Reckless Engineer, which might for instance have been Richard Trevithick carrying an axe incorrectly, but is in fact a pub. It's in exactly the right place for staying in phase.

There was a band. I got a pint, and sat down at the empty table just to their right. They were a covers band, it turned out. Bad Company, REM, Robbie Williams, Coldplay. You know the kind of thing.

People were dancing, but not in a flattering way. Speaking as someone with two left feet, who's been known to leave a family function because people wouldn't stop trying to make him dance, I may not be that well placed to judge, but it seems to me that at some point you have to stop dancing about the music, and dance to it instead. I felt a wave of sympathy with the band, particularly the singer, who was really quite good.

So when they took a break, it seemed natural to ask him for a request. And when he asked me what I wanted, it seemed just as natural to say play us one of your own songs. I do concede, though, that it was an error to respond to his startled look with Oh - aren't you allowed?

At one stroke, the hollowness of his professional life was laid bare. He didn't have any of his own songs, and he wouldn't be allowed to perform them if he did. I could have died.

And yet, it was fine. Because he saw my hat. And suddenly, the whole thing was forgotten, and we were talking about players and strategies. He told me he wasn't going at the moment, because he used to go with his Dad but couldn't face it since he died two months ago. He said he hoped he'd be going back soon, and we talked about the pleasure his Dad had got from it when he was alive.

Which brings me to my theme, which is the way that being a Bristol City fan got me out of trouble all night. You can be crass, you can be drunken, you can be excessive, yet people will forgive you. Truly they are my redemption team.

And we're second. Still, after two thirds of the season. See the Championship League table if you don't believe me. See it before Saturday, though. Things might change on Saturday.

For some reason they never delivered the Independent to my newsagent last Sunday, so I had to get the Observer instead. Which gave me a three in thirteen chance that paid off handsomely. it was the week when they put the Observer Sports Monthly in with it.

You're right, of course. Actually, the odds are twelve in three hundred and sixty five and a quarter, unless I live to 2100 in which case they suddenly tumble to twelve in three hundred and sixty five and six twenty fifths. Or alternatively, given that it was the first Sunday in the month, they were one in one. It all depends how you define your terms. There are similar problems with the Goldilocks Principle.

Just look it up. I'm not going to spoonfeed you. What am I, your nurse? Oh all right, it's here. Now open wide. Yes, your mouth. Don't go thinking you're geting lucky with me.

Anyway, there was a very interesting article about home advantage. In most sports, the team playing at their own ground does better on average than the team that's visiting. We, the fans, like to imagine that it's all down to us, urging our team on and inspiring them to heroic deeds, while browbeating the enemy team into submission. That should have read the opposing team, not the enemy team. It was just a slip of the keyboard, signifying nothing.

It turns out, though, that home advantage declines significantly whenever a club moves to a new stadium. Arsenal are famous for this. After they moved into their new Emirates Stadium, their performance fell off for a few months. The same thing happened several years ago, when they played their European home games at Wembley for a season.

This suggests that it isn't us fans that make the difference, but the advantages that come from playing on a familiar ground. Players know how the ball will bounce in the boggy bit by the goal line. They know the wind will hold up a cross slightly differently at each end, and the sun will put wingers off on one side of the pitch, but not the other. Rugby players know exactly where you need to drop kick from. Cricket players know how the wicket will behave on a wet day in September, when it's had a lot of bowling that summer.

It's also to do with confidence, and territoriality. Even when tested an hour before the game, home players have more testosterone in their bloodstream than away players. The theory is that they're psyched up to defend their own territory. Women football teams average a much smaller home advantage, while national teams, ripped to the tits on patriotism and pride, enjoy a bigger home advantage even though they're playing in relatively unfamiliar stadiums.

Travel also appears to be a factor. The evidence for this is that teams from Scotland, Greece and Turkey do hugely better at home in the Champions League than they do away, because when they're at home the other team has to travel long distances to get to them, while for away games the opposite is true.

But it doesn't make as much difference as it once did. In the early days of the Football League, home teams would average 70% of points earned. Now it's nearer to 60%. Weirdly, the change occurred just after the war. The theory is that the home stadium didn't feel so much like home any more, plus the away players had learned there were more frightening things than a strange pitch.

There are blips in the data. Team sports have a bigger home advantage than individual ones, which is why the English never win Wimbledon. For some reason baseball has the lowest home advantage of all sports, and it's less for American sports in general. The suggestion is that that's because the testosterone bonus is wiped out by steroids and other drugs.

After the stats, the sex Olympics. An anonymous British athlete, let's just call him Linford, writes about the shagging at athletics tournaments. Athletics is a fuckfest, that's the only word for it, he begins, promisingly if inaccurately. Whenever someone tells me there's only one word for something, I can't help but hear it as a provocation. Shagathon. That's two. Frottalong. Bonkmelée. Porkaboloosa. Knobgymkhana. Actually I'm going to stop now, as that last one is conjuring up some rather inappropriate images.

It's all in the villages, apparently. The Olympic villages, which as it turns out are more like Olympic bath houses. The Commonwealth Games are even worse, which is why they're called 'The Friendly Games'. I'll never hear that in the same way again.

The Linford thing is just a tease, but I bet it's sprinters. And Javelin throwers. The marathon runners wouldn't have the energy, and let's face it, the shot putters aren't built to entice.

The hard part is, they all have to wait until after their event. Wouldn't that be annoying? You're trying to get an early night before the decathlon, and the relay teams are all finished, and out on the barbecue area having a spit roast. Galling or what?

Let's just hope the boyfriends and girlfriends never find out. As we've already established, you're on a hiding to nothing, playing away.

Courtesy of Graham Linehan, it's quite the strangest product I've ever seen.

MySpace have deleted an atheist group, for other reason than because they're an atheist group.

I'm pushing it to make out I really care, to be honest, but here at the Backlash we're always keen to do outreach to the young folks, if only to encourage them to switch those fucking things off on the bus. So, boycott MySpace. Anathematise it, and all its works.

I was already boycotting it 100% in the first place. How prescient am I?

For those of you who came here from the Science Blogs this is ancient history, but it might be new for the rest of you. It comes courtesy of the consistently enjoyable Zooillogix, whose taste for the neutral zone where the shores of reason fade into the hinterland of the grotesque exactly mirrors my own.

It's the 5 most horrifying bugs in the world. And they kick off with the best. The Japanese giant hornet.

The Japanese giant hornet does have a sting, like other hornets, and if sufficiently riled they can sting you to death. Unfortunately, that's not its worst of it. It can also spray flesh-melting poison at you. Oh yes, and it targets the eyes. And tags you with a pheromone, so all the others can come and have a go.

I wrote something on bees and hornets last summer, about the defence against hornets that honeybees have evolved. Because the hornet's skin is too thick for bee stings to penetrate, they mob the hornets and frottage them to death, as the ceaseless rubbing of hundreds of bees raises the hornet's temperature beyond all endurance. The video clip on the site ( I couldn't get it to work on YouTube, but it works fine on the page) shows the other side to the story, as a bee colony which has failed to grasp the trick is cut to shreds. They reckon 30 hornets can wipe out a colony of 30,000 bees in three hours, which by my calculations means a hornet in full on attack mode can kill one bee every 10.8 seconds, without pausing for breath. Which is handy, considering they don't have any lungs. Insects take in oxygen through the skin, which is one reason why they've never evolved to be big. This is definitely a good thing, otherwise we'd have to be constantly frottaging huge great hornets to death all the time.

And now, a tribute to the scientific mindset. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

Yes, if you're a scientist and you get stung, there's really only one viable response. You have to categorise your pain, in relation to all the other similar pains. In fact, if you're Justin Schmidt of the US Department of Agriculture, you can go around deliberately getting as many different kinds of insect to sting you as possible, so you can produce a proper index, based on valid research.

And he's produced a kind of Beaufort Scale of stings. It starts with the sweat bee (light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm), and passes through, among others, the yellowjacket (hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue), on its way to the Torquemada of the insect world, the bullet ant (pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel).

Doctor Schmidt, I salute you. I would say someone had to do it, but that would be a lie. Nobody had to not do it, and that's good enough for me.

And while we're bigging up the science guys, Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells. There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue, said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.You go, girl. Thanks to Mrs Tilton for the link, and much of interest besides.

It's ready! It's my new blog. Fresh out of the oven, and filling cyberspace with its heavy odour. Is that cinnamon?

I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago (Blogging the Qur'an). There's lots more posts now, and I've caught up with the Guardian's progress.

What are you still doing here? Go there and comment.

Do comment, please. I started the whole thing because the Guardian have disabled the comments box, so if I start a blog for comments and nobody comments, I'll look a right Charlie, won't I?

You don't mean that. That isn't even me, you know, that's Wittgenstein.

I can't do a swoosh, but just do it.