Happy FBITS Day, everybody! (Flaming Bovines In The Sky, that is)

For the uninitiated, this is a fairly (extremely?) random holiday that Jonathan and Ben crafted a couple of years ago so they'd have an excuse to stay up until midnight to eat chocolate chip cookies.

Given that they already knew the required date of the holiday, along with their nonsaniacal tendencies, they hand-crafted a complex formula for determining the date. Since then it has undergone a couple of transformations to satisfy our "needs;" here is the current one:

1. Find the day of the year (1-365) of the year's first 1st-quarter moon.
2. Divide by twelve and take the remainder.
3. Subtract 1: this is your main FBITS month (1-12)
4. Find the day 12 days after the first full moon in that month: this is the year's main FBITS day.
5. Add and subtract 42pi days from the main FBITS day (wrapping around the ends of the year) to determine the auxiliary FBITS days. (We added this so we could celebrate more often.)

(Since calculations of the moon's phases vary in accuracy, the normative standard is David's fbits.pl. We picked this one after a Visual Basic program predicted an FBITS day on Sept. 11, 2001, which we decided was too uncanny. (The Perl script said it was Sept. 12)

Several customs have arisen over the course of the holiday's short history. Notably, one is required to repeat "wadda wadda wadda" whenever one has the occasion to descend stairs. Also, as noted above, one is encouraged to celebrate with chocolate chip cookies. Several of these are to be placed on one's doorstep for Bob the Destroyer; otherwise Bob will come and turn around on your doorstep three times and leave.

FBITS days for the next few years: