Huh?

Bishop Ussher (Crackpot-N.Ireland) calculated that The Creation occurred 6,014 years ago today.

That's October 23, 4004 BC.

In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, Gen. 1, v. 1. Which beginning of time, according to our Chronologie, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of Octob[er] in the year of the Julian [Period] 710. The year before Christ 4004. The Julian Period 710.

So why is this year's birthday NOT 23-October-2009?

Do the math. Then factor in the errors in the Julian calendar that he used. The Julian Calendar was designed without accounting for the fact that 1 year is NOT 365 days. True, the Julianistas knew about the extra 1/4 day. However, even that is not exact enough. There are several issues involved in defining and calculating the length of the year.

By 1582 it was clear (even to the Holy Roman Church) that the calendar was WAY, WAY off. Legend has it that the problem was that the Julian Calendar's errors were messing with the date of Easter. I don't know (and don't care) if that's true.

Pope Greg il tredicesimo had his minions straighten out the mess. The Gregorian Calendar was the result. It turns out that the Julian version was off by several days. So, In February 1582, the calendar was corrected by skipping a few days. That solution was fraught with problems and opportunities.

What if your parents didn't get the memo, and you were born in late February, 1582? The date on which you were born didn't exist. Does that mean that you didn't exist? Or was your life's day count debited or credited with the number of missing days? Did someone have to kill you a few days early? Did people pretend that you lived a week or so longer than you actually lived? What about your life insurance policy?

Even that fix wasn't precise enough, and every few decades someone has to move a day from the end of the list and sneak it back into the part of the sequence prior to 1582. So the Julian calendar gets wronger and wronger.

For us mere mortals, all of this has little significance. Beyond the inconvenience of a February 29 every few years (and that is quite a leap), who really cares? In the big picture, it only matters to geologists, anthropologists, physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists (like Stephen Hawking). THEY are the ones who have to straighten it out in their calculations of millions of years and billions of years and such. That Julian thing really threw a wrench into their so-called discoveries.

It might even prove that dinosaurs and humans really did coexist, just as made obvious at the Creation Museum.

You see, during those lost days, God sneaked in those pesky fossils and darned layers of sediment. S/he tweaked the evidence of the age of stars by pumping in a bunch of extra Hydrogen ... you get the idea. Why not? No one was looking, because those days didn't exist.
The Scopes Trial took that same number of days to pit God against Darwin. Coincidence? I think not.

BTW, Scopes was convicted. By the time that the Tennessee Supreme Court set aside the fine imposed by the original trial judge, Scopes had already moved on. That suggests an important question: why would a man of science want to leave a Bible Belt state? But I digress.

On a happy note, I suspect that Mother Earth won't mind if you took advantage of the 13-day oopsie. Your belated card/gift weren't quite so late - or maybe even a few days early.