Sidelines is a column by CGTN Social Media Desk

February is special for being the shortest month of the year and even more special in 2021 because it's a "rectangular month."

The passing February comprises exactly four weeks, starting from a Monday and ending with a Sunday, which appears as a square on your calendar if yours starts every week with Monday, hence the name.

"Rectangular February" may be singular but not rare – Halley's comet beats it in rarity by showing up every 75 years across the sky. The month of four whole weeks comes sporadically following a pattern of six years, 11 years and 11 years after which the loop starts again with the first interim period being six years. For example, the subsequent three "rectangular Februarys" are in 2027, 2038 and 2049, then the fourth is in 2055. 

Four weeks fitting perfectly within a month panders to our evolutionary bias for orderliness. But likely for the same reason the month's less than perfect rhythm of temporal distribution could have arrested the mystification of it, contrary to the attempts made on comets. Perhaps Euclid of Alexandria might be the guarding angel of the square-shaped month? Certainly, his spirit cannot be on duty on the 14th day of the month when the connection most often made between love and geometry is also the least happy one.

Despite some dubious claims on social media that the "'rectangular February' comes every 800 years," the month slips away as quietly as the other 11, being a mathematical coincidence on a calendar in a random universe, remembered only because of the events to which it becomes a footnote.

For Chinese film lovers, the "rectangular month" of 2021 will be remembered sadly for the loss of one of the industry's most talented actors, Ng Man-tat, who died one day before the curtain drops on the month. He starred in a series of box office hits alongside Stephen Chow during the 1990s, leaving behind a number of beloved characters. The pair is often credited as defining a decade's worth of Hong Kong comedy cinema. One of his most celebrated roles is in the King of Comedy that debuted in the "rectangular February" of 1999 in Hong Kong and later topped the city's box office chart of the year.

A day before the film appeared on the silver screens in the Chinese city, political drama was culminating in the U.S. Senate. On February 12, 1999, the then U.S. President Bill Clinton survived the impeachment against him which was launched a year before following probably the world's best-known scandal of the decade. The Democrat president was acquitted on both counts of lying under oath and obstruction of justice as neither received the necessary two-thirds majority vote in the U.S. upper house.

The impeachment case resurfaced temporarily in 2016 during Hillary Clinton's presidential bid but exactly how it affected the outcome of the year's election is hard to account for. It might have little impact at all when Donald Trump who beat Mrs. Clinton to the Oval Office had done so in spite of the sexual misconduct allegations trailing behind him. Moreover, in comparison to the turbulent political atmosphere and the cause for impeachment, the 1999 proceedings are probably no match for the second impeachment filed to the Senate against Donald Trump in the rectangular February of 2021, during the build-up to which the Capitol Hill was sacked by the Republican president's violent supporters. 

As the world was being shocked by the political chaos unfolding and quieting down in Washington, another shock was brewing. In a different kind of turbulence, the price of Bitcoin surged through $50,000 per unit on February 16th and rocketing to $60,000 per unit four days later. Towards the end of the "rectangular month" of 2010 the digital currency had almost finalized its first public offering and the price of 10,000 units inched up to $50 in the ensuing month. Only God knows how many hats have been eaten thereafter by investors and how many more there will be.

Sometimes it's tempting to romanticize the sentimental side of complicated things (for the benefit of a column, for example). Yet human affair is seldom mere a mysterious knot of entangled fates. Rather, it is a convergence of multiple trends driven by psychological, socio-economic and political forces. The coordinates of the happenings in space and time are determined by the variables that can be scientifically analyzed and, maybe in the not-so-distant future, mathematically broken down into data on which future can be predicted. 

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." And "rectangular February" might just as well be one of the rhymes.