[QUOTE=Christenson;264681]The myth is clearly just made-up, scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo.

Now, we want something rare....so we need something on a different cycle than 365 days...the lunar month is a good candidate. Why don't you calculate how often the full moon falls on the first of the month, and it's a Friday? Or there is a total eclipse of the sun, somewhere on earth at the same time?

But, as we are supposedly coming from China, how about something based on it being the year of the dragon, too?[/QUOTE]

Yes, just look at the calculation of Easter dates which follows the lunar cycle:
[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus[/URL]
Apparantly the full cycle is 5,700,000 years: [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Easter_Distribution.png"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Easter_Distribution.png[/URL]