time without seconds

If I have a time stored in MySQL, and I only need the hour and minutes without seconds: 1) Can I crop this in PHP after retrieving it? 2) Is there a way to store this without the seconds in MySQL? Same goes for storing a date without the year. I could use a regular char field, but I want to be able to retrieve a row that corresponds to the current month and day, currently I am doing this with $month = date("n"); $day = date("d"); $query = "SELECT ... WHERE MONTH(date) = $month AND DAYOFMONTH = $day"; Is there a better way to do this without storing unnecessary data? Thanks, -Lisi