Writing Samples

2000: Not the millenium, but a nice round number

As 1999 began to draw to a close and the deadline for my last article of the year loomed, I decided that I would like to write something special to mark the occasion. Perhaps a retrospective on the last hundred years of electronic discovery or a schmaltzy blurb on some of the bizarre and creative rituals that people were coming up with to 'ring in' the next thousand years. There was even a delirious moment where I considered giving my rhyming dictionary some much-needed exercise and crank out a (computer-related) verse recapping all the wonderful things technology had brought mankind.

So, with a song in my heart (and freshly-cracked knuckles), I sat down at my trusty PC and began scouring the Internet for information on all things 'millennial'. To my joy and adulation, I soon realized the deadline for my last MONiTOR article of the millennium could be pushed back a full year - which was fantastic news to me, a born procrastinator. And all this thanks to the most unlikely of characters, a little-known Scythian scribe by the name of Dennis.

For more than a year now, everyone has been getting very excited about the Year 2000. The Y2K bug has loomed so large in the public eye that it has been easy for us to associate the end of the millennium with January 1, 2000, and its non-negotiable mathematical deadline. Even back in 1982, the artist formerly know as Prince was getting right excited about the prospect of partying like it was 1999.

But, if you want to get technical about it, this coming New Year's celebration won't really herald the new millennium. Folks 'in the know' realize that the dawn of the new millennium will occur as the clock strikes twelve January 1, 2001. All those people who have booked their New-Year's-Party-Ocean-Cruises years in advance so they could greet the new Millennium with style still have to wait one more year before the official first day of the third Millennium.

I'm not one to make New Year's pre-dictions but I believe that, in the months following the beginning of 2000, the media will slowly begin rekindling all of this year's millennial hype anew. The hotels, motels, clubs and cruise lines will have a fresh vehicle for packaging new rounds of millennial blow-outs and getaways. And the merchandise is already out there, friends. Even now, with next year's round of millennial hype set to roll out, you can even download your very own 'Billennium clock' from: http://www.billennium.com/index.html.

But who can we really blame for all this confusion? Sadly, the real culprit is long dead. Back in 525 AD (or possibly 526 or 534 depending on your school of thought) a little-known Scythian monk set out to ruin your millennium party. Little Dennis (Dionysius Exiguous, to his pals), proposed what would become our modern calendar system.

This is more or less how it happened.

Dennis began his illustrious career translating works in the papal archives into Greek and Latin. As time went on, he was assigned by the church to translate the Easter tables for Pope John Paul the First. While Dennis was translating away, he decided to fix the dating system. The previous calendar's frame of reference was based on the number of years since the archaic and not-terribly-church-friendly Roman Anno Diocletani. Dennis's new calendar system was a really easy sell as it was based on the generally-agreed date for the birth of Christ.

Which brings us back to the beginning of the third millennium.

Since Dennis decided that the year Christ was born should be considered 'year one', there was technically no 'year zero'. Dennis, in fact, would not have had the number 'zero' at his disposal until Arab mathematicians shared it with the world several centuries later.

So, the simplest grade two math dictates that, by adding 2000 years to Dennis' 'year one', the new Millennium starts on January 1, 2001.

For more information on this topic, Ian Chadwick of Collingwood, Ontario, has written a brilliant little summation of this issue, and goes into much more detail than I have here. It's at: http://www.georgian.net/rally/madness.html.

The real significance of all this is, if you were too busy to come up with some dramatic way of bringing in the new millennium this year, you still have another full year to work on it, with plenty of unintentional pre-millennial bashes to crash in the meantime!

So, now I have both a finished article and the happy prospect of spending the whole of next year writing a clever retrospective worthy of the turn of the millennium. Or, I may just keep trying to find something that rhymes with 'General Protection Fault'.