Common Misconceptions: The New Millennium

Seven/eight years later and I'm still bitter about this.

There's no year zero. The calendar starts with year 1. Thus a grouping of one thousand years, a millennium, ends when the calendar changes to a year ending in 1.

Now the coming of the the "new" millennium in the late nineties was hot shit, acted like it owned the place, didn't take off its shoes, and put its cold, sweaty drink glasses directly on top of the wood surfaces of your furniture without a coaster intermediary. A factor in this was Y2K hysteria to be sure. The story broke ahead of time, because computers were going to think when the calendar switched from 1999 to 2000 that since they only had a two-digit year marker programmed in that the calendar was actually going from 1999 to 1900. And since all computers are in fact working time machines, computers were going to send the world itself back to 1900 and all the technological advances of the twentieth century would become anachronistic and subsequently disappear by way of self-fixing paradoxes.

Also, every digit in the year was going to change and there would be three zeros and that's really cool guys. Zeros be rolling over like on your analog display clock.

Now let me quote a bit of popular culture minutiae, "The Millennium" episode (820) of Seinfeld:

Jerry: Oh, that's interesting, because as everyone knows, since there was no year zero, the millennium doesn't begin until the year two-thousand and one. Which would make your party, one year late, and thus, quite lame.

Jerry is right and he's wrong here. Newman's party would be one year early, not late. Still since that is when everyone else is celebrating the new millennium, it would instead be lame to be the hipster douchebag who chooses to celebrate the new millennium on the night of December 31, 2000 when the general population ("normies") are asking, "Wasn't that last year?"

Ironically (irony: that's still a thing, right?) none of this matters as calendars are superfluous and based around arbitrary starting dates to begin with, and nations systematically changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian over the late middle centuries of the second millennium anyway. Plus when we talk of the decades, we talk about the eighties as being from 1980 to 1989, and not 1981 to 1990 because calling '90 a part of the eighties is retarded and counterfactual. All one really needs is an almanac to follow the phases of the moon.