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.

Common Misconceptions: Immaculate Conception

I hate when the media continues to misconstrue the meaning of things and how it propagates the culture. And I'm not even Catholic. And barely Christian. Is Christian non-believer a denomination? Non-Catholic Christians aren't even supposed to believe or care about the immaculate conception according to doctrine. So why do they always get it wrong?

Immaculate conception is the conception of Mary, the mother of Jesus, through normal heterosexual vaginal intercourse, but without the stain of original sin, and not the virginal conception of Jesus by the said same Mary and the Holy Spirit. Original sin being the result of a certain garden, a certain fruit of knowledge and experience (likely a pomegranate), a certain fall; being the reason we're all going to hell if not for His sacrifice. Now only most of us are going to hell.

Now was that so hard to understand?

Common Misconceptions: A.D.

A.D. is the Latin "anno domini", not "after death". Anno domini stands for "in the year of our lord. After death stands for nothing. But if you, anybody, keeps on using "after death", the only solution is to propose a new calendar starting in the year 33 A.D. on the Gregorian calendar, otherwise thought to be the (most common of the disputed) traditional year of Jesus Christ's death. This will create a third calendar epoch: During Christ or D.C. Thus we have B.C., D.C., and A.D. Welcome to the year 1975 A.D.