Oh, No

I have a sort of millennium bug up my ass. It’s not exactly a Y2K problem… it’s a Y2KX… no YMMX… well, it’s all these end-of-the-decade-wrapup stories I’ve been seeing the last few days.

Remember back when everyone was partying like it was 1999? I mean, when it actually was 1999 and they were all like, “It’s the end of the millennium!” And all the geeks [like me] were all, “No, the millennium actually ends next year.” And we would try to explain that there was no year zero, which NEVER worked, so then we would say, “OK, see. The first century had to be years 1 to 100, and the second century had to be years 101 to 200, and so on. So the twentieth century has to be years 1901 to 2000.” And that’s when we were uninvited to all the new year’s eve parties that year and some of us the next year also [because we just couldn't let it go and we would have spent all that night too explaining that this was the dawn of a new century] and a few of us several more years after that [but I'm not bitter].

OK. So we have NOT just finished the first decade of the twenty-first century. We have finished a decade of years with 0-numbers. But even though I am one of those annoying people [shut up] that said twenty-oh-one right up through twenty-oh-nine, not even I ever said twenty-oh-oh instead of two-thousand. [I have said uh-oh a LOT, but the date has nothing to do with that. Well, once it was on a date. But that's a different story....] And I know you’re wondering, so yes, to me this year is twenty-ten, not two-thousand-ten.

Is this what Santayana meant by, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”?