New Millenium

Updated 09JAN2000

Well the QANTAS co-pilot had me down for a "the new millenium starts in 2001" pedant, but he was so wrong. I'm really a "the new millenium starts in 2000" pedant! Or, accurately, "it's 1,475 years since we started counting" pedant, so I figure we're perfectly entitled to celebrate "the change of the most significant digit". If you want to find out some of the historical reasons why, you can go search Google yourself, but I keep finding that people are hasty to mention the whole Roman-zero problem as soon as they start talking about Dennis the Short counting the number of years since Christ's birth. As far as I'm concerned, he was asked or decided to find Jesus's age. So when you turn 20, you celebrate your 20th birthday, how old are you really? 20 years, not 19. Besides which, I'm into the whole "count from zero" thing which computing science students like to do ... as in, the C textbook which starts from Chapter 0. To prove a point.

Anyway, enough of that. Here's some stuff I've noticed about the New Millenium:

The most conservative of Y2K predictions seem to have come true. This is not, I might add, the same prediction that luddites were making 4-5 years ago, when magazine columnists were having a hard time trying to convince us there was a problem. Since then, the world has spent a few hundred billion (well-spent) dollars giving our IT society its first real overhaul in general, and a different bunch of luddites has decided to latch Y2K onto their armegeddon banners.
We haven't really had that much obvious memorabilia, expensive things, I mean. I might hope that this is a sign that people have come to recognise the transience of the whole occasion. Or it might mean that we just couldn't be bothered enough; there were some good exceptions, like London, which decided to plonk down for the whole Spruce Up Your City Kit; whereas other examples like Sydney Opera House not having the foggiest idea what it was doing for New Year back in June show that people scarcely gave this new year's event a thought back in 1998.
But where were all the slogans, symbols, songs? London has a handful, but only for itself. Am I really going into the 21st century with nothing but f*cking Silverchair's "Anthem for the Year 2000" to take with me? That's even less than The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince gave us for friggin 1999! Does George Michael's "Songs From the Previous Century" count? I dunno. Oh well, it's quite a relief, after you get over the sense of panic of missing a big occasion.
The 2001 protagonists really shut up. I mean, I hardly heard a peep out of them. How nice, how sociable! The whole 2000 vs 2001 debate seems to have quietened down, so much that I haven't heard an argument for months, or a good one for years since it marked its official opening with an entry in Column 8 in 1993. All that's happened have been some fairly decent documentary pieces on radio and TV. What with all the laid-back attitude to the occasion, does this really mean it was a season of good will? Wow.
Talking of laid-back, the conservation that I kept hearing around the place in December was that people would be staying at home, probably trying to pre-empt a crowded catastrophe in the Sydney CBD. Naturally the Murdoch press published the obligatory disaster prediction headline some weeks ago, when all the bad news lined up, about the streets being closed to cars, the ferries stopping service late at night (duh), the underground train stations closing for Y2K (daylight and standard time), the taxis being simultaneously scarcer than usual and also more expensive, and the general Y2K-lights-will-go-out bogey. Maybe the cold, blowy weather turned them off, but the crowds were as much or less than 1997 or 1998. It certainly was the mildest December I can remember, and all the better for me, travelling to the Northern Hemisphere.

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