, a presently little noted distinction, but one that will no doubt be much marketed later in the year.
Make sure you are Y2K+1 compliant. The really smart machines are waiting until then to go nuts in honor of HAL the computer from the 2001 movie. Remember, folks, January 1 is 01/01/01. Be prepared for the binary blitzkrieg1x
Enough already. To me it was just another New Year's Eve, a date I never got too excited about anyway.
Why start the year January 1st? Why not on July 1st so I can at least have a barbecue. Better yet, let's go back to starting the year with March and stick January and February at the end of the year. That way months like October (oct as in eight) and December (dec as in ten) would at least be sensibly numbered positions as they were in the
ten month calendar.
Speaking of Rome, I wonder what a New Year's countdown may have been like for say, welcoming in the year one, the beginning on the first millennium. I'm not sure who the orator may have been. (Even Dick Clark doesn't go quite that far back.)
Friends. Romans. Countrymen. V,. . . IV,. . . III,. . . II,. . . I,. . . Happy New Year1x At least we think it's midnight; these sundials aren't worth a damn in the dark.
If we have a holiday which is based simply on a date, what about celebrating dates that at least are more fun? I first started noticing date holidays back on July 7, 1977, or 7/7/77. This was before I had a VCR, so I couldn't rent The Magnificent Seven or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. So I settled for drinking a seven-up at 7 O'clock. As you might imagine, I had precious few co-celebrants for this occasion, and for a similar commemoration on 8/8/88, when I drank a V-8 and "ate" a lot. (I skipped 9/9/99, deciding to say "nein" to the whole thing.)
I had a whale of a good time, albeit a particularly fleeting one, on June 7, 1989. At exactly 1:23 and 45 seconds the time and date could be referred to as 123456789. Granted, I couldn't celebrate too loudly at 1:23 in the morning, nor too much with only one second to work with. Still, I got to do it again 12 hours later.
Then there was "odd day" back in November. That was 11/19/1999, the last date for many hundreds of years in which all of the digits are odd. Don't fret though. Who needs a holiday to justify acting odd?
What's coming up? I'll be hiding out in my underground bunker on 01/01/01. But 2/2/22, which is also Groundhog's Day, should be fun, as long as long as I don't get two, two, tired. And maybe I'll spend most of the year 2020 hanging out with Optometrists.
I'm leaving instructions for my descendants to defrost my body so I can be around, in a manner of speaking, for cool-sounding stuff like 2468 (the "who do we appreciate" year), 4321 (the "countdown"year). Things like that.
Hopefully, by one of those years, if they are still on the ice when I'm thawed out of my ice, the NY Rangers may have won another Stanley Cup.
