Re: The Millennium Conundrum.

Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Thu, 7 Jan 1999 17:03:11 -0500 (EST)


On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, I'm not a real doofus, but I play one at a national laboratory wrote:
> My main complaint with the purists is that they don't insist that the
> decade of the '90s won't end until January 1, 2001 also. They can't have
> it both ways.

This reminds me of a comment someone I care greatly about once
uttered. He complained that the same people who were against abortion
were in favor of the death penalty.

For the record, *I* think the '90s won't end until the end of 2000-12-31.

(The '60s didn't end until 1972, did they? ;)

> The one dichotomy we can't avoid, to my mind, is the names of the centuries.
> This is the 20th century, and to try to call it the 19th because it
> starts with 19 would make talking about history impossible, for several
> generations.

Or we could just call it the 1900s, and eliminate the confusing dichotomy.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
[around 1998-12-23], it is amazing to watch fear and loathing and greed at
play with the more speculative Internet stocks.  To call this a tulip
craze would be a vast understatement. -- Adam Rifkin, <adam@cs.caltech.edu>