[Kooler] When DOES/DID the Millennium start? [was: Re: [Kooler]19991231 1526]

[George]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2000 at 03:22:09PM -0800, Lan Barnes wrote:
> Notwithstanding the missing year 0, I feel perfectly justified in
> defining the last millennium as the period 1/1/1000 - 1/1/2000. I
> feel perfectly justified as defining the millennium before that
> as the thousand (or so) year period before that. Furthermore, at
> least one scholar who has studied this exact question (Stephen
> Jay Gould) has written that both positions are equally
> defensible. 

But you haven't answered one thing.  Why do you do this for years, but leave
months and days in a 1 counting sheme?  Like say today.  It just turned 5th
January, and I just opened a beer to celebrate the beginning of the last day
of the first 5 days of the year.  But not the first 5 days.  I don't
celebrate the first week until the morning of 8th.  Just like I don't
celebrate the new century until it actually hits.  What is the exact reason
that years are counted from 0 in your calendar and days and months from 1?
I mean wasn't your whole idea of calling this the millennium consistency?

I'm not taking away an occasion to celebrate.  I'm all for celebrating at any
time.  Though us Czechs don't need to move dates around to celebrate.  We can
celebrate the new year 2000 as the biggest thing, but why call it a
millennium.

What seems nutty about it is not that people don't know or whatever.  But
that people randomly change this around just to 1) have an excuse to get
blitzed (Perhaps it's because us Czechs don't need an excuse that we won't
celebrate the next millennium until the next new years) 2) to see you a
product.  It's like people suddenly starting to use 10 instead of 12 hours
just to make counting hours in days easier.

I'm also not Christian, I don't believe in any special meaning of Christ and
I don't care when he was born, what he did and how he died.  I just use the
calendar, that has been based on that.  You have to pick an arbitrary point.
I don't care how it got picked, I don't care what it stands for.  But it's
there ... Jan 1st 1 A.D.  And the calendar defines a millennium starting from
there.  I perhaps celebrated this new years more then the last one.  But I
did not celebrate a century.

This year was the biggest calendar change in a thousand years.  It's been a
thousand years since it changed from 999->1000 (according to Gregorian
calendar, I'm a firm believer in recalculating all dates according to one
calendar)

> So if you can't stand the thought that there's someone in Pacific
> Beach who knows what you know, and still disagrees with you
> (along with a few million other revelers who -- sorry George --
> really aren't as stupid and uninformed as we have been saying,
> but rather didn't care), then perhaps we should shift the thread
> to the question of what remedies a person can seek when somebody
> refuses to agree with him/her.

I don't care.  What I'm arguing about is that your reason for pushing
millennium around (it seems to be only "the date looks it" and "we need
something to celebrate").  The whole reason we have had problems with
calendars in the past is that people change the calendar all the time because
they think that theirs makes more sense.

George