2024: It’s About Time

Star Date: -299000.0000317098

Here we are at the end of another Gregorian calendar year. I prefer the Julian calendar. After all it was named after my brother. It has been a lifelong disappointment knowing that a calendar named for Gregory, the ‘quiet Beatle’, supplanted my brother’s birthright and his quotidian place in our lives.

Having survived Y2K, I am more sanguine about ascribing meaning to specific dates these days. Numerology sits about as low as phrenology on my list of things worthy of my ever-shortening attention span. But then I was never good at math, at least not until I discovered Excel. And the peculiar divots and lumps on my head were, I was informed, the result of superior genetic commingling by my parents and they were nothing to worry about.^[1] In fact, I was told I should carry my bumps with pride.

(For those of you thinking this section was generated by artificial intelligence – you’re not far off. Natural intelligence isn’t much better these days. Particularly if one relies on the Internet for cross-references. Perhaps the greatest commonality between AI and humans is both our innate abilities to hallucinate, i.e. simply make stuff up when it suits us.)

Kludge

Speaking of hallucinations, the Gregorian calendar became our accepted standard for tracking the number of days before Christmas because the Julian calendar was deemed inaccurate. Both calendars have months of different lengths, leap years every four years, and derives its structure from the solar cycle. From what I read the only difference between the two is the Gregorian calendar allows leap years in a new century only if the century is divisible by 400 (like 1600 or 2000). Despite attempts at decimalising timekeeping by the French in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, this kludgey arrangement of dates and times has stuck with us. Kind of like how Britain uses the Celsius scale for weather reporting and miles for road signs.

As an enlightened rationalist either calendar is daft. As a hallucinating natural intelligence, I find it rather sweet that our days of the week are defined by a modification to a system of measurement dating back 2,068 years, or more. And that system relied on crude observations of the sun’s movement throughout the year. Perhaps there wasn’t that much to do back then. Imagine if the Romans had had Netflix. We’d still be turning over the hourglass and wondering why teatime is late, again. After all, everything stops for tea.

WHY2K?

I’m reassured that so far, every prediction of the world’s end on a particular day hasn’t occurred. At least not that I noticed. Y2K, January 1, 2000, was the modern poster child for an apocalypse. But, like most fin-du-monde prophecies, it was more about the predictor than the prediction.

24 years ago the end of the world was to have been precipitated by computer programmers using two digits for the year instead of four. Most programmers, foolishly, believed their software would be replaced long before the year 2000 when their two-digit counters would flip over to 00 and send the Earth spiralling back through time to 1900, not lurching forward into the 21^st century^[2].

Every consulting firm in the world smelled blood in the water and money in the boardroom. Partners and salespeople whipped up Y2K into a fate Nostradamus would have been proud of. Billions of dollars were invested ‘fixing’ the issue.

Except in Italy, where the country’s business-folks and politicians took a ‘wait and see’ attitude. Such was the state of Italy’s digital infrastructure when the clock struck midnight and the double-nought digit counters fell, the trains still ran late, water still flowed, and the Pope still smoked dope (as we used to say in high school – in a hallucinatory haze). The canny Italians saved trillions of lire and millions of euros. Of course their software was still cruddy and out of date, but plus ça change…

Traditions

These days I eschew many of the traditions associated with the first day of a new year. For example, I am not convinced wearing yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve will bring 12 months of good luck. Particularly if one has to wear the same knickers all year.

As for resolutions, you can keep them. For example, the worst time to go to a gym is right after New Year’s. Every exercise class fills to capacity as resolutionists grit their teeth and lean into making this year, THE year. By February things return to normal. The resolutionists fall back into their routines of overwork and too-short calendars and quit coming.

Traditions I approve of include getting a good night’s sleep, acknowledging just how damn fortunate we are, and sending thanks and well wishes to all our friends, families and supporters of our adventures. While we try and do that throughout the year, it makes sense to put it on the calendar. And January 1 is as good a date as there is. It remains for me to say,

Happy New Year! And thank you!

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[1] The bumps, I mean. Not my parents.

[2] I recognize that the 21^st century started on January 01, 2021, but there’s no room for pedantry here. Only hallucinations.

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