emergent ink

Let’s start the second decade of the third millennium with some things you might find confusing, pointless, or mildly controversial.

The Tennessee Titans lost Super Bowl XXXIV in January 2000 when wide receiver Kevin Dyson was tackled one yard short of the goal line as time expired. I mention this because January 2000 was one year short of the new millennium.

If 2010 is the tenth year of the third millennium, 2001 was its first year.

That means December 31, 2000 was the last day of the last millennium. Oops.

We are an impatient bunch. We showed it by celebrating the turn of the millennium a year early.

Unless… was there a really big party at the end of 2000? Why wasn’t I invited?

Bad planning and short attention spans are a couple more of our failures that have been on display over this past decade.

It started with a sigh of relief when the world was not destroyed by the Y2K bug.

The bug was created by people who didn’t expect us to make it to 2000. When that became likely, there was a mad scramble to fix it.

Some people, seizing the opportunity, made a fortune talking about how the world was about to end. These could be the same ones who recently discovered the Mayan calendar has no refills after 2012.

When Y2K didn’t kill us, a lot of us wrote the whole thing off as a hoax.

My feeling is, we spent millions of dollars to make sure nothing bad happened, and then nothing bad happened. It might not have been a waste of money.

I don’t go for countdowns or watching the ball drop in Times Square. Maybe it’s because I’ve stayed up past midnight far too many times already. Nothing really changes at midnight.

If you want to think something special happened at midnight on December 31, 1999, go ahead. I won’t stop you.

But if you count things my way, and 2010 is the first year of the second decade of the millennium, that means the first decade only had nine years.

It was a lousy decade anyway. So I don’t mind that it’s come to an end.

The millennium really started when everything changed on 9/11/01.

I’ve been uneasy ever since. I think we’ve all been uneasy since oh-one. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the threat level is orange (high) for air travel. The national threat level is yellow (elevated, or “significant risk of terrorist attacks”). It seems like it’s never been below yellow.

I used to think the terrorists made a mistake attacking us like that. Remember how we pulled together? But lately we’ve been at each other’s throats worse than ever. Mostly for little things. When we fight among ourselves, terror wins.

If it wasn’t terrorists, we’ve been threatened by SARS, avian flu, E. coli, salmonella, and now swine flu.

You wouldn’t know these were the big health risks of the decade if all you did was watch TV. It’s full of ads for drugs that will lower your cholesterol, strengthen your bones, or shrink your prostate, if they don’t kill you with side effects first.

Then there are the ads for performance enhancing drugs. No, not the ones that Barry Bonds took to hit more home runs.

These are the ones that sound like luxury performance sedans. But if you find yourself driving your Lexus Levitra for more than four hours, call your doctor.

Watch any sporting event and you’ll be hit with one after another of these ads, all with the same message, that you need to be ready because you never know. The threat level is yellow. And in between there are ads for what’s probably causing the problem in the first place: beer.

Other ads hint at the state of the economy. Some people are doing fine and were giving jewelry for Christmas; other people were selling their gold.

By the sheer volume of car insurance commercials I saw, each one promising to save you money, each one offering lower prices than the competition, you would think there was no profit in car insurance. But from the number of commercials, I can tell that car insurance must be a big and profitable business. Maybe it’s because we are legally required to buy it.

I expect that we’ll see lots of health insurance commercials in the next decade, since it looks like that’s becoming mandatory, too. It turns out that health care reform is going to help companies more than people.

Apparently there is a tradition of giving cars for Christmas that I was not aware of. I didn’t see any big red bows in my neighbors’ driveways again this year, so I’m not sure if this ever happens.

Maybe I don’t live in the right neighborhood. Or maybe I do.

In oh-eight we went through a financial crisis, and for all of last year I worried that there was worse to come. I’m still worried about it, but we made it through and the world has not been destroyed. Yet.

The stock market rebounded, some kid who spends too much time on his webcam got rich last year, and a lot of us wrote the whole financial crisis off as an excuse for the government to bail out Wall Street with our money.

My feeling is, we spent billions of dollars to make sure nothing worse happened, and then nothing worse happened. Yet. So it might not have been a waste of money.

I’m happy to be done with the oh’s.

As bad as it was, the short decade was good for a couple of baseball teams that hadn’t won a World Series in a while. When the Boston Red Sox won in oh-four, it was their first championship since 1918. And when the White Sox won in oh-five, it was their first time since 1917.

The only people who aren’t glad the decade is over are Chicago Cubs fans. They’ve been waiting since oh-eight. That’s nineteen-oh-eight.

The Mayan calendar is fast approaching what we could call MY2K (12/21/12, or maybe it’s 12/23/12). None of the guys who did the original programming are around anymore, although I think they expected to be. We’ll just have to wait and see if they were wrong about this, too.

Keep an eye on the Cubs. I expect them to come up short as time expires.