Welcome to 2000…sorry, 2000 and 12, now? Well, how about that? It’s been twelve years already—no, thirteen years! Goodness me, how time flies.
So, exactly why are we celebrating the turn of the millennium thirteen years late? Well, dear reader, there’s been a lot of hubbub about 12/21/12. The Internet's been abuzz with “OH NOES! THE MAYANS PREDICTED THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!1!11 0MGWTFBBQ!!11!” And it got me thinking about the last great crisis…the Y2K bug, and how I pretty much missed the New Millennium celebrations because of it.
A bit of background for you: on New Year’s Eve 2000, computer software that hadn’t been adjusted for the next century would, for whatever reason, switch the calendars back to 1900. Ultimately, this proved to mean absolutely nothing, but financial experts whipped up all sorts of crazy hysteria about it. That’s right—financial experts. Not computer experts or scientists, but money-men. Unfortunately, we herd animals automatically think “Authority!” upon seeing someone wearing a professional-looking suit (or a white lab coat) and glasses. Sometimes they carry clipboards, but I digress.
Anyway, the point is, there was so much cra-a-a-a-ziness around me that the change from 1999 to 2000 went by without so much as a yawn for me. It was as if everyone had suddenly said, “Oh…that’s it? No planes falling out of the sky? No bank savings crashing? No nuclear power plants melting down?” and then decided to get on with other things. NBC contributed to a lot of it with Y2K: The Movie, which featured the above doomsday scenarios and many others.
Flash-forward to 2012. Roland Emmerich’s imaginatively-titled 2012 carried echoes of Y2K, but this time most of us didn’t get so crazy with that. Most of us, that is…there were a few doomsday-preppers here and there, but I think most of us just rolled our eyes and said, “Here we go again.”
And it got me thinking: When this 2012 business blows over, I might like to remind people that we survived the 2000 crisis and the 2012 crisis, and we sure as hell are going to survive whatever else happens. And then, I realized that I have a lot of Year 2000-themed stuff in my collections, and I should put it to good use with this blog.
And now, without further ado, we move to the first exhibit.
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