And so, the first decade of the 21st Century (and 2nd Millennium) comes to an end. Oh, I know, there are some smarty-pants types out there who will insist that, no, the decade actually ends next year, and the millennium didn’t begin on Jan 1, 2000, but actually on Jan 1, 2001. This is because certain people like to be contrarians and need to feel superior to others. Then it gets picked up by the wannabe smarty-pantses who think it sounds good, so then mindlessly repeat it with an air of smugness (as if they thought of it first). The most common reason given for this point of view is that “you start counting with one, not zero” – that you count from 1 to 10, not from 0 to 9. That, of course, is nonsense. Zero is most definitely where you start, even if it’s so obvious that it’s kind of implied. I mean, count all the honest Republicans in Washington, and tell me what number you start with. One? I don’t think so.

More important, though, is that we’re not counting the number of apples in a bushel or something. I mean, yeah, if you pay for ten apples, I don’t give you apples zero through nine. But we’re talking about spans of time (you don’t ask me for a decade of apples now, do you?). I mean (setting aside the gestation period), when does your first year of life begin? On your first birthday? Of course not. It begins the day you’re born. Your first birthday marks the beginning of your second year of life, just as Jan 1, 2010 is the first day of the second decade of this century. So don’t listen to those other people who think they’re so damn smart. They’re just being pains in the ass.

So, anyway, has it really been 10 years already? Where has the time gone?

2000

Remember all the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) generated by the whole “Y2K” thing? The power grid was gonna collapse, financial institutions would crumble, your microwave would stop working, and there was a pretty good possibility of the Apocalypse. I’d just embarked on my new career as a Web Administrator, having somehow managed to get hired with my web portfolio consisting of my personal web page, and one I’d one for my CSEA union local (which actually got a lot of attention, I must say, what with it being the first CSEA local with a web page, and the fact that it vastly outclassed the statewide one), and we had to make sure we applied all of our Y2K patches to everything.

Of course, turned out there were no real Y2K-related problems to speak of, though what we didn’t know at the time was that the Clinton Administration was “running around with their hair on fire” preventing the Millennium Bomb Plot. Thanks to good police work, lots of luck, and Clinton (whatever else you want to say about him) not being asleep at the wheel, terrorist attacks at a hotel in Amman Jordan and LAX were thwarted.

On Memorial Day, SU beat Princeton 13-7 to win their sixth Lacrosse National Championship. Other than that, I don’t recall much else going on that year – at least not until the election in November. Here in NY, we elected our first female to the US Senate – former First Lady Hillary Clinton – to fill a seat that had been held for 24 years by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who would go on to teach at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs after retiring from the Senate). Sadly, Moynihan would pass away just three years later.

More infamous, of course, was that year’s Presidential election, when Al Gore defeated George W. Bush by a small plurality of the popular vote. Thanks to the shenanigans in Florida and the non-precedent setting precedent set by the Republican controlled Supreme Court, Dubya was eventually declared President.

2001

On Jan 31 2001, Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. On Memorial Day, SU lost to Princeton in the Lacrosse National Championship game 10-9 in OT. Other than that, and a little incident in April when a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet, the first eight months of the year 2001 were fairly quiet (and not at all like the Stanley Kubrick movie). Our new president mostly laid low and did a lot of brush clearing on his “ranch,” where he all but ignored a daily briefing titled, oh, gee, I dunno, something like “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US.”

About a month later, Bin Laden attacked inside the US as our brave President sat, paralyzed with terror, in a classroom in Florida.

There were some anthrax attacks, as I recall, and then we invaded Afghanistan in order to “smoke out” Bin Laden. We got bored with that pretty fast, though (nothing really good to bomb there), and decided to gear up to attack Iraq instead.

2002

On Memorial Day of 2002, SU beat Princeton 13-12 in the Lacrosse National Championship game.

2003

In February 2003, the Space Shuttle Challenger burnt up on reentry, killing all 7 aboard. In March, the US invaded Iraq with the Army it had, rather than the Army it wanted to have. On April 7th, Syracuse won the NCAA Basketball National Championship at the Super Dome in New Orleans, and on April 8th, everyone in Central New York happily nursed their hangovers at work (except for my wife, who said “oh, was there a game last night?”). On April 9th, the US military seized control of Baghdad, paving the way for our glorious President and his magnificent codpiece to land on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declare “Mission Accomplished” on May 1st.

In July, US forces killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, and then proudly displayed their bodies on international teevee (a practice that the US loudly howls about when the dead are Americans). And in December the US finally pulled a very scruffy-looking Saddam Hussein out of his hidey hole.

2004

2004 saw the CIA admitting that the whole Iraq WMD thing was bullshit, and we broke ground on the “Freedom Tower” at Ground Zero in New York, which now towers 1,776 feet above former World Trade Center site. A new “progressive” radio station went on the air on March 31st, with comedian Al Franken locking Ann Coulter (played by Bebe Neuworth) in a closet. On April Fools Day, “Morning Sedition” made its debut at six past six AM. Then, on Memorial Day that year, SU beat Navy 14-13 to win the Lacrosse National Championship. On the morning after another close Presidential election, John Kerry – who had vowed to make every vote count – rolled over and quit, consigning us to a second Bush term. The day after Christmas that year, an earthquake measuring 9.3 on the Richter scale caused a Tsunami that killed something like 300,000 people (though we’ll never know exactly how many).

2005

In May of 2005, we found out who Deep Throat was, and he turned out to be somebody most of us had never heard of. In August, I started grad school on the same weekend a hurricane named Katrina made its way up the Gulf of Mexico, heading for New Orleans as George Bush vacationed. New Orleans was drowned and Americans were, at first, shocked at the lack of response to the emergency (except for Bush, who thought his FEMA Chief was doing a heckuva job). The President’s mother, Barbara, saw all the colored folks sleeping on cots at the Astrodome in Houston, and declared that this whole hurricane thing “…is working very well for them.” By October, most Americans had pretty much forgotten about New Orleans. On December 16th, Marc Maron “landed” Morning Sedition for the last time.

2006

The Marc Maron Show began its short run on Feb 28, 2006. It wouldn’t last long enough to see the the Super Dome in New Orleans reopen in September. I spent most of that summer in a sweltering dorm room at Catholic University in DC. I wasn’t crazy about it, but of course I never complained. 🙄 In October, the US population hit the 300 million mark, and in November, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, a feat which allowed them to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006. Thanks to cell phones, video of his hanging is still available on the Internet.

2007

Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House in January, 2007, and Bush countered by escalating the war in Iraq. By the end of the year, the nation was obsessed with much more important matters, as the Mitchel Report on Steroids in Baseball is released.

2008

In 2008, Michael Phelps won a lot of medals at the Olympics (later, the world would be shocked – shocked, I say – when a photo of him doing a bong surfaced on the Internet), in a very mavericky move, John McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a running mate, and Bush crams a $700 billion Wall St. bailout through Congress. On Memorial Day, SU beat Johns Hopkins 13-10 to win the Lacrosse National Championship. In November, the US elects its first-ever African American President, Barack Obama (though some doubt the “American” part). With Democrats in control of the House, Senate, and Presidency, they can now end the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and enact Single Payer Health Care.

2009

In March of 2009, SU beat UCONN 127-117 in a six overtime game that ended at 1:22 AM. The next day, all of Syracuse stumbled around half asleep, but happy (except for my wife, who said, “oh, was there a game last night?”). In April, the Tea Baggers began to hold Barack Obama responsible for the Wall St bailout, and protest taxation with representation, while warning politicians to keep their dirty hands off their Medicare. On Memorial Day, Syracuse beat Cornell 10-9 in OT to win its 11th Lacrosse National Championship, which is a record; Johns Hopkins is in second place, with nine (just in case you were wondering, in the 29 years there’s been an NCAA Division I Lacrosse tournament, SU’s tourney record is 54-18, with 11 first-place finishes, 5 runners-up, and a total of 26 final four appearances).

Anyhow, by summer, Swine Flu had all but eradicated the US and World populations (all but 6.7 billion or so). Towards the end of June, SC Governor Mark Sanford goes MIA for a few days, and a new euphemism for having sex – “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” – is born. In July, invoking the famous cliche “winners always quit and quitters always win”, Sarah Palin resigned as Alaska Governor, having served half a term. This half-term as Governor of a state with a population roughly equivalent to that of Charlotte, NC, as well as her two, three-year terms as Mayor of Wasilla, AK (whose population is roughly 1,000 less than the number of employees where I work), makes her the darling of the Teabaggers, and presumptive 2012 GOP nominee. Michael Jackson died somewhere in there, too (not from Swine Flu, though), but Abe Vigoda is still alive. On Aug 20th, the Scottish Government released convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi on compassionate grounds that he had less than three months to live. Like Abe Vigoda, he’s still alive.

A family of morons launched a helium-filled Jiffy Pop bag as a nation of concerned morons watched it over and over again on a loop, thinking it was a live feed (“damn kid must be gettin’ awful dizzy, the way that thing keeps spinnin’ around in circles”).

In November, Sarah Palin’s support for Doug Hoffman in the NY 23rd special election helped win that seat for a Democrat for the first time since the Civil War, and SU’s basketball coach – Jim Boeheim – became just the eight coach in Division I history to win 800 games. As most of us were sleeping off our Thanksgiving dinners, Tiger Woods was getting “rescued” by his 7-iron wielding wife, after she finally caught on to what he really meant when he told her he was going out to play 18 holes.

On Christmas Day, some idiot tried to blow his balls off on an airplane headed to Detroit. As if Detroit didn’t have enough problems. Wingnuts all over the nation are appalled by President Obama vacationing outside of the United States in Hawaii while the US is under attack from underwear bombers, as wingnut in chief Rush Limbaugh is rushed to the hospital with chest pains – in Hawaii.

The last ten years seem like they went by in a blur for me. In some ways, New Years Eve 1999 seems like yesterday, and in other ways, it seems like it was a lifetime ago. Hell, it seems like we’ve been working on our damn kitchen for more than ten years already.

Oh well, I guess it’s time to head out for the last work day of 2009. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. See ya in 2010 (is this the year we make contact?).