Do you think the decade is over? Count to ten. No, really, go ahead; start counting. Did you start at zero? Of course not. Unless you count in binary, you start counting at one. That’s what people did when the date was set according to Anno Domini. In the transition from 1 BC to 1 AD, there is no year zero. The first year is 1, the 100th year is year 100, making the first century. So, to believe that the new century and millenium started with 2000, and in turn that the new decade starts at the next zero, 2010, is to believe that somewhere down the line, there’s a poor decade, century, and millenium with an entire year missing. My guess is that, since the media wasn’t able to spread idiocy at the speed of light a century ago, most people started at 1901, and at the turn of the century, we trimmed away a year from the 20th century while we were still in it.

    On CBS just now, Katie Couric said, “we may not know what to call this decade, but at least we can call it over.” to which I say, how? Are we that desperate to leave this decade behind that we have to skip a year? Apparently, the media has a huge problem with fact checking! Entertainment Weekly made the same mistake, including events from the year 2000 as part of the current decade in their "Best of the Decade" list. I realize the difference is arbitrary overall; it’s just dumb that, as a country, we can’t count or perform simple math. If you count to ten from zero, you get eleven numbers! If you count ten numbers from zero, you arrive at nine. I’m sorry, I can’t agree that nine is the tenth number.

    Seriously though, why wouldn’t the 20th century include 2000? Century means 100, so 20th century means 20 hundred, 20 00, but we decided the 20th century would culminate in the completion of 1999. Musicians should understand what I mean. In a measure, the most common count is one, two, three, four. When counting beats in a measure, the fourth beat doesn’t end the measure immediately. For example, a vocalist would sing a whole note (comprising four beats) through to the end of the measure, stopping the sound on beat one of the next measure. Stopping the sound once the beat reaches four leaves a gap where the count is still part of the fourth beat, making what is written as a duration of four last for only three. That’s something like what happened when we got to the year 2000. We stopped counting when we reached one thousand, even though the rest of the count - each month and day in the duration - is part of that one thousandth year.

People are still obsessing over Kanye's debacle - which he has apologized for repeatedly. This makes me wonder, how long will people be talking about Obama's Nobel? Granted, Kanye has been a pop-star longer, but Obama is the Political King of Pop and the atmosphere seems to be he'd have to do something ridiculously un-American to have less than 8 years in office. That is, unless this Nobel thing hurts his chances by setting up his potential failure from a larger, higher-up, shinier platform for the dive into change and hope and all that.

It's rather hard to justify that Obama deserves the award, especially since he was nominated less than 2 weeks into the presidency. Whatever diplomatic cheer he's been spreading, he is still waging wars, just not all the same wars as Bush. (If you haven't heard, closing Gitmo would do little-to-nothing to solve the problem, only relocate it.) What's the difference between a warmonger and a peacekeeper? Image? Public Relations? The right animal for a mascot? Allow me to take this opportunity to say that we were all warned from the dawn of the US on through today's textbooks. George Washington told us not to get entrenched in a two party system, but we didn't listen to him did we? How long has congress been entrenched in division between left and right? Let's not forget that the president is one man subject to checks and balances. The scope of the change he plans to bring is such that I will be extremely surprised if he pulls it off. There are industries and consumers to be reckoned with before we can bring about any major change in energy, for example. Climate change hasn't been enough to change our habits until recently, and even then probably falls under the too little too late category.

Has everyone seen the list of candidates this year? The Nobel Prize has been cheapened, not that it's the first time. Hitler and Stalin (twice) were nominated in the past. So, what is Sweden trying to do? Is it simply a pat on the back for promising a change in direction for the world's greatest geo-political power? A slap in the face of the Bush administration and the Republicans? Or is there something else going on that isn't really being discussed? That's what I'd put my money on. It seems to me that the core of any heated or widespread issue slips through the cracks of public discourse. I'm sure the conspiracy theorists are all over it, but they tend to go to extremes.

Pay attention everyone.