THE FRED COLUMN -- fred martin

In the upper left-hand corner of the electronic page on which I began

writing today’s column, I typed what, in newspaper lingo, is called a

slug.

A slug is simply a conglomeration of letters and numbers that identify

the article, date and author. In this case: “fredcolumn for tues 010400.”

However, the history of newspaper slugs, though quite fascinating, is not

today’s momentous news. Nor is the fact that I have ground out yet

another column.

The gasp here is the date: “010400,” shorthand for Jan. 4, 2000.

That’s it, folks. The end of a year, a century, a millennium; the

beginning of new eras for each.

Yeah, yeah, I know all about the smug types who look down their long,

thin noses at we ignorant fools and tsk-tsk that this simply is not the

end of the 20th century; that the year 2000 Anno Domini is no way the

beginning of the third millennium.

But if the first page of all our new calendars shows the year as 2000,

that certainly smacks of virgin territory -- a new millennium and a new

century.

After all, we have had the old ones for quite some time now, and I

suspect most of us were quite delighted to be able to commemorate our new

epochs at midnight on the Friday just past.

According to the naysayers and nit-pickers, we celebrants employed faulty

logic. We must wait, they say, until it is 2001 for the next century and

millennium to begin. Pshaw.

I wish I had thought to ask my Great Aunt Margaret how she figured this

millennium business. Had she not died five years ago, Aunt Marg would be

112 now, and would have lived in three centuries. That certainly would

qualify her as an authority on the to-millennium or not-to-millennium

conflict.

It strikes me that the people who are ceasing and desisting over this

controversy of the official turn of the millennium and century are a

bunch of spoilsports.

My take was, when the last page fluttered down from the calendar on our

refrigerator door at the bewitching hour last Friday night/Saturday

morning, that was it for 1999.

It was a done deal. Finito. Period. The End. Ergo, if the last year of

the century is over, it must be the beginning of the next century. And if

that final year was 1999, that must mean the following day, Saturday,

became the first day of the year 2000, which is definitely a whole new

ball game.

Anyway, that’s my story and I am sticking to it.

Just Wednesday I received a pertinent e-mail greeting from two dear

friends in Costa Mesa: Lorin and Charline Weiss. Lorin was born out east

near the Kansas border in Bethune, Colo. He says it’s Indian territory,

but precious few Native Americans -- or anybody else -- live thereabouts

these days.

Lorin’s family moved toward the West Coast early in his life and settled

in Loveland, Colo., where his mother still lives and which is about 11

miles south of where I sit now.

He grew up in Loveland and graduated from what was once called Colorado

College of Agriculture and Mining. It is now simply Colorado State.

Lorin is an electronics engineer by trade and a stickler for specificity.

Here is what the greeting said:

“For you and yours, in the New Year, the New Century and the New

Millennium, may you cry less, laugh more and enjoy more sunsets.”

I don’t know if Lorin wrote that himself, but it wouldn’t surprise me if

he did; he’s becoming quite eloquent in his later years.

But I do know that, with his engineer’s mind, Lorin simply would not talk

about “the New Century and New Millennium” unless they were, in fact,

precisely what we entered into the first second of the Saturday morning

just past.

So please accept my wishes for all three “Happys” -- Year, Century and

Millennium. We should all, as my friend Walter Cronkite puts it, be most

pleased to be upright.

* FRED MARTIN is a former Newport Beach resident who now writes a monthly

column from his home in Fort Collins, Colo.