Hayes & Koetzner

[Randy Caparoso]

David, David, David -- This is not an issue that should trouble us wine revelers. There was a fellow named Jesus, it seems, who enjoyed his wine. In fact, historians who claim to have known him talk about the time he attended a wedding party in a town called Cana, and there was no wine. Horrors! And so, miracle of miracles, wine was magically made to appear -- and this was nearly 2000 years before David Copperfield!

In any case, the Roman/Gregorian calendar by which we mark the millenniums was eventually adjusted to mark the birthday, roughly, of this dude name Jesus. Jesus was in his early 30s when he started multiplying loaves and wowing revelers. And so they refer to the days when he walked around as "anno Domini" -- A.D., or "year of our Lord." This means, oh David of the Rants, that as far as most people in the western world are concerned, that the first millennium was well under way during the weeks when his parents went racing across the desert to escape some lunatic local king. Like most babies, he eventually turned 1 after 12 inexact (since Caesar hadn't yet made adjustments for solar movements) months, and he died before or slightly ahead of his time, depending upon how you look at it.

So anyway you slice it, January 2000 is not much different than January 0. If the first modern millennium started with Jesus's first breath, surely we must be living and breathing in a new millennium ourselves!