IJMC - Newsflash, Canterbury, England. A.D. 999

Ok, so I'm four days behind. I've been working a temporary position that 
a friend of mine arranged for me, and well, let's say my sleep schedule 
hasn't yet adjusted to being awake and active at eight am. So, the IJMC 
suffered for a bit. Think of it this way though: If you're at work, now 
you have even more to do this Monday before starting any actual work! 
See, there's a good side to everything.                            -dave





 Canterbury, England. AD 999:
 
 An atmosphere close to panic prevails today throughout Europe as the
 millennial year 1000 approaches, bringing with it the so-called "Y1K Bug," a
 menace which, until recently, hardly anyone had ever heard of.
 
 Prophets of doom are warning that the entire fabric of Western Civilization,
 based as it now is upon monastic computations, could collapse, and that
 there is simply not enough time left to fix the problem.
 
 Just how did this disaster-in-the-making ever arise? Why did no one
 anticipate that a change from a three-digit to a four-digit year would throw
 into total disarray all liturgical chants and all metrical verse in which
 any date is mentioned? Every formulaic hymn, prayer, ceremony and
 incantation dealing with dated events will have to be re-written to
 accommodate three extra syllables.  All tabular chronologies with
 three-space year columns, maintained for generations by scribes using
 carefully hand-ruled lines on vellum sheets, will now have to be converted
 to four-space columns, at enormous cost. In the meantime, the validity of
 every official event, from baptisms to burials, from confirmations to
 coronations, may be called into question.
 
 "We should have seen it coming," says Brother Cedric of St. Michael Abbey,
 here in Canterbury. "What worries me most is that THOUSAND contains the word
 THOU, which occurs in nearly all our prayers, and of course always refers to
 God. Using it now in the name of the year will seem almost blasphemous, and
 is bound to cause terrible confusion. Of course, we could always use Latin,
 but that might be even worse -- The Latin word for Thousand is Mille, which
 is the same as the Latin for mile. We won't know whether we're talking about
 time or distance!"
 
 Stonemasons are already reported threatening to demand a proportional pay
 increase for having to carve an extra numeral in all dates on tombstones,
 cornerstones and monuments. Together with its inevitable ripple effects,
 this alone could plunge the hitherto-stable medieval economy into chaos.   A
 conference of clerics has been called at Winchester to discuss the entire
 issue, but doomsayers are convinced that the matter is now one of personal
 survival. Many families, in expectation of the worst, are stocking up on
 holy water and indulgences.