Trivial Stuff

Call it "trivial", a "pet peeve", or whatever....I have two items related to the calendar on my mind today:

First.....everyone talks about the "new decade" we are entering. Sorry...wrong answer. The decade will begin next year with 2011. Correspondingly, 2000 was not the first year of the millennium, 2001 was.

Second.....for the past 9 years the majority of people have pronounced the years, for example, "Two-thousand nine", or "two-thousand one". It would be more uniform to say "Twenty-o-nine". You never called 1909 "one-thousand, nine-hundred nine" did you? Now that we have reached double-digits, maybe we can get it right. Welcome "TWENTY TEN"!