Up until about ten years ago, nineteen was the convenient, pre-typed century on your checks and forms.   Nineteen was how it was at: it had been 19 for nearly a century, we couldn't be bothered to write a full year for so long!   The assumption that years start with nineteen began to reveal itself as a problem...there was a twenty on the way.   When the change finally did happen, the internet was flooded with the year 19100: it's what you get when you prefix the year with a "19", without realizing what happens when you add one to 99.  It was still happening in 19103, but only in rare cases; it was a simple fix to add instead of prepend.   Teams of COBOL programmers sifted through thirty-year old code and found it wasn't too bad to fix there, either.  Y2K, the named threat of the reckless use of the number nineteen, didn't happen.   Nineteen wasn't as big a problem as anybody had predicted.  Our current checks make no assumption: the date is a contiguous, unbroken line to fill in how I please.  Even if I want to say today is 7/11/19109.

I'm trying to crank-start my writing mojo; I finished reading Penguin Island, a political satire from a 19th (19!) century French writer, and translated to English shortly thereafter.  We intend to re-print it, with minor edits because the translation is kinda crappy, adding end-notes and illustrations to help modern readers, and a foreword analysis of the book with some insight.   I'm the one who needs to provide the insight.  It isn't a difficult book -- books about penguins turned into humans due to a bureaucracy slip-up in Heaven leaves little to read in to the satire -- but it was written in sections of varying style, and the parts which directly reflect post-Napoleonic France are a little heady for me.   Were I a Parisian at the turn of the 20th century, I would probably be chuckling heartily at the wit and nuance of the story, but, well, I'm a literary amateur in a time when the more fantastic parts of the book are scarily prescient.   Going to war for material gain, without any emotional weight to it; loosely-knit anarchist terrorists who decide to destroy society simply because they hate it; veneration of public figures that is due only because of selective memory.  Another of the book's themes is that everything goes around, but comes back to the same point: that a century-old satire on modern society -- a satire devoid of audio recordings, television, air travel, computers, satellites, and the internet should sound like ignorant whimsy of a prehistoric age -- would be so relevant shows that, yes, what goes around comes around.

In other writings: at Collector's Quest I help identify first editions, examine the dangerous world of butterflies, discover Brasher's doubloons, and reveal a rare U.K. minting error.  At the Double-Breasted Dustjacket, which I'm pleasantly keeping updated, I see how naughty bookworms are, drink some Robinsonade, review a book on North Dakota's border, and realize bookstores don't understand Father's Day.  Over at Metafilter I wrote up a promising scientist who has mysteriously disappeared. At Thingsville, US!  I've got lost hockey sticks, giant olives, and sad easter bunnies.  At Kitschy-Kitschy-Coo I posted instant moustaches, Sistine needlepoint, and scary vent dummy kids.  The Infomercantile and 11111001111 have, sadly, been neglected.