B.C. daily strip (12-29-1966)

Great premise-driven gag from December 29th, about the turning of the year, but in the B.C. backwards convention.

I love the gag, but especially I love the non-comics personal story it reminds me of.

In 1999, I was living in Australia and headed off to a three-day musical festival well outside Melbourne, closer to the coast. With Y2K fears abounding, I expected "something" to happen at the turn of the clock and ensured that my watch was perfectly calibrated. With the headliners (Violent Femmes) coming on, I wondered what they would do for the countdown. I mean, its the once-in-a-thousand year event! What will they do? Looking anxiously at my watch all night, we got closer to midnight and the show was fantastic. But, curiously, the Femmes started a song with only two minutes to go to the millenium. Obviously, they would stop, right? Without regard to the history in the making, with thirty seconds to go (TO THE MILLENIUM!!!), they were still jamming away, remaining oblivious as each second passed. Keep in mind, this wasn't just the GODDAMN MILLENIUM, it was also Y2K, where many people had forecast a possibility of disastrous results and societal breakdown as the world's computer coding hit digits that were not written into the original programs...code that was still used to control dams, power plants, and nuclear warheads. So how could Violet Femmes skip right past this? Not sure how, but they most certainly did. With few Aussies giving a rat's ass about my frantic watch-pointing at 12:00:01, I just let it go and waited. After the band finished their unremarkable song (at 12:04am, firmly within THE NEW GODDAMN MILLENIUM!!), they began their countdown to rapturous applause. I looked to the sky for the ICBM's to start falling to take me out of my misery, but alas, Y2K proved to be as disappointing as these shitheads from Milwaukee who decided that their unremarkable setlist was more important than a once-in-a-thousand-year event.

This brilliant B.C. strip will forever remind me of my own turning of the millennial calendar, but in the opposite direction.