I cannot believe it is 2009. I've made it to about 1978 on my own personal to-do list. I'm running just a little bit behind.

Time comes at you like a freight train, but it is bad form not to smile and wave as it screeches by. So here's to 2009, which I am told is the number of the current year.

Some pundits now suggest it was obvious that 2008 would collapse suddenly into 2009. 2008 was not sustainable, they say. It was a bubble, and as a matter of simple arithmetic, 2009 was sure to follow. It was inevitable, they say, like a Kondratieff winter.

Readers of Interfluidity are not so gullible as to fall for that kind of rear-view forecasting. It was always improbable that 2009 would attach itself to any year present or past. After all, 1984 is eternally the number of a dystopian future, and logically the present can be no later than the future. We have not found babies on Jupiter, an event that would be past in any year subsequent to 2001. Sure, strictly speaking, this kind of reasoning should have ruled out 2008 too. But what are the odds that a rent in the fabric of Keynes-Einstein space-time would endure for half a femtosecond, let alone for a whole 'nother year? No. The smart money expected a correction back to 1931, or 1974, or 1982. 2009 wasn't even in the running. But here we are. Anybody got a road map?

Who knows. Maybe this peculiar dimension will turn out not to be so bad. Here's hoping. May it be all sparkly and strange for you. Perhaps we will encounter a benevolent and impossibly advanced alien race, and then discover at the last moment that the comm-screen through which we speak with them is actually a mirror.

I want to take a moment to thank Interfluidity's commenters, who continually amaze me. This is one of those websites where the quality of comments almost always exceeds that of the headline posts. I'm off in some sunny place right now. I just had a read of the comments attached to my previous, kind of crappy post. Wow. Amazing. Thank you.