Standing beneath a replica of the Declaration of Independence, the president announced the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton will head the White House Millennium Project, and they're looking for splashy ideas for the celebration starting New Year's Eve, 1999. Hope she does better as the chair of this project than she did with that whole Health Care Task Force, when she somehow managed to get the whole country convinced that health was a dirty rotten bad thing and we'd all be better Americans without it. One problem is, the next millennium doesn't really start until 12:01 a.m., 2001. See we never had a year 0, and as a matter of fact because some Pope was having a bad couple of weeks, we skipped 11 days in 1752 going straight from September 2 to the 14th, making the real millennium, January 12, 2001. AND, then you figure the birth of Christ as the usual starting date of the Gregorian calendar, which supposes he was born December 25, 1BC, making the true date of the thousand year celebration January 5, 2001, but some modern scholars place His birth three years earlier at 4BC, indicating the party should start January 5, 1998, and we're extremely close to missing the whole damn thing. Of course, since it's in the hands of a government committee now, I imagine they'll reach a compromise and have the celebration sometime around noon on April 13, 2003. Perhaps an April Fool's Day would be appropriate.Will Durst is the official fool of the Millennium.