"Yeah Tuck, I'm listening. Sorry, you were talking about where they count the bada boom from, the creation date?"

"It's called a b'ak'tun, not a bada boom," Tuck said, smiling at what he saw as either my ignorance or my lame attempt at humor. "And what they call the creation date is said to be mythical, probably completely made up. There's really no evidence that it marks any particular historical event."

Darn. My hopes had been dashed. If this great creation date was made up, then their calendar couldn't be any more prophetic than ours. These Mayans were suddenly a whole lot less interesting to me than they were a minute ago.

But Tuck continued, "You had the right idea when you said it was like the birth of Jesus. Despite the separation of church and state that we supposedly have here, the U.S. has become a Christian country, and it was the offspring of another Christian country. If you're not going to start the clock ticking from when God created the universe, then the next most religiously significant date is the birth of Christ."

"Only the clock didn't start ticking from 0," I offered, "because there was no year 0."

"That's right, there's no year 0 on the Gregorian calendar," Tuck said. "It was 1 B.C. one year, then 1 A.D. the next. I guess they just plum forgot about zero. This must drive you mathematically inclined types crazy."

"Yeah, it sure does," I agreed. "Most people forget that counting is supposed to start from 0, not 1. If you don't start from zero, it's bound to throw all your counts off sooner or later."

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