It's hard to believe it's been a whole decade since we were wondering if the Y2K Bug was actually going to knock modern civilization back to, oh, maybe about 1600.

Ten years ago this week, I had the worst "it really could be the flu" of my life, picked up on an Airbus during a four-hour flight back from Calgary, most of the time in the close company of a three-year-old throwing Cheerios at flight attendants.

Oh how things have changed.

Can you even take Cheerios on a plane these days? Or a bottle of milk for the baby? Or a bag full of treats, juice bottles, games, and other stuff to pass the time while swapping children between seats?

Can anyone, even a three-year-old, throw anything, even Cheerios, at a flight attendant without the plane making an "unscheduled stopover event" to "process a possible belligerent non-combative young person", or whatever?

I don't know.

That was the last flight I took. I wouldn't do it now. Too much hassle, too many regulations. I'd be afraid I'd tell a joke or move my left hand the wrong way, and end up being sent to Syria for interrogation.

Also, I've watched far too many episodes of Mayday on the Discovery channel, chronicling how forgetting to remove a piece of tape or not flipping a switch back to AUTO caused planes to crash.

But that's beside the point.

Here we are, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century - the New Millennium - and it's time to look back and take stock for a moment, at some of what's happened in the last 10 years.

Ten years ago, George Bush was yet to be elected, terrorism was a vague threat that usually involved other countries, and "911" was only an emergency phone number. In Canada, Jean Chretien and the Liberals were comfortably ensconced on Parliament Hill, thanks to the decimated political right wing that was only just starting to pull itself into a new, eventually coherent whole.

On the entertainment scene, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, the Lord of the Rings movies, "Lost," Harry Potter mania and Hannah Montana were all still in the future. But we did have Britney Spears.

Also still to come were wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein, and new terms like "rendition" and "embedded" and "detainee".

In Canada we were to be shocked by the killing of four RCMP officers in Alberta, and then further shocked as Canada's national police force seemed to stumble into questionable tactics, near-scandal, and to "betray the public trust" as the recent report into the tasering of Robert Dziekanski stated.

We would be scared by avian flu, SARS, and H1N1; lose another space shuttle - this one the victim of a chunk of insulating foam; and find out just how devastating mother nature could be with Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and earthquakes in China and Kashmir - among others.

It kind of makes you wonder what the next 10 years have in store.