BUT WITHOUT DST IT’S ACTUALLY ONLY 12:02. Someone’s been smoking something over at the AP, and now treats us to this funky little story about a slightly jerry-rigged number set:

Call it a coincidental sign of our digital times or a reason to stay up late and stare at the clock. Either way, early Wednesday morning the time and date will be 01-02-03-04-05-06.

At 1:02 a.m. and three seconds on Wednesday, April 5, 2006, it will be the first hour of the day, the second minute of the hour, the third second of that precious minute in the fourth month and the fifth day of … uh oh. It’s not really the sixth year.

It’s actually 2006 � only in our shorthand is it ’06.

“It just happens to be a chronological oddity,” said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory, an official world atomic clock timekeeper.

You know what’s not a chronological oddity? A subscription to The American Prospect Online. It’s just $14.95 for a year — and you don’t have to stay up late to check it out.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.