Bathurst — With New Year’s Eve just around the corner, people around the world are eagerly anticipating the coming of 2019. However, in the small city of Bathurst, N.B., residents are preparing themselves for all that awaits them in 2007.



“2006 was a looooong year,” said Bathurst mayor Paolo Fongemie. “In fact, it’s lasted 28 months, which is the longest on record since 1998, which was 34 months long.”

Unlike other rural areas in Canada, where time merely feels like it’s passing extra slowly, in Bathurst, it actually is. While the time does fluctuate, it averages out to about 2.4 Bathurst seconds for every five seconds everywhere else on the planet.

German physicists have attempted to attribute this to the uneven shape of the Earth, theorizing that Bathurst is, in fact, the lowest point on the planet, which means that it is moving at a much slower rate during the Earth’s rotation, as per Einstein’s theory of relativity. Bathurst physicists have attempted to attribute this to God being angry at their stinky farts.

Whatever the reason, residents say that they are excited to finally move on to the year 2007.

“There’s so much to look forward to,” gushed 19-year-old Stephanie Melaney. “Spider-Man 3, the last Spider-Man movie ever, is coming out soon. I’m super excited for that. Uh…the States will soon get a chance to kick Bush out of office. Man, there will never be a worse president than that guy. Oh, and I just got my first BlackBerry cellphone this Christmas! I can’t wait to be able to call my friends from wherever I’d like.”

When it was pointed out how random and on-the-nose the items she had listed were, Melaney shrugged and said she was going to go watch a DVD Bill Cosby special she had mail-ordered from the back of a Cracked magazine on her 4:3 television set.

Mayor Fongemie reiterated the city’s elation at passing on into the year 2007, but said that they have some major adjustments to make in face of the new year.

“I sent a MSN message to Premier Shawn Graham about climate change just this morning,” he said, solemnly. “I just went to see An Inconvenient Truth at Apollo Cinemas, and man, we have to get that stuff sorted out before 2020.”