Stay Tuned/The Millennium Game

Sometime around May of 1998, in conjunction with the regular observations here at Stay Tuned, I began noticing a definite upswing in the number of advertisements and other popular-culture references to the coming turn of the millennium - including the hoary debate about when it was going to actually happen, which for a while seemed to be every periodical's filler story of the week.

I began The Millennium Game as a separate project to track such sightings. The reason it was a "game" was that people sent me their sightings and I kept a point tally for the people sending them in. I have deleted references to individual names and point totals here because it makes the text cleaner. Although I have long since misplaced the tally sheet I kept with overall totals, I strongly suspect the winner was Keith Dawson, who at the time was running a site called Tasty Bits From the Technology Front, now unfortunately deceased (although its archives are available). Dawson is now apparently a frequent contributor to Slashdot. (If you somehow encounter this page, Keith, hi!)

Stay Tuned had a meltdown (well, I had a meltdown and Stay Tuned suffered for it) in September 1998 and went on a long hiatus from which it never really recovered. The Millennium Game was a casualty of that meltdown as well, but probably would have collapsed under the weight of its own overhead anyhow. As early as July 1998, when the game was last updated, it was already becoming clear that density of "sightings" was rising beyond anyone's ability to keep pace.

The material below is not a comprehensive list of all the sightings that were turned in from mid-April 1998 to mid-July 1998; it has been edited to read better as a single piece, and many things have been omitted or summarized. It is presented here as an artifact, a snapshot of what mass media were saying and doing as the world prepared to turn over the high digit of its odometer.

N.B. There was one further millennial report, of sorts, after this project ended. You will find it as a regular Stay Tuned column on 18 October 1999.

Around 28 April 1998 I noted "I see that in the Boston Globe today there is a feature which utterly wastes several pages of otherwise usable newsprint. It is called Generations 2000, it promises to be the first of four parts (oh, goody), and the teaser line is 'Who will we be in the next millennium?'

"Then they spend the rest of the time talking to and about a group of local kids, ages seven to fifteen, about what they think they'll be like when they're teenagers. Honest.

"A twelve-year-old doesn't know what he'll be like next week, let alone in two years. Sample quote from a seven-year-old girl: 'Will we like boys when we're teenagers? Yes. No. Maybe.'

"This is news?"

An undated article from the Washington Post around the same time set the cost at fixing the Year 2000 bug at 50 billion dollars. The remainder of the article was boilerplate explaining the bug, for those readers living in caves, except for a quote from a high-ranking member of the Federal Reserve Board stating that the problem is "real and serious." Well, yes.

One of the first and most obvious boondoggles sent in was the Millennium Wheel (I believe it is actually called the London Eye), which is just a big ol' Ferris wheel. This goes along with the Millennium Dome, which was semi-immortalized at the beginning of a James Bond movie in 1999.

Since to the best of my knowledge both of these structures are still extant, they remain the biggest permanent reminder of Millennial Madness. They are also the canonical examples of what was the most-sought Millennium Game category, the "boondoggle." See below for my description of same.

A reader sent in two from the Austin American-Statesman:

April 26, 1998: An article in the real-estate section called "New clock is worth watching." It's all about the CountDown clock from Branco International. "In addition to keeping current time, it has a digital read-out of how many hours, minutes, and seconds remain until the year 2000. The clock comes in two styles -- one with photos of the Earth, moon and sun with the words 'count down to the future,' and one with three color spheres representing the Earth, moon and sun with 'the third millennium challenge.' Each is $69.95 ...."

I believe this is the first actual millennium-themed product sighting anyone sent in.

May 3, 1998: Financial item called "Year 2000 bug could be market crisis or speed bump," reprinted from the Chicago Tribune. It's about a Chicago investment banker who has started his own Year 2000 consulting firm after determining that the bottom is going to drop out of the economy once 2000 hits. Another economist predicts that corporate and government spending to correct the computer bugs will give the economy a boost.

My reader noted, "The article seems to be aiming for a fair estimate of the situation, but a streak of paranoia does run through it at times."

A reader noted in the first week of May or so: "I was at the opera yesterday and saw in the program an ad for Waterford's Millennium crystal series. It's a limited series of four different patterns of stemware. I don't remember what the names of the individual patterns were, since I didn't keep the program, but they were names like 'happiness' and 'long life'."

A lovely anecdote on 11 May:

"Wine broker Bordeaux Index has spent a fortune making sure its computers can handle the Millennium bug. Yesterday it had no trouble shifting a magnum of Chateau Margaux 1900 for 9,000 pounds - but trying to log the sale proved more difficult. No matter how hard they tried, the computer kept changing the description to Ch. Margaux 2000. 'We are stumped,' says a spokesman. 'We can't get it to register the proper name.'"

On 19 May we have the following from CBS Marketwatch:

"Intuit, the maker of Quicken software, is the subject of a Year 2000 lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California. The lawsuit, filed last month, alleges the personal finance software maker improperly required customers to pay for an upgrade to fix the Year 2000 problem, which could affect the way computers read and work with data after Jan. 1, 2000.

"The complaint, filed by the law firm Millberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach of San Francisco and New York, alleges that versions of Quicken before Quicken 98 are not compliant with the software's online banking features. The class-action lawsuit, filed on behalf of consumers who bought Quicken software prior to the introduction of Quicken 98 in October 1997, says Intuit is improperly requiring consumers to pay for upgrades to fix the Year 2000 defect."

From another reader, roughly the same date: "Please find enclosed image which advertises the Mastercard Millennium-Edge credit card, featuring 4.9% apr until March 1999. Also available are 4 card designs which feature:
- The 'world's first 3-D hologram card,' otherwise known as the Galaxy 2000;
- Zodiac, a card with the signs and symbols of the zodiac printed on it;
- New Beginning, picturing a blazing, rising (presumably) sun over a bank of clouds;
- Celebration: A exploding display of fireworks graces this last card.

"In terms of points I would like to point out an ironic aspect of this promotional item: Isn't it likely that quite a few people who own and use this card in the next two or three years will find their credit accounts directly affected by the Y2K bug?"

An Australian reader also noted that she had purchased some Millennium wine a few days back. She added that it was "not a bad red, but, as the name suggests, could do with waiting until 2001."

On 27 May I posted a large number of accumulated items, beginning with a link I was not sent but saw in TBTF, the first stirrings of the survivalist-type issues:

"A topic you will begin seeing more of shortly is the 'safe haven' debate: is it ethical for Y2K workers who fear the worst to remove themselves from the problem by moving their families out of cities? Long-time systems and methodology guru Ed Yourden, author with his daughter Jennifer of a non-technical Y2K preparedness book aimed at families, has been interviewed recently for articles in preparation by Wired magazine (August issue), TechWeek, and Forbes. Yourden has talked publicly about his upcoming move to New Mexico. An "empty nester," Yourden had been planning a move away from New York City for several years; he is frank about the degree to which Y2K concerns influenced the destination and the timing. (He plans to stay involved with Y2K remediation work.) This discussion will become shrill."

The Eds - Yourden and Yardeni - turned up a number of times in Y2K-preparation articles as this project continued.

Yourden is the quoted speaker below, from an interview by Scott Rosenberg from Salon of the preceding March.

"Something else I've become more aware of is that we now have trained a whole generation of clerical and administrative people to turn their brains off - they don't have to do any thinking. All their instructions and day-to-day activities are guided by computers. If you go into a restaurant and the cash register is broken, the waitresses can't add up your bill anymore - they've forgotten their third-grade arithmetic. We've already seen a couple of year 2000 versions of this.

"The classic one is the disaster at Marks & Spencer. Some corned beef hash came in. It had a bar code on the side of the boxes with an expiration date that happened to be 2002. So the clerk waved his bar-code reader on it and the computer rejected it, thinking it had expired in 1902. Well, the clerk thought, that's cool - the computer said reject it, what do I care? And he can't read the bar-code anyway. So he puts it back in the loading dock and sends the stuff back. A day or two later it arrives back at the corned-beef hash company, and that clerk types in a transaction saying, six cases of corned-beef hash rejected by our good client Marks & Spencer. Fine, no problem, what does he care? Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer wanted the corned-beef hash, so they put in another order. A week later, another six cases show up. Rejected the same way.

"It went back and forth apparently four times before they ran out of inventory up at the store. Now the shelves are empty. Somebody comes down to the purchasing department and says, 'What's going on? You guys can't manage your inventory!' After a lot of angry phone calls and finger-pointing, finally it percolated up to the point where somebody had his brain in the 'on' position."

Another reader sent two from the Chicago Tribune, of which only the leads are needed here:

May 18: YEAR 2000 POSES GRAVE PROBLEM FOR HEADSTONE CUTTERS

"There has been plenty of talk about the problems computers will face when the calendar hits the year 2000. But what about gravestones?

"Scattered throughout cemeteries across the country are headstones that have already had the first two digits of the year of death, '19,' set in stone. The headstones await the arrival of forward-thinking people who got a jump on their own death dates, often ordering the carving at the time of a spouse's death." ...

May 17: WORK ON MARKET SQUARE TO BEGIN

"Market Square 2000 and the City of Lake Forest will have a groundbreaking for the Market Square landscape renovation.

"Speakers include Prue Beidler and Crissy Cherry, co-presidents of Market Square 2000, and Lake Forest Mayor Cornelius Waud." ...

I added to the latter: "I'm not sure whether the Market Square item counts under the boondoggle category [which delivered the most points in the game] - I'm looking for items which are being built specifically in honor of the millennium, and which will have no reason to exist after that, lying dead on the landscape like an abandoned World's Fair site. This project actually looks like it might have some lasting value." [Unlike, say, the Millennium Dome, above.]

Another reader wrote: "From the Annals of Improbable Research - two interesting Y2K tidbits. The former is just amusing, the latter is relevant and can be traced to Reuters."

The items turned out to be connected to their project to keep a list of business with 2000 in their names (see, I'm not the only crazy person in the world). In this case the slant is a little different:

"Investigator Rob Middleton is conducting a Mini-Corporate Survey for the coming nomenclature apocalypse. Here is his report:

'Your Project 2000 got me thinking again about corporations like 20th Century Fox and Century 21, and whether the turn of the century is going to have any affect on the reasoning behind their names (which, I must admit, I find opaque to begin with).

'To: <C21CORP@aol.com>
Yours is truly one of the most recognizable companies in the world today!! I was wondering about the founding of the company, including the selection of the name 'Century 21' and if you had any thoughts as to what you would do when in fact the 21st Century is upon us? Does that matter? Will your name change to Century 22, or will it remain the same?

'Thank you very much,
Rob Middleton

'I received this reply:

'Thank you for your interest in century21.com. The answer to your question in your email is that our name will remain the same. Thank you for visiting the CENTURY21.com.
- CENTURY 21 Product Support'

"At least there is one less unanswered question in the world now. (Still no word from 20th Century Fox, the ones who are in the real danger of becoming irrelevant.)

"The nomenclature apocalypse is already underway. Investigators Jonathan Weinberg, Lee Seitz, Jordan Brown and many others send us copies of a report from Reuters wire service:

'Gateway 2000 says it is officially dropping the '2000' from its name, introducing a redesigned logo and launching a new advertising campaign.'"

I noted, as an addendum to this, that Fox was already well on its way toward ditching the "20th Century." Only the film imprint displays that part of the name; the TV stations and other media projects do not, and as far as I know, never have.

On 1 June I wrote:

"Ellen Goodman, esteemed columnist for the Boston Globe, whom I adore when she's not out of her depth, wrote a column last week about Y2K. Apparently she found out about this little problem - reminding me that there are still a lot of people who are slow to follow news stories if they happen to be about technology. Ms. Goodman blamed the programmers for their failure to plan ahead and their cheap corner-cutting (why couldn't they just use all four digits)?

"I don't blame Ms. Goodman for being suspicious of technology in general - and, given a few caveats, I agree with her statement that 'today we remain far too cheerful in the belief that technology can save us from the troubles technology got us into.' However, this time she's wrong.

"Programmers shaved off those two digits to save space, yes - usually at the behest of the People Upstairs, the suits. (Can you make it smaller? Can you make it faster? In a database of several million records, two bytes saved per record means something.) As they did this, they warned the suits that this wasn't the correct way to do it, that it would have to be fixed later or there would be a problem.

"Programmers are generally pretty aware of these things. Any set of commercial source code usually has in it at least one block marked 'This is a messy, horrid way to do this - but management wants the product last week - go back and do it right later.' Most of the code that makes up the software you buy has a lot more than one block like this, marked or not. Microsoft code is entirely composed of it.

"Of course it never gets fixed. Commercial software is bad because the suits always want to work on the next version, with more features crammed in, and never want to allot time to go back and repair what's already there. Sooner or later, though, you pay for what you sweep under the rug. The Y2K reckoning was a long time coming, it's a bug that dwarves all others, and the programmers have been saying 'I told you so' for about thirty years."

I was pleased to see that a few days later, a letter appeared in the Globe, pointing out all the things I just said (and in much less space than it took me).

Meanwhile, one reader sent me a DVD company that had changed its name to Multimedia 2000 for no good reason, and another sent me news that the city of Dallas wanted to have a big Millennial Fair, which sure sounded like a municipal boondoggle to me.

Then we have this:

"In today's Sunday New York Times magazine is an interesting example of an advertising supplement, designed to look like an article, which features the (surprise!) millennium. (Costs of the ad underwritten by various liquor companies.)

"One thing I've noticed with all this stuff is the passions the millennium is apparently inspiring in copywriters' language. (The classic advertising question - are they creating the consumers' interests or merely refelecting them?) For instance, in this three- or four-page ad, the article starts with a quote from Yeats and then goes on to give recipes for cocktail drinks: 'The Century Sour,' 'The Millennium Passion Margarita,' 'The 1999.' Later the article states 'This is a bona fide one-shot moment of history of which we're all fortunate enough to be a part. And even though every moment of every day is a singular event, never to be repeated, the sweeping of the clock to twelve midnight on December 1999/January 2000 will own a unique significance.'

"The article then concludes with this: 'So, with your Century Sour cocktail or your glass of champagne in hand - hey, maybe even one in each hand - remember to toast the New Millennium for everyone's sake for, indeed, joy is wisdom and time is an endless song.'

"Gosh, with those drinks in both hands all night long chances are the New Millennium will be one long blackout."

On 7 June I wrote about listening to President Clinton speak at the MIT commencement exercises and how, unlike when Gore did the same, there was a notable absence of "hacks" (elaborate pranks from the students). I then noted: "Which makes it doubly amusing that Clinton, in his speech, joked that the real story behind the Year 2000 bug is that it is all an elaborate hack that the Class of 2000 has been planning. Could be, Bill, could be ... but hacks are usually no-permanent-damage, and this sounds like anything but, don't you think?"

The Washington Post has a feature called "HUH? An Occasional Primer on Popular Culture." I was in DC the prior weekend, and there was a HUH? on "Pre-Millennial Tension," illustrated nicely with a panel from "Zippy." ("I was given a millennium once ... it was very uncomfortable ....")

I added "Pre-millennial tension (PMT) is basically caused by 1. fear of an apocalyptic event coupled with 2. the belief that everyone around you is getting crazier and crazier, and the world is going to hell in a handcart. I don't believe in an apocalypse, but I sure do believe in PMT. That's why I'm looking for those "silly season" stories. But, like PMT pundit Andrew Walker, I don't expect them to really kick in until 1999. Keep watching the skies."

Meanwhile, hot reader item of the week was the world's oldest Y2K bug., which I was sent by three separate sources. Seems there is an orrery-like mechanical device for telling the positions of the planets sitting in a museum in Liverpool, England. It has a small problem:

"The equatorium, built by an unknown craftsman in 1600, predicts the position of the Sun, Moon, other planets and even eclipses through a system of rotating discs and arms.

"But the last date inscribed was 1999. 'It must have seemed like an eternity at the time,' said curator Martin Suggett."

I also got sent an item plucked from a website called Everything 2000, which as far as I'm concerned counts as a sighting in itself.

The first concerns two artists, Daniel and Janos Herner, who were planning to build an enormous hourglass to honor the turn of the millennium:

"The Time Wheel is 8 meters in diameter and 2.5 meters thick. It ismade of red granite, rust-free steel and bulletproof glass. It holds 7 tons of sand, can be turned over, and weighs 60 tons in total.

"It will take a full year for the 4.4 cubic metres of sand in the Time Wheel to fall from one chamber into the other. 'The Time Wheel is a symbol of global thought. It would be erected on 31 December 1998 and first turned over at midnight on 31 December 1999, as a key event in the series of celebrations to welcome every new year and the new millennium,' they continued."

On the alarmist/survivalist front:

"Think the Year 2000 problem means mere elevator snafus? Try dealing with a platoon of Marines who show up in your front yard to confiscate your hoarded lentils. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) asked the deputy secretary of defense at a hearing this morning what plans the Pentagon has 'in the event of a Y2K-induced breakdown of community services that might call for martial law.' John Hamre replied carefully, but none too reassuringly, 'We've got fundamental issues to deal with that go beyond just the Year 2000 contingency planning. And I think you're right to bring that up.'

[...]

"For the record, though, Bennett did say, 'I am not one of those who says that Y2K will automatically produce martial law,' and blamed 'alarmists, extremists out there on the Internet' for unnecessary scaremongering."

From the same reader, the following lead - the rest is unnecessary:

"Fifteen Russian pilgrims set off from the Pacific port of Vladivostok Monday for a 6,250-mile walk to Moscow, where they will mark the 2,000th Christmas 18 months from now." ...

Finally, a note from a reader which I reproduce verbatim:

"I don't know if Tony Brown's Y2K Boot Camp is a sighting or not, but man, it's weird. I mean, Tony believes in the Illuminati. I've heard his pitch on public television that all we have to do is teach a million young black people to program in COBOL and send them out to reap the benefits of the Y2K - taDAH!"

On 22 June I posted what was more or less a freestanding essay. To make it easier to read I am going to present it without enclosing it in quotes:

The big story for me, actually, isn't any of the goodies from Darkest Mailbag which follow - it's the fact that Time magazine, in the 15 June issue, actually printed an anti-hysterical article about the Year 2000 bug. It wasn't entirely complimentary to the programmers, but you can't have everything.

Anyway. Among other things in Time's cheery point-by-point checklist, they note that

- Banks and investment houses have every incentive to make sure that fiscal transactions are unaffected; they began debugging their computers years ago.

- The nation's groceries have about fifteen to twenty days' worth of food in the distribution pipeline at any time, so even if some of their computers crash, they do not expect any severe shortages.

- Utility companies will have problems, but, as the article points out, they know it's coming, and they're used to dealing with outage-causing disasters in a big hurry. Their computers may not be ready, but they will be.

The article also finally debunks that damned elevator story (See? Time said it too. Now do you believe me?) and points out that fewer than five percent of the chips imbedded into non-computer gadgets have any sort of date susceptibility. Elevators don't need to know what day it is to go up and down. Nor does your pacemaker need to know what day it is, nor your dialysis machine.

Now the bad news. The government is seriously behind. How serious is serious? Well, the Department of Defense assures Time that missile launch systems are fail-safe and so there shouldn't be any accidental nuclear wars started - at least not on our end. Russia they're not sure about.

One thing a lot of people seem to agree on: You don't want to fly in early '00. The FAA is one of the most seriously delinquent branches. The IRS is another. As Time points out, the good news is that the IRS may not be able to process your returns. The bad news is, they won't be handing out any refunds either.

There are a number of people yelling and screaming about how far behind the government is, but it may be moot at this point; even if they devote all the resources they can grab to fixing this, there might not be enough time at this point. The federal government, says Time, owns roughly one-fourth of all the computers in the U.S.

"We're going to use the Time article as our apex of optimism, and we'll return to their claims at various points below.

Now for the other end of the optimism numberline: There's a gent named Gary North who'd probably say that the Time article is pie-in-the-sky nonsense. At the beginning of the page leading to his message boards, the first words are

"These forums are here to help you come to grips emotionally with four words: 'If the banks fail ....'

"These four words summarize the second-worst threat of y2k. (The worst threat is the failure of the power grids.) It is this threat that people refuse to face emotionally. They interpret everything they hear about y2k in terms of four other words: 'Banks must not fail.' Banking must not fail because people do not want it to fail. They refuse to face up to the enormous y2k problem because they are committed emotionally to the survival of fractional reserve banking. Instead of buying silver coins, they dream of silver bullets."

In two paragraphs North has managed to toss aside two of Time's most reassuring claims. The bank computers, he claims elsewhere, are nowhere near as finished a project as the bankers would like, and even so, what's going to keep people from getting itchy and making a run on the banks in 1999, whether the computers are ready or not?

North is apparently regarded as something of a flake at worst and a prophet of doom at best. Unfortunately, if he's a flake, he's one of the most rational-sounding flakes I've encountered. If he's just using the rhetoric in order to scare people into awareness, then it worked for me. Good going, Gary. Reading the copy on his site makes me want to learn a few skills and head for a remote island somewhere.

However, I feel we should stick around and try to convince everyone to act rationally, not flee ... and Mr. North's devotees do nothing to help his reputation. Check out one or two of his message boards (the Relocation one is particularly vivid) and tell me these people are a credit to their species.

While I respect Mr. North's work, I am inclined to categorize the behavior of these head-for-the-hills folk as cultlike - that is, a herd mentality categorized by not stopping to think clearly nor to question their own behavior. I'm not saying Y2K's not real; I'm saying that these people are behaving very much like the "sheep" they poke fun at.

A reader called this site to my attention along with a couple of others [unfortunately, all these URLs are now essentially defunct] which, taken together, uncover a huge squirming mound of uncomfortable behavior. Meanwhile, he also pointed out Ed Yardeni's site, a more balanced approach, neither a doomsayer nor a cheerleader.

Going back to that claim that our missiles aren't going to go off, but the Russians' might, I was also sent this relevant tidbit:

"The Pentagon plans to share data with the world's other nuclear powers to ensure that the Year 2000 millennium bug does not lead to an accidental nuclear exchange.

"John Hamre, deputy secretary of Defense, last week told the Senate Armed Services Committee that while the Pentagon does not believe the Year 2000 problem will cause an accidental nuclear exchange, the department intends to mitigate the risk with operational procedures that call for sharing data about nuclear early-warning systems and missile warnings - information zealously guarded during the Cold War - with Russia and other nuclear nations ...."

Lest you think this little game, which is supposed to be about millennial weirdness, has become a forum of despair over Y2K, people have also sent in some items which are rather more lighthearted.

Here's a BBC special report: "How is the rest of the world celebrating the millennium?"

"Paris is having very peculiar plans: a school of 2,000 luminous plastic fish is to be released in the river Seine, and there have also been suggestions that a huge 'egg' should be placed under the Eiffel tower. A 600ft (200m) Tower of the Earth, made of wood, is also planned and there will also be a giant book sculpture. The Centre Pompidou, which is undergoing a complete revamp under a shroud of secretive hoardings, will be reopened on January 1, 2000.

"In Malta, plans are well advanced for a huge telecommunications tower at the centre of a [$130m] leisure and retail complex at Paceville, near the seaside resort of Sliema.

"The financially strapped Ukrainian government is helping to construct 1,750 churches.

"New Zealand plans to install the world's biggest tuned bell in the Carillion in Wellington, which will chime for the first time at 12.00am on January 1, 2000.

Also posted on 22 June: a number of products from the Year 2000 Products area of the "Year 2000 Information" page, an ad for a rather nastily exploitative company called Planet Marketing, some news about Office 2000, a discussion of whether the new Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington was named that for any particular good reason, and a bit about the MBTA, the people who run the buses and subways in Boston, announcing their five-year plan for Y2K readiness - which is only funny if you, unlike the MBTA, can subtract.

On 12 July I checked in to apologize for the hiatus and explain the problem, which was summarized neatly in a comment I had received that morning:

"I think one can safely say that the millennium bug phenomenon has hit some sort of threshold. In fact, it is starting to look as if issues of anxiety re: millennium will dwell directly on the "bug" itself and not much else. Case in point: In an article from USA Today which I clipped out and lost, some government official made a link between the Y2K bug and El Nino .... I really wish I had kept the article, because as I write this I'm confused as to the link myself, but I think it had something to do with the inevitability of a major system converging on a hapless public."

In short, at this point it was clear that Y2K was eclipsing all the other millennial stories: "I am getting Y2K items and not much else. The problem with Y2K items isn't that I don't like them - it's that, as the rules state, they have to be unusual Y2K items. A news story which amounts to 'such-and-such has a Y2K problem; isn't enough. It's assumed that everyone does.

"And, to a large extent, that's what's happening: the world is realizing how big Y2K is. It's a little late, but better late than never."

On the other hand, as I added on 19 July: "Y2K may feed directly into millennial madness, as some people are sure to interpret it as a genuine sign of the apocalypse. No, that's not especially silly. Think about it. If you believe in Revelations, and you also believe that the millennium is due to arrive (there's about six ways to count, and by some schools of thought it was due to happen already), then you also believe that there are going to be some catastrophic, civilization-trashing events any minute now. Who says they have to be tidal waves or earthquakes? The Lord, they tell us, moves in mysterious ways, and new technologies call for new plagues. For example, what would cause more damage to California in this era - the San Andreas fault finally going bust, or all of the computers in the state stopping dead?

"I haven't gone all apocalyptic on you, don't worry. But it's something to take seriously. You may not believe it's the apocalypse - watch out for your neighbor who does. Or as an article in The Boston Globe's opinion section today put it: 'Are you targeted as an agent of the Antichrist? As the year 2000 approaches, the list grows ....'"

In other words, look out for the possibility that someone else is blaming you for the end of the world.

I had several sequential emails from the same reader. Mail #1 notes:

"A couple of wonderfully terrifying news stories about the rest of the world. The part that gets me is in the second story, where the Russian Ministry of Telecommunications notes that 'A final decision will come in 50 years time and will require changing date codes in about 60 million programme products throughout the world.' I mean, one would hope that the problem would be seriously moot in 50 years time."

Mail #2 had a bunch of Millennium product names, all of which seemed to have taken it arbitrarily (i.e. had nothing whatsoever to do with the product at hand).

Mail #3 mentioned a Year 2000 webring, but more importantly, added:

"Also found a site which deals purely with the legal issues arising from it all, although I know you don't like whole sites. But it is kind of funny. It's a law firm dedicated to the proposition that if you terrify people enough, they'll hire you to handle the legal problems arising from insufficient millennial preparedness. The interesting little core twist is that apparently simply hiring people to fix your systems may not be enough (aside from the fact that it may violate license and warranty, which I'd think would be a given). It all gets horribly convoluted - apparently, if the original vendor of the product agrees to fix an application, they violate their own copyright."

Mail #4 covered a press conference Ed Yardeni gave (Mr. Yardeni has already been mentioned here) and an article about Yardeni's prediction of a Year 2000 recession.

Mail from another reader, for a change of pace:

"Tonight on 'All Things Considered,' there was an interview with a Los Alamos scientist who is pushing the idea of using ICBMs due to be dismantled, ours and the Russians', to mount the world's greatest display of fireworks over all the cities of the world, timed for local midnight on 12/31/99. His name is Dave Kalkins (sp.?) and he has an article coming out in the Journal of Pyrotechnics, so they said. No Web presence was mentioned. The idea is to replace the warheads with 'peaceheads' (he actually used that 'word') about the size of garbage cans, filled with 50K - 100K pellets the size of aspirin tablets, the consistency of plaster, with traces of heavy elements as needed to make a colorful reentry. They would be explosively dispersed near the ICBM's apex and would reenter over a city as a spherical array of bolides in all the colors of the rainbow."

The next mail, same reader, concerns a statement from that cheerful fellow Gary North. Mr. North was also covered here already, but the item is notable:

"At a June 2 conference on Y2K sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Alan Simpson confirmed what I [North] have been saying for over a year: the trains will go down. He said that the railroads have abandoned manual controls. 'Going back to the rail system, they've taken out manual points. I talked to some of the major rail companies a few days back and said, 'Go to manual.' And they said, 'All our manual points are in the warehouse up in New York State waiting to be disposed of. We cannot switch manually anymore. We have taken out manual reversion systems on most of our key communication, power, and switching systems."

As I pointed out to the reader, as far as I know most of the grocery-type items in this country are delivered by truck. Which is not to say that the train failure isn't a big problem; it's also not to say there won't be food shortages ... but to say "Result: Famine" (which is the way North hypes it) is to indulge in fear-mongering, and demonstrates why I prefer Yardeni's views to North's.

Another mail, same reader, from the New York Post:

"... [Brokerage director William] Loomis predicts fewer corporate mergers in the next 18 months. That is not just because companies will have to expend their resources on fixing their computer code. It is also because investment banks, which run a computer model when they are advising potential merger partners, have found that the model cannot forecast earnings beyond 1999 because the software has not yet been updated."

Change of reader again. This one covers another weird Y2K aspect: Insurers are trying to lock the barn door after the horse has been stolen. This is from a western Massachusetts paper whose name I have lost:

"Imagine you're the captain of the Titanic, and you're 20 feet away from that iceberg. Suddenly your insurance agent comes bounding up to the bridge to add just one thing to your policy: a provision excluding coverage if you hit an iceberg.

"That, says a spokesman for the Massachusetts Division of Insurance, is in essence what the insurance industry appears to be trying to do in the face of a giant iceberg ahead - the Year 2000 computer bug.

"Property and casualty insurers are beginning to fear that the price tag for Y2K litigation could rival the ruinous costs the industry incurred in the cases of asbestos and environmental exposure. Insurers are quietly trying to get out front of the problem.

"Virtually unnoticed, the industry has received approval in about 40 states for new language that could exclude coverage for losses associated with Year 2000 problems in most new or renewed policies. The exclusions deal mainly with coverage for businesses, but also affect some homeowners' policies."

Massachusetts, the article notes, is not yet one of those forty states, and there are several people who want to keep it that way. It's true that on one hand, the insurance companies are going to bleed red ink from this problem. On the other hand, isn't this exactly the kind of disastrous event we buy insurance for? Then we have a mail about Wall Street getting ready to beta-test its measures against Y2K, of which the most interesting part was that the SEC is prepared to yank the licenses of any brokerages which didn't meet compliance standards by Q4 1999.

Then there was more weird news about what the French were planning:

"The brainchild of two young Parisians, Vessel 2 Thousand constitutes a monumental sculpture intended to symbolize the dawning of the year 2000 in Paris. Sixteen meters long and five meters tall, this vessel goes beyond the image of the Eiffel Tower to create a sort of primitive rocket a la Jules Verne ...."

Then we have:

"You remember that link I sent you a while back that said that people might be legally liable even if they corrected their Y2K problems? Well, turns out that it wasn't just a scare-tactic article; there seems to have been something to it. Buried near the end of the following article is something about Clinton submitting legislation to congress to exempt companies from Y2K liability if they share data to help with the problem, and the data turns out to be wrong. (Which is, if nothing else, a rather peculiar way to think of the problem - if the legislation is as simple as proposed, there's no allowance for malice. Which could lead to all sorts of interesting things.)"

"There's also a line that says that Clinton has set March 1999 as the deadline for the federal government to have fixed its Y2K problems. I must admit, that line alone has given me giggles for a while now. Last I heard, no federal agency was on schedule to be finished with its conversions before 2002."

And finally, for the last of a dirty dozen emails, I was sent the URL of a Y2K-oriented personals site. Honest! I went and confirmed it for myself. When I checked, there were only three ads on the page, and I found all of them inadvertently hilarious - I can't decide if that reflects badly on me or on the people who wrote the ads.

On 27 July, the last of the Millennium Game updates, I wrote:

"The Boston Globe reports that no matter what other catastrophes are taking place, there's currently a boom market in prognosticators. Anyone who's willing to rub the old crystal ball (or some more newfangled crystal ball equivalents) and provide a vision of days ahead, no matter how warped, is set to rake in money with both hands. You may be missing out on a genuine Career Opportunity! If Faith Popcorn, a woman who's never impressed me with her abilities, can do it, so can you.

"Unfortunately the Globe article was completely free of the type of cynicism employed in the above paragraph. A little more hard analysis of what these people are actually delivering for the buck would have been welcome.

"It's true that in uncertain times - and these, my friends, are definitely uncertain times - people turn to the oddest places for comfort and consolation. It's at times like this that the prophecies and portents come out of the woodwork."

To illustrate this, I cited something that had been sent to me on 3 July, which I hadn't been quite sure what to do with:

"I saw this on a filler program on TV. It was about this little town in England called Bungay. Now, Bungay is haunted by a big black dog, or even several big black dogs, that represent no lesser evil than the devil himself. The program consisted of interviews with the locals about the dog appearing, and how with these apparitions came the sudden demise of certain town folk, a definite bad omen.

"According to history this dog (or dogs) has been around since the 1500s when it stormed into two churches and killed a few people. The part that interested me is that the millennium will be celebrated with a huge bronze statue of the evil beast. Not all the townfolk are too happy about this but most feel that it would put their little town on the map, and of course make the rest of the world aware of the evil presence in their midst."

I'm calling that a case of millennial madness. But, as the next reader item shows, it only scratches the surface of crazy.

"The July 20 New Yorker has an article called 'Forcing the End' by Lawrence Wright (p.42). Its teaser reads:"

"'Why do a Pentecostal cattle breeder from Mississippi and an Orthodox rabbi from Jerusalem believe that a red heifer can change the world?'

"This is one amazing piece of reporting. It delves into the millenial beliefs and preparations of evangelical Christians, far-radical Jews, and extreme Muslims.

"I've never read the Bible closely, myself, so the red heifer stuff was all news to me. Amazing. Jews are unclean because of having walked on the dead of the earth, according to a far-fringe teaching, and can only be cleansed enough to step foot in the rebuilt Temple by washing in the blood of a perfect red heifer, bred in Israel.

"This Mississippi cattleman and itinerant preacher read this and sent a letter to the State Department. It gets weirder from there."

I had heard of the cabalistic significance of the red heifer before, but I didn't think it had a millennial connotation to it. I added a few comments about the just-opened movie Pi, and then said:

"The end of the world is hot stuff right now, folks. In fact, it's so hot that one reader has already begun looking for a place to take refuge from the blitz."

That reader sent me this excerpt, which he did not source:

"Television studios around the world are announcing plans to air live 24-hour worldwide millennium broadcasts. Producers of two of these shows were boasting of this 'shared experience' as they promoted their programs to television programming executives at a recent convention in New Orleans.

"'It will be an international festival of human creativity that will celebrate our differences and a sharing of a common humanity,' says Zvi Dor-Ner, executive producer of 'The Millennium Day' Broadcast. Fifty networks from 50 countries have formed the Millennium Consortium to produce the broadcast. Dor-Ner is a veteran documentary producer for public television station WGBH in Boston, which along with PBS and the BBC is spearheading the broadcast."

The reader then listed the fifty countries which make up the Millennium Day Broadcast Consortium, including such notoriously TV-heavy countries as Senegal, and added:

"I included this oppressive list to try to convey a sense of the operation. As you can see, even outer space will not harbor a media fugitive like myself; I'm thinking Amazon rain forests or that Biosphere in Arizona (actually, scratch that - I'm sure there's something in the works with them). Or perhaps the safest solution is cryogenic. Freeze me now and wake me in five years when it's all over."

Yes, but what will happen to your cryo tank when the utilities fail due to Y2K bug?

and now back to our program

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