THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS

A handy recap of the last thousand years or so

BY JOHN SCALZI

© 1999, 2010 by John Scalzi

This electronic edition of this collection was made available for free and can be shared on a non-commercial basis. Don’t sell it! Don’t buy it! Just enjoy it.

These essays originally published on Whatever, John Scalzi’s blog:

whatever.scalzi.com

INTRODUCTION (from 1999)

Oh, look. Another Millennium thing. Just what we need -- and I am well aware, thank you very much, that the Millennium doesn't truly occur until 2001. However, when there are 6 billion people on a planet, 5,999,900,000 of whom maintain that the year 2000 is The Millennium, the wee, small, logical voices of the remaining 100,000 count for exactly diddly. People like their major historical events to coincide with nice big round numbers, and there's little value arguing that point any more. 2000 it is.

Now, I originally wasn't planning to do anything regarding the millennium, because, really -- who isn't doing something on the millennium? However, the thought then occurred to me: When will be the next time I'll be able to wrap up an entire thousand years? (Yes, I know, 2001. Shut up.) Everybody's doing their millennial thing, but that doesn't mean it's automatically a bad thing. After all, everyone breathes oxygen, and that doesn't stop me from following the crowd.

And so, beginning November 1 and going through the remainder of 1999, I will present daily my selections for the Best of the Millennium. But not just any selections -- I'll b cataloguing the things people really care about (or should, in any event). Like: Best Lopsided War. Best Vision of Hell. Best Condiment. And how could we omit: Best Plague. No one else is going to get around to these categories, and, damn it, they deserve comment as well. So I'm gonna do it. Each day, for the rest of this millennium (or, more accurately, for the rest of the popular perception of this millennium).

INTRODUCTION (from 2010)

Not too much to add here; I was just playing with making electronic tests and thought this would be a fun little package to put together. Beyond that it’s an interesting historical document in its way – it’s interesting to look back down through eleven years and see which things are still relevant after more than a decade, and which seem, well, quaint.

Technical notes: This little electronic book is only very lightly edited, and may have a few spelling/grammar/factual errors in it. I wrote each of these entries in just a few hours, using information I could find online (in 1999! Before Wikipedia!). While I’m pretty sure most of what you read here is factually correct, there may be slipups here or there. Try to enjoy it anyway.

The entries are presented in the order they were written and posted, between November 1, 1999 and December 31, 1999.

Some of these entries have appear in edited form elsewhere, including in my essay collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998 – 2008. If you enjoy this, consider picking up that or other of my books. My mortgage thanks you.

This book is dedicated to my dog Kodi, who was with me in the last millennium and who just passed on. She was a good dog.

-- John Scalzi,

July 18, 2010

THAT WAS THE MILLENNIUM THAT WAS

Best Beverage of The Millennium.

Coffee. Hands down (and shaky). Discovered in 850 by an Arab goat herd, who watched his goats gobble some beans and then perform the world's first poetry slam, coffee finally hit the big time in the 16th and 17th centuries, when coffeehouses (almost none of them Starbucks!) were the rage in London, Paris and other European capitals. Nowadays it's the planet's favorite beverage; some 2 billion people suck down java every day.

Who is your average coffee drinker? Look in the mirror. Most serious coffee drinking begins in college, when the realization that your parents are now actually paying for your education inspires a student's very first all-night study session. This first true exposure to coffee generally ends in catastrophe as the student sucks down about six cups too many and spends several hours shaking  like a Kobe earthquake survivor. But eventually the correct daily dosage is found, and a lifetime "friendship" with the brown stuff begins.

More than a beverage to keep people awake, coffee is a symbol of the American century, its jittery charms indelibly tied to an industrious people who rebuilt the world, from the days of Henry Ford to these days of Bill Gates, fueled by caffeine jolts that helped exaggerate America's already overly-developed "can-do" spirit. Take a look at the Empire State Building sometime, or a Dodge Viper, or the demo of the Quake Arena videogame. You can almost smell the bitter tang of that 7th cup that inspired that one guy to say, "Of course, you know what would be really cool..."

Coffee is tied to the US like tea is tied to the British, the former rulers of the world, and of course that fact is illustrated in who in the world drinks tea and who drinks coffee. Tea gets the nod in places like India, China (who, of course, got there first, but even so) and all those other places where the British empire oh so kindly shouldered its white man's burden, until the natives asked, if it was quite all right, old chap, if they could kindly have their own countries back. Coffee is everywhere else, except Russia, where the role of coffee is played by vodka.

You could even say that what you drink is what you are, at least when it comes to tea and coffee. Tea is refined; coffee, for all its success, is vulgar. Tea is old money going back to the 13th century or so; coffee earned its money selling tires, or collecting trash, or making television shows about babes fighting crime. Tea doesn't soil its hands; coffee is elbow-deep in motor oil and transmission fluid. Tea is in a cup; coffee is in a mug. Tea is aristocratic; coffee is egalitarian (why do you think they call it "joe"?). At one point everyone who drank coffee aspired to be the sort of person to drink tea; nowadays, of course, these people realize that they don't actually like people who drink tea. People who drink tea don't do anything.

The bad news is that coffee is becoming tea. Tea has its Earl Greys and Orange Pekoes; coffee has lattes and half-caf double mochas. Used to be that these unholy brews were confined to the dark recesses of college town coffee shops, to be sucked down by scraggly-bearded graduate students who were reading yet another book on to bolster their thesis that Abelard and Heloise were precursors to the gender politics typified on the Jerry Springer show (or something), i.e., people who weren't doing anything. Now you can't throw a rock without hitting some overbred stock-option jockey with Starbucks coffee in one hand and a cellular phone in the other (try it. Throw hard).

Coffee qua coffee, the bitter engine of progress, is being tamed into a polite, froo-froo brew. Meanwhile, the coders and geeks who are constructing the framework of the 21st century are sucking down their Surges and Mountain Dews and that old carbonated friend, Cola-Cola (no serious coder drinks Pepsi). Caffeine will survive into the next millennium, but it's unclear if coffee will.

But you can do your part. Ditch the Starbucks 90% foam latte, go to the supermarket, and buy a can of, oh, Chock Full O' Nuts coffee. Go to the thrift store and buy a percolator. Put the coffee in and brew a pot. Then put some more coffee in and double brew it. Get a mug that's taller than it is wide, pour it in, and slam it down. As the bitter liquid sears your esophagus, swelling it to the size of a honeydew melon in your throat, you will undoubtedly be seized by the need to build the world's longest suspension bridge, or the highest clock tower, or the fastest personal computer with the most bitchin' graphic cards. Go do it. That's what coffee's all about.

Best Lopsided War of The Millennium.

The Spanish-American War. Hey, they started it.

Actually, they did. A little-known fact about the Spanish-American was (as if any fact involving this war is perennially on the lips of Americans) is that Spain declared war on the United States first, on April 24th, 1898. The United States, furious at being caught napping on this issue, declared war the very next day -- and then backdated the declaration to April 21. Take that, you lousy Spaniards!

The Battle of the Declarations was, alas for our sadly incompetent Iberian antagonists, the very last thing that the Spaniards won. A week later, George Dewey and a fleet of American battleships steamed into Manilla's harbor and sunk the entire of Spain's Pacific fleet like they were shooting fish in a barrel. Which, considering the Spanish fleet was anchored and silent, was exactly what they were doing. A couple of months after that, Americans landed in Cuba (Teddy Roosevelt had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to lead his "Rough Riders" into battle -- proof that downward mobility isn't always a bad thing for one's career) and forced the Spanish fleet into a retreat that found it beached and burning up and down the Cuban shore line.

The whole war took less than four months, and at the end of it, we got Guam and Puerto Rico for free, and bought the Phillipines at a cut-rate price. Oh, and in all the hub-bub, we somehow managed to annex Hawaii. Apparently, some folks there are still sore about that.

Spain never had a chance. Oh, sure, Spain could kick around Cuba, whose bid for independence, and Spain's brutal repression thereof, had started this whole sorry she-bang. But like the third-grade bully that terrorizes the kindergartners yet cowers under the pummeling, pre-pubescent fists of the sixth-grade bully, Spain got spanked by superior firepower -- and a country that was itchin' to use it. Yet another little-known fact about this war was that for years, the US had a contingency plan to kick Spanish butt up and down the entire western hemisphere. It was called "The Kimball Plan" -- the national equivalent of the sixth-grader waiting for that third-grader to rough up a younger kid, so he'd have a legitimate excuse to beat him up and take his lunch money.

Americans loved the Spanish-American war, a fact that reflects on a salient feature about the American psyche. It is frequently said and written that Americans love an underdog, but that is a damnable lie. What Americans really love is watching a  good whuppin', particularly when we are the whupper and not the whuppee. This is why millions tune in every four years to watch the latest incarnation of the US Basketball "Dream Team," packed with towering millionaires from the NBA, crush the hopes of tiny poor white men from places like Macedonia and Ireland. Being an American is about winning with an unimaginably huge point spread. Close shaves are for second-raters.

The Spanish-American War was America's debut out of the ranks of the second-raters. All our other wars up to that point (those couple of wars with Britain, that nasty intramural squabble between the States) had been fairly even slug-fests. Even that war with Mexico wasn't entirely a blowout, though giving up two-thirds of their territory had to hurt 'em. The Spanish-American war, by contrast, was a slam-dunk. We lost more people fighting the Filipinos, who apparently didn't much cotton to the Americans buying their country for a lousy $20 mil, than we did fighting the Spanish (What? You don't remember the Phillipine-American War, which lasted three years and cost 4,200 American lives? Funny about that).

Since 1898, we've participated in other lopsided wars, of course, most recently that one in the Gulf, where the casualty ratio between Them and Us was something on the order of 100 to 1. But in those wars, we had help, and we didn't come away with any real estate to speak of -- real estate being, of course, the Gold Standard in war gains.

We could beat up on Spain again -- they're even more vulnerable now, if that's possible -- but it wouldn't sit well with us. As much as Americans love a blowout, we also like at least the appearance of being provoked. These days, all Spain does is lie there in Europe and occasionally spit out a Pedro Almodovar film. It's not actionable. The Spanish-American war will have to remain as it is, our first, best example of how to win, and win really really big, against a massively inferior foe.

Best Television Series of The Millennium.

The Simpsons. And if you don't think a crudely-drawn animated series filled with bug-eyed miscreants can't be the best television series ever, you're missing the whole point of episodic television.

Television exists for three reasons. The first reason is to provide illiterates with news, although this is a futile effort, since why would illiterates watch news, especially when another station is showing Ricki Lake at the same time? (I can write these terrible things about illiterates because, really, how are they going to find out? And if they do, how will they complain? By sending me e-mail?)

The second reason is to remind the general populace that actors who work in commercials are trapped a special sort of living hell provided to those who've squandered a college education by getting a theater arts degree. What could a beautiful young woman have done to be forced to extol the virtues of a one-day yeast infection cream on national TV? A reader's theater version of "Our Town" instead of an economics course, that's what. Kids, let that be a lesson.

The third reason for television is to keep people amused. What keeps people amused? Certainly not their real lives -- if their real lives were so amusing, why would they be at home gaping mindlessly at a glowing box? (Gaping at the glowing box on which you're reading this is another matter entirely.) People like to see fantasy worlds, preferably worlds as static as possible -- because once you've found something you like, it shouldn't ever be messed with.

The Simpsons fits this exactly. Of course it's a fantasy world -- it's animated, after all. Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are given set roles, but that doesn't stop each of them from doing whatever catches the writer's fancy that week. Homer, purportedly a nuclear safety engineer for the last ten years, has in fact had more jobs than anyone not living in the Silicon Valley. For that matter, so has Marge -- cop, pretzel vendor, church counselor. Bart's owned a factory. Lisa's always on some crusade. Maggie's the spawn of aliens.

The Simpsons are also blessedly static. Thanks to the miracle of animation, they've not aged a day in ten years -- and as an extra special added bonus, there's none of those "real" actors to worry about breaking out of character. If they were a real life series, the actor playing Bart would be twenty and undoubtedly making the rounds at the nightclubs and spending his summer hiatus drying out at Betty Ford. The actress playing Lisa would either be starring in a teen horror film, or arrested for shoplifting from Marshall's. The actor playing Homer would have tried to negotiate for more cash at the end of the fourth season, only to be replaced by John Larroquette. The actress playing Marge would have gone in for liposuction. Four times. It's no good.

(Sure, real people play the Simpson's voices, but let's face it: If Dan Castellaneta sat next to you on the bus, or started dating rich scary old women, or spent his days espousing a nutbag philosophy that involved high colonics, you couldn't possibly care less. You wouldn't look at Homer and think to yourself, "That guy's probably either dating Martha Stewart or having an enema right now." Well, I wouldn't, anyway.)

Beyond this is the fact that "The Simpsons" is brilliantly, bitterly funny, and have been for almost all the decade they've been on. What is the secret? Despite their unreality, despite their static nature, and despite the slashing commentary on life, at heart, the characters are good people. "The Simpsons" mock religion at every opportunity, yet they go to church and have values -- admittedly sometimes grudgingly (the episode where Bart loses his soul and regains it through personal trial is easily the best religious programming of the 90s).

Homer and Marge have had their troubles, but they've never not been in love with each other. Bart and Lisa are unspeakably cruel to each other, but there's no doubt that when the chips are down, they'll stand by each other. "The Simpsons" can get away with being heretically funny because the Simpsons themselves have genuine heart. If you don't think it matters, watch "Family Guy" sometime. Same general outlines, but it's just freakin' awful.

This is not to say "The Simpsons" hasn't had its rough spots. Then again, you try doing something for ten years without flubbing now and again. Pound for pound, episode for episode, "The Simpsons" clobber the competition and keep going. It's TV the way TV is meant to be. When it's not telling illiterates about the news, of course.

Best Invaders of The Millennium.

The Mongols. The difference between the Mongols and every one else was the personal touch they provided each and every town, hamlet and village they visited. Other notable invading armies didn't really give a damn about  your pathetic little hole-in-the-wall burg. It was just another bump on the road to, oh, let's say, Russia. You could just feed 'em lunch and send them on their way, and still get the harvest in on time. Everyone was happy, at least until the army froze itself to death outside of St. Petersburg later that winter. But hey, like that's your problem.

Not so the Mongols. Sure, they were gonna kick the stuffing out of China, sooner or later. But they weren't in that much of a rush. China wasn't going anywhere -- heck, it's just over that wall they built. Handy marker, that. In the meantime, they were happy to devote their full and undivided attention to you. But at least they made it simple. You had two choices: Resist, and die a totally freakin' horrible death, what with the screaming and the stabbing and the horse trampling with the clop clop clop clop, or surrender, and have your village serve as the shock troops to invade the pathetic little hole-in-the-wall burg two miles down the road. Unless they decided to kill the hell out of you anyway, for tactical reasons. Nothing personal.

Historians (inevitably on the losing side, as the Mongol language wasn't codified into writing until well into the continental ass-kicking) typified the Mongols as a "horde." While admittedly this would appear the apt description, as tens of thousands of yowling Asiatic warriors bore down on you with spears, atop a sea of fiery steeds, the fact is that the Mongols were both amazingly well disciplined and utterly loyal to the aims of their maximum leader.  He's a fellow we call Ginghis Khan, but who, to his friends and family, was known as Temüjin (although anyone who further shortened this to "Timmy" was shown his own steaming liver, freshly extracted, ere he died of blood loss).

You can't tell the story of the Mongols without telling the story of Ginghis, a story that reads like the script pitch of a desperate hack screenwriter to a development minion for Roger Corman. Ginghis, pampered son of a clan leader, found his life shattered when his noble father Yesügei was poisoned by the evil Tartars (it was in the Yak's milk!). Abandoned by his clan, Ginghis' family was reduced to eating roots and fish. Ginghis swore, with God as his witness, that he would never be hungry again!

Later, Ginghis would go to claim the woman to whom he was betrothed by his father as a small boy, only to find that she had been kidnapped and ravished by the nefarious Merkit people!  Enraged, Ginghis allied himself with an old blood brother of his father, gathered an army together, and crushed those nasty Merkits like the fiancée-ravishing worms they were! While he was away, the Jürkins, supposedly his allies, plundered his lands! Those Jürks! He squashed them too, and killed every member of the clan taller than a wagon axel, leaving only children and Dr. Ruth Westheimer alive!

Thus Ginghis began his conquering ways. It wasn't all murder and pillage, mind you. Ginghis actually had a plan. It had been the old clan system that contributed to his father's death and which kept the Mongol people set against themselves; Ginghis changed all that by scattering the members of conquered clans amongst his troops, and by arranging those troops into divisions that were arranged numerically rather than by clan. Advancement in the army was thus tied to a soldier's loyalty to Ginghis, not to his former clan; soon enough, everyone was sucking up to Ginghis, and of course he liked that just fine.

By 1206, Ginghis and his highly-regimented not-at-all-a-horde horde was ready to kick some serious non-Mongol booty, and off they went. They were almost all on horseback, which gave them exceptional mobility and range, since all the horses needed to eat was the grass they found on the way to clobbering some poor foes. The Mongols also made use of whatever technology they found; they were extremely happy to use a nation's own knowledge against it. Ginghis himself, despite his current reputation for crazed, baby-eating dictatorship, actually took advice rather well. For example, he had planned to turn the whole of northern China into a horse pasture, until it was pointed out to him that it might be better to raise food there and then profit from the taxes and trade. Only after he made that decision did he eat any babies (no, not really).

It was in fact this combination of ruthlessness and adaptability that made the Mongols the invaders to beat -- literally-- this entire millennium. They were smarter, they were meaner, and they could ride circles around you on their little horses. Their empire ultimately reached from China to the Russian steppes.

(And they would have gotten Japan, too, were it not for a fortuitous typhoon that sunk their attacking ships -- the fabled kamikaze, or "divine wind," which would serve as a motivation for Japanese fighter pilots to ram explosives-laden fighter planes into American battleships in WWII. Alas, it was America who ultimately brought death from the skies, but that's another installment, somewhere down the road.)

The Mongol's problem was that they were better at conquering than they were at actual empire ruling; after the death of Ginghis's grandkid Kubla Khan in 1294, it all sort of fell apart. But who cares? When they knocked on the door, and said "Hi! We're the Mongol Horde!" you just knew they weren't selling magazine subscriptions to work their way through college. It was trouble with a capital "T," and that rhymed with "G," and that stood for "Ginghis." That's what it took to be the best invaders of the millennium, and the Mongols had it, with plenty to spare.

Best Plague of The Millennium.

It's The Plague, that funny little infection we like to call the Black Death -- bubonic plague. Other plagues have killed more people more quickly (just this century, in 1918, a mutated swine flu erupted out of Kansas and killed 25 million in just over a year -- proof we should have quarantined Kansas a long time ago), but none have had, shall we say, the same style and impact. The Black Death didn't just kill people, it pretty much killed off Europe. The continent was out of it for a century, as it struggled to get back to the place it was, economically and intellectually, before the plague knocked off a third of the population. That's right, if it weren't for the plague, we might right now be at the technological level where we could all drive our own rocket cars to the moon! Instead, I'm forced to tool around in a 1989 white Escort. Stupid Black Death.

As a point of fact, it should be noted that bubonic plague was just one version of The Plague -- and, as it happens, the least fatal version at that. What we call The Plague is a bacterial infection that takes on several forms. In the bubonic form, symptoms begin with shivering, vomiting, headache, giddiness, intolerance to light; pain in the back and limbs; sleeplessness, apathy, or delirium. In short, nothing to distinguish the disease from the state of your typical college freshman after his first frat party.

But then come the blackened, festering inflammation of the lymph nodes known as "buboes," which no amount of cheap fraternity beer will cause. Unless your frat typically allows a flea-ridden Norway rat to float in the keg. Which they almost never do anymore. From there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to a massive rise in body temperature, constipation or, alternately and much more grave, diarrhea, and then, you know, death.

Remember, this is the most pleasant version. Worse is the pneumonic plague, in which the victim drowns in his own phlegm and infects everyone around him (bubonic plague is not directly contagious). Even worse than that is the septicemic plague, in which so much of the plague bacillus is dumped into the blood stream that the vessels literally explode. You'd also suffer brain damage, but really, how is that worse than every vein in your body popped open like an over-boiled hot dog? Besides, with septicemic plague, you were dead in a day, anyway. It's not like you were going to use your brain afterwards for a hefty game of Scrabble.

If you were to go back to the 14th Century, easily one of the crappiest centuries around even if you throw out the plague, you'd find that the average European citizen had not the slightest idea of how this plague was getting around. Most chalked it up to God (who as the Old Testament shows us, was always scourging someone or another, because he was God and, darn it, sometimes us humans just really ticked him off) and hid in a barn, never even guessing that it was  the fleas that were passing the disease around. If you had suggested that if they took a bath every once in a while it might help, you'd have received a blank stare and then probably would have been held down while the general population had you pressed to death with stones. Everyone knows that bathing removes that protective layer of grime! What, you want to get everyone killed or something?

Even the more learned minds of the era had not a clue. Advisors to the Pope informed His Holiness that the plague had been the result of a conjunction of  Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius, back in 1345. This conjunction caused warm, moist conditions that allowed the earth to release poisonous gases; essentially, the plague was a case of planetary halitosis (the irony is that this explanation is not entirely out of left field -- scientists today suspect a strong El Nino effect in the 14th Century contributed to milder winters that allowed for easier transmission of the plague. Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, of course, had little to do with it -- or that's what today's "scientists" would have you believe...). The Pope's advisors suggested avoiding meat, sleeping in the daytime, olive oil, and of course, bathing. Nothing about avoiding rats or their pesky fleas.

In Venice, the plague begun the process of quarantine, named for the number of days (40, for those of you who aren't so handy with the Italian) an incoming ship had to stay isolated, presumably to let the plague burn itself out. Over in Germany, they decided to blame the plague on the Jews, and slaughtered 8,000 of them in the city of Strasbourg alone. The Germans also took to self-flagellation as a way to cleanse their bodies and their souls. The  Germans were freaks, particularly since the rest of Europe was going the other direction morally. While the Germans were literally whipping themselves (and the Jews) into a frenzy, everyone else was drinking and partying. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, every one of your blood vessels might explode. It's hard think of a better reason to get down.

At the end of the 14th Century pandemic, 25 million Europeans were dead. It would take 300 years to get the population back up to pre-plague levels (at which time, the plague came around for another bite). The plague took another 10 million or so in China in the late 19th century; all told, plague ate up over 100 million lives this millennium. It's still around, too -- there are a couple thousand cases of the plague worldwide every year, including about a dozen and a half right here in the States (kids, stay away from strange squirrels).

Thanks to such advances as streptomycin, bathing, and the general avoidance of nasty, flea-bearing rodents on a daily basis, the Black Death is not likely to make much of a comeback. But you never know. Right now, Jupiter and Saturn are cozying up to each other just southwest of Taurus; follow the line down, and you'll find Mars, loitering south of Aquila. They're all up there. And that global warming is acting up again. Throw in a vegetarian S&M fetishist with a cat o' nine tails, and the Black Death will be right back in business! Hide in the barn. It's the safe thing to do.

Best Stuffed Toy of The Millennium.

Teddy Bears. Beyond being cute as, well, little tiny stuffed bears, there's also a great story behind how the Teddy Bear got its name. It seems that Teddy Roosevelt was out hunting one day, as that burly, totally manly man did, when he wasn't charging up a hill in Cuba and scaring the hell out of Spaniards, and he came upon a poor, helpless bear cub. A lesser man, say, Ernest Hemingway, would have shot the poor thing and then lied to Gertrude and Alice about how the thing charged him. Because he was covered with honey and salmon. Don't ask.

Not Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy took one look at that wee bear cub, and said, in these exact words (I'm guessing), "Hey, I can't shoot that. It's tiny and defenseless. I will spare its life, and come back when it is bigger and thus able to better defend itself against high-speed chunks of metal, launched explosively from a great distance." Well, word got around how Teddy spared the life of the cub, and a grateful nation, impressed with his wisdom, elected him President and called their little stuffed bears "Teddy Bears" from then on. Although neither of these stopped other people from shooting bear cubs whenever they damn well felt like it.

(Incidentally, Teddy Roosevelt despised being called "Teddy," a fact that might surprise many, but which in fact makes perfect sense. He was President of the United States, after all. He's supposed to have a little dignity. You don't call the leader of the free world by a diminutive. We did that once -- Jimmy Carter -- and look where that got us. Roosevelt's hatred for "Teddy" casts doubt on a second Teddy Roosevelt story about naming the stuffed bears, in which he christens them himself at his daughter's wedding. However, Teddy is responsible for the Maxwell House coffee slogan -- "Good To The Last Drop." That Teddy Roosevelt, he got around.)

From the time of Roosevelt forward, it's hard to think of anyone in the North America or Europe who hasn't had a little stuffed bear at one time of another in his or her life (generally during childhood; the 46-year-old CEO who can't ruthlessly trample a foundering competitor without clutching "Binky Bear" to his Wharton-graduated chest is a rare one indeed). My infant daughter has an even dozen, provided to her at her birth by relatives, friends, and a Kay-Bee Toys whose security was just a little too lax that one day I was short on cash (I'm kidding. It was Toys-R-Us). She's got other stuffed toys, including lions, bunnies, puppies and a vibrating helicopter (it was a gift. I swear). I suspect, however, that none of these will have the staying power of the bears.

Why? At least partially because they have been so popular in the past, and at least as it comes to children's first toys, familiarity breeds success. We all had teddy bears, so our kids will have them too. And of course, there are other nefarious plans at work -- We had to fight to keep Winnie-The-Pooh from metastatizing all over our baby's nursery and becoming a locked-in, just-send-all-your-income-straight-to-Disney theme. Fight, mind you. Now, growing up, we all had other stuffed creatures, too, but none of them have the eternal staying power, the claw hold in cultural memory. Two decades from now, when today's first graders start their cycle of reproduction (Parents: Whatever you do, don't think of your own first-grader reproducing -- on that path lie madness), their children will know nothing about, say, stuffed Pokemons. And, might I add, Thank God.

Anyway, darn it, stuffed baby bears are cuter than any other animal known to man -- so much so that they pose a hazard in real life. Forest rangers are always having to tell people to stay away from bear cubs they might find out there while camping, not so much because of the threat posed by the cub (though if you think about it, your average bear cub is the size of a Rottweiler, and just as much a carnivore), but because wherever a cub might be, a momma bear is sure to follow, weighing half a ton, bearing four-inch claws, and being more than happy to gnaw on your dumb-ass skull if you so much as even breathe in the direction of her darling cub, which of course you've done -- you've had the kids pose next to the thing for a Kodak moment.

It's hard to feel too sorry for these people. Anyone whose brain can't wrap itself around the idea that a wild animal might not be the same complacent stuffed toy they remember from their youth deserves what they get. That's one trait we don't need floating around in the gene pool. Be that as it may, the fact it happens with enough frequency that Fox could fill up an entire hour of television with it ("When Bears Attack Stupid Tourists -- 4!!!") points to the wide-scale influence teddy bears have had. I suppose we ought to be glad Teddy Roosevelt didn't decide to spare the life of a baby Great White.

Best Science Fiction Novel of The Millennium.

Somnium (Dream of a Voyage from the Earth to the Moon). In the book, the hero is launched, with the help of his mother, who has magical powers, to the moon. Here's an excerpt (translated by by computer, with some judicious editing by moi), in which a demonic tour guide (of sorts) describes the precautions necessary for a moon launch, and the effects of weightlessness on the passengers.

"The initial shock is the worst moment, because the traveler is projected as by a powder explosion... It is thus necessary that he is calmed by opiates; arms and legs must be carefully protected so that they are not torn off, and so the effect of the launch is spread in all his body. The passenger will then encounter new difficulties: an extreme cold and difficult breathing...

"After the beginning of the voyage, things become easier, because during a so long voyage, the body undoubtedly escapes the mathematical [read: gravitational] force from the Earth and penetrates that of the Moon, so that the latter takes the top.

"At this point, we release the        travelers        and leave them to their own means: like spiders, they lengthen and retract, and are propelled by their own forces - because the magnetic forces of the Earth and the Moon attracting the suspended body and it together, the effect is as if there were no attraction - so that at the end its mass will turn of its own accord to the Moon."

I know, you've never read it. That's because it was published just  a little before your time. Say, 1634. The author: Johannes Kepler.

Surely you've heard of Johannes Kepler. He was the fellow who, appropriately enough, discovered Kepler's  three laws of planetary motion, in which -- everyone sing along, now:

(1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus;

(2) the time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and  that arc;

(3) there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets' periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits.

Not just the law, but a good idea. Break the laws of planetary motion, and you get a fine, or, alternately, your planet sinks into the hot gaseous bowels of the sun, while you run about, yelling and screaming. Your choice. Hint: Take the fine.

Somnium is a little quaint to read today, but then again, what written in the early 17th Century isn't? Even Shakespeare comes across as a little twee now and again. But for its time, man, it had everything: Wild, fantastic ideas, a breathtakingly original premise, and, of course, that most important part of any novel's publicity cycle: Controversy. This book was so hot that it couldn't be published in Kepler's lifetime. They waited until Kepler was planted four years before they slipped it onto the shelves.

The controversy regarded the mode of propulsion in the story: Magic, provided by his mother, Katharina Kepler. Nowadays, magic is simply a cheap trick employed by lazy writers who don't want to bother with giving the implausible events in their books a reasonable explaination (we generally call these people "fantasy writers," though they are not the only ones -- every time someone in the "Star Trek" universe discovers a new type of sub-atomic particle to get them out of a scrape at the last moment, it's magic!). But back in the 17th century, if you were thought to know anything about magic, you didn't play birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. You were strung up and tortured until you admitted that, why, yes, you and Satan regularly got together to eat children and do the shag nasty. Was there some sort of problem with that?

Which is in fact what happened to Katharina Kepler: Round about 1619, several years after Somnium was initially completed, Katharina was accused and tried for being a witch. Kepler had to travel to Württemberg to defend his mother -- and the reason she was eventually released had less to do with her innocence (and of course she was innocent; like nearly all women charged with witchcraft, Katharina Kepler was at most a screwy old biddy with some practical knowledge of folk remedies) than with the fact that the authorities didn't follow the correct torture procedures ("You idiot! You were supposed to impale her there, not there! Yeeesh!"). Kepler's use of his mother as a convenient mode of space propulsion was not so very convenient for mom.

Moving away from the mommy-whipping consequences of the book and turning to the actual contents, Somnium has some breathtaking leaps of intellect and imagination. When Kepler started work on Somnium, the heliocentric theory (the one that states that planets move around the sun instead of the earth) was still a zany and highly debatable idea, and the minutiae of gravity awaited Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.

Into this scientific void, Kepler lept, and sketched out some tantalizing concepts: Zero gravity, space travel, extraterrestrial life (Somnium postulates a race of creatures living on the moon), the environs of space being cold and, if not airless, at least extremely air-poor. It's not a stretch to say that Kepler was the first person to think about these subjects in a manner that did not involve a late-night astronomer's BS session, fueled by pea-soup thick German beer ("Wow, what if there were, like, people on other planets, man?" "Shut up, Kepler! Wanna be burned at the stake like your mommy?").

This is perhaps also why, even today, some of the best science fiction writers are also scientists in their right, though admittedly, not of Kepler's caliber: Arthur C. Clarke and Issac Asimov, from the "Golden Age" of science fiction, folks like David Brin who are still writing. Like Kepler, these people are right on the precipice of human knowledge, staring out into the inky blackness and wondering what the hell is going on out there, anyway.

You may not have read Somnium, but Jules Verne and H.G. Wells sure did. They were in turn read by the Golden Era authors, who were read by this generation's writers, who will be read, barring the best attempts by the bookstores to sweep new science fiction from their shelves, by the next. Everyone who ponders and then writes about little green men, space travel and the infinite mysteries of space (including, dare I say, myself) share in the DNA of his or her imagination a small chromosomal link to Johannes Kepler, and his dream of a voyage from the earth to the moon. For someone who loves science and science fiction in equal amounts, this is a highly satisfying thought.

Best Crackpot Religious Leader of The Millennium.

Rasputin, and yes, I know, how can I choose Rasputin when L. Ron Hubbard is swinging there, fat and languid, like a low-hanging fruit? Well, for one thing, them Scientologists are a sue-happy bunch. In going after Rasputin, the only people I annoy are the Romanovs, and what are they going to do to me? They're all down a well in Russia.

Besides, unlike L. Ron and his merry band of celebrity-worshipping Thetans, Rasputin actually had power and influence, though not of any good sort. He was the wrong guy at the right place at the wrong time. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Imperial Russia was like a Jenga tower with one supporting strut too few. Rasputin didn't cause the Tsar to fall, but he sure helped to push.

Grigory Rasputin was his own walking warning label. The name "Rasputin," wasn't his name, it was his condition: in Russian, it means "debauched one," and it was given to him after he built up a reputation, at a young age, for being a horny little turd. You would think that being known as "Rasputin" would be a detrimental sort of thing -- I mean, just imagine trying to meet people here if your name was "Greg Pervert" -- but we're talking about Russia. If the last millennium teaches us anything about Russia, it is: For God's sake, don't get into a land war there. But secondarily, it teaches us that the Russians really aren't like the rest of us, and you can take that any way you like.

Rasputin experienced a religious conversion at the age of 18, which one could normally assume would have got him and his horndog ways sorted out. Au contraire. First, he joined a sect known as "Khlysty," which translates, roughly, as "the Flagellants." Not a good first step. Later he chose to pursue the closeness to God that only comes through what Rasputin described as "holy passionlessness," which could only be reached through sheer sexual exhaustion. Or, to put Rasputin's religious philosophy into bumper-sticker form: "Get Laid. See God." This provided Rasputin the theological rationale he needed to hump everything in sight.

Fast forward to 1903. Rasputin is the toast of the St. Petersburg movers and shakers, who, with that sort of spiritual dilettantism that inflicts the bored upper classes everywhere, regarded him the same way celebrities in the 60s regarded their swami, or regard their favorite motivational speaker today. Sure, Rasputin was illiterate and he only bathed once a month, but there sure was something about him (besides the stink).

Within a couple of years, Rasputin had found his way to the Tsar Nikolas II and Tsarina Alexandra, and he endeared himself to them by easing the pain of their hemophiliac son (historians think by a form of hypnosis). He also told them that his destiny was now tied to theirs; without him, they were doomed. The Tsar, never the world's most spineful person, kept him around.

This is when things got bad. By day, Rasputin was the Tsar's spiritual adviser; by night Rasputin wallowed in the orgy pit. People complained. The Tsar had them transferred to Siberia. Finally the Prime Minister presented the Tsar with a formal report on Rasputin's extracurricular activities. The Tsar booted Rasputin for a couple of months, but the Tsarina would have none of that. Rasputin was back, and the best the Tsar could do was shrug and regard Rasputin as his wife's hairy, scary, smelly pet.

World War I broke out, and the Tsar, perhaps wanting to feel like he actually was in charge of something, went to command the army in the field. The Tsarina was left to tend to internal affairs, and stop that snickering. Rasputin was in the background, advising the empress. His advice on political matters was just about as helpful as you might expect any advice coming from an ill-educated, over-sexed religious wacko might be. The Russian nobles, perhaps suspecting that the Proletariat Revolution was on its way and that Rasputin's "advice" wasn't going to do much to help the nobles keep their lands or their heads, decided to get Rasputin out of the way.

And thus it was in late December 1916 that Rasputin found himself at the home of Prince Feliks Yusupov, lured there by the promise that he'd meet someone's very attractive wife (no, really). They fed him poison in tea and in cakes. He gobbled it down and didn't blink. Then they shot him and cut off his instrument of theological enlightenment (no, not his brain. Yeesh). He managed to launch himself out the door. They shot him again, wrapped him in a carpet, and heaved his body into a river. At which point, of course, he died. Let's see you wiggle out of a wet carpet. But he was true to his word; the Romanovs and the rest of the nobility were all dead meat on a stick (in some cases literally) within a couple of years.

The moral of this particular story is, if you're ever the emperor of the largest country on earth, and a strange-looking monk comes by and offers to heal your hemophiliac son, run. Just run. No good will come of it. It's a valuable lesson for us all.

Best Historical Era of The Millennium (Excluding Our Own).

There isn't one. Uniformly and without exception, every single era before this one was pretty much the same from the standpoint of the average person. And the one we're living in now isn't one big happy basket of tropical fruit, either.

Now, let me amend this by saying that the current historical era is doing very well by me. I live in the wealthiest and most intellectually free country that has ever existed on this planet, surrounded by a dizzying array of astounding technical devices, ensconced in a domicile of surpassing comfort (it has cable!). I am overfed, overeducated, overpaid. My greatest physical need is to remember to blink because I stare at a glowing phosphor screen all day. I have all my teeth and limbs. I have to opportunity to bathe every day (and yes, I do just that, thank you very much).

Given the current state of technology -- and some not unreasonable expectations of where that technology is going -- it's not at all unlikely that I'll breeze past the 100-year-old mark. And my infant daughter, who as I write this is cheerfully chewing on a toy designed for maximum educational value, will have everything I have and more.

But, let's be very clear on this, I'm not the average citizen of this crowded, belching globe, and neither, for that matter, are you. If you have the ability to read this, you are more or less like me: Living in a high-technology, high-protein, high-personal-expression zone. The trivia of your life vary from mine, of course, but basically you either are, or have endless opportunities to become, a big stinkin' capitalist pig.

The average human on this planet is not one of the 1% that is currently and blandly clicking his or her way through the Internet. As Kofi Annan is fond of reminding people, half of this planet's six billion human interlopers have never made or received a telephone call, much less are worried about installing a permanent DSL line into the home office.  The average human on this planet is a dirt-poor farmer in China or India, and her life pretty much blows, compared to yours. And it's probably more accurate to say this: The median human on the planet is a dirt-poor farmer in China or India. Which means that underneath her, there's three billion people looking at her and wondering, why can't I have that life? Forget about your life. Your life isn't even on the table.

So, given: The average human's life on this ball of rock isn't a great big grab bag of joy. But also consider: The average life is still a hell of a lot better than it's ever been before. The average person doesn't have a tenth of what you or I have, but he or she has better medical care, better education and a better standard of living than his or her ancestors. Even more personal freedom, if you can believe that (but generally not by much). From this point, it's a simple equation. The present sucks for most people. It is still generally better than any other era before it. Conclusion: For the average Joe, any historical era was a bad era to be in, and the present's only marginally better.

Now, this doesn't mean these people were or are unhappy --  billionaires can be surrounded by every conceivable thing humans have ever thought of and be suicidal depressed, while someone squatting down and sticking a plant into a muddy bog of water can be happy as the proverbial clam. Most people who are not actively starving or being hoisted on an invader's pike are usually fairly content. But being happy doesn't mean the circumstances of your life don't reek.

The problem with history is that it's maybe one hundredth of one percent of what's going on in the world at any one point. History is rife with kings, queens, explorers and inventors. The bulk of the world's population at any time, however, is a bunch of schmoes planting crops and making horseshoes and typing code and asking you if you want fries with that. We see movement and advancement in the course of humanity's stay because we pick up individual events like seashells on the shore and string them together and call the necklace history. Meanwhile, the acres of sand at our feet stays the same.

"As it is now, so it was and evermore shall be" -- well, no, I don't really believe that. The average sad sack benefits from the technological and intellectual advances that make up the bulk of history, just not as much, or as often, as those of us at the top imagine (the flaw in the "trickle-down" theory is implicit in the title -- no one was ever satisfied by a "trickle" of anything). You can go to nearly every spot on the globe and see the vast majority of your brethren living essentially the same lives as their fathers, grandmothers, and ancestors, all the way back to beginning of the agricultural age, with only the occasional television or Bulls jersey thrown into to remind you that you're still here in the 20th Century.

Ask any of these people what historical era they feel it was best to live in, they'd probably look at you like you're nuts. They'd understand the question, of course. They just wouldn't know why you'd possibly think it applied to them.

Best Stupid Piece of Attire of the Millennium.

It's the necktie. Codpieces and drawstring pants come and go, but over the centuries, the necktie and its antecedents persist, hanging about a man's neck like a noose done in a four-in-hand. And unlike, say, the codpiece, which had at least an initial utilitarian purpose, the necktie has never been anything but a pointless strip of cloth, born to dangle and sway and wait for a use. Yank on one, you half expect a ticket to issue forth from the mouth of the wearer, to be validated when you buy some bit of Guatemalan handiwork  from that Crate and Barrel down the street.

In fact, ties can be traced back, like so many pointless things, to the idle vanity of a king. And in this case, the king who knew more about idle vanity than any before or since: Louis XIV, the Sun King. Seems in 1660, Louis was reviewing a regiment of badass Croat soldiers, who wore brightly colored silk handkerchiefs around their necks. Why? Who knows? Maybe the Croats were worried they'd get separated at court and needed some conspicuous piece of clothing to locate each other later, like wayward second-graders on a field trip. Whatever the reason, Louis saw the regiment and their handkerchiefs, and just had to have one: A regiment of badasses, that is, not a handkerchief. He already had some of those.

So he got one, because who was going to tell Louis no, and he called them the "Royal Cravattes" ("cravatte" derived from "Croat" in French) and gave them fancy handkerchiefs for their necks. That was that. The King had spoken. Everyone started wearing ties. If it happened today, the badass Croats could probably sue for copyright infringement. But this was the 17th Century. What were you gonna do.

Men got stupid with the cravats. By the early 1800s, cravats were stuffed around the neck as if the head were being surrounded by tissue for transport in a box. Some guys couldn't move their necks at all; like whiplash victims or HR Pufnstuf, they had to rotate their whole bodies to look around. And some of these boys wore two cravats at the same time; one imagines they needed servants and a system of mirrors so they could navigate the street.

There were a hundred different ways to tie a cravat, some of which could take hours. Perhaps for this reason, fiddling with someone's cravat was a dueling offense, though think about it: If touching someone's tie was bad, how much worse it would be if you got blood on it? Fortunately, no one who would get worked up over a mussed cravat was likely to be missed once his cravat was further mussed by a sword point sticking through it into his carotid.

The best you can say about today's iteration of the necktie is that at least it's not aggressively stupid. One does not wear it wrapped around one's jaw, or more than one at a time. Even the horrifyingly wide ties in the 70s had a rational basis for their lateral expansion --they were merely keeping pace with the expanding lapels of the time. Mocking a 70s tie is purely a case of blaming the victim. They didn't want to go wide. They had no choice.

Be that as it may, it still doesn't take away from the fact that the tie does not now serve, nor has it ever served, any useful purpose. At least bell bottoms and Nehru jackets kept your extremities warm. Tie manufacturers would dispute this assessment of their products' usefulness, of course. But then, cigarette manufacturers used to pawn off their wares to pregnant women.  No industry can be trusted to be an objective observer of its product's place in the universe -- particularly one that has a literal chokehold on the world of men's fashion.

Men simply do not realize that the tie is there at all their major life events. It's there when you graduate from high school and college. It's there at your wedding. It's there at your children's baptisms and bar mitzvahs. And when you die, they stick one on you and, like a pharaoh taking a prized but aggravating cat into the next world, you are both stuffed into the ground together (and the question is: Who is the pharaoh, and who is the aggravating cat?). The only reason men aren't born with ties is the grudging acknowledgement by the tie industry that looping the umbilicus into a Windsor knot around the neck of a fetus might cause brain damage. Which would limit tie purchases later in life.

Tie enthusiasts, the Quislings of men's attire, point out that ties allow for some individuality in an otherwise regimented world of men's business attire. But really, now. It's not individuality ties provide, it's the illusion thereof, and a poor one at that. Wear your Jerry Garcia tie all you want, you still have to file the same reports as Ted, three cubicles down, wearing his $6 poly blend from Sears. A Bugs Bunny tie will not keep the gun-toting ex-co-worker who just shot his way through Accounting from seeing you as any less of an extension of The Man That Kept Him Down. A tie with Edvard Munch's "The Scream" silk-screened upon its narrow width will not stop you from your dark suspicions that The New Guy makes twice what you do, with half the experience. And anyway, you wouldn't wear a single one of those ties to a performance review, so what does that say. Tie enthusiasts also point out that ties accentuate a man's verticality. Well, if you want to accentuate your verticality, go on a freakin' diet, already.

Men wear ties because so far as they know, men have always worn ties; it's what men do. If they knew that the tie got started as the passing fancy of the foppiest of the Great Kings of Europe, it probably wouldn't change a thing; the dress code is always dictated from above. Will they ever stop wearing them? Probably not. The best we can hope for is that ties don't start hampering neck movement again; and that if they do, we can somehow take out those tie wearers before they infect the rest of us. Their peripheral vision would be shot, you know. They would never see it coming.

Best Vision of Hell of the Millennium.

It comes from Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter who lived in the 15th and 16th Centuries (although assuredly, not through them both entirely). Other people wrote about Hell, lectured about Hell, or simply feared it as the inevitable end to their sinful ways. Bosch saw Hell, like Walker Evans saw the Depression, and then reported on what he saw. It wasn't a very cheerful report, but then, what would you expect. Hell's not a resort filled with Payday bars and happy kittens. Unless you're allergic to nuts and cat dander. In which case, that's exactly what it is.

How did Bosch get this preview of Hell? It's not that hard to imagine. Sartre famously said that Hell is other people, and while he was probably directly referring to some annoying waiter at Deux Magots, the line has broader implications. People are flawed, and not in the Japanese sense of wabi, in which a slight imperfection merely accentuates the fundamental perfection of a thing. Wabi is the mole on Cindy Crawford's lip, the wheat bits in Lucky Charms, or the fact that Bill Gates' fortune is owned by him and not you.

No, we're talking about deep-seated incipient screw-upped-ness, the kind that puts you on the news as the helicopter gets a top down view of the police surrounding your home. For most of us, fortunately, it expresses itself in less virulent form, usually a furtive, opportunistic violation of one or more of the seven deadly sins when we think we won't get caught. Coupled with this is the dread knowledge that, not only do we know what we're doing is wrong, but we'll probably do again the next time everyone else's attention is back on the TV. We're all a country song waiting to happen. With that realization comes the grinding sound of Satan's backhoe scraping out space in our brain for another yet Hell franchise (six billion locations worldwide!). Hell is in all of us, not just the ones who use cell phones when they drive. All you have to do is look.

Bosch looked. A pessimist and a moralist (one can hardly be one without being the other), Bosch saw what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and then hit the paint.  His friends and neighbors were no doubt unhappy to learn they were the motivation for Bosch's horrifying and fantastical canvases; It's difficult to live near someone who might paint your face onto a damned creature with Hell's staff fraternizing in what used to be its butt. But there's a story about another painter which could shed some light on what Bosch was doing. Pablo Picasso once painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein, only to have someone comment that Stein looked nothing like the painting. Said Picasso: "She will, soon enough." (And she did). Apply this same reasoning to a picture of yourself with imps in your ass. It might make you think.

Beyond the existential and theological nature of Bosch's work is the fact that, as paintings, they are just so damned cool. Bosch's paintings of Hell influenced two great schools of art: Surrealism and Heavy Metal. Surrealism got off on Bosch's vibrant and innovative use of color and his ability to combine the mundane and the fantastical to make bitter and intelligent social commentary. In fact Bosch had one up on most of the Surrealists in that he actually believed in something; unlike the surrealists and their kissing cousins the dadaists, Bosch's work is rooted in morality rather than running away from it. Bosch wouldn't have painted a moustache on Mona Lisa; he'd've had her devoured by a fish demon as a pointed warning of the dangers of vanity.

Heavy Metal artists dug Bosch, because, dude, he totally painted demons. Without Bosch, we'd have no Boris Vallejo airbrushings or Dio album covers, and it's debatable whether Western Culture would be able to survive their lack.

Some ask, does Bosch's work show Hell as it really is? No less an authority than the Catholic Church suggests that Hell is not so much a location as it is a state of being, an eternal absence of God's grace rather than a place where pitchforks are constantly, eternally and liberally applied to your eyeballs. In which case, Bosch's turbulent colors and troublesome devils are just another picture show, a trifle used to scare the credulous and the dim from indulging their baser instincts, like sex and thoughts on the possibility of even more sex.

It's the wrong question. It's not important that Bosch shows Hell as it truly is; it's entirely possible that, other than a useful philosophical construct, Hell doesn't exist at all. (This does not change the fact that the Backstreet Boys must somehow be eternally punished for their crimes.) But whether it truly exists or not, humans need the idea of Hell, whether it be to scare us into a moral life, comfort the smug ones who believe everyone else is going there, or simply to remind us that the actions of our lives, good or ill, live beyond those lives themselves, and the accounting of them may occur past the day we ourselves happen to stop. Bosch saw the importance of the idea and put it down in oil.

The question is not whether Hell exists, but rather: If we could see our souls in a mirror, rather than our bodies, would they be as Bosch painted them? If they were, we wouldn't have to wait until the next life for Hell. It would already be here.

Best Non-Toxic Creative Tool of the Millennium.

Play-Doh. No one outside the manufacturing process know exactly what this stuff might be made out of (it's not clay! It's not dough! It's somewhere in between!) but just about everyone has eaten some. When you're four years old, and there's five more minutes between you and your cookies and milk, there's only one toy you have that will quell those annoying tummy rumblings. And as an extra bonus, tomorrow, you're going to have a couple of really creative bathroom moments, too! There's no downside. Thank God someone thought to make it non-toxic.

Blame the smell. You pry off the lid of Play-Doh, and that sweet, unidentifiable aroma wafts out. It almost smells like a number of things, many of them yummy. Some people think it smells a little bit like vanilla. Sure, if it's been rubberized; as good as Plah-Doh smells, it also smells identifiably non-food-like. There's something implicit in the Play-Doh Smell that says, "You know, bud, you're not supposed to eat me." Upon further sniffage, however, there's also nothing that says "Nibble on me, and your children will be born with four opposable thumbs." Kids being what they are, that's a green light to drop a ball down the gullet.

Whereupon the big surprise of Play-Doh: It's salty. As an adult, you have to wonder why salt is an ingredient in the stuff. Surely sodium chloride is not being used in its role as a preservative here; hardy sea adventurers did not venture away from sight of land with only Play-Doh and hardtack to sustain them all those months until  they discovered the Pacific Ocean. I think the salt is there specifically to keep kids from eating an entire can of the stuff. Kids will eat anything, but they prefer that anything to be sweet. Salty obsessions come in those teen years. Then kids wolf down Doritos and Sour Cream and Onion chips, which are essentially salt licks for adolescents.

But I've come to praise Play-Doh, not to eat it. Play-Doh is not the only non-toxic creative tool around, after all. If one wished, one could arrange Crayolas into a delightful fan pattern, set a bowl of ranch dressing at the base, and then happily munch away (after the skins had been removed, of course) while watching football or "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." No, Play-Doh has other qualities besides the gustatory. Number one among them is the fact that it's meant to be played with.

Crayons color and paints paint. But Play-Doh is meant to be squished and squooshed and, if you're up to it, made into something else. You can't squish and squoosh your crayons, at least not without the use of a heating element, like an oven or an open flame. And of course that's a big no-no. Now, everyone once and a while a kid will make his or her finger paints into a facial mud pack. But it's not usually intended expressly as such (it's just what it turns out to be). Crayons and paints and markers are conduits; the flow of activity goes through them. They are the means, not the ends.

Now take Play-Doh. I mean that literally -- you pick it up, and make a tight little fist and let it ooze through your fingers. Kids spend hours just poking it and squashing it, making little balls of the stuff and then slamming them into thin primary color pancakes (and then eating them). It's tactility with a purpose; once you realize you can do just about anything with Play-Doh, you start thinking about what you can make with Play-Doh.

What a moment! God made Adam from the dust of the Earth, a sort of primordial Play-Doh, if you will, although it came in only one color (muddy brown). When little Bobby or Susie sets down to make that first Play-Doh person, it's a moment that recapitulates that first Divine Inspiration. Let's hope Bobby and Susie's Play-Doh planet is a happier and more peaceful than the one we've got. One suspects that God's modeling substance had more than one toxic substance in it; it would explain a lot about people. If God had made Adam out of Play-Doh, I don't know that we'd be better, but I do know this: When we'd sweat, we'd smell like vanilla.

The makers of Play-Doh have come out with a lot of different Play-Doh Fun Toys, in which you press the Play-Doh into pre-existing forms or ooze them through holes to make "hair" or whatever. I don't much like these. Some of these playsets are simply ill-advised; the fellow who thought up the Play-Doh McDonaldland Playshop has forgotten that to a kid, a non-toxic modeling substance turned into a McDonald's fry is now actually a fry, ready to be consumed (it's already got salt!).

More to the point, it's limiting to the Play-Doh. Play-Doh was meant for finer stuff than to be extruded into fries or hair. It's meant to be played with as is: A lump of not-clay, not-dough lying in the hand of a kid, its possibilities limited only by the imagination of the child. And by the amount the child has remaining, after that first exploratory bite.

Best Domesticated Animal of the Millennium.

It's the cat, and I really don't want to hear from you doggie folks about it. As the owner of both a dog and a cat, I willingly concede that were I on a desert island with no other sort of companionship, and were given a choice between my dog and my cat, I'd go with the dog. The dog  is friendlier, more fun and, most importantly, has a quite bit more meat on her frame than the cat (come on, people. If you're stuck on a desert island, it's not because you want to be there).

But dog owners should also concede that by and large, it's been a pretty good millennium for their favored pet. The Ed McMahon to our Johnny, the Paul Allen to our Bill Gates, the Captain to our Tennille, dogs have prospered inordinately from their relationship with humans over the last thousand years. Dozens of breeds have shot out of the dog's disturbingly plastic gene pool, gracing us with animals that range in size from handbag to a Volkswagen Beetle yet which are all supposedly the same species (does anyone really think that would stop a Rottweiler from eating a Chihuahua? Drop the chalupa, indeed). There've been a few episodes of human bad behavior concerning dogs over the last thousand years, yes, usually coinciding with a war so devastating that it reminded folks that Man's Best Friend was wearing a fur coat, which it wouldn't need after it was fried up right nice. By and large, however, it's been smooth sailing.

The same cannot said about the cat. The cat has spent a goodly chunk of the last thousand years being killed in depressingly creative ways by the very humans who were benefitting from its presence. These deep valleys of feline persecution were interrupted by wan peaks of enthusiasm: by the sailors, who valued the cat's companionship on long voyages, and by millers and other folks who stored grain, and were thus happy to see someone killing all those rats. But mostly, for the cat, this second millennium was all about being kicked.

Who to blame? Christianity (which I've noticed is responsible for quite a lot of things this millennium, actually). Seems that when Christianity was busy sweeping across the European continent in the millennium previous to this one, one of the ways it would compete with other religions would be to demonize the deities of those religions -- a perfectly logical course of action when one is trading in monotheism, of course. If your god is the only god, then all those other gods have to be, well, you know, false idols and all that. Thus the former gods fell into disfavor, as did their accouterments.

Including cats. Cats were intimately associated with the Norse goddess Freya, who you might know from her association with the last day of the work week (that's right, thank a Goddess it's Friday).  Freya was surrounded by cats everywhere she went, and her wain was pulled by two very large and one assumes somewhat tractable cats. Cats also played a role in her religious ceremonies. You can see what's coming. Freya was relegated to a demon (the world's first "crazy cat lady"), and all those cats, her cute and furry little demonic friends, were labeled "familiars," conduits to the "To Do" list of ol' Scratch himself.

Cats were in such bad odor during the medieval times (ironic, considering innate cleanliness of the cat, and general stink of the humans of that era) that it's been estimated that the cat population of Europe decreased 90% as people killed them, quick and slow. Some cats were even tried as witches, and you can see how unfair that would be to the cat. It clearly couldn't speak in its defense, and if it could, it would just be bolstering the prosecution's case.

Europe paid for its crimes. You've probably heard about a little something called the Black Plague; the Plague was transmitted by fleas, which used rats as their public transportation system. Normally the cats would kill the rats, but all the cats were busy dying or being interrogated by the Inquisition. Rats had free rein, the fleas infected humans, and humans died horrible stench-filled deaths. Call it Freya's revenge.

Cats clearly could not have stopped the plague from coming, but they probably could have limited its impact by eliminating a main vector of infection. In fact, that's what they did: in all the zaniness and hub-bub surrounding the Black Death, people were too busy counting their buboes and their days to worry about slaughtering cats. The cat population went up and went after the rats (who, as you might imagine, were doing very well in those days); the rat population went down and with it the main avenue of plague transmission. Did the humans thank the cats afterwards? Hell, no. As soon as they were feeling better, they went back to their cat-burning ways. Stupid humans.

People eventually stopped their wholesale cat extermination policy, although felines were still never entirely trusted. Start with the black cat superstitions and move to the one about cats sucking the life out of babies and you've got yourself an animal who is even now on humanity's "double secret probation" list -- one false move and it's back to the stake with them. And don't think they don't know it. Cats are famously standoffish, but maybe that's just because they've learned the value of a running start when it comes to dealing with humans.

Admittedly, cats often don't help their case. They're not pack animals like dogs, designed down to the genetic code to follow the leader. Your dog would follow you off a cliff, because if it's good enough for you, it's good enough for him. As opposed to your cat, who would watch you all the way down, staring at you like you're the dumbass you so obviously are. Your cat likes you and may even love you (depending on how well it's fed). That doesn't mean it's going to back you up on every damn fool move you make. Cats have their own agenda, and while it's generally simple (eat, sleep, kill something its own size or smaller), it doesn't mean it's any less important than yours.

It's this element of cat nature (combined with the fact people have pretty much stopped believing cats are the Devil's own furry telephone into this world) that have finally given cats an edge in this last half of the 20th Century. We're all somewhat more independent these days, less inclined to follow the leader. The cat has the attitude of the age, and that's why this beleaguered animal has managed, finally, to make it to the top of the heap. Don't think your cat's not enjoying it. Don't think your cat is under the illusion it will last, either. More than any other animal, the cat knows the danger of human nature.

Best Buddy Team of the Millennium.

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Sorry to disappoint all of you who were rooting for Shields and Yarnell.

What does it take to be a successful buddy team? Well, as years of violently formulaic motion pictures tells us, you need at least a couple of the following elements:

a) One "buddy" has to be older and established, the other young and brash. At least one of the two has to be a loose cannon; usually the younger one, but the older one will do in a pinch. Sometimes the two buddies can be the same age, but one has to act older.

b) The "buddies" have to hate each other in the beginning but eventually develop a grudging respect for each other and their abilities, which usually involve guns or martial arts.

c) The buddies undertake a long and arduous quest (or police investigation) together.

d) The two "buddies" bicker like an old married couple, leading to the inevitable intimations of homoerotic undertones, even when the buddies are in fact of the opposite sex. Hey, I'm not making up the rules. I'm just telling you what they are.

Thus, we are provided with any number of famous buddy teams: Riggs and Murtaugh. Mulder and Scully. Spock and Bones. C-3PO and R2D2. Bert and Ernie. Any two members of the Superfriends, mixed and matched. But these, of course, are fictional folks. It's much harder to match up these qualities with real people (real people being more complicated than fictional people for some unexplainable reason). Yet Johnson and Boswell had it all. They were a true 18th century dynamic duo. Just look at what they were like, when first they met in 1763:

Johnson: The grizzled veteran of the 18th century intellectual wars, famous thoughout London for both his rapid fire wit and his hulking physical presence. He could take you to town intellectually and then throw you the hell out of the saloon! Sure, he was a loose cannon in his younger days, but when you were a Tory during a Hanoveran monarchy, you had to back up your politics with your fists! Now Johnson has received a 300-pounds yearly stipend from the King, "not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done," notes Prime Minister Lord Bute. A symbol of gratitude from a nation...or hush money from the higher ups? Johnson will take the money. Hey! He's got drinking to do! But he'll never quell his wild intellect -- not even for the King!

Boswell: The new kid in town with something to prove! He's ditched dusty old Edinburgh for the glitzy lights of London -- but not before cutting a swath through the ladies! In London, he hung out with some pretty radical dudes, like Oliver Goldsmith and John Wilkes. They were young, they were wild, they didn't want to just wait around for the old guard to die! When you're 22, smart, and have a way with the ladies... who's gonna stand in your way?

The two have their first meeting at in the parlor of actor Thomas Davies. Did they get along? As if!

Boswell (knowing Johnson has poor opinions of Scots): Mr. Johnson,  I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.

Johnson: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.

Zing! They spend the rest of the evening quarreling about actor David Garrick and other issues, and then Johnson, easily stomping Boswell's young and silly head, takes his leave. Notes Thomas to Boswell, with perfect ironic timing (he is an actor): "I can see he likes you."

But Boswell is not dissuaded. He calls on Johnson a few days later, and from there a friendship begins, one full of bickering, zany adventures in bars, and even an extended trip together to the Hebrides, a frosty island chain in the north of Scotland. Any screenwriter worth his salt would have concocted a mystery for them to solve while they were there ("Johnson and Boswell came for relaxation. They got framed for murder. Now they're fighting back...and this time, it's personal."). But mostly they just ate and drank themselves silly, and kept the blazing gunfights to a minimum.

But it was more than just friendship (and no, not in that way), since Boswell, unbeknownst to everyone at the time, was an inveterate diarist. For the next 21 years, until Johnson dies in 1784, Boswell commits every bon mot that passes from Johnson lips to memory, goes home and scribbles it down. Boswell's not merely a sycophant with a detailed memory: His diaries project a sense of documentary immediacy. You are there when Johnson whacks at Boswell when they first meet. You are there while Johnson deconstructs the literary lights of his day, from Alexander Pope to Colley Cibber (who between them had their own little literary tiff, of which we shan't concern ourselves with, except to say -- mrrrow, girlfriends. Just get yourselves a room, already). You are there when Johnson does just about anything, and Johnson comes through bigger than life and twice as natural.

Boswell's diaries are so good that Boswell himself ends up looking bad. When Boswell published his diary entires, first in 1785 with The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and then in 1791 with his magnum opus The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell makes Johnson look good in part by exposing his own weaknesses of personality as a natural part of the narrative. He was observing himself observing Johnson -- just the sort of thing Norman Mailer would do 150 years later, though Mailer wouldn't bother trying to pair up with another literary light (Mailer and his fists! That's the buddy team, pal!). This made people think that although Boswell's books were excellent, the author himself was something of an ass. It's not entirely incorrect (Boswell was a loud, messy drunk, among other things), but it's still mean.

Johnson and Boswell had their own separate lives independent of each other of course -- Johnson in particular, as he went some 54 years before even meeting Boswell. But the two are now indisputably tied together. It's Boswell's doing, of course (and good for him, as otherwise he'd be only a minor literary figure instead of the pre-eminent diarist of the 18th Century), but Johnson's reputation certainly didn't suffer out of it. Their relationship ended up making the both of them look good. And ultimately, that's what being a buddy team is all about.

Best Personal Hygiene Products of the Millennium.

Feminine hygiene products. Toothpaste and underarm deodorants are very well and good. But we don't bleed from the teeth and armpits five days every month.

This is a difficult topic for me to write about. There are several reasons for this, but primary among them is simply that I'm a man. Men are not mentally equipped to handle menstruation. I don't mean this in the sense that we all rush for the remote when the tampon ads are on television. Avoiding those ads is just common sense. No one should be expected to believe that any woman is that cheerful about tampons. It'd be like a man, wide-eyed and smiling, extolling the virtues of medicated, cottony swabs for testicular herniations.

No, when I say men are not mentally equipped to handle menstruation, I mean that there is no parallel in the male experience. Men simply do not bleed from their genitals on a regular basis. We can't even imagine it. Suggest to a man that his equipment should hemorrhage for five out of every 28 days, and he will instantly drop to a fetal position, clutch his tum-tum and scream for mommy (who, of course, would have no sympathy whatsoever). This is not to say that men can't grasp the concept of menstruation. We're aware it happens. It just fills us with a confused and holy terror, like Australopithecenes confronting the Monolith.

Be that as it may, it's just a physical process, and a messy one at that. Something had to be done. Or did it? The most amazing thing about feminine hygiene products is not what they do, but the fact that they weren't commercially available at all until well into the 20th Century. This is astounding to me; after all, the onset of human menstruation didn't suddenly occur in tandem with the rise of the radio. What were women doing before then?

Various things. As early as the second millennium BC, Egyptian women were fashioning crude tampons out of available materials. Polynesian cultures created "menstrual huts," in which women would retire for their interim. The "hut" concept is not exclusive to island paradises; similar huts pop up everywhere from the Caucus Steppes to New Guinea (New Guineans, incidentally, having a very complex and disturbing relationship with menstruation; among other things, the men in certain New Guinean tribes would practice genital mutilation, the aim being to imitate the menstrual flow. Women, that sound you hear is the soft thump of every man reading this falling to the floor and clutching his groin in sympathetic pain). Mostly, however, women made do, using natural sponges, rags or other absorbent materials. In the 19th century, reusable cotton pads came into existence, but, you know, ick.

Then World War I, and the discovery by nurses that a super-absorbent type of cellulose fiber designed to bandage soldiers also made an excellent menstrual pad (blood is blood). Kimberly-Clark, the makers of the cellulose bandages, decided to market the pads, and thus Kotex was born. And almost died, when it was discovered that women of the time were so mortified at the concept of asking their pharmacists for menstrual pads that they would rather go without. Finally, someone came up with the concept of the "honor box" -- A woman could discreetly go to a box, drop in a nickel, take the pad (in an unmarked box) and walk away as if nothing ever happened. Clearly this is a far cry from today, in which women are shown on television celebrating the existence of "wings."

Commercial tampons followed the introduction of the pads in the 20s and 30s, though there was some trial and error: Not only did the first tampons not have applicators (that wasn't standard equipment until 1936), some of them didn't even have strings. I'm cringing just thinking about it. The manufacturers were apparently also blissfully unaware of the bacterial danger of leaving a tampon in too long; the copy of one early tampon box notes that one wearer left hers in for 48 hours with no ill effects. One wonders if it was the 49th hour that killed her.

Not all feminine hygiene products were of such utility and usefulness. As with so many other products women use, some feminine hygiene products seem designed specifically to intimate to a woman that walking around in a natural state is tantamount to scaring babies and dogs. Specifically, I'm referring to feminine odor products, in which the menstrual order is played up to be the closest thing to raw sewage that ever came out of a person's body, and never mind the actual raw sewage located one orifice south.

One memorable 1948 ad shows a husband stalking out the door while the wife cowers in a chair, weeping. "Why Does She Spend Her Evenings Alone?" the ad asks. The answer: Because she's stinky. You know what I'm saying here (although the putative solution -- Lysol, of all things -- hardly seems much better; if ever there was a place for "minty not medicine-y," this is it). The irony of this is that in 18th Century France, for one, menstrual odor was thought to be seductive, 'impregnated with subtle vapors transmitted by the essence of life,' according to a commentator of the time. This assessment has to be tempered by the fact we're talking both about the 18th Century (as stench-filled a century as there's ever been) and France, a place full of underbathed people who regularly eat cheeses that smell like gangrenous feet. Still, the point is yet in evidence: Normal menstrual odor is not nearly the worst thing to come out of one's body.

Odor products aside, feminine hygiene products allowed women more control of their bodies, and as an extension, more control of their lives. This is something to which most hygiene products don't aspire; most hygiene products merely make you cleaner. And while there's nothing wrong with that (quite the opposite, in fact), in the race for the millennium's best hygienic products, there's really no contest. So, three cheers for the tampon and the sanitary pad.

And now, you'll excuse me. I need to go and shiver uncontrollably for a couple of hours. I'm just a man, after all.

Best Condiment of the Millennium.

Mayonnaise. What, you thought I was going to give it to catsup? Catsup is vile stuff, I tell you -- originally made from fish brine. Yes, fish water. Enjoy that on your fries. These days in America catsup refers exclusively to the tomato variety (thus the lame "Isn't 'tomato catsup' redundant?" crack from the ill-educated posing as the ironic), but in the rest of the world, you'll find catsups made from mushrooms, oysters and unripened walnuts. And here you thought catsup couldn't get any worse.

Well, okay, you say, but mayonnaise isn't any better. Off-white and pasty, it's an ill-flavored goo that's somehow managed to nudge its way into our food supply. Its provenance is unreliable; most of us know it's made from eggs, but we couldn't tell you the process, except to suggest that the eggs that are used to make mayo are being karmically punished. This is what you get for carrying salmonella in the last life.

And then there's the consistency: Not quite a liquid and not quite a solid. It's like humiliated gelatin. There's actually a scientific word for materials in this state -- thixotropic -- and mayonnaise shares this state with quicksand and drilling mud. And you wouldn't want to put either of those on your sandwich.

Granted. Mayonnaise can be a horrifying concoction. With the possible exception of headcheese (the normally discarded parts of animal carcasses, suspended in their own disturbingly sinewy aspic -- big in Scandinavia, which goes to explain the unusually high suicide rate) there is no single foodstuff as nauseating as warm mayonnaise. My gag reflex goes to DEFCON 3 just thinking about it.

And yet. Mayonnaise has a secret -- indeed even noble -- past. Like Eastern European royalty, ejected from their palaces by the glorious peoples' revolution and forced to live the remainder of their lives in genteel poverty in a New York hotel, hocking their jewels headpiece by brooch, their princelings attending -- the horror! -- public schools, mayonnaise has come far, far down in the world. There was a moment, not entirely shrouded in the mists of time, when mayonnaise was a celebrated sauce, and not just some glop designed to ease sandwiches through peristaltic motion.

The time was 1756. The place: Mahon, a city on the Spanish island of Minorca. The occasion: The capture of the city by the forces of Louis-Francois-Armad de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, and the expulsion of the hated English from that place (what were the English doing on a Spanish island? Hey, it's Europe). After a hard day beating the crap out of the English, Louis decided it was time to celebrate and ordered his chef to whip up a feast.

The chef decided to make a cream sauce for the meats he was making, but then discovered, to his horror, that there was no cream to be found. Sacre bleu! Showing the improvisatory spirit that can only be brought on by sheer panic, the chef grabbed some eggs and some vegetable oil, put them together, grabbed a wisk, and begun to pray. The result: Mayonnaise, named for the captured city. You decide whether God truly answered that prayer.

The French, perversely, celebrated the discovery, and used it for the basis of a number of sauces and dishes. Mayonnaise verte, with puréed green herbs. Sauce rémoulade, with anchovies, pickles, and capers. Chaud-froid, created when mayo meets aspic. Sauce aoli from Provençal, where the secret ingredient is garlic -- and love! It was the taste for aristocratic palates -- at least until those palates were severed from the rest of the digestive system during the French Revolution.

Mind you, even today, you can still find mayonnaise used for its first and most elevated purposes. But those moments are few and far between. Most mayonnaise will suffer a far more prosaic fate. Some will be tarted up as a salad dressing, perhaps Russian (so named because the first versions featured caviar), or Green Goddess. It's like mayonnaise in drag. There's no shame in it, though, and at least it's far better than being slathered on a Whopper somewhere on Interstate 10, where your fate is to be consumed in wolfing bites by a speed-ragged trucker who would think that Chaud-froid is that penis-envy dude, were he to think of it at all. Which he wouldn't.

Oh, yes, mayonnaise has pride. You think of it only as a thick, gummy paste designed to hold your Wonder Bread in place, but it's known better days. It was meant for finer things than to be a Belgian dipping sauce for french fries (really, what the hell is wrong with those Belgians?). It is painfully aware that adding a dash of paprika during a late stage of processing does not, in fact, make it a "mirace whip."

And yet, it suffers in silence, accepting your derision. It knows it's not your fault. The American educational system has no place for the secret history of mayonnaise. It's accepted its fate with dignity. Mayonnaise does not weep for what could have, should have been. It's happy just to do its job, quietly. Go ahead and use it in your macaroni salad. Sure, it's no lobster mayonnaise. But beggars can't be choosers.

Best Thing to be Thankful For of the Millennium.

That you are who you are, where you are, when you are. You probably won't agree with this tomorrow, when you'll be just another schmoe traveling on the day before Thanksgiving. In fact, as you sit in your coach seat, breathing stale, dry airplane air and listening to the non-stop squalling of the angry, angry infant in the row directly in front of you, dreading the inevitable loss of your bags if and when your plane is ever allowed to land, you'll probably wish you were anyone else, anywhere else, anytime else. But you'll be missing the bigger picture. It's hard to maintain perspective when the horizon consists of a plastic tray lodged into the back of an airplane seat.

And the bigger picture is that you are doing just swell. Probably better than any of your ancestors at your age (even mom and dad), and certainly better than the vast majority of humanity as it has existed at any time. In the "Best Historical Era of the Millennium" segment, I argued that for the average human being, all historical eras were pretty much equal (and pretty much equally bad). However, I also pointed out that the average human being on this planet is a dirt-poor Chinese farmer. Chances are very good you are not he or she (very few dirt-poor Chinese farmers have an Internet connection).

It's true: You are not average. Well, maybe you are -- in the context of the United States and Canada (and let's throw in Western Europe and Japan, just to be fun). But that's being average for the top 10% of the world: Combined, US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe have 600 million people in them. That's exactly 10% of the world's population -- and the top 10% in terms of income, education, nutrition and health care, life expectancy, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. Being average in this group puts would put you in the 95th percentile for the entire planet. You're getting an "A" and you're not even trying.

And the fact is, you're probably doing better than that -- Internet access still correlates with better education and higher wealth, and all the fringe benefits that come with those items. Go on, admit it -- you're on top of the world! You big fat cat, you. Sure, sometimes you experience problems. Everyone does, even Bill Gates (and these days, especially Bill Gates). But I'd be willing to bet that given the choice between your problems and, say, starving to death in Eritrea because battling warlords won't let a UN convoy of People Chow get through to your village, you'd pick your problems. Even your issues are better than most everyone else's. You hardly deserve a hug.

What you are experiencing has been true for the top echelons of every historical era; by and large, life is always better when you're well-off and educated. Be that as it may, even for the comfortable and thinking, this historical era is far better than any that came before it. Let me prove it by using a fine example of indolent late 20th-century fat slob and show the many ways he would be dead or miserable in any other age (I'll pick the 1600s, just for convenience, and assume more or less the same station in life). That 20th-century fat slob is -- of course! -- my own egregiously undeserving self.

First, naturally enough: Birth. All my mother's children lived to adult years, which certainly wouldn't have happened in the 17th century -- up until the dawn of the 20th century, one child in five was lost to infant mortality and childhood diseases. Of course, my mother would have had eight or so children instead of the three she had, because it was her duty and there wasn't any reliable birth control. Provided she lived long enough to squirt out that many kids; in those days, women died in childbirth in numbers that are nothing short of horrifying.

Fast forward to my tenth year, when I broke my leg (I had a fight with a car. I lost). I broke both bones in the lower right leg. They doped me up real good and set the bones. In the 1600s, of course, there was no anesthesia; in order to set by bones back then, five 200-pound men would have had to sit on my chest and extremities in order to keep me still while the doctor maneuvered the ones into place. In my break, aside from scrapes, the skin was unbroken; mildly lucky now, but back then, it would have been a minor miracle. Broken skin would have almost certainly caused the wound to get infected. Given the general hygiene of the 17th century (it was a festering pit) and poor state of medical technology, I would be a goner likely as not.

Jump again to my 18th year, when I slam my face into a door at college, snapping off the bottom half of my front tooth. I cursed my stupidity, and then went to the dentist to get the thing capped. In the 17th century, of course, there were no caps and not much in the way of dentists (they were often barbers -- the traditional red and white barber pole is a memory of those days, the colors representing bandages before and after dental surgery). I would be stuck looking like Jethro until the tooth rotted out of my skull. Which wouldn't have taken very long, since they weren't exactly selling toothbrushes down at the market.

Also, I probably wouldn't have gone to college. It presumes literacy at the very least, and there'd be only a fifty-fifty chance of that. Hell, it's not like I or anyone I'd know would actually own a book, except -- possibly -- a bible. If I was lucky, I'd be an apprentice to a trade and doing what amounted to slave work for several years (oddly enough, this practice continues in academia; the poor bastards are known as "grad students").

If I were unlucky, I'd be off killing and being killed by some foreign person in a war of dubious value. I'd almost certainly be killed; I'm nearsighted and without glasses being widely available, I wouldn't be very good at noticing that archer lining up his shot 35 yards away. And if I wasn't killed on the field, I'd die of my wounds (which, historically speaking, have always killed more soldiers than the actual battles).

I'm 30 now, which in the 1600s would make me, if not exactly old, certainly getting up there -- the life expectancy right up to the 20th century was in the mid-30s, thanks to childhood mortality, disease, war, plague and the general crappiness of the age. I'd certainly look older than I do now -- life was harder then. Frankly, if I were back in the 1600s, the only thing I'd have to be thankful for was that I wasn't born a woman. As bad as the men had it, the women had it, oh, much, much worse.

You might say that in comparison to past ages, people today are soft -- that we at the top of the human pyramid have it far too easy. Well, yes; yes we do. Personally, I like to think that my ancestors wouldn't have it any other way, and that if they still exist in some spiritual plane, that they look down and see me typing away and think to themselves: Amazing. 30 years old and he still has all his teeth. They wouldn't think of me as soft for having those teeth (quite the opposite, in fact).

So be thankful you're here now. For an admittedly small number of us on the planet, it's the best time ever to be alive. And if you feel mildly guilty about that (why should you have it easy, when all your ancestors died at age 35, with bare gums?) then do this: Do what you can so that when your great-grandchildren ten times removed look back at today, they wonder how we could have possibly survived in such savage, unkempt times.

Best "Little" Invention of the Millennium.

Punctuation. It is perhaps the epitome of what should be regarded as a "little" invention (a category whose criteria I am forming as I write this, assuring that it will be exactly so): It's something you almost certainly do not think about on a day-to-day basis, but whose presence you would also almost certainly miss if it were to disappear tomorrow. without punctuation and that includes capital letters nottomentionspacing things would become substantially more difficult to read its amazing that civilization managed to get through a couple thousand years without it at all or managing it haphazardly at best

Or perhaps not. Punctuation assumes people want to be able to read things; the desire to read assumes literacy. For most of our time here on Earth, most people couldn't read (even now, I'd guess global literacy hovers at the 50/50 mark); for these people punctuation is beside the point, like a slide rule would be to 13th century Bedouins.

For those that could read, what punctuation there was, up until the 17th century, was used exclusively for pacing oratory. Up until that time, most things written down were meant to be declaimed in some manner or another; punctuation marks told you when to pause or to take a breath (people who declaim for a living would otherwise talk until their lungs collapsed. Confirm this by chatting up a stage actor sometime). A comma was a short pause, a semi-colon longer still; and a colon the longest pause of all: It still works that way, of course, though each of these marks carries added responsibilities. Should you ever riff through your Shakespeare, use these marks as your guide as you orate. You will instantly become a better Shakespearian actor (this does not mean you will become a good Shakespearian actor. Just better).

Thus some mild irony in the fact that our current understanding of punctuation comes from a contemporary of Shakespeare, and indeed, his closest literary competitor at the time: Playwright Ben Jonson, whose posthumously published English Grammar codified the concept of syntactical punctuation. Beyond allowing actors an infusion of oxygen, it also allowed for clarity in the written language though use of punctuation to demarcate important stops, detours and reroutings of thought. One wonders how Jonson would feel knowing that hardly one English speaker in five hundred could name one of his plays (Volpone -- there, now you're one of them), but that every time one of us scrawls a sentence, we're doing it according to his basic precepts. Literary immortality is a strange and fickle mistress.

But you take immortality where you may. And in this case, it's a practical immortality; these days a writer measures his or her punctuation as much as he or she measures words. Indeed, how one uses punctuation is often as indentifiable a mark of a writer's personal style as how he or she strings his words together. The famous San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was famous for his ellipses....which gave the impression that his collection of random sentences were somehow related to each other...even when they were not....meanwhile, Hemingway rarely used anything but a period because his terse biting prose so compactly entered the mind that other punctuation was not necessary. (Or so he thought.) Readers may be able to discern some habits of punctuation even in my own writing; for example, I am inordinately fond of semi-colons (not to mention parentheses).

This is not to say punctuation has been set in stone since the 17th century. Just as we don't wander about speaking Shakespeare's English on the street (unless we're theater geeks, in which case we should prepare to be beaten on by the jocks during lunch break), neither do we punctuate exactly as we did in the past. Punctuation is still on the move, as each era and medium places its own mark (get it? Huh?) on the format. In the 18th century, for example, every subordinate clause, and separable phrase, was separated by a comma, whether, in fact, the sentence, as a whole, needed that many commas, or not. This may explain why so much writing of the time gives modern readers a headache; reading it is like driving a car solely by popping the clutch.

During the first part of the 20th century, no less than George Bernard Shaw suggested an overhaul of punctuation, advocating the abolishment, for example, of apostrophes in contractions. That's one idea we haven't moved on very much. It's a shame, ain't it.

The online medium is a perfect example of how punctuation is transmuted and added to: Online, the traditional indentation at the beginning of a paragraph has all but disappeared, replaced by the new method of entering a line break after each paragraph (This only makes sense. Paper costs money to print on, so indentation rather than line breaks in print is an economic consideration. Electronically, of course, there's no worries on that score).

And then there are "emoticons" and "smileys," the sideways representations of grinning faces :-). Many people (myself included) believe that the emoticon is a sign of the apocalypse, as well as further proof that outside of snarky television commercials, we're living in an increasingly irony-free world where fake-happy little expressions aim to rob us all of our dignity. It's only a matter of time before the first layoff order with emoticons is sent to some poor white collar drone ("Due to budget constraints, you've been terminated. Sorry! :-( ") in an attempt to forstall the subsequent disgruntled shooting spree. God forbid the North Koreans ever figure out what emoticons are for. We'd all be dead meat ("We've just sent a nuke into Seoul! >;-P ").

Even so. One stupid use does not the whole category condemn; the advantages of punctuation on the whole outweighs the emoticon, asinine as it is  (or using the exclamation mark excessively! Which happens more often than it should! Because people want to make their sentences seem more exciting than they are! It's a hateful thing!). You might disagree that punctuation deserves this honor; certainly the paper clip, or Pez, or the mute button, deserve due consideration. On the other hand, think of it this way. If there was no such thing as punctuation, would you actually bother to sit through an entire essay on any of those subjects?

Neither would I. And I write the stuff.

Best 15 Minutes of Fame of the Millennium.

Monica Lewinsky. And if you don't think she deserves it, let's see you provoke a constitutional crisis using only a pizza, a thong, and an oral cavity.

Yeah, I didn't think so. Besides, and this is the point that tips the award in Monica's favor, she wasn't looking to be famous. This is opposed to most recipients of a quarter hour of limelight, whose lives up to that moment of dubious glory are often tales of grotesque hunger for adoration, the back and shoulders of all who've known them bearing the claw marks of where they were grabbed, hooked and used for climbing. In contrast, all Monica wanted was a job at a cosmetics firm and a boyfriend. Sure, that boyfriend just happened to be the (married) President of the United States. But that's not her fault. Anyway, Harold Ickes wasn't interested. What else could she do.

Monica's main problem wasn't that she was a gold digger, or a backstabber, or yearned for fame at any cost, but that she was needy and naive. Her naiveté is amply documented in her choice of friends; Linda Tripp was a friend to her like Neville Chamberlain was a friend to the Sudetenland.

As for the needy aspect, thanks to the emergence of that really icky pony-tailed former teacher of hers, who seemed to appear purely to enter his name publicly in the Bill Clinton "Six Degrees of Penetration" game, we're all intimately aware of Monica's "daddy" complex, her unfortunate need for intimacy with older guys in a position of authority (Child of divorce? Oh, my, yes). The thing about daddy complexes, however, is that while the younger women are looking for intimacy, the older men are usually just looking to have sex with someone who doesn't sag  (Why did Bill Clinton have sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter? Because he could, you silly). Monica was either too young or idealistic to clue into that; she really thought Clinton gave a damn about her thoughts on education.

(The other option is that Monica was simply too dumb to figure out, but I reject that. I don't think she's dumb; the White House, whatever other flaws it has, doesn't hire chimps as interns. There have to have been some brains in the package, just not ones that were working very clearly. In any event, in the realpolitik grand scheme of things, who was showing fewer brains: The woman who had sex with the most powerful man in the world, or the man who had sex with an intern?)

None of Monica's flaws should have been enough to launch her into the spotlight. Certainly there are millions of needy folks with bad friends who live in terminal obscurity, and in retrospect Monica would probably have been happy to be one. But as they say, location is everything. Had Monica stayed in Los Angeles and become the pet of a movie executive, no one would have cared; she might have got a production deal out of it. Had Monica been in New York, her relationship might have been treated in an equally blasé style; it might even be considered a trophy wife tryout.

But it happened in Washington, with a President that the opposing party hated with a passion that not only bordered on irrational, but in fact colonized that emotion and sent out armed emissaries. Gone were the days when President Harding could boink his mistress in a closet, or FDR could fool around with a mistress, with only Fala standing guard against an untimely Eleanor appearance. The Republicans were gunning for bear, and if that meant punting Monica into the limelight, it was a small price to pay to get Clinton. She was quite obviously a Democrat, anyway. There was no downside.

There's no point in rehashing the details of the actual political scandal, since everyone, and especially the Republicans, knows how it went. Focus instead on how Monica handled her newfound and unwanted fame: By shutting up and, as much as possible, keeping to herself. For most of the first year of her fame, no one even knew what her voice sounded like. This is not the modus operandi of a fame monger. Others dined nightly at her expense; that odious first lawyer of hers trotted her out to restaurants like a trained horse, in hopes of gaining entree into the talk-show level of fame. Everyone was relieved when they canned his ass.

Monica did eventually cash in, of course, with the book, and the Barbara Walters interviews, and the appearance on Saturday Night Live. But think of all the things she didn't do: The paid interview to the National Enquirer. The Donna Rice-like ads for blue jeans. The nude spread for Penthouse (which offered $2 million for it). The special appearances in B-movies. God forbid, the pop album. Instead she's living a relatively modest life, designing handbags or something, and accepting with reasonable grace that fact that her name has become a synonym for oral sex.

The funny thing is that Monica Lewinsky is probably now a pretty interesting person to know; anyone who can go through the wringer as she has and not come out of it certifiably insane has got something going for her. Almost certainly she's ready not to be famous, which is also not something that most people are willing to do after their fifteen minutes are up. I just hope this time she has some better friends. After everything she's been through, that's the least the world can do for her.

Best Use of the Brain of the Millennium.

Cryptanalysis. Because it's harder than it looks, and it looks damned difficult. Also because, up until the advent of the Web, in which 128-bit algorithms encode your purchase of the most recent Michael Chrichton book or the Pokemon Yellow Gameboy cartridge from prying eyes, the only people who used codes were armies and bankers and spies. Crack an encoded message, and trust me, you were on to something. The Nazis were not purchasing Korn CDs with their encrypted messages, you know.

Cryptanalysis is the best use of the brain because cryptology (the science of encrypting information) is nearly as difficult. People have been coding information for as long as there's been a reason to hide news from someone, of course, though early methods were almost charmingly simplistic. The Greeks did it by writing messages on a piece of cloth spiraled down a stick of a certain thickness; unraveled, the cloth strip was gibberish (it was all Greek to them). The Romans used letter transposition, shifting all the letters by a certain amount, not unlike you would do for your Lucky Charms Secret Decoder Ring. Although in this case, it would be Julius Caesar and not some fey leprechaun telling you how many letters to click over, and the secret message would be to take Masada rather than to eat more sugary cereal.

Serious coding had to wait until this millennium, and the 15th Century, when the Arabs (who had been caretaking and expanding on Western knowledge while Europe festered in that unfortunate dark age it had going) codified fundamentals of both cryptology and cryptanalysis. They were the first people to figure out that certain letters (such as vowels) appear with more frequency than others, and that you could crack a simple code based principally on frequency counts of certain letters. I know, you're thinking, "Duh, who doesn't know about letter frequency distributions and probable plaintext in cryptanalysis?" But remember, this was a simpler time.

Cryptology in itself probably never won any wars, but cryptanalysis certainly helped to win them, and it was enough of a priority that combatants would often go to desperate measures to crack the enemy's codes. Take the Confederate army (please). The Confederate army had such a difficult time cracking the Union's codes that they actually published encoded Union messages in newspapers to encourage the folks at home to play along. Sort of like a Word Jumble, where the unjumbled message would be Sherman's request for torches, the better to burn his way from Atlanta to the sea. The Union had no problem cracking Confederate codes, incidentally; the Rebs were using a relatively unsophisticated cipher. Stupid Confederates.

Probably the most famous example of the importance of cryptanalysis comes from the Second World War, and the vaunted British "Ultra" program to crack the German encryption code, known as "Enigma." Spearheaded by the famous mathematician Alan Turing, the Ultra project gave the Allies an immense advantage in terms of knowing what the Germans were up to -- even if they couldn't take advantage of all the information. If Allied forces just happened to show up where the Germans were, the Germans would figure out their code had been broken, you see. The Nazis were genocidal curs, but they weren't morons.

This made for some torturous maneuverings: The Brits would decrypt the location of a German convoy, for example, and then send out a plane that would "discover" the convoy, after which they would blow it up right pretty. Be that as it may, sometimes sacrifices were made: The British once discovered that the town of Coventry was going to be bombed, and rather than evacuate the town -- and risk exposing their knowledge -- the bombing was allowed to happen.

A little-known secret about the British Ultra project, however, is that much of the heavy lifting in that effort came not from the British but from the Poles. During the 1930s the Polish government, which had a justifiably dim view of the Germans, assigned Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rózycki and Henryk Zygalski to crack the Enigma code. They did it the old-fashioned way: First they procured expired Enigma codes and a booklet that explained how to set up an Enigma ("So You Want To Send Secret Messages: A Beginner's Guide"). Then they built a replica of the Enigma machine. Then they whacked away at the codes and the rewired the Enigma machine until they got actual deciphered messages.

In 1939, realizing Poland was about to be sliced up like an Easter ham (they had the German's messages, after all), the Poles set up a secret meeting with a Brits and handed over all their research on Enigma up to that point. The Brits were dumbfounded, to put it mildly. Did they let Rejewski, Rózycki, and Zygalski on to Ultra project? Of course not. They were foreigners, you see. They had enough problems sharing information with the Americans.

(Who, incidentally, were busy cracking a code of their own: "Purple," an Enigma-like code used by the Japanese. It was no small task -- the lead researcher on Purple suffered a total nervous breakdown -- but it yielded very positive results. Thanks to cracking Purple, an American fighter planes "just happened" to shoot down a plane carrying Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan's naval forces. He was the guy who suggested attacking Pearl Harbor, you know, so there was probably very few tears shed over what was, in fact, a bald-faced assassination by aeroplane.)

It's not an exaggeration to say that the need to crack the Enigma code expanded human knowledge considerably. Much of this expansion took place in the rarified field of mathematics -- by the time of WWII, cryptanalysis was indistinguishable from higher-order math, and today it's even more so -- but other fields also got their share. The first programmable computer was not constructed in the United States after the war as is generally presumed, but in Bletchley Park, home of the Ultra project. The computer, called "Colossus" (because it was) was designed to crack codes quicker than any human could. You're reading this on the spiritual descendent of that first computer, "spiritual" because the machine, secret during the war, was destroyed just as secretly afterwards -- the Brits were nothing if not paranoid, and by extension, thorough in covering their sneaky little tracks. The world didn't find out about Enigma or Ultra until the 1970s. At which time, the Argentine air was filled with the sound of former Nazis smacking their foreheads in aggravation.

As mighty an intellectual feat as cracking the Enigma and Purple codes were, the tale is also an example of how when it comes down to it, people with big brains often have to rely on people with teeny brains making really dumb mistakes. The Enigma code was broken partially because German army soldiers, confident the code was invincible, got sloppy and used simple "initial" codes -- a three letter code at the beginning of a transmission that allowed the guy at the other end to "tune" his machine to receive the message -- that allowed the Brits a window of opportunity (The German navy was more circumspect with codes and who sent messages -- as a result, the naval codes were cracked years later than the army codes). It's proof that the biggest problem with any perfect system is the imperfect humans who use it.

Best Mass Hysteria of the Millennium.

The Death of Rudolph Valentino. Because it was a "Chick Thing," and so was hysteria -- or at least it was assumed to be.

I mean this literally. The word "hysteria" is directly related to hystera, the Greek word for "uterus." Seems the Greeks (who despite their large, meaty brains, had this penchant for presenting theories without the observational data to back them up) believed that hysteria was a condition of mental agitation brought on by "vapors" from the uterus. Show me a freaked-out woman, said the Greeks, and I'll show you someone with a belching womb.

You think someone would have figured this one out eventually, but, eh, no. Well into the 19th century, "hysteria" was frequently diagnosed in women, and often the treatment was, shall we say, rather intimate. It involved "massaging" a particular nerve-filled area on a woman's body to "calm" her (men, if you can't figure out which area I'm talking about, you now know why you're so often alone on a Saturday night).

In the 20th Century, the word passed into more general usage, and men were finally allowed to get just as "hysterical" as the gals, even without the previously-required womb. Just think, fellows -- every time you get hysterical, you're in touch with your feminine side!

The etymological derivation of "hysteria" seems to imply that men never work themselves up into an irrational lather. This is of course patently false, otherwise we would not have televised wrestling. I suppose it's more to the point that men were allowed a whole range of reasons to get stupid, whereas women were not; look at a crowd of yowling, chuffing men, and it's just men being men;  you don't immediately attribute it to their gonads (well, you do, but you don't call it "testeria").

Also, frankly, hysteria as a psychological condition is associated with ignorance, sexual and social inhibition, and an authoritarian family structure, a situation which conveniently describes your average woman's life for most of the millennium (and still is, in some places -- thank you Taliban!). Hysteria was not a natural part of a woman's character, it was pretty much thrust upon her. Let's face it, if you were kept dumb and down, you'd go a little nuts, too. It was, if nothing else, a change of pace.

Valentino's death could probably be described as the last "pure" instance of mass hysteria in the classic "female" sense. There were a number before it -- the Salem witch trials come to mind, as does the celebrated female obsession with the famed 18th century castrato Farinelli (although in that particular case, it was quite obviously wasted effort) -- but if you want real mass hysteria, it's hard to beat Rudolph. He was the right man at the right place at the right time with the right death.

Valentino was Hollywood's first real male sex symbol, a swarthy Italian fellow with sensuous lips, dark eyes, and the ability to dance (he was a professional dancer in New York before he headed west to fame). He rose to prominence in the 1921 feature The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and in the next five years cranked out a dozen mostly successful films. Thanks to the widespread reach of film, women everywhere knew his face; thanks to relaxing sexual mores of the 1920s, for the first time a woman could openly swoon for someone who wasn't her thick, idiot husband. The public, meaning women, couldn't get enough of him (and as a bonus, Valentino was by all accounts actually one hell of a gentlemen).

And so when he died in 1926 at age 31, due to complications from abdominal surgery (surprise! No antibiotics in the 1920s!), women went nuts. And not just a little nuts -- we're talking out of control wacko-ness on a scale heretofore unimagined. Unable to consider to world without Valentino in it, dozens of women committed suicide. At a private memorial service in New York, 15,000 women tried to get in to have one last moment with the man they never knew, but, you know, knew. That crowd was peanuts compared to the 100,000 that surrounded the funeral home; those folks rioted outright, and the mass of human bodies filled the streets for 13 city blocks. Finally laid to rest in Los Angeles, his crypt was visited yearly by a mysteriously veiled "Lady in Black," and sometimes more than one (in 1939, there were three). It still is, although the most recent Lady in Black is more or less just carrying on the franchise, not unlike a mall Santa.

What was it about Valentino? Well, in a very real sense, it was nothing about him -- Almost none of the tens of thousands of women who became dramatically verklempt over his death actually ever met him. He was just an ideal, a first glimpse into a new world, where women were allowed to lust, and brooding men were there to satisfy their needs. There's not been a hysteria quite like it since, precisely because you can never have more than one first love, and women (at least in the part of the world where we live) have moved beyond that sort of thing. Women still have idols they get irrational about, of course, a fact that everybody from Ricky Nelson to N'Sync has taken to the bank. But, honestly. It's just not the same.

Ask yourself: if the Backstreet Boys were to suddenly expire, en masse, from acute peritonitis, would there be widespread rioting and hysteria? (From grief, I mean.) I don't think so. However, I'm willing to sacrifice them to find out. Eager, even.

Best Thing We Should Probably Never Do Again of the Millennium.

Use a nuclear bomb on people. This one's pretty obvious. The bumper sticker says "One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day," but that's really only true if you're a couple of miles or more from the point of detonation. Everyone inside of that radius has, at best, a fraction of a second of puzzlement as to why they can suddenly see all their bones before their atoms are freed from their bonds. The rest of their day isn't ruined. It isn't anything.

Having said that, let me express my opinion that nuking someone is not actually the worst thing you can actually do to them on a person-to-person level; ask a survivor of a genocide (there have been a few this century you may have heard about) to confirm this.

Let me further suggest that dropping the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not even have been the worst carnage visted upon the Japanese during the final months of World War II. Compare them to when U.S. forces flattened a quarter of Tokyo, using conventional bombs, over two nights in March 1945. Those bombing runs killed 80,000 and left more than a million homeless -- and were followed by similar bombing runs over Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, and Toyama. The main difference (in the short term, at least) between these bombing campaigns and the two nuclear events was the shocking economy of the nuclear weapon. It was the ratio of one bomb, one city that shook the Japanese into unconditional surrender.

The salient point to make about nuclear weapons, as opposed to all the other truly terrible ways that humans have used to dispatch each other off this planet, is that we've only done it once (well, twice).  After Fat Man and Little Boy (the winsome names of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), there have been no more nuclear weapons used directly on human beings. We've bombed the hell of out iguanas, gecko lizards and several other reptile species that happened to exist on various atolls or desert landscapes before we fused them into glass (and thus Godzilla was born!), but we haven't directed any to where people might habitually be found.

This is an astounding bit of restraint on the part of the human race, which is not known to resist temptation when it comes to these sort of things. The genocides of the Armenians and the Jews certainly didn't seem to hinder subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia; the horrors of gas warfare in World War I meant very little to the Iraqis who gassed the Kurds. It's not that humans can't or don't learn from previous horrors, mind you. It's just that we don't particularly seem to think the lessons apply to us. Ask a Serb who participated in the slaughter of his Muslim former neighbors whether there are any parallels between his actions and the actions of the Nazis, and he'll look at you like you've slapped him. It's entirely different, you see. He's not a monster.

Of course, it's giving the human race as a whole entirely too much credit for not having nuked anybody else to this point. Unlike genocide, which requires only, say, a mob and a more or less equal number of machetes and stones, a nuclear explosion actually requires a nuclear bomb. Historically, these have been difficult to come by, and those who have them have been reluctant to use them. First off, they're expensive. Secondly, they make rather a large statement. After all, their only previous use was to end the largest armed conflict in the history of the world. Using one for anything less seems a bit...overly dramatic. People would talk.

Finally, there's the matter that by the time anyone thought to use these sorts of weapons in another armed conflict, other people also had nuclear capability; the Soviets in 1949, followed by the British, the French, the Chinese, and so on down the line until you've got folks like India and Pakistan waving their uranium around. Others could make the bombs if they wanted to, thanks to sufficient infrastructure and know-how; for example, Brazil (take that, you lousy Amazon!).

As much as it pains any vaguely liberal person such as myself to say it, the specter of mutually assured destruction probably did more to keep humanity from making mushrooms than any other reason, certainly more than any sort of touchy-feely sentiment about how, you know, nuclear war was, like, bad. If nothing else, touchy-feely types generally weren't given launch codes. Because, really. It's not like they would do anything with 'em. Don't take out the car if you don't want to drive.

People don't think much about nuclear war anymore, and there's a good reason for that: A nuclear war, in the classic look-out-here-come-the-ICBMs-over-the-pole sense, is wholly unlikely to happen. Russia doesn't want to bomb us anymore. If they did, where would their mafia launder their money?

To the extent that people worry about it, they're more concerned about a lone terrorist walking into Central Park and detonating a bomb out of his knapsack. Even the most brain-dead terrorist organization, however, has to realize that's the sort of thing that the United States would feel obligated to respond to, and not in a dainty fashion. The universally recognized ability to peel the planet's surface like it was an orange is, in fact, a dandy deterrent.

No, the next nuclear bomb that goes off around people is going to go off like the first one did: Against a people who won't have any possible way of responding in kind. Will it actually happen? I actually think the odds are against it: Them bombs are still hard to come by, and we do have people looking to make sure they don't pop up where they shouldn't. And the one thing that such a bomb was able to provide in World War II -- a definitive ending -- is the one thing that certainly won't happen the next time one goes off.

But you never do know. If it does happen, don't expect it near where you are. Expect it on or near the equator, in a hemisphere that is not your own.

Best Hideously Inbred Royal Family of the Millennium.

That'd be the Hapsburgs. And here you thought inbreeding (or, as I like to call it, "fornicousin") was just a low-rent sort of activity. In fact, it's the sport of kings: All your royal families of Europe have participated in a program of inbreeding so clearly ill-advised that it would disgust Jerry Springer's booker. They paid for it, of course (how many royal families are left any more) but not before polluting their bloodlines to an intolerable degree. Any little girl who dreamily wishes to marry a handsome prince on a white steed is advised to marry the horse instead. The horse probably has better DNA.

You'd think that the royal families of Europe would have figured out that a recursive family tree was not the way to go; at the very least, when you'd go to a royal function and everyone was married to a relative, you'd clue in that something was amiss. But royalty are different from you and me, and not just because all their children were still drooling well into the teenage years.  Royalty wasn't just about kings and queens, it was about families and dynasties -- single families ruling multiple countries, or in the case of the Hapsburgs, most of the whole of the continent. You can't let just anyone marry into that sort of thing. There had to be standards, genetically haphazard as they might be.

The Hapsburgs, based in Austria, carried this admonition to the extreme, even for the royal families of Europe. Take the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (you may remember him as the nominal cause of World War I, when the poor fellow was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. What, you don't? Ah, the glories of our educational system).  Long before his assassination, Franz fell in love with Sophia von Chotkowa und Wognin, who was a Duchess of Hohenburg. For you and me, linking up with a Duchess of Hohenburg would probably be a step up in the grand scheme of things, certainly something to brag about at the family reunion at the municipal park ("You married Cindy? How nice. I married nobility. Look, here come our dukelings now.")

Franz's family, on the other hand, was horrified. Franz was an heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire! He couldn't marry any shameless duchess who just happened to bat her hereditary lands at him! It was a scandal! Franz eventually married Sophie, but he was made to renounce all claims of rank for their offspring (i.e., no little emperors for Franz and Sophie). As a final insult, Sophie, the hussy duchy, was not allowed to ride in the same car as her husband during affairs of state. In retrospect, this may not have been such a bad idea; Sophie was in the same car as Franz in Sarajevo (presumably not a state function) and she got assassinated right along with him. But at the time, it probably just came across as mean.

No, in the grand scheme of things, the Hapsburgs figured it was better off to marry a Hapsburg when you could (and one of those degenerate Bourbons if you couldn't). On a territorial level, this worked like a charm; at the height of the Hapsburg influence, the family ruled the Holy Roman Empire and the Iberian Peninsula, and had good and serious claims on a large portion of what is now France. The family had initially achieved much of this, interestingly enough, by marrying people who were not them; after a particularly profitable spate of marriages arranged by the family in the late 15th century, it was said of the Hapsburgs, Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube ("Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry"). Once lands were assimilated, of course, it was first cousins all the way.

In the short run, the interbreeding caused some noticeable but essentially minor physical distinctions: the famed "Hapsburg lip," in which a full lower lip jutted out in front of a somewhat less lavish upper lip. This is distinction was on par with other royal families, who had (and have) their own physical distinctions; the Bourbons, for one, had a distinctive nose (it was huge), while today, the English House of Windsor is known for its Dumbo-like ears. Proof that there were worse things than to have big lips.

Here's the thing, however. It's one thing to marry, say, your cousin. Not the smartest thing you can do, but so long as you move to another state and don't talk much about your family, you can get away with it. But if you marry a cousin, who was him or herself the product of cousins, who were themselves products of cousins, and so on and so forth -- and you're all in the same family -- well, you don't have to be Gregor Mendel to see what's coming. Alas for the Hapsburgs, what was coming was Charles II, king of Spain from 1665 through 1700.

With Charles, the question was not what was wrong with him, but what wasn't wrong. To begin, thanks to all that cousin cuddling, the Hapsburg lip stopped being a distinctive facial characteristic and became a  jaw deformity so profound that Chuck couldn't chew his own food. This would depress a person of normal intelligence, but since Charles was also mentally retarded, he might not have minded. Anyway, it wasn't the most depressing deformity Charles had; let's just say that generations of inbreeding kept Charles from breeding new generations. It was bad enough to have a sick freak ruling Spain; it was even worse that there were no more sick freaks coming.

For lack of a better idea, Charles willed his possessions to a relative. Unfortunately, it was a relative who was also a Bourbon. Enter the War of Spanish Succession, at the end which Spain would lose most of its European holdings (such as the Netherlands), and the Hapsburgs would begin their long decline, which would end with the First World War and a final dismemberment of the family's territorial holdings.

Clearly, this might never have happened had the Hapsburgs slipped in a commoner now and then, just to set a genetic Roto-Rooter to their chromosomes. Wouldn't that have been an irony -- a few more serfs in the gene pool, and there might yet be a Holy Roman Emperor. The Hapsburgs probably wouldn't think that was funny. But a sense of humor was probably not what they bred for, anyway.

Best Dead-End Technology of the Millennium.

It's the 8-track tape, and maybe that's a little unfair to the 8-track. After all, all analog sound recording is dead-end technology: be it LPs, cassette tapes, or reel-to-reel, it's all dead meat on the technological stick, gutted and fried up nice by flawless and cheap digital technology.* Even so, when you're looking for a combination of poor performance, questionable utility and

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inherent technological limitations in any piece of technology, it's hard to beat an 8-track. Unlike so many unfortunate but promising technological cul-de-sacs, the 8-track is dead for a reason.

But let's be truthful. The 8-track was a piece of crap, but it's that way because it was pretty much designed to be that way. Most audio products are designed with at least some attempt towards sound quality, but that wasn't the case with the 8-track; in its case, the idea was not quality but portability. The 8-track made its popular debut not in the middle of a swingin' sixties hi-fi rack, bracketed by Playboys, fondue makers and Ian Fleming novels, but in a car:  In 1965, the Ford Motor Company made the 8-track an option on all its 1966 models. The car was the 8-track's exclusive domain; there were no commercially available home units. 8-tracks were available in auto part stores instead of record shops.

If you grant that the 8-track was designed for the road in mind, it's not an entirely unholy creation. 1965 was still well in the era of the AM radio and mono LP recording, and unless you wanted to blow a harmonica and drive at the same time (not recommended), there was no way to bring your own music into the car. Auto makers had actually tried putting record players into cars; it worked about as well as you might expect it to. In contrast, you could drive over train tracks and while your 8-track might warble a bit, it could nevertheless keep going. And it was stereo! Stick that in your dashboard and play it!

If the 8-track had stuck to the roads, where it was the best thing going, it might not have become a universal symbol of derision and pointlessness that it has become. But alas, it did not; 8-track players for the home came out in 1966, and there the format's shortcomings were exposed for all to see. Unlike the reel to reel tape, the sound reproduction of an 8-track was vile, the effect of having eight tracks of music (four programs, a left and right channel each) on one half-inch strip of tape.

Unlike the LP, there was no ability to quickly go from one music track to another. Most 8-track players didn't bother with a fast forward or rewind option; you either had to know where all your favorite songs were in relation to each other in the programs and switch back and forth, or you had to sit there for the long haul and wait for them to come around again.

Even the compact cassette, which had even worse sound quality than the 8-track in the early days, had one up on the 8-tracks: No clicks. Because all four programs on an 8-track had to be of the same length, music listeners were often faced with either dead time at the end of a program or (even worse) the dreaded fade-out-click-and-fade-in phenomena, in which a song was butchered over two programs.

(This phenomenon however, made for some creative attempts to mask the click -- in the 8-track version of Pink Floyd's "Animals" album, for example, there's a guitar solo, unavailable anywhere else, that acts as a bridge between "Pigs on the Wing" parts 1 and 2. It was done by Floyd tour guitarist Snowy White. There, now you know something about Floyd that your terminally-stoned, "Dark Side of the Moon"-playing-on-a-continual-loop college roommate doesn't. Even better, he'll hate you for it. And they say there's no justice.)

The 8-track was dying by the end of 70s and officially declared dead around 1983, when most major record companies stopped making them. After that date you had to get your 8-tracks from the record clubs, which manufactured the things until about 1989. If you look hard, you can actually find an 8-track of Michael Jackson's "Bad" album (but then, why would you). The last major album on 8-track, or so it is said, is Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits collection. This is, of course, entirely appropriate.

No one misses the 8-track, which is final, incontrovertible proof of its dead ended-ness. Sure, people gawk in awe if you show up at a party with one, and if you somehow manage to get one to play, you'be be hailed as a hero of cheese. But this isn't the same as saying that anyone actually wants to hear music in the format anymore. Unlike old wax cylinders and 78-rpm Victrola records, there's nothing on 8-track that wasn't placed on a better recording medium as well. Unlike vinyl, you'll not hear of some geek audiophile haranguing bored listeners about the supposed sonic superiority of the 8-track, and thank God for that.

Its only value today is to remind us that not every technological "advance" is a good one, or one that will last.

* Statements like this inevitably arouse the wrath of audiophiles, who maintain that their beloved vinyl records sound so much "warmer" and better than those cold, sterile digital recordings. To which I say: Sure. If you want to spend $4,000 on a gyroscopically balanced turntable, another $2000 on a vacuum tube-bearing receiver, and God knows what for speakers designed by NASA scientists to transmit sound in cold, deep, airless space, you might theoretically get better sound quality from vinyl than your average guy gets off a CD and a boombox. But if you would spend $10,000 to eke out total sound quality from a 39-cent wheel of plastic, let me just say: You're a big freakin' idiot.

Best Planet of the Millennium.

Uranus. And stop that. You're not thirteen any more.

This will come as a painful selection for those fans of Mars, angry red planet and recent eater of NASA landers. But Mars is a sham, a planetary glory hog that owes its notoriety to the poor eyes of Giovanni Schiaparelli, which convinced him there were "channels" on the surface of the planet, and a subsequent mistranslation of the dubious discovery into English, which led the excitable to believe that there were actual canals on Mars, built by intelligent creatures (and what canals they would have been -- to be visible from earth, they'd have to be roughly as wide across as Rhode Island). From then on it's been nothing but little green men, War of the Worlds, and alien conspiracy buffs pointing out that face on Mars' surface.

Sure, it's all flashy, but it's not based on anything tangible. There are no canals at all, much less any the width of Rhode Island, and the closest Mars is going to come to little green men are what may or may not be microbes flash-frozen into rocks a couple billion years ago, and even they commuted off Mars as soon as they could -- we found them in Antarctica. As for the mysterious disappearance of all those Mars missions, I mean, come on. Space geeks can't even parallel park.

Now, gaze, if you will, on the featureless disk that is Uranus (stop that). You probably have not given much thought as to how important Uranus truly is (really. Stop that). But the fact is that the discovery of Uranus ranks as one of the top finds of the millennium (I mean it. Don't make me come back there). In fact, we can safely say that science today would be entirely different, if it weren't for Uranus.

I can wait until you're done, you know.

"Uranus," of course, has nothing at all to do with your terminal excretory sphincter. First off, it's pronouned "yooor-ah-nus," not "Yer Anus," as folks as so wont to do. Second, the word refers to one of the oldest characters in Greek mythology, the personification of the cosmos, who with Gaia, the personification of the Earth, sired the Titans. They in turn sired the Olympian Gods, whose names (the Roman versions) grace the other planets, excepting Saturn, a Titan, and our own.

When Uranus was given its name, it was to imply the majesty of the vasty reaches of the universe. Its present status as the butt of butt jokes is an unfortunate and mean-spirited coincidence. One assumes that if astronomers had wanted to go that way, they simply would have named it "Big Ass Planet." And thus, we have my final discursion on the duodenal qualities of this planet's name.

Uranus is exciting because for the majority of the millennium, humans didn't even know it existed; it was the first new planet observed by humans since we looked up and noticed some "stars" were moving against the static backdrop of the sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were all bright enough to see in the night sky (Venus, in fact, was commonly regarded as two separate planets, depending on whether it was visible in the night or morning sky). Uranus, on the other hand, was too far away from the sun -- 1.8 billion miles or so -- to reflect enough light to be seen. Don't mind me, it said. I'll just sit here in the dark.

It had to wait until 1781 and English astronomer William Herschel for discovery. Hershel was doing a survey of the night sky, looking for stars down to the eighth magnitude of brightness (about five times dimmer than most humans can see with the naked eye) when he came across disk just plopped down there in the middle of a star field. Stars are too far away to present a disc shape, and it had no tail and a slow, regular motion across the sky -- it had to be a planet. And so it was. The discovery of Uranus led directly to the discovery of the next planet, Neptune, after discrepancies in Uranus' orbit suggested there was yet another planet out there. Neptune's discovery in turn suggested the existence of yet another planet -- Pluto. It was like getting three planets for the price of one.

This would be enough to qualify Uranus for Planet of the Millennium honors -- but wait, there's more. Every member of our solar family has its odd quirks; Venus has a day that's longer than its year, Jupiter has its Red Spot, Saturn its rings, and Earth -- well, Earth's got us. Be that as it may, Uranus has got some truly freaky things going on. First off, the planet's axis of rotation is tilted some 97 degrees, which means that relative to all the other planets (whose axes are more or less pointing perpendicular to their orbits) Uranus is on its side. It's fallen down and it can't get up. Its magnetic poles are additionally skewed by nearly 60 degrees from the rotational poles, and -- get this -- the magnetic core of the planet is offset from the actual planetary core by 30%. So, you know, don't bother to bring a compass.

There's more, like the fact that Uranus produces anomalously small amounts of internal heat for a gas giant, and the fact that spectral analysis reveals the planet to be mostly various types of ice; in effect, it's God's Sno-Cone. But you get the point: Uranus is just a big mess (stop that). If any planet could be a metaphor for the freakish, off-kilter and frankly inexplicable times we live in, this is the one.

There's a reason we discovered it when we did, and not just because Bill Hershel just happened to be using one of those new-fangled telescope thingies. We found it because the timing was right. And if we end up making fun of it because of its name, well, it's just been that kind of millennium, now, hasn't it.

Best Serial Killer of the Millennium.

Herman Mudgett. Yes, I know you've never heard of him. That's sort of the idea when you're a serial killer, now, isn't it.

I should note that this topic was one of the most requested by readers, you sick freaks, but I personally don't have much good to say about serial killers. First and most obviously, killing people is just plain wrong, unless it's self-defense, or a war, or your stuffed animals have told you that Jesus wouldn't mind.

More than that, however, is the fact that I think serial killers, as a class, simply exhibit poor form. While it's all very fun and ironic to follow the exploits of crazed murderers as if they were sports heroes (the gruesome collection of Serial Killer trading cards several years ago made this point rather forcefully), the metaphor is in fact entirely wrong. Outside of hockey, the aim of sports is not to actually brutally murder your opponent, and even if it was, your opponents would generally not be terrified student nurses.

Fact is, serial killers go for the easy targets, under false pretenses. They're not like gangsters in the 20s, when if you saw a guy in a pinstripe suit coming at you with a violin case, you knew you were gun butter -- and that you as often than not had it coming. Serial killers lure you in, offering sex or money or candy or whatever, a terminal bait-and-switch, and the next thing you know, you're dead, your pancreas is being fried up, and some guy is using your skull for a candle holder.

Mudgett (or Henry Holmes, his alias at the time) operated in Chicago at the time of the Columbian Exposition (that's 1892 to you), and is a perfect example of this concept. Mudgett killed women in a baroque chamber of horrors he had secretly built into his mansion/hotel on 63rd street (how does one manage to build a secret chamber of horrors? By changing contractors frequently during the construction process, so no one person -- besides Mudgett -- knows the set up of the entire house), and he lured them into the place by offering them a job. He needed a secretary, you see, someone who could take dictation, file, and then die.

Over two years, Mudgett had something on the order of a hundred secretaries, a fact you'd think someone would notice ("You're Ethel? What happened to Betsy? And, come to think of it, what happened to Bonnie, Daisy and June?"), but apparently no one did. Maybe they thought that Mudgett was a harsh boss. Well, and he was. More to the point, however, this was 1892, and sort of woman who had to work out of the home was also the sort of women who was less likely to be missed. Mudgett also went out of his way to "employ" new arrivals to town, who had the added benefit of no one to look out for them.

Mudgett was not just a crazed whacko who liked killing people, mind you. He was a crazed whacko who liked killing people and taking their money. Before he offed his victims, he would gain their trust (often by making them his mistresses -- so these days not only would he be liable for murder, he'd also be slapped with one hell of a sexual harassment suit) and then convince them to give him their life savings. His rationale, perhaps, was that once he was done with them, they wouldn't need it anyway.

As it happens, Mudgett had a long history of gruesome money-making schemes. While he was in medical school (say ahhh!), he would steal cadavers, burn them horribly with acid, and them place them in a place that had a lot of insurance in hopes of extorting a settlement of some kind -- not unlike the old "cockroach in the salad bar" manuever, except in this case the "cockroach" used to be someone's Uncle Ted.

This not to say it was all just business for Mudgett. No, he was, in fact, seriously screwed up: Abusive parents, early episodes of animal mutilation, all the classic signs of total bonkerness. His torture chamber on 63rd was literally just that: Mudgett used his medical expertise to perform horrifying "experiments" on his victims, most of which, as you might imagine, ended quite badly for the patient. After he had had his fun, Mudgett disposed of the evidence in a special cremation oven in the basement (oh, sure, it's a furnace...), or, if he chose to sell the bones to a local medical school, as he did from time to time, there was always the lime pit.

No one knows how many people Mudgett killed; estimates go up into the hundreds. Beyond the "secretaries," Mudgett also offed guests at his hotel -- like a roach motel, they checked in but didn't check out. His cover was the Columbian Exposition, a huge World's Fair taking place a few streets north; it attracted a vast number of people from faraway places. They wouldn't be missed, at least not by anyone local who might put two and two together.

He never got caught. Not for the murders in Hotel Hell, in any event. Mudgett's downfall came in the form of Benjamin Pitezel, the Igor to Mudgett's Dr. Frankenstein, who a penny-pinched Mudgett (hey, murdering hundreds of people costs money!) decided to kill for insurance purposes. Wouldn't you know, the insurance company had suspicions, as did Pitezel's wife. Mudgett's response was to try to kill off every member of Pitezel's family, a tactic that he apparently seemed to think wouldn't look in the least bit suspicious.

He murdered three of Pitezel's kids before the cops got him in Boston. At which point they worked backwards, found Mudgett's hotel (now a smoking ruin -- another insurance scam), and the evidence of his terrifying serial murders. Mudgett was tried, convicted, and, on May 7, 1896, hanged. Mudgett's last words were to the effect that he had really only killed two women. Odd statement to make as your last on this planet, considering that even only one murder was more than enough to stretch your sorry neck.

There's no doubt Mudgett was a horrible man who preyed on the weak and the innocent. The worst thing about it was that he was as good at it as anyone in his line of work -- possibly the best ever. That is, that we know about. The real best serial killer of the Millennium, we probably will never know about. Think about that the next time you meet a smooth-talking stranger.

Best Weapon of the Millennium.

The Longbow. Interestingly enough, when I wrote up the Best Dead-End Technology of the Millennium (the 8-track, in case you already forgot last Tuesday), a reader from Harvard (yes, smart people read this too, or at least people from Harvard) replied that

I think you have seriously underestimated the claims of the long-bow and the knight's armor to be the best (most?) dead-end technologies.  You couldn't live (literally) without them when the millennium began, and now -- now, you would be dead if you depended on them!

to which my response was, true enough (though not literally, since neither armor nor the longbow was in wide use in Europe until the 1200s). However, should the world ever collapse and we're all back to banging rocks together, the longbow and armor might come in handy, whereas the 8-track would be even less useful than it is today, if that's possible.

Besides, it's not a fair assessment of the longbow (it is of the armor, for reasons we will discover). A longbow, properly used by someone who knows what he or she is doing, is still a hell of a weapon; an arrow shot from a full draw of a longbow is fully capable of nestling deep into an engine block from 100 yards out. Imagine the terror at rush hour! Back in its day, roughly the 13th to 16th centuries, it wasn't just a weapon, it was the weapon, the ultimate kick-ass tool of any serious arsenal. It made England a superpower in Europe, much to the surprise of the Europeans, especially the French.

More on that in a minute. Right now, let's concentrate on the actual longbow itself. Historians debate on the original length of the longbow, but it was generally considered to be no less than five feet. Ideally, the bow was as tall or maybe just a little taller than the person wielding it, and made from the yew, a type of wood known for its elasticity. The longbow was not an easy weapon to master; it's not like a TEC-9, which any idiot can swing in an indiscriminate arc and release a hail of death. The "pull" of a longbow, the amount of force needed to stretch the bowstring back to where it needed to be, was between 80 and 110 pounds; it's a hell of an aerobic exercise, a fact which I'm sure generations of English longbowmen appreciated. Back in the 14th century, stair-stepping to the oldies was not considered manly.

You put your whole body into being a longbowman, and I don't mean this metaphorically. Skeletons of lowbow archers show signs of deformation consistent with the use of the bow: A spine curved in the direction the pull arm, arm bones thick with compression, and coarsened bones in the three fingers used to yank back the bowstring. It wasn't just a weapon, it was a way of life.

The good news was that all that work paid off in the long run. An experienced longbowman could hit a target with killing force 200 yards out. He could fire 6 to 10 times in a minute, a rate of fire that no practical weapon would match well into the 19th century. A longbow arrow wouldn't just bounce off a knight's armor -- it would go right through, killing the knight inside like a crab impaled on a pick. Get a couple of thousand longbowmen together, point them at an equal or greater number of knights in armor, and what you've got, friends, is a massacre.

Thus the French learned -- or more to the point, didn't learn -- in three major battles that defined the Hundred Year's War. The first of these is the Battle of Crécy, in 1346. The English came to the party with 10,000 archers and 4,000 men-at-arms (or, in modern terminology, "grunts"); the French had 12,000 men-at-arms and  backup from cavalry. In this battle, the French kept driving up the middle of the English forces with their horse and knights; the bad news was that the English longbowmen were on the sides, picking them off as they came. It was a slaughter. The French lost 1,500 knights and King Phillip VI himself was wounded. The lesson: Watch out for those longbowmen, they'll get you bad.

Flash forward 20 years to the Battle of Poitiers. The French had the numbers, but the English had the archers and the terrain (thickets and marshes) on their side; when the stoopid French lumbered in with horses and heavy armor, the longbowmen picked them off like wolves going after crippled sheep. This time the French king wasn't wounded, he was taken prisoner. Whoops.

Leap another 60 years or so to perhaps the greatest single example of the superiority of the English longbowmen and the incredible military incompetence of the French in dealing with them: The fabled Battle of Agincourt, October 25, 1415. You know the setup. King Henry V of England, with 5,000 sick and wounded troops, is desperately trying to drag his ass back to England, when he runs smack dab into 30,000 French, fresh and spoiling for a fight. He and his exhausted crew are in deep foie gras, and would have been -- should have been -- brutally slaughtered, had not the stupid French made an amazing tactical blunder.

Which was: Picking the field of Agincourt to fight on. The field is more or less a narrow channel between two stands of forest; in order for the French to get at the English, they'll basically have to funnel their vast forces into a bottleneck. This loses them both the advantage of their huge number of troops, who are unable to perform any large-scale maneuvers, and of their cavalry, who have to wade through throngs of their own men-at-arms (as an added bonus, long rains in the days before the battle have made the field of Agincourt a mudpit -- not optimal cavalry ground). The bottleneck serves the English longbowmen admirably as well: By concentrating their forces, the French have made them incredibly easy to hit with longbow fire.

You know the rest. The French funneled into Agincourt and died by the screaming thousands, arrows in their chests from 5,000 English longbows. And while the English losses were not so light as Shakespeare indicated in his play of the events (in which the dead were tallied at 25, not counting the occasional nobleman), they were nevertheless spectacularly low -- something on the order of 500 compared to the French tally of at least 6,000, 1,500 of which were knights in armor. The reason they were so low, of course, is that the longbowmen did all the heavy lifting; by the time Henry V ordered his men-at-arms into the fray, the French were already decimated and in chaos. Agincourt won the French crown for Henry, and rightfully so.

As for the longbow, its military service came to an end at the end of the 16th century not because it was obsolete as a weapon -- in the late 1500s there was still no weapon that could beat its combination of power, accuracy and rate of fire -- but because there were too few people taking up archery as a profession. The longbow didn't fail us, we failed it.

Far as I know, there's not another weapon that can hold that claim. For that fact, and its own merits, it's the weapon of the millennium. And if the world collapses on January 1, 2000 (they could be lying to us about all those bug fixes, you know), it could very well be the weapon of the next millennium, too.

Best Emotion of the Millennium.

Angst. And I'm pretty bummed out about that.

Let us stipulate that "angst" is one of those words that people use a lot but which they don't really understand; in today's nomenclature, it is a trendy synonym for fear or even annoyance (e.g., "I went to Starbucks and my latte was mostly foam. I was filled with angst." Aw, poor baby). This dreadful misuse of the word is problematic, but in one way it's indicative of the fundamental nature of the concept of  “angst," which is, like diet-related obesity or supermodels, a leisure society's affliction. Poor, ill-educated serfs didn't know from angst. They didn't have the time, or the inclination.

Which is not to say that didn't have fears, of course. To a poor, ill-educated serf, the world is full of fear: Fear of one's feudal lord. Fear of the Plague. Fear of the that witch down the lane, you know, the one with all the cats. Above all, a fear of God, He who could squash you in this life and the life everlasting, thank you very much. The point here is: Fear had direction. It was like a sentence; there was an subject (you) and an object (the thing that was gonna get you), and the verb "fear" was adequate to describe what your typical serf had going on in his brain, such as it was.

Angst is something else entirely. If fear is hard working and has a goal, angst is like fear's directionless cousin, the one that has a trust fund and no freakin' clue what he wants to do. Angst by definition has no definite object; it is formless and ubiquitous, and it just sits on your head and freaks you out. Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote the book on angst ("The Concept of Dread," 1844), believed that dread was a desire for that which you fear. This led to sin; sin leads to guilt, and guilt leads to redemption, preferably (at least from Kierkegaard's point of view) through the good graces of Christianity. God always gets you, sooner or later.

Martin Heidegger took angst even further, suggesting that dread is fundamental for a human being to discover freedom, as dread can lead to a man to "choose himself" and thus discover his true potential. When you're full of angst, you see, you tend to concentrate on yourself and not to sweat the little stuff -- say, everything else in the entire universe (to say this is a massive simplification of Heidegger's work is to say you can get a cup of water out of the Hoover Dam). Embracing oneself brings one closer to embracing nothingness, and thus full potentiality of authentic being.

Confused? Join the club. Heidegger's writings are so famously impenetrable they could be used by SWAT teams in place of Kevlar; to the uninitiated, he sounds a little like the self-help counselor from the third circle of Hell ("Love your Dread! Embrace the Nothingness!"). Left unsaid is what happens after one has in fact embraced the nothingness; one has the unsettling feeling that it's difficult to get cable TV. Also, there's the question of what happens when one has reached a state of authentic being, only to discover one is authentically an ass. Heidegger is unhelpfully silent on these matters; he himself embraced the nothingness in 1976 and will have nothing more to do with us inauthentic beings.

Angst is probably best described not through words but through pictures, and fortunately we have a fine illustrator of angst in Edvard Munch. Munch knew all about dread; first off, he was Norwegian. Second, he was a sickly boy whose family had an unfortunate tendency of dying on him: His mother when he was five, his sister when he was 14, then his father and brother while he was still young. His other sister? Mentally ill. Munch would write, quite accurately, "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life." They weren't no bluebirds of happiness, that's for sure.

Munch's art vividly showed the nameless anxiety that Munch felt all around him. The most famous example of this, of course, is "The Scream," in which a fetal-looking person of indiscriminate sex clutches its head and emits a wordless cry. The weird little dude is Munch himself:

"I was walking along the road with two friends," he wrote,        "Watching the sunset - the sky suddenly turned red as blood - I stopped, leant against the fence, deadly tired - above the blue-black fjord and the town lay blood and tongues of fire - my friends walked on and I was left, trembling with fire - and I could feel an infinite scream passing through the landscape."

Perhaps the infinite scream was the knowledge that one day his painting of the event would become such a smarmily iconic shorthand for angst that it would lose its power; its hard to feel dread when the screaming dude is on some VP of Advertising's tie. More's the pity.

Fortunately, there is other, less exploited, Munch work which still packs a punch. "The Scream" is just one element in Munch's epic "Frieze of Life," a collection of 20-odd canvases jam-packed with angst: One of the four major themes of the work, in fact, is "Anxiety." But even the more supposedly cheerful theme of "Love,"  features paintings swaddled in depression and dread: check out "Ashes" or  "Separation," and angst leaps up and hits you like a jagged rock. Don't even view the "Death" pictures if you've skipped your Xanax for the day. Viewing any of the pictures, you immediately grasp the concept of angst; it sits on your chest like a weight, pressing the air out of you. Edvard Munch himself suffered a nervous breakdown, a fact which anyone who has spent any time with his work would find entirely unsurprising.

The irony about naming angst as the emotion of the Millennium is that at the moment, most everyone who can read this is living in almost entirely angst-free world. The economy is booming, people are well-fed and cheerful, most of us are safe and content. This is surely a switch from most of the 20th Century, the Century of Angst, which opened up with the perhaps the most dreadful war of all time, World War I, and then hunkered down under two decades of global depression, followed by a genocidal holocaust, a cold war, the cultural malaise of the 70s and the unvarnished capitalist ugliness of the 80s. Ask anyone then what the 90s would be like, they would have suggested more of the same, but without trash service.

Instead we have Britney Spears, SUVs and 28-year-old stock millionaires; our most difficult decision is whether to buy a DVD, or just stick with the VCR until we go and get an HDTV. Oh, sure, we think we feel angst on occasion, but closer examination reveals it to be irritation, pique or annoyance. I wouldn't suggest that this is a bad thing -- nameless dread can really crap on your whole day -- but I might suggest that the absence left by angst ought to be filled by something more than the luxurious malaise of sated comfort. What that something might be, I'll leave to you. Hint: It's not a "Scream" coffee mug.

Best Accidental Discovery of the Millennium.

Penicillin. The closest competitor is the discovery of vulcanized rubber, which led to our ability to sit around during the hottest part of the day in 5-mile-long traffic jams, listening to radio personalities with the brain capacity of hypoxic stoats. But as much fun as that is, not dying a terrifying, stench-filled death at the microbial hands of some bacteria is even better.

Make no mistake, a stench-filled bacterial death was a serious possibility for just about everyone well into the 20th Century. Serious strides had been made in the general sanitation of the planet in the 19th Century (thank Joseph Lister, who among other things, convinced doctors that wearing a perpetually bloody smock as a badge of competence was actually helping to kill patients), but sanitation only goes so far. Bacteria are teeny little things, and they can get into places they're not supposed to be with surprising rapidity, where they are happy to procreate until they kill you. This isn't very smart on the part of the bacteria (killing one's host tends to cause the food supply to tap out), but it's not like bacteria have brains, and anyway, they live for about 20 minutes. What do they care.

Come with me now to the battlefields of the First World War. Nasty little war, that one, with lots of soldiers wallowing in mud and getting shot or bayoneted or gassed every now and again, just for variety. If they were lucky, they'd die right there in the mud; if not, they ran a very good chance of dying in the hospital -- not from their wounds directly, but from the infections those wounds inevitably bred (War isn't just Hell, it's Hell without maid service). Doctors knew bacteria were the culprits to so many soldiers' deaths, and so researchers were assigned to discover antibiotics. Scotsman Alexander Fleming was one of them.

Fleming wasn't much help on the antibacterial front during World War I (neither was anyone else), but in 1928 he noticed an odd thing in one of his petri dishes, which had been swabbed with Staphylococcus, the nasty little bug that can cause everything from boils to toxic shock syndrome. One of the petri dishes had been contaminated -- some sort of airborne something had managed to get into the dish before Fleming sealed it off -- and whatever it was that was in there with the staph was killing it off something fierce. Now, if Fleming had been a bug-eyed drone, he would have tossed the sample; contaminated samples were supposed to be ditched. But Fleming was a scientist, thank God, and he knew he had found something.

He had found a fungus among us: Penicillium notatum. The penicilli were releasing some sort of chemical (which Fleming, in a burst of stunning originality, called penicillin) that killed bugs dead, and not just a few bugs -- we're talking all sorts of bacteria. Deader than Marley's ghost. How? By screwing with the bacteria's assembly process. In order to bacteria to survive, they have to build a cell wall as they reproduce; penicillin keeps the bacteria from building these walls. The bacteria die, exposed to the elements. It'd be sort of sad if they weren't in fact trying to kill you.

(Incidentally, this is how antibiotics work -- by messing with the assembly process. Penicillin attacks cell walls, erythromycin inhibits protein formation, rifampin goes after RNA replication. The best way to keep bacteria from using your body as real estate is never to let them lay down their subdivisions in the first place.)

The catch  -- and there's always a catch with these things -- is that naturally-occurring penicillin (known as Benzylpenicillin or penicillin-G) isn't very stable and thus isn't very useful. Fleming has found the wonder drug, but he can't do anything with it. Frustrated, Fleming shelves his penicillin research in 1931. Penicillin has to wait until Oxford researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain manage to synthesize a stable form of penicillin. It performs as promised and in 1940, penicillin debuts and starts kicking microbe ass. Fleming, Florey and Chan get the Nobel in Medicine in 1945. They were all also knighted. Fungus was very good to them.

Fungus has been very good to all of us, in fact -- not too many of us die from sore throats anymore. However, don't get cocky. Human beings, convinced as we are that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, have spent the better part of the last 60 years wantonly misusing antibiotics in lots of really dumb ways. We use antibiotics for viral infections, which is pointless (you use antivirals for viruses, dummies). We feed antibiotics to animals to who aren't sick to make 'em bigger and fatter. We take antibiotics only until we feel better instead of following the directed medication course (if you feel better, you are better, right?).

The result is that we've bred some amazingly drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We've got some TB bacteria running around these days that is, in fact, resistant to every single antibiotic we can throw at it, even the incredibly toxic antibiotics that hurt you as much as they hurt the bug. This may be fine with some of you -- if tuberculosis was good enough for John Keats, you say, it's good enough for me -- but let's see how you feel about it once you actually hork up a lung.

And it's not just TB, of course: Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and Pneumococcus, heck, all the really popular coccuses, all of them have virulently drug-resistant strains out there. Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are just waiting to poison your blood. And here's a thought for you: streptomycin-resistant e.coli has been found in the diapers of today's infants. Thing is, streptomycin hasn't been used to treat much of anything for three decades. It's evolution, baby. Anyone who doesn't believe in the process is going to be mighty surprised when an ear infection sends them to the morgue. But what can I do about it? Well, for one, stop using that stupid anti-bacterial soap. You're just making things worse, you know.

This is perhaps the great irony of the millennium's best accidental discovery -- that all the benefits that we have gotten from it could be wiped away because of our own quite deliberate actions. It'd be like Prometheus giving man fire, and then, after watching man burn down a forest or two, just to see the pretty lights, deciding that maybe he should take it back. It's an accident we got antibiotics, but when we lose them, it'll be our own damned fault.

Best Calendar of the Millennium.

The Mayan Calendar. On which the date, incidentally, is 12.19.6.14.6. That's right, only 5,485 days until the next baktun! Better hit the mall now!

Typically speaking, calendars do two things (beyond, of course, giving "Far Side" cartoonist Gary Larson a way to recycle decade-old cartoons for ready cash). First of all, they provide us with the ability to meaningfully note the passage of time. For example, today is the 226th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the 55th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and the 78th-month "anniversary" of my first date with my wife (we were obviously not married at the time). One week from today will be my daughter's first birthday. Send gifts.

All these events are contingent on our calendar for their notability relative to the time in which I exist; If we noted weeks and months differently, it might be the anniversary of something else entirely different. Months and weeks have no basis outside us: We made them up, or, if you prefer, God made them up, and we went with his basic plan (don't we always).

The second thing calendars do is notify us of the cyclical nature of our planet. Thanks to a more or less fixed tilt of the earth's axis and a regular period of revolution around our sun, our world gets hot and cold on a predictable schedule, and the patterns of life take note. Flowers bloom in the spring. Animals hibernate in the winter. Leaves fall in autumn. We get re-runs in the summer. It's the circle of life. For various reasons primarily relating to food, the planting and harvesting of, we've needed to know when to expect the seasons to come around again.

The problem has always been that humans have picked bad ways to note that passage of time. The biggest culprit has been the moon. It has a cycle, of course, about 29 days from new moon to new moon. Alas, that cycle has no real relation with the earth's position in its orbit. So while creating months relative to the moon (the word "month" is in fact etymologically descended from the old English word for "moon"), is perfectly fine for recording subjective blocks of time, it's rather less helpful in keeping track of when the seasons are coming. Sooner or later you'd get snow in July. And that would just wreak havoc on your baseball schedules.

Some of your smarter civilizations switched to a calendar in which the year was demarcated by the path of the sun (in the case of the Egyptians, they used Sirius, the Dog Star. Those crafty Egyptians). This was better, as there was, in fact, a direct relation of the sun's path and our year. But the rotation of the earth does not correspond exactly to its revolution. There's an extra quarter of the day (but not exactly a quarter of a day) thrown in for chuckles. Give it enough time, and your seasons and your months will still get away from you.

So you keep fiddling. Our current Gregorian calendar deals with it by inserting a leap day every four years, except in years that end with double zero, except those years which are cleanly divisible by 400. Like 2000. Don't worry, scientists are keeping track of these things for you. Be that as it may, there's still slippage. Calendars aren't an exact science.

Enter the Mayans, who, it should be noted, were the kick-ass mathematical minds of the pre-computational world (they used zeros before zeros were cool!). While everyone else was looking at the sun or the moon as a guidepost for the passage of time, the Mayans looked a little to the left of the sun and discovered...Venus, which as it happens, has an exceptionally predictable path around the sun that takes 584 days. Five of these cycles just happens to coincide with eight 365-day  years. Thrown in a couple of additional formulae, and you can keep time that's damn near perfect -- The Mayan calendar loses a day about once every 4000 years. Consider we can't go four years without having to plug in a day, and we've got atomic clocks and everything.

So why don't we switch to a Mayan calendar? Well, this is why:

First bear in mind that the Mayan kept track of two years simultaneously: the Tzolkin, or divinatory calendar, which is comprised of 260 days, demarcated by matching one of 13 numbers with one of 20 names (13x20=260 -- you can do at least that much math), and also another calendar of 18 months of 20 days, with five extra days known as the "Uayeb," for Days of Bad Omen (probably not a good time to do much of anything).

These two calendrical systems linked together once every 18,980 days (that's 52 years to you and me): this period of time was known as a "Calendar Round." Two calendar rounds, incidentally, make up another time period in which the Tzolkin, the 365-day calendar, and the position of Venus sync up again. Think of this as a Mayan century, if you will.

With me so far? Okay, because, actually, I lied. There's another calendar system you need to keep track of as well: The Long Count. Here's how this one works. You start of with a day, which in Mayan is known as a kin. There are 20 kin in a unial, 18 unials in a tun, 20 tun in a katun, and 20 katun in a baktun (so how many days is that? Anyone? Anyone? 144,000 -- roughly 394 years). Each of these is enumerated when you signify a date, with the baktun going first. However, remember that while kin, tun, and katun are numbered from 0 to 19, the unial are numbered from 0 to 17, while the baktun are numbered from 1 to 13. So if someone tries to sell you a Mayan calendar with a 14 in the baktun's place, run! He's a bad man!

And thus, combining our Long Count calendar with our Tzolkin and our 365-day calendar, we find that today is 12.19.6.14.6, 6 kan, 12 mak. Now you know why we don't use the Mayan calendar. And the next time you plan to cheat on a math test, sit next to a Mayan.

What happens after you reach the 13th baktun? I don't know, but it's going to happen pretty soon --the Mayan calendar rolls over on December 23rd, 2012. Maybe then we'll get a real apocalypse. Until then, let's all party like it's 12.19.19.17.19.

Best Gay Man of the Millennium.

Richard I of England, otherwise known as Richard the Lionhearted. He's here, he's queer, he's the King of England.

Although, certainly, not the only gay King of England: William II Rufus, Edward II, and King James I (yes, the Bible dude) are reputed to have indulged in the love that dare not speak its name (On the other hand, rumors pertaining to the gayness of King William III have been greatly exaggerated). Women, don't feel left out: Anne, queen from 1702 to 1714, had a very interesting "friendship" with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, who was her "lady of the bedchamber." Which was apparently an actual job, and not just some winking euphemism.

The difference between Richard and the rest of the reputedly gay monarchs of England is that people seemed to think fondly of Richard, whereas the rest of the lot were met with more than their share of hostility -- though that hostility has less to do with their sexuality than it did with other aspects of their character. William II Rufus, son of William the Conqueror, was known as a brutal tyrant who smote the weak and raised their taxes; he took an arrow in the back in 1100, in what was very likely an assassination masterminded by his brother, Henry. James I, who had been King of Scotland before he was also made King of England, spent a lot of money and lectured Parliament about his royal prerogatives; they thought he was a big drooling jerk. Queen Anne had a weak will which made her susceptible to suggestion, a point that Sarah Churchill, for one, exploited to its fullest extent.

(However, then there's Edward II. Not a very good king to begin with, Edward further annoyed his barons by procuring the earldom of Cornwall for Piers Gaveston, Edward's lifelong very good friend, and the sort of fellow who wasn't a bit shy about rubbing your nose in that fact. The barons continually had him exiled, but Edward continually brought him back; finally the barons had enough, collared Gaveston, and in 1312, lopped off his head. Edward himself met a truly bad end in 1327; having been overthrown by his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, he was killed by torture that included a red-hot poker as a suppository. You can't tell me that wasn't an editorial comment.)

On the surface of things, there's no reason that Richard, as a king, should be looked upon any more favorably than these folks; in fact, as a king, Richard was something of a bust. During his decade-long reign, he was in England for a total of six months, and most of that was given over to slapping around his brother John and the barons, rather than, say, handing out Christmas hams to the populace. Richard wasn't even very much interested in being King of England. His possessions as the Duke of Aquitaine were substantially more important to him, enough so that he went to war against his father Henry II over them. Seems that after Henry had made Richard the heir to the throne, Henry wanted him to give the Aquitaine to John, who had no lands of his own. Richard said no and went to arms; this aggravated Henry so much, he died.

What Richard really wanted to do, and what is the thing that won him the hearts of the subjects he didn't even know, was to lead the Third Crusade against Saladin, the great Muslim hero who had conquered Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin had taken Jerusalem from the Christians, who had nabbed it 88 years before, and who, it must be said, acted like animals doing it. When Saladin's troops regained the city, it was remarked how much nicer they were than the Christians had been (why, the Muslims hardly slaughtered any innocent bystanders!).

In one of those great historical coincidences, Saladin is also rumored to be gay, which would be thrilling if it were true. The idea that both sides of one of the greatest of all religious wars were commanded -- and brilliantly, might I add -- by homosexuals is probably something neither today's religious or military leaders would prefer to think about. Put that in your "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" pipe, guys: The Third Crusade was won by a pansy!

(Which pansy, of course, is a matter of debate. Richard's exploits and military brilliance during the Third Crusade are the stuff of legend, and he did manage to wrest a three-year truce out of Saladin, which, among other things, assured safe passage for Christians to holy places. On the other hand, Richard never did take back Jerusalem (which was the whole point of the Crusade), and if you check the scorecards of most judges, they'll tell you Saladin and Richard fought to a draw, so the title goes to the incumbent. However, Richard's crusade was not the unmitigated disaster that later crusades would be -- ultimately the Christians were booted out of the Palestine. So in retrospect, Richard's crusade looked pretty darn good. Way not to lose, Richard.)

Yes, yes, yes, you say, but I don't give a damn about the Crusades. I want to know who Richard was gay with. Man, you people disappoint me. But fine: How about Philip II Augustus, King of France concurrent to Richard's reign as King of England. You may have already known about this particular relationship, as it constituted a plot point in the popular play and movie "A Lion in Winter." However, even at the time, the relationship between the two was well-documented. Roger of Hoveden, a contemporary of Richard I and his biographer, has this to say:

"Richard, [then] duke of Aquitaine, the son of the king of England, remained with Philip, the King of France, who so honored him for so long that they ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the king of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the king of England was absolutely astonished and the passionate love between them and marveled at it."

(Other translations -- Hoveden wrote in Latin -- replace "love" with "esteem," toning down the breathless m4m feel of the passage, thereby allowing the nervous to assume Richard and Philip were just really really really close buds. Whatever works, man.)

Richard and Phil's relationship, beyond any physical aspect, was tempestuous at best. On one hand, Richard appealed to Philip for  help (and got it) when Henry tried to take the Aquitaine from him. On the other hand, once Richard became king, he fortified his holdings in France, on the off chance that Philip might, you know, try to stuff a province or two in his pocket while Richard was away at the Crusades.

As it happens, Philip went to the Third Crusade, where he had a falling out with Richard and eventually headed back to Paris in a huff; once there, he tried to slip some of Richard's lands in his pocket, just like Richard thought he would. The two eventually went to war over the whole thing. Richard was winning, until he was shot in the chest by an archer and died. Legend has it that Richard actually congratulated the archer for the shot, which, frankly, strikes me as taking good manners just a little too far.

You may wonder what about any of this makes Richard the best gay man of the last 1000 years. Actually, nothing; when it comes right down to it, Richard's sexuality is one of the least interesting things about him. This is one facet he shares in common with other notable gay men of the last 1000 years, from Michelangelo to John Maynard Keynes.

It's also something he shares, of course, with the vast majority of heterosexual men through the years as well. Although since that's the sexual norm, we don't think about it that way. Rare is the moment in which we say "Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. And, you know, he was straight." One day, if we're lucky, we'll think the same about gay men and women. In the meantime, we'll have Richard to remind us we're more than the sum of our sexualities. That's worth my vote.

Best Monumental Waste of Human Effort of the Millennium.

The Maginot Line. The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive.

To fully understand the Maginot line and its complete and utter uselessness, we need to step into the Way Back Machine and set the dial for February 21, 1916. On that day, German forces began their attack on Verdun, along the Meuse River; the rationale for doing it (other than the general fact there was a war going on, and they had to attack something) came from German general Erich von Falkenhayn, who believed that the Verdun attack would force France to exhaust their resources defending their position. Soon they would be out of brie, and Paris would fall!

This would be a correct assessment, as far as it went. Unfortunately the Germans did not consider the possibility that they might also hemorrhage men and supplies, which they did, in vast amounts. All told, about 800,000 men kicked it in Verdun, in more or less equal measure on both sides, and at the end of it, Verdun was back in French hands. So I suppose you could call it a draw. But isn't that just like World War I: Lots of people getting killed, but a lot of nothing actually getting done.

Be that as it may, that battle and others like it scarred the French psyche after World War I. Perhaps ascertaining, and correctly, that the Treaty of Versailles was going to go the way of Marie Antoinette's head, and the Germans would once again come calling, the French tried to figure out the best way to avoid that scenario. The answer came from André Maginot, minister war in the late 20s and early 30s: Let's build a wall, and keep those nasty Germans out!

Well, not exactly a wall, but a line -- the Maginot Line, a series of interconnected fortifications that spanned the entire of the French border with Germany, from Sedan to Wissembourg: About 150 miles. There were 50 discrete forts on the line, all within cannon shot of each other, with block houses interspersed between them. Each of these forts was a marvel of defensive design, with the thickest concrete and best defensive weapons the world had to offer.  Each fort held up to 1,000 personnel, and thanks to an immense labyrinth of connecting underground tunnels, men and supplies could be shuttled back and forth without exposing them to enemy fire or prying eyes.

Within the underground spaces were barracks, storehouses, and recreation areas; it was even air-conditioned. It was said that the Maginot Line was more comfortable to live in than any French city you could name. At the very least, no one was peeing up against a wall when they couldn't find a bathroom. By any critical standard military or architecturally, the Maginot Line was a wonder. It was, in fact, the largest single construction event in European history. Think of it as the French version of the Panama Canal, especially since the real version of the French Panama Canal (attempted in the 1880s, laid low by poor financing and malaria) was such a bust.

As far as anyone could see, there were two itsy-bitsy minor problems with the Maginot Line. The first was purely philosophical: By committing so many men and resources to the defensive nature of the Line, the French ran the risk of being lulled into a false (and smug) sense of security. They should also be preparing offensively as well. Charles De Gaulle, of whom you may have heard, suggested to his superiors that France should have an army that was both mechanized and mobile instead of sitting in a bunker waiting for the enemy to tromp into its sights. He was suggesting this course of action through the very beginning of 1940; he was not very popular for doing it.

The second itsy-bitsy little problem was that the Maginot Line only covered the border of Germany; it stopped in the east at Switzerland and in the West at Belgium. No one would be especially worried about something happening at the Swiss end: Switzerland was and is famously neutral (its motto: "We'll take money from anyone") and in any event, it's not real easy schlepping tanks over the Alps.

But what about Belgium? Well, you see. The French had thought about that whole Belgium thing, but they weren't worried. They had already talked to the British, and everyone agreed that if the Germans, for some nutty reason, just happened to come through Belgium, the Allies would mount a ground offensive and everything would take place there (it had worked so well in World War I, after all!). And anyway, getting into France through Belgium meant going through the hilly forests of Ardennes, which were figured to be impassable for tanks and heavy weaponry and equipment. So there you have it. Nothing to worry about.

The French were so fixated on the superiority of the Maginot line that it was literally impossible to consider that it could be defeated, and the Germans (who may have been genocidal curs but were not stupid) used this to their advantage in May of 1940. First, the Germans kept their Army Group C facing the Maginot Line as a diversion, to keep the Line's 41 divisions of French troops where they were. Then the Germans launched their blitzkrieg into the Low Countries on May 10, wiping out any resistance, Allied or otherwise, in the space of days, and giving the Germans the corridor they needed to swing around the Maginot Line and enter France through Ardennes. What about the impassable forests? Not so impassible after all;  the tanks and heavy artillery took to the roads while the German troops trekked through the trees. Over the river and through the woods, past Maginot's line we go.

The Germans were on French soil on May 12 and encountered little resistance; the Franco-Belgium border was the least defended frontier the French had, and what troops were there had little in the way of artillery defenses or anti-aircraft guns. By the 13th, German troops were across the Meuse; a few days later they were swarming all through France. The French finally pulled some troops out of the Maginot Line, but it was too little, too late. By the time of the German offensive at Somme on June 5, the 49 French divisions not walled in on the line faced 130 German infantry divisions as well as 10 divisions of tanks.

On June 9, the Germans began driving towards the Swiss frontier, utterly isolating what troops remained on the Maginot Line. The troops in the line could do nothing to stop it. Inasmuch as the French considered the Maginot Line impregnable, all the big guns faced towards Germany. They could not be turned around. The Germans entered Paris on June 14, and after that, it's all just Nazi collaborators, Vichy France, and Charles De Gaulle going, I told you so.

The few Maginot Line apologists (and there are some) note that the Maginot Line worked as advertised -- indeed, it worked so well that the Germans had to find another way into France! However, one must consider that the point of the Maginot Line was not to keep the Germans merely from attacking through their mutual border with France, it was to keep them out, period. On this ultimate and ultimately solely relevant criterion, the Maginot line is an immense and colossal failure, a testament to what happens when you combine a lack of imagination with a complacent world view. The Maginot Line is, in fact, hubris defined, poured into concrete and set in the ground. You can't look at it without figuring that France had it coming.

The Maginot line is still there (it's hard to dispose of 150 miles of concrete fortresses). The block houses and fortresses are now used for varying purposes, from homes to wine cellars to discos. One imagines that André Maginot might find it a bit humiliating to see a portion of his grand idea serving as a 180-bpm warehouse for young, coke-snorting Eurotrash. But if someone put in a disco and people actually show up to dance, it's at least finally doing what it's intended to do.

Best List of Bests of the Millennium.

The final topics of the TWTMTW series have been posted, and to all you who were wondering: Yes, I will finally get around to telling you the Best Use of Opposable Thumbs of the Millennium, so settle down, already. The final installments will include several topics that were suggested by readers, so let me just say to all of you who contributed an idea: Thanks. It made my job easier.

My only regret was that I was unable to use all the suggestions sent in by readers. But then I thought, damn it, it's my Web space, and I can do whatever the heck I want. So, forthwith, I am proud to present this List of Bests of The Millennium, with topics suggested by you, the valued, wonderful, oh-so-smart and undoubtedly-amazingly-attractive-to-the-person-of-your-choice reader.

Bear in mind that due to the high number of topics I'm going to bang through here, I'm not going to be doing much in the way of rationalizing my choices. But life is always a tradeoff, now, isn't it. Ready? Here we go:

Best Writing Implement: The computer. Because the idea of going back and retyping (or, hell, re-penning) an entire book should fill any writer with suicidal horror.

Best Candy Bar: Snickers. It really does satisfy, although it galls me to put it like that.

Best Hat: The fedora. Any hat that can make an ugly man like Humphrey Bogart look good has something going for it.

Best Method of Execution: The Guillotine. You know, it was created to be a humane way of chopping off someone's head. Someone should have thought that point all the way through.

Best Inaccurate Prediction of What the Future Would be Like: Any Popular Science from the first half of the century. I mean, really: Where the hell is my rocket car, anyway?

Best Means of Transportation: The locomotive. Probably the single most important tool in opening up North America, which is why the natives spent so much time wrecking the rails.

Best Useless Structure: The Eifel Tower. It was built to represent progress. The French hated it. Insert your own punchline here.

Best Font: Goudy. Serifs rule, dude.

Best Character Actor: Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs, Daffy, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, et al. Those were characters.

Best Use of the Wheel: In clocks, to help provide accurate, standard measurements of time. Western Civilization as we know it would not be possible without it; you decide whether this is good or bad.

Best Phallic Symbol: The Washington Monument. Started in the early 1800s, paused during the Civil War (constructus interruptus), completed thereafter. Its status as phallic symbol was confirmed in a recent "Futurama" episode, in which the Clinton Monument was shown, both higher and taller (although not, consistent with rumor, curved).

Best Nursery Rhyme: "Ring Around the Rosey." Proof that even the black plague can be turned into a child's game.

Best Cleaning Material: Soap. Just soap. Around for millennia, its use as a cleaning agent only really picked up in the last couple hundred years. In the 19th Century, Justus von Liebig said that the amount of soap consumed by a nation was an accurate measure of its wealth and civilization. So, you know, pick up an extra bar and let's stick it to the Swedes!

Best Use of Propaganda: Shakespeare's "Richard III." As it happens, Richard III wasn't a hunchback or a mass murderer (he wasn't a very nice guy, but who among royalty back then was?). Why such the nasty representation of Richard? Could be because the reigning monarch at the time was the granddaughter of the man who overthrew him. Just a guess.

Best Man-Made Disaster: Chernobyl. On the other hand, it's not like anyone really wanted to live in the Ukraine to begin with.

Best Dance: The Waltz. When it came out, it brought Vienna into chaos, as people neglected home and business to dance night and day and night again (because people were dancing so close to each other! The horror!). Made the Macarena look like a blip. Which it was, but even so.

Best Drug: Nicotine. Percentage-wise, it's easier to quit heroin than nicotine. Although admittedly, heroin doesn't advertise in trendy magazines with young men with washboard stomachs sailboarding with hot chicks in bikinis.

Best Inappropriate Remark: "Let Them Eat Cake." Purists note that Marie actually said "Brioche," which is a sweet bread, and not exactly cake, but, you know, it's the thought that counts.

Best Superhero: Oh, come on. It's Superman. Nietzsche rolls in his grave with every new issue. Some people hold out for Batman, but Batman isn't a superhero, he's just a psycho with a costume and a lot of money. Spiderman? Crap. Spidey sense ain't nothin' on X-Ray vision. Also, and I'll be blunt here, Marvel Comics superheroes bite. The whole lot of them. And everyone knows it. (I'm betting this last comment gets more mail than anything else I've written in this series).

Best Board Game: Chess, which was introduced to Europe at the beginning of this millennium. Why is it the best? Because no one gives a damn that a computer can beat a human at Monopoly.

Best Use of an Unpleasant Climate by a Defending Army: Russia. Russian winters did in Napoleon and Hitler. Not bad. Oh, sure, the Russian soldiers helped. But look how successful they've been in warm-weather wars, and you'll know: It was the snow.

Best New Religious Movement: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Polygamy! Jesus in America! Building a homeland by a salty lake! Riding bikes in ties! Secret underwear! Not a recipe for success by any sane standard, yet the LDS church (which prefers not to be called "Mormon," if you don't mind), has managed to both thrive and survive. Not the religion for me (I enjoy caffeine far too much), but credit where credit is due.

Best Proof The Human Race Is Not Merely a Festering Sore On The Face of This Over-Burdened Globe: Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which is quite possibly the greatest artistic achievement the human race may accomplish. If all the universe gets out of us is that one piece of music, I figure we've paid our way.

However, it means we've peaked. Let's try not to make the decline too steep, okay? Thanks.

Best Quest of the Millennium.

The Quest For Longitude. Yes, I know that a quest for a geographical unit of measurement doesn't have the same romance factor as a quest to slay a dragon. But finding an accurate gauge of longitude opened up the world, whereas slaying dragons never did anybody any good (least of all the dragons).

Now, you do remember longitude, don't you. Yeah, I know. 4th grade was a long time ago for me, too. Look, find a globe. Now, on the globe, you'll notice the planet is sliced up by a bunch of lines going two separate ways. The horizontal lines are called "latitude." They tell you how many degrees you are north or south of the Equator (if you don't know what the Equator is, you really should just kill yourself now). The vertical lines, by process of elimination, are longitude. They tell you how far east or west you are, using the longitude line that runs through Greenwich, England (for no really good reason) as the prime meridian. By using longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, you can find any spot on the globe.

The catch is getting an accurate reading of your coordinates. Latitude has never been too much of a problem; humans figured out early on that the sun's path reaches higher or lower in the sky depending on how far north or south on the planet  you are on any particular day. If you know what day it is, simply take a reading of the sun's position at high noon, do the math, and presto -- you know where you are, in a northerly or southerly sort of way.

For a large chunk of human existence, this was perfectly serviceable. As humans and their ships navigated further and further from the shore, however, it became apparent that there was a need for longitudinal readings. The oceans are, by their very definition, without landmarks, and traditional methods of measuring how far east or west one's ship was were laughably inaccurate. Take, by way of example, the method in which distance was measured by counting how many rope knots, spaced about 50 feet apart, slipped out of a sailor's fingers in 28 seconds (thus the nautical term for speed, "knots").

This would be fine as long as you traveled in a direct straight line and were constantly gauging your speed. But no one on a ship ever did either; the former because of waves, cross-currents and winds, the latter because, oh, I don't know, the sailors were busy singing sea shanties and fondling the figurehead. This way of measuring distance was known as "Dead Reckoning," because frankly, if you reckoned by it, you'd be dead.

While latitude only required the knowledge of the date and the ability to determine the angle of the sun, longitude required another determining dimension: The knowledge of the exact time at a place that was not where you were (let's call this place "Greenwich, England"). Due to the rotation of the earth, noon comes at different times at different places east and west on the planet. If you spotted the sun at high noon where ever you were, and then noted the time difference between you and Greenwich, you could determine your longitudinal distance from that point. What you needed was a clock, set to Greenwich mean time, that kept excellent time.

This was no problem if one was on land. By the 17th century, thanks to the principle of the pendulum, there were some reasonably accurate clocks in Europe. However, pendulum clocks aren't practical on sailing ships, particularly the rickety deathtraps people used to cross the seas back then. A ship that's rocking and rolling on the waves is really not the ideal place for a time piece that uses pendular motion.

(There was a way around clocks, sort of: In the 1660s, French astronomers created a table of the exact positions of the Jovian moons every day at 7pm Paris time. On each day, one could look up, note the time at which those positions were achieved where they were, and then do the math. Of course, this required both a fairly large telescope and a stable base to put it on. Once again, a ship heaving on the seas was not an excellent candidate.)

After a navigational mishap in 1707 that killed thousands of sailors (English navy ships thought they were further west than they were and tore open the bottoms of their ships on coastal rocks), the British Parliament offered a reward of 20,000 pounds to the person or person who could provide an accurate system of longitudinal reckoning. 20,000 pounds was an astounding sum of money at the time (think about 10 million dollars, which itself was a huge sum until all those Internet IPOs), and the contest coordinators, which included Sir Isaac Newton, found themselves wading through some really stupid ideas.

For example, one suggested stationing warships in permanent positions across the Atlantic; at midnight Greenwich time, they'd send up fireworks that could be seen for 100 miles around. Ships at sea could take their reading from there. Of course, this solution assumes there was practical method for the "firework ships" to know when it's Greenwich time; obviously, were that the case, there would be no need for the ships at all. The entries became so cockamamie that the Quest of Longitude became a shorthand phrase for insanity.

The ultimate hero of the Quest of Longitude was a very unlikely fellow indeed: a certain John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker and a carpenter by trade. Harrison did three things: First, he replaced the pendulum with balance springs. Second, he made the springs with a combination of metals to compensate for shrinkage and expansion. Finally, for the wood casings and other wood parts of the timepiece, Harrison used a tropical wood that was self-lubricating to reduce friction. At the end of it, Harrison had created the first timepiece that could keep accurate time at sea.

He took the first version, the H1, on its maiden voyage to Lisbon in 1734 (and got so violently seasick he never sailed again). Harrison went through three variations of the timepiece before developing the ultimate winner, the H4. In 1761 the H4 went from England to Jamaica and back -- six and a half weeks -- and only lost five seconds. The contest board was so skeptical of the achievement they made the clock do it again. Even then, they only gave Harrison half the prize. It took the direct intervention from King George III (you remember him as the mean, crazy king we got our independence from) for the board to cough up the remaining dough. Cheap bastards.

Harrison not only created the means to establish positions at sea, he also gave the world the most accurate measurement it had ever seen to that point. He also made the important point that it's not just where you are, it's when you are. In this sense, the Quest of Longitude was also another quest entirely: The Quest for Time. Timing is everything when you're looking for your place in this world.

Best Cheese of the Millennium.

Processed Cheese, or, as it's vulgarly called, American cheese. Hey, don't blame the messenger. I'm not the one who is forcing humanity to eat two billion pounds of the orange stuff annually. I'm just telling you that we do. Anyway, cheese is hardly the thing to get snooty about. Any product that is made intentionally to both smell like feet and be put in your mouth, well, honestly. How much respect should it get?

Cheese is in fact the first and best example that a great many of humanity's current culinary selections are based on bad judgment and/or someone drunkenly daring someone else to eat something entirely inappropriate. In the case of cheese, the going story (found on two entirely different cheese advisory sites, so you know it must be true) was that some 4,000 years ago, an Arab was crossing the desert with some milk in a pouch. What sort of idiot goes on a long journey across a desert with milk in a pouch? Well, see. This is the "bad judgment" part.

As the immortal song tells us, "in the desert, the heat was hot,"  so by the time the Arab fellow decided to have a pull off his udder squeezings, the stuff had fermented and became two separate and entirely smelly objects. The first was the runny, armpit-smelling liquid called "whey" (think of the ooze that floats on top of your sour cream before you stir it up -- sour cream, incidentally, yet another dare food from the land of dairy), and the other, a lump of disgusting goo which was the first cheese on record.

Any sane person would have flung the pouch of curdled mommy juice as far from their person as it is possible to fling it. But we've already established the fact we're dealing with a fellow who's a few camels short of a full caravan. So this genius eats the goo and drinks the armpit liquid. The cheese flacks who convey the story would have us believe he was "delighted" with his discovery, which makes me want to sit these flacks down and see how "delighted" they'd be to ingest fermented mammal squirts that had been lying in the sun all day, breeding microorganisms in a largely anaerobic medium. The fellow was probably delighted that he didn't die the next day of food poisoning, and that's about the extent of anyone's delightment.

So why did he do it? I suspect the truth went something like this.

Cheese-Eater: Damn it, my goat's milk's gone stinky and bad. Look at it (shows it to friend).

Friend: Wow, that's truly vile. I'll give you a shekel to try some.

Cheese-Eater: You're out of your freakin' mind. I'd rather tongue my camel.

Friend: All right, two shekels.

Cheese-Eater: There's no amount of money you can pay me to eat this stuff.

Friend: Five shekels.

Cheese-Eater: Okay.

(Tries some; doesn't die.)

Friend: How is it?

Cheese-Eater: Not too bad. Want some?

Friend: You're out of your freakin' mind.

When you think about it, cheese and the process you use to make it is still unspeakably vile. Take milk and let it go bad, either by exposing it to various forms of bacteria or by ladling on an enzyme called rennin, which is obtained from the fourth stomach of cows (this last one is why vegans will have nothing to do with cheese). After it's gone sufficiently bad, you dry it out and shove it in a corner for several months to let it go bad some more, only slower. You know it's done when allowing it get any more bad would actually, you know, cause you to die when you ate it. I imagine they lost quite a few cheese-making monks to this testing phase.

There are hundreds of types of cheese, from Abbaye de la Joie Notre Dame to Zamorano; varied nature of cheese initially had less to do with anything humans were doing than to the fact that every place on the planet has its own sorts of bacteria, so milk goes bad in different ways in different places. Eventually people gained some sort of control over the cheese-making process and started intentionally making different kinds of cheese, although the high-volume commercial aspect of cheese making had to wait until 1851, when the first cheese factory was constructed in upstate New York. Wisconsin, cheese capital of the world, saw its first cheese factory open seventeen years later. It was a limburger cheese factory. There's no punchline there, it's the truth.

Processed cheese, the cheese of the millennium, reared its bland orange head in 1911 in Switzerland. However, the cheese gods had already favored that land with its own sort of cheese, the one with all the holes in it, so it was left to the Americans to take the process and popularize it. And they did: James Kraft developed his cheese processing process in 1912, perfected it five years later, and unleashed the cheese food product on the world shortly thereafter.

The process of processed cheese is the secret to its blandness -- the natural cheese ripening process is interrupted by heat (read: they fry the bacteria before it gets out of hand and gives the stuff actual taste), and what you get is a block of proto-cheese that has an indefinite shelf life. It's bland, but it lives forever: The Dick Clark of cheese.

Within the realm of processed cheese, there are gradations, relative to the amount of actual cheese in the cheese; the higher the number of qualifiers, the less cheese it has. To begin there's processed cheese, which is 100% cheese, just not a very dignified kind (usually some humiliated form of interrupted cheddar, labeled "American" so the other cheddars won't beat it up and steal its lunch money).  Then there's processed cheese food, which features cheese by-products as filler. This is followed by cheese food product, which includes some entirely non-dairy ingredients such as vegetable oils. Finally, of course, there's cheez, which may or may not feature plastics. The less said about that stuff, the better.

I certainly wouldn't argue that processed cheese is the best cheese of the millennium in terms of taste, texture, quality or snob appeal (I may be glib, but I ain't stupid), but I will suggest the utter ubiquity of processed cheese, American cheese, allows it to walk away with the title. Indeed, American cheese is to cheese as American culture is to culture: It's not necessarily better, it's just designed to travel, to be convenient to use, to be standard and unvaried and largely non-biodegradeable no matter where you find it.

We can even go so far as to say that American culture and American cheese will go hand in hand, right to the last. Thousands of years from now, after the inevitable apocalypse of some sort wipes out our civilization, future archeologists will scour the land to make some sense of our times, and I think the process will go something like this.

Archeologist 1: Look, it's another one temple of the ancestors' dominant faith. Note the golden arches.

Archeologist 2: And look what I've found in the storage crypt!

(pulls out a box of cheese slices)

Archeologist 1: Ah, the communion squares. For their ritual obescience to Ro-Nald, the demon destroyer of worlds. You can see his terrible visage, bedecking the illuminated windows from behind the tithing altar.

Archeologist 2 (sniffing the cheese): These smell terrible. It must have been some sort of penance to ingest these.

Archeologist 1 (glancing over): You know, these samples have maintained their unholy orange taint. They may still be potent.

Archeologist 2: What are you saying?

Archeologist 1: I'll give you 10 glars if you eat one.

Archeologist 2: You're out of your freakin' mind.

Archeologist 1: All right, 20.

Archeologist 2: Okay.

Best Curmudgeon of the Millennium.

Ambrose Bierce, 19th century newspaper columnist, wit, short story writer, misanthrope. Some people wake up on the wrong side of the bed. He woke up on the wrong side of the universe.

Let us stipulate that it's not that difficult to be a curmudgeon. The word simply means a cranky, nasty person, usually a man, usually old. Further reflection on this definition leads to the conclusion that this definition is somewhat self-reflexive. Old men tend to be cranky and nasty because after a certain age, your prostate swells and you have to pee three times a night and you look like an ambulatory prune and you're going to die. Eventually, there is just no goddamn upside to putting on a happy face.

In a way, I imagine it's liberating not to have to worry about being nice anymore. But I would bet most men would happily trade the freedom of curmudgeonlyness for the freedom to have sex with an attractive 27 year old (obviously, Hugh Hefner is excluded from this, though frankly, the thought of that man snorkling around with three girls whose combined ages don't equal his own makes me want to infiltrate the Playboy mansion, steal his Viagra, and then laugh cruelly as he undergoes blue-tinted withdrawal symptoms).

Be that as it may, one's curmudgeonosity doesn't count if its brunt is only felt by one's children, one's noisy neighbors, and one's burly, no-nonsense male nurse ("Oh, you better believe it's time for your enema. We can do this easy, or we can do this hard"). One must spread their crankiness around, let it flow as if from an overburdened spigot. As it happens, the written word is a perfect medium for this sort of thing; as fun as it is to shout bitter  invective randomly at people, it's even more fun to daintily handcraft a stream of pure venom, print it up and put it out on the street. If nothing else, people will save the clippings.

Ambrose Bierce was an undisputed master of venom. He wrote with an animosity of such rare degree that in this day and age, any one of his newspaper columns would have been slapped with six different sorts of libel suits, presuming his editor somehow agreed to publish it in the first place (which any sane editor would not). Read, for example, Bierce's lashing of Oscar Wilde in an 1882 column:

That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it— says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding.

And that's just the first paragraph!

What was Bierce's problem? Oh, where to begin. First off, he had, of course, a terrible childhood. Then he fought in the Civil War and took part in several of the bloodiest battles of the entire war, including Shiloh, in which Union soldiers barely fought back a surprise Confederate attack (which probably would have succeeded, had not the Confederacy's commanding general been shot and mortally wounded early in the fighting. D'oh).

During the war, Bierce got a severe head wound that in his words "cracked my head like a walnut." The combination of his own wounds with the general horrors of that fraternal war didn't do anything to brighten Bierce's outlook, and post-war job as a treasury official in the Reconstruction south (the Treasury department being heinously corrupt at the time) didn't help matters, either.

Bierce had a few good years, when he married, raised some kids, and wrote for papers in San Francisco and in England. But it didn't last. Bierce  accused his wife of infidelity, based on suspicious letters, and left her; eventually she filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment, but died before the divorce was finalized. Bierce's two sons both died young, one at 16, in a fight over a girl, and the other at age 23, from pneumonia related to alcoholism.

Even Bierce's writing career had its taints: Bierce railed against the undue influence that California's railroad magnates had over politics and  newspapers, but then he found the magazine he worked for, the Wasp, was in the back pocket of another industrial concern (a water company). He was compelled to resign. So you see, he had plenty to be cranky about.

Bierce's nasty streak didn't win him any friends (and alienated what friends he did have, as he showed no reluctance to keep them off his lists of targets). But it sure sold newspapers and magazines, enough so that William Hearst hired Bierce to write a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner for $100 a week, which was not a bad rate back then (and which would have some writers salivating even now, alas for all us poor writers). Bierce hated Hearst and was something of a prima donna, refusing to do interviews or any sort of legitimate reportage, sniffily explaining that his job did not include "detective work." But a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, I suppose. Even a curmudgeon's gotta eat.

It was largely from the Examiner columns that Bierce's most famous work is extracted: The Devil's Dictionary, a collection of witheringly sarcastic definitions that peppered Bierce's columns for two decades. Reading these bitter definitions, one is struck at how contempory they are; they could have been written by those snide toads over at Suck.com last week as easily as by a Civil War vet 120 years ago (my favorite is actually a two parter: "ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught.").

This isn't necessarily a compliment to the current age, mind you. Today's bitter ironists are ironic for no good reason -- it's just kinda kooky and fun to have a nasty 'tude, or the appearance thereof. The trenchant wit of spoiled middle-class is not something one actually fears, you know (trust me). One imagines that the head-crushed, Shilo-surviving, cuckolded, two-child-burying Bierce would have taken a look at today's smartasses sniggering into their lattes, and, having somehow successfully kept himself from strangling them with his own hands, would have decided to head out for points unknown rather than to deal with them any further.

As it happens, something very much like that is exactly what happened to Bierce. He got tired of America and headed to Mexico in 1913, arriving just in time for Pancho Villa's revolution. Once he crossed the border, he was never heard from again. Responsible folks suggest he was killed in the siege of Ojinaga in January 1914; less responsible folks suggest he joined the revolutionaries as a goad. Indeed, there is a legend of a curmudgeonly old gringo in Villa's camp, who apparently gave the revolutionary leader no end of grief. It may not have been Bierce. But it would have been perfect if it was.

Best Unit of Time of the Millennium.

The second. Because the second is a lot newer than might expect. How new? Try 1967. Yes, the definition of a second and Sgt. Pepper's, both in the same year. Kinda makes you think, doesn't it.

Well, now, wait a second, you say (no pun intended). I'm pretty sure they had seconds before 1967. And it's true: They did. Previous to 1967, everything was not rounded up to the nearest minute. However, that second, and the second we have today, are entirely different things. And if you think a second is defined as 1/60th of a minute, boy, are you ever living in the past.

Let's work this through. Most of us think of the second as 1/60th of a minute, which is itself 1/60th of an hour, which is 1/24th of an entire day (for those of you lost in the math, a second would thus be 1/86,400th of a day). The day, in this respect, is the ultimate unit of time, from which the others are derived.

But -- get this -- there's more than one kind of day. There's the sidereal day -- the time it takes one point on the planet to fully rotate relative to the background of stars -- and then there's the solar day, which is the amount of time from sunrise to sunrise. The sidereal day is shorter than the solar day -- it takes 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds, in mean solar time. This is because the sun moves east, relative to the stars (this is why the constellations "move" in the sky as the year progresses).

Sure, okay, but there's the solar day (the mean solar day, that is, as the actual solar day speeds up and slows down eentsy bits relative to the position of the earth in its orbit around the sun), and that one is 24 hours -- by which we mean that the hour is the amount of time in which it takes the earth to rotate 15 degrees. That seems like a pretty fixed amount of time. The earth doesn't suddenly speed up or slow down, right?

Well, no. Not suddenly. But the earth's rotation is in fact slowing down. You've heard of the moon, no doubt. The moon's gravitational pull on the earth causes tides (so does the sun's, to a lesser extent). Those tides, combined with the fact that the earth's land masses keep the tidal bulge from remaining perfectly positioned under the moon, cause tidal friction. Tidal friction, in turn, is causing two things: it's pushing the moon further away from the earth, and the earth's rotation is slowing. Quite a bit over the course of time -- 2 billion years ago, Earth's day was only about 58% as long as today's. The moon was a hell of a lot closer, too.

(Science trivia: The first mathematical presentation of the tidal friction concept was presented by astronomer George Darwin, son of, you guessed it, Charles. First they tell us we're related to monkeys, then they tell us the day is getting longer! Those Darwin boys are nothing but bad news.)

At some point billions of years from now, earth's rotation will stop completely; the period of the day will match the period of the earth's rotation around the sun. At which point any idiot will be able to run a "four minute mile."

Point is -- if you peg your hours, minutes, and seconds to the rotation of the earth, those units of time are inevitably lengthening. Not enough that you or I would notice over the astronomically puny lengths of our own little lives. But still.

(This doesn't even take into consideration additional relativistic fluctuations of time based on the earth's own gravity well, which conspire to make a "second" at 36,000 feet infinitesimally different from a "second" at sea level. But, you know, don't even think about that. You'll just get a headache.)

How about if we define the second in terms of an hour? Go right ahead -- but be aware that for most of history, including much of this millennium, the length of an hour wasn't 1/24th of a day, it was 1/12th of a period of sunlight or darkness. The length of an hour varied not only from day to day (as you received more or less sunlight through the seasons of the year) but also from daytime to nighttime -- in the middle of winter, your daytime hours would be short, but your nighttime hours would be very long, indeed. Some attempt was made before mechanical clocks to regularize the hour as a passage of time, through candles, water-clock and hourglasses, but short of a few amazing engineering marvels (mostly in China) no one would try to pretend that these methods were anything but imprecise.

Minutes? Please. The first clocks didn't even bother with a minute hand.

In any event, while the essentially variable nature of these units of time don't matter to most of us, they presented a problem for scientists, who tend to be anal about things having exact definitions. You can't describe an event as occurring over a specified duration of time, if that definition of time is not in fact definite. Once scientists realized this was the case, they decided something had to be done. They decided to change the definition of the second.

Why the second? Because it's the most useful unit of time in terms of science. Also, one suspects that as removed from the real world as scientists are, they knew enough to know that the average Joe might raise a stink if them eggheads tried to screw with his whole day. A second -- eh. Who cares if they screw with that? A second's over before you know it.

The first attempt to redefine the second came in 1956 when the (conspiracy theory lovers, start your engines now) International Committee on Weights and Measures defined the second as 1/31,556,925.9747th of the length of the tropical (seasonal) year of 1900. Everybody congratulated themselves on a job well done until someone pointed out that since 1900 was actually 56 years previous, it was going to be sort of difficult to get an actual bead on how long the second was back then. Entropy had occurred in the interim, after all. Back to the drawing board.

The second attempt, in 1964, was somewhat more intelligent. For the first time, the second was defined entirely independent of either the rotation or revolution of our planet. It had been discovered that under particular conditions, the vibration of the cesium-133 atom occurred at phenomenally regular (though of course phenomenally small) intervals. So scientists pegged the second to that. Provisionally in 1964, and exclusively since 1967, the second has been defined as (you'll love this): "9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation associated with the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom." Why 9,192,631,770 cycles? Well, because that was pretty much the length of time that everybody thought of as a "second." You have to hand it to those scientists.

However they came about it, the length of a second is now carved in cesium, an element whose cycle is not susceptible to the ravages of tidal friction, rotational energy or any other messy details of planetary rotational periods. It is still susceptible to relativistic issues, of course. But, hey. I told you not to think about that. Just enjoy it, for a second.

Best End of the World of the Millennium.

Thomas Muentzer's Armageddon, in 1525. It wasn't actually the end of the world, but really. When is it ever?

The history of the human species is the history of a people waiting for the other shoe to drop. The very first human who had the ability to think beyond the next five minutes probably got up one morning, looked around the cave and the savannah outside, smiled briefly and then thought, you know, this just can't last. Humans are innately eschatological -- looking for the signs and portents that signify that the end of the world is nigh. It beats Yahtzee.

While all humans everywhere seem to have some conception of a final end of our planet and our people, Western civilization has been particularly obsessed with the end time (our Eastern brethren look at the world in a less linear fashion, what with all reincarnation stuff, although even they believe in a eventual, final resting point of the human soul -- Nirvana, which is literally the annihilation of desire. That's right, when you finally reach complete understanding, you won't want that Ford Expedition! Better stay on that Wheel of Suffering for a while, until you get it out of your system).

As a systematic collection of beliefs, the Western end-of-the world mania gets its start in Zoroastrianism, a religion out of Iran, whose prophet, Zoroaster, taught that the world was a battleground in at 9,000 year war between the forces of good and evil. At the end of it, a final savior, called the saoshyant, will come and lead the forces of good into triumph. God (or, more specifically, Ahura Mazda, the god of good) will then use him to redeem the world and resurrect the dead.

Sound familiar? It should; elements of  Zoroastrianism deeply inform Judaism and its own messianic writing, as well as Christianity and Islam. Zoroastrianism’s god of evil, Ahriman, is even the blueprint for Ol' Scratch himself -- that'd be Satan, you know.

More recently, the concept of end times and apocalyptic struggle has expanded beyond the usual boundaries of religion. Take, if you will, the political system of Marxism. Marxism is full of the hallmarks of the end times: Belief in a protracted struggle between the forces of good (the workers) and evil (those who would alienate the worker from his labor), a final apocalyptic battle (your worker's revolution), and then, of course, the Worker's Paradise, which is your basic post apocalyptic Millennium, minus of course Jesus (who, however, was well-known to prefer the company of the poor over the rich).

This apocalyptic struggle is even more explicit in Nazism, which had the apocalyptic battle (the eradication of Jews and other non-Aryans), its messiah (Hitler), and, most explicitly, the Third Reich, which of course was also referred to as the "Thousand Year Reich," aping the millennium exactly (the title "Third Reich," though a reference to German history, also fits comfortably into an apocalyptic world view -- in the 12th Century, Joachim of Fiore, an Italian monk, interpreted the Book of Revelation and discovered three ages of the world, hinged on the triune nature of the Christian God. There's the age of the father, which was pre-Jesus, and the age of the son, which was the current time, and an upcoming "Third Age," to be ruled by the holy ghost, which would correspond to the Millennium).

Nowadays, of course, most people are repelled by the explicit Nazi/Judeo-Christian parallels, particularly as it implies that the Nazis are the forces of "good" in this  world view (the idea of Hitler as the Messiah is particularly odious). But in 1938, I'll bet you a lot of Germans thought it was pretty keen.

Ironically, in this century, it's science that has given us fuel for our apocalyptic fire. There's the atomic bomb, most obviously. Nuclear annihilation, nuclear winter, Mad Max, Godzilla. But it's just the fiery tip of the iceberg. AIDS is a favorite example for  the obnoxious Bible-thumper of the incurable plague the precedes the apocalypse (rest assured other plagues, from the Black plague onward, have also pulled this duty). The advance of  technology that allows global network and near- instantaneous access to vast reams information is also a piece of the end days puzzle.

Global warming, and its twin offspring El Nino and La Nina, contributes to those massive floods and hurricanes and fires we've been having recently. Hell, even meteors from space, the 1990's favorite way to blow up the world, belongs in the pot: They didn't call the movie "Armageddon" for nothing, even if they did manage to screw up the reference ("Armageddon" is a battle -- and is in fact an actual geographic location -- not the actual end of the world).

Ultimately, however, the problem for humans, and particularly Christians, has not been that the end is coming, but that it hasn't come soon enough. Christians have literally been expecting the end times since the very beginning of the religion. The earliest Christians fully expected the Kingdom of God before they died; indeed, much of the literature conceptualizing and explaining the second coming (including the Book of Revelation) is about trying to rationalize why Christians are still loitering on earth instead of kicking up their heels on a cloud somewhere.

Subsequent interpretations of apocalyptic literature through this last millennium have filled its days with presumably definite dates in which the world as we knew it would end, and the new world would begin. This despite the fact Jesus himself noted that "No man knoweth the day nor the hour of my coming." But you know how people are. They get all excited and stuff.

First and foremost, of course, is the actual beginning of the second millennium, which (for all you math geeks out there), the people of the times took to be 1000 AD. Churches were packed with the cautious expectation that the Millennium, with the big "M," might actually coincide with the millennium, with the small "m." It did not. Later, the previously mentioned Joachim of Fiore, in formulating his three ages of God, pegged the age of the Holy Ghost to begin sometime in the early part of the 13th century, by which time, conveniently, Joachim would be dead and unable to answer for himself if there was a problem with the calculations, which of course there was.

Somewhat further up the timestream, the biggest End of the World event in the new world took place in 1844. Seems a New York  farmer named William Miller predicted, after careful analysis of the Book of Revelation, that the Second Coming was on the way in 1843. Through skillful promotion and the use of helpful pamphlets, hundreds of thousands bought in, but when the appointed hour arrived, Jesus was nowhere to be found. Miller checked his records and discovered -- oops -- he'd dropped a year in the translation of dates from BC to AD. He set the new date: October 21, 1844.

Miller's adherents, the Adventists, sold their worldly possessions and decamped to Miller's farm to await the Lord. Jesus, alas, missed his Second Chance at a Second Coming. This event, or lack thereof, becomes known as the "Great Disappointment," which, all things considered, may be the only time something described that way can be said to be an understatement.

(Adventists are still waiting, by the way. The new thinking is that the 1844 date was the moment Jesus started his examination of all the names in the Book of Life. After that, he'll come down and start his reign. The Adventists have this time chosen not to set a specific date -- though it's real soon now -- and that's probably wise. As for the fact that Jesus needs 156 years and counting to read a single book, all one can say is: That's some book.)

Thousands lost their property and some probably lost their faith in the Great Disappointment, but nobody died. The same cannot be said for Thomas Muentzer's Armageddon, which is why I, after all this preamble, now bequeath it the title of End of the World of the Millennium.

Thomas Muentzer was a priest who, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, read into the Bible (newly translated into German by Martin Luther, with whom Muentzer had had some acquaintance) that the Apocalypse was coming, and that the forces of good and evil would be arrayed along social and economic lines. The good folks would be the peasants, who are, of course, the salt of the earth, while the forces of evil were in the form of the princes and landowners of Germany.

As you might expect, this particular interpretation of the Bible was not especially popular with the princes (or with Martin Luther himself -- who at one point called Muentzer "The Satan at Allstadt"), but the masses ate it up. And it just happened to fit the mood at the time in Germany, where peasant revolts were popping up all over the lands. Muentzer found himself leading one of those peasant revolts, and in 1525, was at forefront of a peasant army, 8,000 strong, facing the army of the princes at Frankenhausen.

This is the battle Muentzer has been waiting for -- he'd been riling up the peasants by telling them that this battle will signal the End of the World, that God himself would intervene and thus, the Kingdom of God would be at hand. The princes, whose well-armed, well-trained forces reasonably expected to wipe the floor with the peasants, reportedly tried to find a non-confrontational end to the battle (they needed those peasants back in the fields, after all). But Muentzer riled up the troops some more, proclaiming that he himself would catch the princes' cannonballs in his shirtsleeves. What's more, as the battle was about to commence, a rainbow appeared in the sky above the battlefield. As it happened, Muentzer's flag featured a rainbow on it. It had to be a sign. Muentzer's peasants marched into battle, singing hymns. Christ was coming, and he was on their side.

It was a massacre. Five thousand peasants died screaming as the princes rained cannonshot down on their heads (the princes' forces lost maybe a dozen people all told). Muentzer did not catch a single one of those cannonballs with his sleeves; in fact he fled the field of battle and was discovered some distance away, hiding under a bed. Muentzer was arrested, tortured, made to recant his various heresies, and on May 27, 1525, executed by the princes. In one sense Muentzer was right, it was the end of the world, although the world that was ending was his. It was, alas, a very personal apocalypse.

Somewhat ironically, several centuries later, Muentzer would be held up as a national hero by the communist government of East Germany, who saw parallels in his actions and the actions of the Glorious Worker's Revolution. So I suppose when communism fell, that made Muentzer a two-time loser.

We're still awaiting the end of the world. And let's be clear on this: The end is coming, one way or another, for the planet Earth. In the absence of planet-squashing meteors, horrifying viral or bacterial plagues that wipe out all known life, the sudden and unexpected appearance of an alien race that claims Earth in an eminent domain land grab for a wormhole superhighway they're building to Alpha Aquilae, or even, yes, the Second Coming, the sun is still going to use up all its hydrogen one day. In burning helium instead, it will swell up like a big red balloon, swallowing the inner planets as it expands. That'll be about five billion years from now. Wear sunscreen.

In the meantime, I will suspect we'll have plenty of time to think about how everything is going get flushed, one day, sooner or later. Or (and I know this is radical idea), just don't. Stop worrying about the end of things. Sure, things end: Divine intervention, celestial expansion, network cancellation, or simply an inopportune slip that causes you to crack your head on the toilet will all conspire to bring about the cessation of the things you know and love.

The remedy, the only remedy you have, is to keep at it: Keep doing what matters, keep seeing the world around you, keep loving those who matter to you. Because when the end of the world comes, however it comes, what's ultimately going to matter in your life is what you've made of it.

You've got some time left. A whole new millennium, in fact. Get to it.

Table of Contents

Cover

INTRODUCTION (from 1999)

INTRODUCTION (from 2010)

Best Beverage of The Millennium.

Best Lopsided War of The Millennium.

Best Television Series of The Millennium.

Best Invaders of The Millennium.

Best Plague of The Millennium.

Best Stuffed Toy of The Millennium.

Best Science Fiction Novel of The Millennium.

Best Crackpot Religious Leader of The Millennium.

Best Historical Era of The Millennium (Excluding Our Own).

Best Stupid Piece of Attire of the Millennium.

Best Vision of Hell of the Millennium.

Best Non-Toxic Creative Tool of the Millennium.

Best Domesticated Animal of the Millennium.

Best Buddy Team of the Millennium.

Best Personal Hygiene Products of the Millennium.

Best Condiment of the Millennium.

Best Thing to be Thankful For of the Millennium.

Best "Little" Invention of the Millennium.

Best 15 Minutes of Fame of the Millennium.

Best Use of the Brain of the Millennium.

Best Mass Hysteria of the Millennium.

Best Thing We Should Probably Never Do Again of the Millennium.

Best Hideously Inbred Royal Family of the Millennium.

Best Dead-End Technology of the Millennium.

Best Planet of the Millennium.

Best Serial Killer of the Millennium.

Best Weapon of the Millennium.

Best Emotion of the Millennium.

Best Accidental Discovery of the Millennium.

Best Calendar of the Millennium.

Best Gay Man of the Millennium.

Best Monumental Waste of Human Effort of the Millennium.

Best List of Bests of the Millennium.

Best Quest of the Millennium.

Best Cheese of the Millennium.

Best Curmudgeon of the Millennium.

Best Unit of Time of the Millennium.

Best End of the World of the Millennium.