So we’ve reached the end of another millennium. Seems like just yesterday we were eagerly preparing for the year 1000, taking our annual baths, gathering up live chickens to foully eat with our bare hands at the celebration, and marvelling at how we’d lived to the ripe old age of 28 and would indeed live to see another year, provided a Mongol horde didn’t come through the village and wipe us all out first.
Of course I’m aware that the next millennium doesn’t actually start until 2001. I’m aware of this primarily because once a week, every newspaper in the country prints a letter to the editor written by someone who thinks he’s a genius for pointing out this fact. To these people I would like to say two things:
1) Do you READ the letters to the editor, or just write them? Because if you read them, you’d see that this information has already been passed along numerous times. Everyone knows this by now. We are all aware that there was no year “0,” and hence, the new millennium doesn’t really start until 2001. WE KNOW THIS.
2) We don’t care.
Anyway, many of the year-end lists and reflections have focused only upon this year or this century. I’d like to do a true “Best of the Millennium” list, taking into account all the factors that make this world the grand experience it is.
BEST LAND MASS:
1. North America
2. Africa
3. Marlon Brando
MOST DESPISED PERSON:
1. Adolf Hitler
2. Genghis Khan
3. Jar Jar Binks
GREATEST TRAGEDY AT SEA:
1. Sinking of the Titanic, 1912
2. Sinking of the Spanish Armada, 1588
3. “Speed 2,” 1997
GREATEST DISCOVERY:
1. America
2. The law of gravity
3. That you can sing the words of “If You Could Hie to Kolob” to the tune of “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme song.
MOST IGNOBLE DEATH:
1. Hitler’s cowardly suicide
2. Elvis dying on the toilet
3. The last episode of “Seinfeld”
BEST ANCIENT RUIN, DISCOVERED AND RESTORED IN THIS MILLENNIUM:
1. King Tutankhaman’s tomb
2. The Roman Colosseum
3. Elizabeth Taylor
MOST CONTROVERSIAL THEORY, LATER PROVEN AS FACT:
1. Galileo’s theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa.
2. Columbus’s theory that the Earth is round, not flat.
3. My theory that Ann Landers and Dear Abby are actually the same person, and that their “separate” columns are word-for-word identical to each other about three times a week.
GREATEST INVENTION:
1. The printing press
2. The microchip
3. Flesh-eating robots that will one day assist me in my plot to take over the world (NOTE: Flesh-eating robots still in development.)