As humane people who don't WANT it to end, we'd better hope that something like the piece below (better written we'd hope!) will one day appear. But I'm a 10 today, I don't believe it ever will.

-RC

____________________________________________________ Pre-publication excerpt from:

"Game Time !: The Bug That Failed - A History of the Y2K Apocalyptic Movement" by Prof. Jeeves Rene Bulsh (Boston: Beddanaylz University Press, to appear, April 2043)

From the Introduction:

"A specter haunted the English speaking countries of North America in the waning years of the last decade of the previous century: the specter of y2k. Though not widely recalled today, except by its few surviving frazzled participants, it has been considered by many historians as the largest apocalyptic movement of American history. In this work, having allowed the leavening of time to compost and marinate our subject suitably lo these several decades, we will attempt an objective and comprehensive analysis of what it was all about, and how the movement's disparate and loosely integrated "community of belief" reacted when the 'machine failed to stop' [Forster, 1909].

From the Conclusion:

"We have examined the y2k "bug that failed" from all angles in the several hundred pages above. We have reviewed the history of apocalyptic movements, religious and secular through the ages, from the pre-first millienium controversy [Bulsh 2029] to Jonestown. We have reviewed the history of anti-technology sentiments in the English-speaking world, from the Luddites to the Unabomber to the Eekonese Pleistocene Rehabilitation Front [Bulsh 2036]. We have considered the technical foundation of the movement, the ultra-efficient two-digit date pearl embedded in all those stinky COBOL oysters. We have analyzed and rejected the numerous claims of deliberate malfeaseance or government conspiracy in promulgating this approach as a loose conventional standard in the programming community of the period. We have reviewed the childhood and adult autoholohagiographies of the major early, extreme, and consistent alarmists, prominent among them Dr. Gary North. We have reconstructed the post-natal cryptochemocraphylic records of the early, extreme fluctuationists, e.g. Yardeni. We have reviewed the carbon-14 data resulting from the exhaustive reconstruction of the lower orofacial muscles of the pivotal figure Joel Koskinen, exhumed from the potato fields surrounding his retirement cabin. We have considered the early history of the 'internet' which, as the media of time were frequently pleased to report, played such seminal role in the spread of the y2k 'meme', through the psychological syndrome then referred to as "internet addiction disorder". We have exposed the unscrupulous motives that underlay the media's mid-1999 espousal of "y2k panic syndrome" and "y2k preparation disorder" as major psychopathological conditions requiring pharmacological attention [cf. also: Bulsh & Krupp "What a creep, man, you should be on Prozac or something" - The "media-pharmacological complex" scandals of the late 1990's" Beddanaylz U. Press, 2024]. We have reviewed the finding of all major studies of the "true believers" of the period, noting that their were many positive results reported from participants in the hysteria of that time, from those who learned new trades (from shell-reloading to chicken farming); and especially from the 2% of the 1998 population of the city of [], who relocated just before the [] nuclear power plant exploded (for unrelated causes, cf. W. L. V. R. Rine (2018) and GAO report #098098) , taking out the entire population of []. These survivors, with impressive and moving sincerity, attribute their survival to Dr. Gary North. What we have NOT yet considered is the simple question: why ? Why were so many of the most residents in the most technologically advanced, creative, energetic, optimistic nation on the face of the earth (we refer here primarily to the US, the Canadian response was covered in Chapter 440 above) so inclined to accept the inevitable demise of the system of which they should have been masters ? But perhaps this is to view the question wrongly. Perhaps it would be more meaningful to consider the converse: why was 98% of the population totally oblivious to the problem ? Brothers would split - one a y2k prepper, one a DGI (cf. appendix G "The Dialectotogy of Y2K: a glosssary), parents ordering tons of grain, while their adult children installed full wall HD TV's. Most people, in fact, never got it, never knew about the iceberg that passed so near in the cold millenial night. The stupidity of the sheeple of that period has been rated by idiotologists of our own era as so awe-inspriring, so impervious to reason, evidence, and argument, that had the population of that time been the Titanic in its collision, the iceberg would've sunk, and the ship sailed obliviously on. And yet, just as a painted clock, with its hands in fixed position, tells the right time in ignorance twice a day, the sheeple were untroubled, and indeed, y2k was "the bug that failed". Indeed, the lack of comment on this question, apart from one bizarre and rather labored satire of the period (cf. "Game Time" by Runway "Double Tap" Cat, 1998) is strange to the point of being disturbing. Some researchers have attributed the y2k fizzle to the fact that programmers, unexpectedly, stayed on the job right up to New Year's Eve. This was because they had nowhere to go! After all, it was estimated to require up to 12 months to fully prepare a "y2k retreat" (cf. Appendix G), and by late 1998, when by hypothesis only 2% of the population had "gotten it", the programmers had, in the words of a popular song of the immediately prior historical era "nowhere to run, nowhere to hide". So they fixed everything. This Herculean feat went largely unheralded and unrewarded. Indeed, the genuine trench warriors of the period, the welfare recipients who had received two months of COBOL training in late 1998 and "saved our ass" (in the words of one y2k survivor interview for this book) were summarily fired in January 2000 in order to, in the words of a typical annual report of the period "bring expenses into line with expected revenues and to assure our shareholders and stakeholders of continued high profit performance well into the next quarter".

-- runway cat (runway_cat@hotmail.com), December 06, 1998

Answers

GAME TIME???

I WIN!!

JERRY WINS GAME OVER!!!!

TAKE THAT YOU COMMIE LOSERS!!!!!!!1

-- jerry (j@jjj.jjjjerryHERRY!), December 06, 1998.

You're too old to be playing these games, Mr. Chittum.

-- Juanito (hispanic@mexico.com), December 06, 1998.

Ahhh,this will be a relief to my doctor who has been trying to diagnose me for some time. Now I can tell him it is called "Y2K Internet Addiction Disorder".

-- y2klady2 (y2klady2@aol.com), December 06, 1998.

But I've been taking my prozac and I'm still scared! Now I may have to up it to 3 if this NWO thing is at all possible. Can't go any higher than that, gotta be able to reload fast. And have to be in the front lines cause if I'm not ,I'll be one of the first to go anyway.

-- Prozac2 (prozac@scared s**tless.com), December 06, 1998.

" and by late 1998, when by hypothesis only 2% of the population had "gotten it""

Interesting tibit: 2% of the population is in the "gifted" range, i.e. IQ of 130 and above.

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), December 06, 1998.

Pieces like this pollyanna satire, and more especially Leo's novella and the folk-tale piece posted by Diane (Wietookay) should be stuck all together in a single "y2k TB200-generated-fiction" section.

bh

-- Blue Himalayan (bh@k2.h), December 08, 1998.

I'm trying to figure out if 2% survived, 2% were wrong and prozac'ed out of their misery, or if 98% "sank the iceberg" and Y2K didn't happen because they were watching MTV and didn't notice.....

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 08, 1998.