Celebrate like it's 1999

Because the real thing will be Hell on Earth

by Robert David Sullivan

YOU'D BETTER ENJOY this New Year's Eve, because the next one is going to be the biggest disappointment since the last episode of Seinfeld. First off, if you think that little TV show was overhyped, you may need some serious medication to get through the next 12 months. As next New Year's Eve approaches, we'll be assaulted by such lists as the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, the 500 Most Amazing Animals, and the 666 Most Accomplished Serial Killers, along with rankings of the century's top movies, TV shows, songs, and Web sites. On the big night itself, arguments over who really deserves to be named Most Influential Miss America will dominate New Year's Eve parties. People will spend all evening on the Internet, voting on whether James Joyce, the Beatles, or Adam Sandler has made the greatest contribution to Western culture during the 20th century. In all such contests, the newest candidate will win (e.g., Jesse "The Body" Ventura over Franklin Delano Roosevelt for best politician), and highbrow types will be surprised by this outcome and spend the rest of the evening sulking in corners and clutching bottles of peppermint schnapps.

Even worse, next year every New Year's Eve party will include some smartass telling anyone who will listen that the 21st century won't begin until 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2001. These idiots will explain, over and over, that our calendar didn't start with a year "0" and that it took until the end of the year 100 to complete the first century. They will not be able to grasp the fact that the rest of us understand this explanation but reject it on aesthetic grounds. That is, we get a meaningless but palpable thrill when we witness a car odometer changing to all zeros, and we get depressed when we turn 30, 40, and 50 -- not 31, 41, and 51.

Even if you get beyond the "When does the century really begin?" debate, you won't be able to avoid the equally tedious topic of what to call the first decade of the next century. The Zeroes? The Ohs? The Naughts? Unfortunately, some people will never accept the consensus choice, whatever it is, and they will pick fights about it at every New Year's Eve party until 2010, when we move into the Tens, or the Teens, or the . . . uh-oh.

You think people yelling about calendars isn't bad enough? Then consider this grim fact: January 1, 2000, is the beginning of a presidential election year. Prepare to listen to people trade opinions on the most boring pair of front-runner candidates in any century, Albert Gore and George W. Bush (son of our all-time whiniest president). And I hate to take away all hope, but arguments over the Monica Lewinsky mess will flare up again, as Kenneth Starr decides whether to prosecute Bill Clinton for perjury after he leaves the White House and becomes an ordinary citizen. All of this may make you wish for a state of martial law, just so everyone will be forced to shut up about politics.

And maybe you'll get that wish, thanks to the infamous "Y2K" threat. Y2K, of course, refers to the fact that computer systems all over the world will go haywire at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, because many of them will think it's actually 1900. A Web site managed by the United Nations includes such scenarios as "Phone calls started just before the end of 1999 and lasting until 2000 might well be billed as 52 million minutes long" and "Computers of food distributors may order the destruction of entire inventories, assuming that food is 100 years old." Massive power failures are also cited as a possibility, and people are advised not to spend New Year's Eve on a plane or a ship, given that navigational systems are liable to self-destruct as soon as they detect the strains of "Auld Lang Syne."

The most serious effect of Y2K is that you're going to have to find a really good date for New Year's Eve, since you may end up spending several hellish days with this person, huddling together for warmth and looting Mrs. Fields outlets for sustenance. As will soon become apparent, the pressure of finding a date before the end of a typical year is nothing compared with the pressure of finding one before the end of a century. And next New Year's Eve falls on a Friday, so you can't even fake someone out by pretending to arrange an innocent midweek pseudo-date. ("How about doing something, oh, three weeks from Tuesday?")

All in all, New Year's Eve 2000 (yes, I know the evening will actually begin in 1999) is shaping up as a worldwide lame party, so you'd better have fun this year. Not that there's any pressure or anything. . . .