John Montgomery Presents This Week's	January 8, 2000	Creep Logo by Alan Fraser
	The Whining Y2K Wildmen
	Apocalypse Not!

Is your electricity on? Do you have running water? Does your ATM work? Seen any planes fall out of the sky yet? Has the first week of the millennium seemed pretty normal to you so far? Was the only catastrophe the disappearance of Peanuts from the comic pages? Surprised? You were if you'd been taking any of the Y2K Prophets Of Doom seriously. These guys have spent the last few years jumping up and down, creaming their jeans, peeing their pants and foaming at the mouth, scaring the bejesus (and quite a bit of money) out of innocent, gullible, and generally uninformed people who looked to them for guidance and knowledge. Apocalypse! Armageddon! The Second Coming! Back to the dark ages! The end of civilization as we know it! Pull your money out of the bank and send it to me!

Yes, the Y2K computer bug was real. Yes, there was legitimate cause for concern. Yes, it made sense to take some prudent precautions. There were some responsible people providing responsible information and responsible warnings. But the vultures were out to get you and they stuffed themselves pretty well this time.

Some of the yahoos were the familiar, standard brand fanatical religious buzzards, out circling in full force, as usual. The Reverend Jerry Falwell deemed Y2K "a divine judgment against the sins of technological civilization." Not surprisingly, he was also selling a video called "Y2K: A Christian's Guide to the Millennium Bug", which forecast a dismal, heathen post-Y2K civilization inhabited solely by Democrats and Tinky Winky dolls. What does Jerry have to say now? Only that Y2K was not as serious "as I first feared possible." No word on refunds for the drooling bottom-feeders who bought the video.

We've come to expect such Dementia-For-Dollars dung from Jerry. But who's that guy pictured above on the right, showing us how far removed from reality he is? He's Gary North, a Christian Chicken Little who's been predicting disasters of various sorts for decades. In the 1980's, it was nuclear war with the Soviet Union and then AIDS. Buy "gold, silver, a safe place outside the major cities," he warned. "In 1992, we will run out of available hospital beds. The world will eventually panic." Gary would like you to subscribe to his Remnant Review newsletter to learn more. But he was just getting warmed up.

With Y2K, Gary reached full force hysteria. He has a web site containing thousands of pages of hype, describing the upcoming holocaust with such pearls of wisdom as "a nightmare for every area of life, in every region of the industrialized world," and "the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced." The prediction: "At 12 midnight on January 1, 2000, most of the world's mainframe computers will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data." And let's not forget, "Y2K is about handing out blame. The corporate judgment of God always is."

Think Gary's sorry for his pompous rabble rousing? You know better. It wasn't just him predicting disasters: "The governments of the world were planning on at least some. That was why there were no New Years Eve vacations for policemen anywhere in the industrial world." Maybe some of that paranoia came about as a result of people who read his web site.

Which brings up an interesting point: What do these religious zealots know about computers anyway? Nothing! So you might be justified in thinking that people who would take advice from such lunatics deserve to spend their New Year's Day standing in line at Sam's Club, waiting to return that gas-powered generator, dozen flashlights with extra batteries, and 27 cases of canned tuna.

On New Year's Eve day, I was in the grocery store and was nearly run over by a burly woman with a mustache who was galloping in a panicked frenzy over to the water aisle. There she stopped, gasping for breath, with huge, dark sweat stains under each arm pit, as she struggled to fill her shopping cart with gallon jugs of water, one at a time. She looked close to collapse, so being the polite Boy Scout-like guy I always am, I attempted to help her by picking up a jug and putting it in her cart. Immediately, she grabbed me around the neck into a headlock, and began beating my head with one of the full jugs, screaming at top volume, "Don't you touch my water, you son of a bitch!" Nearly asphyxiated from such close proximity to her malodorous pit, I managed to escape by yanking on her mustache and then made a hasty exit out of the store. I ran home and hid under the couch until I heard Dick Clark say that the ball at Times Square was down and all was well.

Let's hope that lady used all her water to A) take a bath, B) shave the mustache, and C) clean out her ears of all that Y2K waxy build-up once and for all.