Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far) Read Online Free PDF

ooking back on the year 2000, we have to say that, all things considered, it was pretty good.
    No, hold it! We just received some late returns in from the 159th manual recounting of the ballots of Palm Beach County, and it turns out that, by a slim margin, it was actually a bad year. So we’re glad that it’s finally…
    Whoops! Hold it! We have just been informed that a Florida court has reversed a ruling overturning an earlier court ruling that upheld a previous ruling that rejected an appeal of a ruling that overturned an earlier reversal of an upheld rejection of the decision to count ballots marked only by drool, which means that the year 2000 was…
    OK, to be honest, we’re not sure what kind of year it was. We’re not sure of ANYTHING anymore, except that we never, ever, ever want to have another presidential election like this one. We think that everybody who had anything to do with this election, including the entire state of Florida, should be banned from the political process for life. We especially think that all the lawyers involved should be marooned on a desert island, surrounded by man-eating sharks, from which the only escape would to be to build a raft out of severely dimpled chads.
    But setting aside the Election from Hell, there were some bright spots in the year 2000:
NASDAQ went deep into the toilet, which meant we heard a LOT fewer stories about twenty-two-year-old dot-com twerps making $450 million for starting companies that never actually produced anything except press releases.
The federal budget surplus got so huge that experts believe it could take Congress as long as eighteen months to blow the entire thing on comically unnecessary pork-barrel projects such as the Museum of Ketchup.
Toward the end of the year, most people finally stopped thinking that it was clever to say “Is that your final answer?” and “Whassup!”
You also heard almost nothing about Dennis Rodman.
    So, on balance, we’re feeling pretty uncertain, in an undecided kind of way, as we take a reflective look back at 2000, which began—as so many years seem to, lately—with…
    JANUARY
    â€¦which opens with the entire world braced for the impending Y2K disaster, a story that had received more media hype than global warming and Britney Spears combined, with experts warning the public that the electricity could go out, planes could crash, the economy could collapse and renegade ATMs could roam the streets, viciously attacking pedestrians who were unable to remember their PINs.
    As it turns out, the only technology that is actually affected by Y2K is the George Foreman Grill, which, at precisely midnight on New Year’s Eve, suddenly starts ADDING fat to foods. Other than that, nothing bad happens, and on New Year’s Day, all the “experts” admit that they were wrong and refund all the money they received for giving flagrantly incorrect advice. And the Backstreet Boys win the Rose Bowl.
    Meanwhile, the dawn of the twenty-first century is celebrated around the world with extravaganzas in all the great cities, most notably Paris, which uses the Eiffel Tower as a framework for the most spectacular light show ever seen; London, which turns the Thames into a mighty river of fire; and Warsaw, which unveils the “Millennium Kielbasa”—a nineteen-hundred-foot-long sausage stuffed with more than fifty thousand pounds of high explosive that, when detonated, causes chunks of smoked meat to rain down festively all over central Europe.
    In other foreign news, Vladimir Putin takes over as president of Russia, replacing Boris Yeltsin, who is forced to resign on New Year’s Eve when the Kremlin runs out of vodka. In his inaugural speech, Putin, a former KGB agent, pledges to work for international understanding and maintain peaceful relations with the United States “until we can refuel our missiles.”
    The United States turns ownership of the Panama