MISCmedia for 1/19/00
The Ultimate Leftovers

THE NEW YEAR is well upon us.

By now, even the most trenchant black-helicopter-fearing militia-cult members have risen from their bunkers, surveyed industrial civilization's failure to have failed, and begun to reassess their past stances.

Or maybe not.

If there's one thing I've learned about True Believers (religious, political, dietary, or otherwise), it's that the really ardent ones almost always find a reason to insist they weren't ever wrong.

So it's quite interesting to see the Y2K scaremongers like Gary North (who, it turns out, has been predicting nasty fates for everyone not in a militia cult for many years, under many excuses) backtracking from, and making justifications for, their predictions of a glorious fire-'n'-brimstone end awaiting all of us who didn't belong to their guns-and-bunkers subculture.

When the calendar rolled over into the big two-ought-ought-ought, all the world's mainframe computers didn't go crazy. The power didn't go out. Guys with computer-chip-enhanced pacemakers didn't keel over. All there have been, nearly three weeks into the year, are normal everyday technical glitches of the type we're all used to.

One of the funniest such glitches was on North's own website. For the first week or so, it continued to warn of how horrible everything was going to be after 1/1/00. The only new material on the site was on the message-board pages, with readers entering sarcastic comments about North's nonexistent apocalypse.

The year-date on these message-board posts: 19100.

The continued existence of urban societies and their related infrastructure, however, won't stop the most fanatical militias, white-supremacists, and compound-dwellers scattered across the inland west. But it leaves many of their less dedicated followers, and non-believers who prepared themselves just in case the scaremongers had been right, with a lot of unused survival food.

Stuff that's supposed to stay "good" for years. Which may be what it'll take to eat through it all.

Complicating the situation further is the fact that a lot of these food and drink supplies are going to be dispersed among people who didn't originally buy them. Editorials in some U.S. newspapers are asking former would-be survivalists to donate their canned and freezed-dried hoards to local food banks. And some survivors will undoubtedly pawn some of their pantry-fulls onto friends and relatives.

Fortunately, some folks have prepared for a post-preparedness era.

MRExcellence sells a cookbook covering creative uses for those Army-style Meals Ready to Eat.

For that canned staple of meat-esque goodness, Hormel has an entire Spam recipe site.

Another site, Y2Kitchen, offers a cookbook with more general tips about the broader range of never-spoil, no-cooking-necessary foodstuffs, from hard crackers to that chalky dehydrated ice cream.

And please bring your own concoctions to our book release party Monday, Jan. 31 at the glorious Two Bells Tavern, 4th and Bell in Seattle.

But you might hold on to the bottled water for a few months. You might want to water your lawn with it if we have another dry summer.

TOMORROW: The lucrative industry of being an ex-liberal.

ELSEWHERE:

• Defending those under-romanticized Interstate highways....
• Is it possible to fall in lust with a computer? (found by MacSurfer's Headline News)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• A few real-life movie locations revisited.
• Waiting for the Internet stock bubble to pop.
• The right and wrong reasons to recall Mayor Paul Schell.
• Should netzines go back to the (print) future?
• Why "Attitude" has become such a bore.
• New media buys old media, or is it the other way around?
• A few not-half-bad tunes from among the indie-MP3 glut.
• Why women may become "johns" while traveling but not at home.
• Does "political" writing have to be incomprehensible?
• When California stops being America's political bellwether.
• Why self-proclaimed trendsetters can't imagine a future without trendsetters.
• Musings on the end of Peanuts.
• The always-splendiforous MISCmedia In/Out list.
• Remembering the Nineties, when seemingly nobody else is.
• Comparing punks to neo-punks.

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