THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS

by John Scalzi

  Clearly, this might never have happened had the Hapsburgs slipped in a commoner now and then, just to set a genetic Roto-Rooter to their chromosomes. Wouldn't that have been an irony -- a few more serfs in the gene pool, and there might yet be a Holy Roman Emperor. The Hapsburgs probably wouldn't think that was funny. But a sense of humor was probably not what they bred for, anyway.

  Best Dead-End Technology of the Millennium.

  It's the 8-track tape, and maybe that's a little unfair to the 8-track. After all, all analog sound recording is dead-end technology: be it LPs, cassette tapes, or reel-to-reel, it's all dead meat on the technological stick, gutted and fried up nice by flawless and cheap digital technology.* Even so, when you're looking for a combination of poor performance, questionable utility and

  (click)

  inherent technological limitations in any piece of technology, it's hard to beat an 8-track. Unlike so many unfortunate but promising technological cul-de-sacs, the 8-track is dead for a reason.

  But let's be truthful. The 8-track was a piece of crap, but it's that way because it was pretty much designed to be that way. Most audio products are designed with at least some attempt towards sound quality, but that wasn't the case with the 8-track; in its case, the idea was not quality but portability. The 8-track made its popular debut not in the middle of a swingin' sixties hi-fi rack, bracketed by Playboys, fondue makers and Ian Fleming novels, but in a car: In 1965, the Ford Motor Company made the 8-track an option on all its 1966 models. The car was the 8-track's exclusive domain; there were no commercially available home units. 8-tracks were available in auto part stores instead of record shops.

  If you grant that the 8-track was designed for the road in mind, it's not an entirely unholy creation. 1965 was still well in the era of the AM radio and mono LP recording, and unless you wanted to blow a harmonica and drive at the same time (not recommended), there was no way to bring your own music into the car. Auto makers had actually tried putting record players into cars; it worked about as well as you might expect it to. In contrast, you could drive over train tracks and while your 8-track might warble a bit, it could nevertheless keep going. And it was stereo! Stick that in your dashboard and play it!

  If the 8-track had stuck to the roads, where it was the best thing going, it might not have become a universal symbol of derision and pointlessness that it has become. But alas, it did not; 8-track players for the home came out in 1966, and there the format's shortcomings were exposed for all to see. Unlike the reel to reel tape, the sound reproduction of an 8-track was vile, the effect of having eight tracks of music (four programs, a left and right channel each) on one half-inch strip of tape.

  Unlike the LP, there was no ability to quickly go from one music track to another. Most 8-track players didn't bother with a fast forward or rewind option; you either had to know where all your favorite songs were in relation to each other in the programs and switch back and forth, or you had to sit there for the long haul and wait for them to come around again.

  Even the compact cassette, which had even worse sound quality than the 8-track in the early days, had one up on the 8-tracks: No clicks. Because all four programs on an 8-track had to be of the same length, music listeners were often faced with either dead time at the end of a program or (even worse) the dreaded fade-out-click-and-fade-in phenomena, in which a song was butchered over two programs.

  (This phenomenon however, made for some creative attempts to mask the click -- in the 8-track version of Pink Floyd's "Animals" album, for example, there's a guitar solo, unavailable anywhere else, that acts as a bridge between "Pigs on the Wing" parts 1 and 2. It was done by Floyd tour guitarist Snowy White. There, now you know something about Floyd that your terminally-stoned, "Dark Side of the Moon"-playing-on-a-continual-loop college roommate doesn't. Even better, he'll hate you for it. And they say there's no justice.)

  The 8-track was dying by the end of 70s and officially declared dead around 1983, when most major record companies stopped making them. After that date you had to get your 8-tracks from the record clubs, which manufactured the things until about 1989. If you look hard, you can actually find an 8-track of Michael Jackson's "Bad" album (but then, why would you). The last major album on 8-track, or so it is said, is Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits collection. This is, of course, entirely appropriate.

  No one misses the 8-track, which is final, incontrovertible proof of its dead ended-ness. Sure, people gawk in awe if you show up at a party with one, and if you somehow manage to get one to play, you'be be hailed as a hero of cheese. But this isn't the same as saying that anyone actually wants to hear music in the format anymore. Unlike old wax cylinders and 78-rpm Victrola records, there's nothing on 8-track that wasn't placed on a better recording medium as well. Unlike vinyl, you'll not hear of some geek audiophile haranguing bored listeners about the supposed sonic superiority of the 8-track, and thank God for that.

  Its only value today is to remind us that not every technological "advance" is a good one, or one that will last.

  * Statements like this inevitably arouse the wrath of audiophiles, who maintain that their beloved vinyl records sound so much "warmer" and better than those cold, sterile digital recordings. To which I say: Sure. If you want to spend $4,000 on a gyroscopically balanced turntable, another $2000 on a vacuum tube-bearing receiver, and God knows what for speakers designed by NASA scientists to transmit sound in cold, deep, airless space, you might theoretically get better sound quality from vinyl than your average guy gets off a CD and a boombox. But if you would spend $10,000 to eke out total sound quality from a 39-cent wheel of plastic, let me just say: You're a big freakin' idiot.

  Best Planet of the Millennium.

  Uranus. And stop that. You're not thirteen any more.

  This will come as a painful selection for those fans of Mars, angry red planet and recent eater of NASA landers. But Mars is a sham, a planetary glory hog that owes its notoriety to the poor eyes of Giovanni Schiaparelli, which convinced him there were "channels" on the surface of the planet, and a subsequent mistranslation of the dubious discovery into English, which led the excitable to believe that there were actual canals on Mars, built by intelligent creatures (and what canals they would have been -- to be visible from earth, they'd have to be roughly as wide across as Rhode Island). From then on it's been nothing but little green men, War of the Worlds, and alien conspiracy buffs pointing out that face on Mars' surface.

  Sure, it's all flashy, but it's not based on anything tangible. There are no canals at all, much less any the width of Rhode Island, and the closest Mars is going to come to little green men are what may or may not be microbes flash-frozen into rocks a couple billion years ago, and even they commuted off Mars as soon as they could -- we found them in Antarctica. As for the mysterious disappearance of all those Mars missions, I mean, come on. Space geeks can't even parallel park.

  Now, gaze, if you will, on the featureless disk that is Uranus (stop that). You probably have not given much thought as to how important Uranus truly is (really. Stop that). But the fact is that the discovery of Uranus ranks as one of the top finds of the millennium (I mean it. Don't make me come back there). In fact, we can safely say that science today would be entirely different, if it weren't for Uranus.

  I can wait until you're done, you know.

  "Uranus," of course, has nothing at all to do with your terminal excretory sphincter. First off, it's pronouned "yooor-ah-nus," not "Yer Anus," as folks as so wont to do. Second, the word refers to one of the oldest characters in Greek mythology, the personification of the cosmos, who with Gaia, the personification of the Earth, sired the Titans. They in turn sired the Olympian Gods, whose names (the Roman versions) grace the other planets, excepting Saturn, a Titan, and our own.

  When Uranus was given its name, it was to imply the majesty of the vasty reaches of the universe. Its present status as the butt of butt jokes is an unfortunate and mean-spirited coincidence. One assumes that if astronomers had wanted to g
o that way, they simply would have named it "Big Ass Planet." And thus, we have my final discursion on the duodenal qualities of this planet's name.

  Uranus is exciting because for the majority of the millennium, humans didn't even know it existed; it was the first new planet observed by humans since we looked up and noticed some "stars" were moving against the static backdrop of the sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were all bright enough to see in the night sky (Venus, in fact, was commonly regarded as two separate planets, depending on whether it was visible in the night or morning sky). Uranus, on the other hand, was too far away from the sun -- 1.8 billion miles or so -- to reflect enough light to be seen. Don't mind me, it said. I'll just sit here in the dark.

  It had to wait until 1781 and English astronomer William Herschel for discovery. Hershel was doing a survey of the night sky, looking for stars down to the eighth magnitude of brightness (about five times dimmer than most humans can see with the naked eye) when he came across disk just plopped down there in the middle of a star field. Stars are too far away to present a disc shape, and it had no tail and a slow, regular motion across the sky -- it had to be a planet. And so it was. The discovery of Uranus led directly to the discovery of the next planet, Neptune, after discrepancies in Uranus' orbit suggested there was yet another planet out there. Neptune's discovery in turn suggested the existence of yet another planet -- Pluto. It was like getting three planets for the price of one.

  This would be enough to qualify Uranus for Planet of the Millennium honors -- but wait, there's more. Every member of our solar family has its odd quirks; Venus has a day that's longer than its year, Jupiter has its Red Spot, Saturn its rings, and Earth -- well, Earth's got us. Be that as it may, Uranus has got some truly freaky things going on. First off, the planet's axis of rotation is tilted some 97 degrees, which means that relative to all the other planets (whose axes are more or less pointing perpendicular to their orbits) Uranus is on its side. It's fallen down and it can't get up. Its magnetic poles are additionally skewed by nearly 60 degrees from the rotational poles, and -- get this -- the magnetic core of the planet is offset from the actual planetary core by 30%. So, you know, don't bother to bring a compass.

  There's more, like the fact that Uranus produces anomalously small amounts of internal heat for a gas giant, and the fact that spectral analysis reveals the planet to be mostly various types of ice; in effect, it's God's Sno-Cone. But you get the point: Uranus is just a big mess (stop that). If any planet could be a metaphor for the freakish, off-kilter and frankly inexplicable times we live in, this is the one.

  There's a reason we discovered it when we did, and not just because Bill Hershel just happened to be using one of those new-fangled telescope thingies. We found it because the timing was right. And if we end up making fun of it because of its name, well, it's just been that kind of millennium, now, hasn't it.

  Best Serial Killer of the Millennium.

  Herman Mudgett. Yes, I know you've never heard of him. That's sort of the idea when you're a serial killer, now, isn't it.

  I should note that this topic was one of the most requested by readers, you sick freaks, but I personally don't have much good to say about serial killers. First and most obviously, killing people is just plain wrong, unless it's self-defense, or a war, or your stuffed animals have told you that Jesus wouldn't mind.

  More than that, however, is the fact that I think serial killers, as a class, simply exhibit poor form. While it's all very fun and ironic to follow the exploits of crazed murderers as if they were sports heroes (the gruesome collection of Serial Killer trading cards several years ago made this point rather forcefully), the metaphor is in fact entirely wrong. Outside of hockey, the aim of sports is not to actually brutally murder your opponent, and even if it was, your opponents would generally not be terrified student nurses.

  Fact is, serial killers go for the easy targets, under false pretenses. They're not like gangsters in the 20s, when if you saw a guy in a pinstripe suit coming at you with a violin case, you knew you were gun butter -- and that you as often than not had it coming. Serial killers lure you in, offering sex or money or candy or whatever, a terminal bait-and-switch, and the next thing you know, you're dead, your pancreas is being fried up, and some guy is using your skull for a candle holder.

  Mudgett (or Henry Holmes, his alias at the time) operated in Chicago at the time of the Columbian Exposition (that's 1892 to you), and is a perfect example of this concept. Mudgett killed women in a baroque chamber of horrors he had secretly built into his mansion/hotel on 63rd street (how does one manage to build a secret chamber of horrors? By changing contractors frequently during the construction process, so no one person -- besides Mudgett -- knows the set up of the entire house), and he lured them into the place by offering them a job. He needed a secretary, you see, someone who could take dictation, file, and then die.

  Over two years, Mudgett had something on the order of a hundred secretaries, a fact you'd think someone would notice ("You're Ethel? What happened to Betsy? And, come to think of it, what happened to Bonnie, Daisy and June?"), but apparently no one did. Maybe they thought that Mudgett was a harsh boss. Well, and he was. More to the point, however, this was 1892, and sort of woman who had to work out of the home was also the sort of women who was less likely to be missed. Mudgett also went out of his way to "employ" new arrivals to town, who had the added benefit of no one to look out for them.

  Mudgett was not just a crazed whacko who liked killing people, mind you. He was a crazed whacko who liked killing people and taking their money. Before he offed his victims, he would gain their trust (often by making them his mistresses -- so these days not only would he be liable for murder, he'd also be slapped with one hell of a sexual harassment suit) and then convince them to give him their life savings. His rationale, perhaps, was that once he was done with them, they wouldn't need it anyway.

  As it happens, Mudgett had a long history of gruesome money-making schemes. While he was in medical school (say ahhh!), he would steal cadavers, burn them horribly with acid, and them place them in a place that had a lot of insurance in hopes of extorting a settlement of some kind -- not unlike the old "cockroach in the salad bar" manuever, except in this case the "cockroach" used to be someone's Uncle Ted.

  This not to say it was all just business for Mudgett. No, he was, in fact, seriously screwed up: Abusive parents, early episodes of animal mutilation, all the classic signs of total bonkerness. His torture chamber on 63rd was literally just that: Mudgett used his medical expertise to perform horrifying "experiments" on his victims, most of which, as you might imagine, ended quite badly for the patient. After he had had his fun, Mudgett disposed of the evidence in a special cremation oven in the basement (oh, sure, it's a furnace...), or, if he chose to sell the bones to a local medical school, as he did from time to time, there was always the lime pit.

  No one knows how many people Mudgett killed; estimates go up into the hundreds. Beyond the "secretaries," Mudgett also offed guests at his hotel -- like a roach motel, they checked in but didn't check out. His cover was the Columbian Exposition, a huge World's Fair taking place a few streets north; it attracted a vast number of people from faraway places. They wouldn't be missed, at least not by anyone local who might put two and two together.

  He never got caught. Not for the murders in Hotel Hell, in any event. Mudgett's downfall came in the form of Benjamin Pitezel, the Igor to Mudgett's Dr. Frankenstein, who a penny-pinched Mudgett (hey, murdering hundreds of people costs money!) decided to kill for insurance purposes. Wouldn't you know, the insurance company had suspicions, as did Pitezel's wife. Mudgett's response was to try to kill off every member of Pitezel's family, a tactic that he apparently seemed to think wouldn't look in the least bit suspicious.

  He murdered three of Pitezel's kids before the cops got him in Boston. At which point they worked backwards, found Mudgett's hotel (now a smoking ruin -- another insurance scam), and the evidence of his terrifying seria
l murders. Mudgett was tried, convicted, and, on May 7, 1896, hanged. Mudgett's last words were to the effect that he had really only killed two women. Odd statement to make as your last on this planet, considering that even only one murder was more than enough to stretch your sorry neck.

  There's no doubt Mudgett was a horrible man who preyed on the weak and the innocent. The worst thing about it was that he was as good at it as anyone in his line of work -- possibly the best ever. That is, that we know about. The real best serial killer of the Millennium, we probably will never know about. Think about that the next time you meet a smooth-talking stranger.

  Best Weapon of the Millennium.

  The Longbow. Interestingly enough, when I wrote up the Best Dead-End Technology of the Millennium (the 8-track, in case you already forgot last Tuesday), a reader from Harvard (yes, smart people read this too, or at least people from Harvard) replied that

  I think you have seriously underestimated the claims of the long-bow and the knight's armor to be the best (most?) dead-end technologies. You couldn't live (literally) without them when the millennium began, and now -- now, you would be dead if you depended on them!

  to which my response was, true enough (though not literally, since neither armor nor the longbow was in wide use in Europe until the 1200s). However, should the world ever collapse and we're all back to banging rocks together, the longbow and armor might come in handy, whereas the 8-track would be even less useful than it is today, if that's possible.

  Besides, it's not a fair assessment of the longbow (it is of the armor, for reasons we will discover). A longbow, properly used by someone who knows what he or she is doing, is still a hell of a weapon; an arrow shot from a full draw of a longbow is fully capable of nestling deep into an engine block from 100 yards out. Imagine the terror at rush hour! Back in its day, roughly the 13th to 16th centuries, it wasn't just a weapon, it was the weapon, the ultimate kick-ass tool of any serious arsenal. It made England a superpower in Europe, much to the surprise of the Europeans, especially the French.