Hey, you’ve got just a few more hours to make those resolutions…a few more before you start to break them…Best wishes for the new year, new century, new millenneum…and don’t worry if the power goes off…It’s Santa Cruz County……And I hope during the new year that all you readers get what you really deserve…
…Here’s are the top 10 mover and shakers of the millennium as picked by A&E Network: Johann Gutenberg who invented moveable type in the 15th century, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare…
…Also Christopher Columbus, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei…
…Time Magazine picked Einstein as Man of the Century……My man of the century is my parole officer…just trying to stay on his good side…
…What we need is a list of the 100 worst lists prepared for the millenneum……What are we going to do without the comic strip Peanuts?…After more than 40 years of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy and the rest of the gang, creator Charles Schulz is shutting down…What’s your idea for a best final strip?…Charlie Brown kicking the football?…Charlie Brown kicking the girl?…
…Charlie Brown’s kite actually flying?…The kite flying away with Snoopy, head down, entangled in the cord?…The Little Red Haired Girl runs away with Linus because she likes younger men?…Charlie Brown sells Snoopy and buys a cat?…Charlie Brown sells Snoopy for animal research?…
…Smoking down the interstate, special plates in the crosshairs: “TAN BOD”…“TEECH” on a Tucson teacher’ car…“LFT NJ” by someone who apparently doesn’t care for the Garden State…
…At the GV Post Office Bill Hauser looked at a sign on a closed window and said he wished he had one…It read “Excuse Me While I Complete Other Duties. Thank You”…Hauser says every man should have one…
Item: Scientists are experimenting putting jellyfish genes into monkeys…next it will be human genes into monkeys…But the monkeys say “thanks but no thanks”…
Item: Backers say the millenneum will start at the Dibble Glacier in Antarctica, Pitt Island New Zealand, Kirbibati in the south Pacific, or Katchall Island in the Indian Ocean…They’re wrong…It starts when I wake up Jan. 1…
…Juan Velasco, one of Sheriff Tony’s new deputies, set a record during just-completed police academy training…He bench pressed 320 pounds according to the sheriff…
…Schmoozing with a guy across the line recently I said in very, very broken Spanish “Trabajo un periodico (I work for a newspaper)”…“English or Spanish?” he asked…We looked at each other a second, then broke into laughter…Yo no hablo Español for sure…
…Besides looking forward as the New Year dawns we should also look back…I regret that I made fun of Tubac’s motto “Where Art and History Meet” by saying some people wondered aloud if it shouldn’t be “Where Art Is History?”…What I really should have said is it’s “Where Art and Hysteria Meet”…
…Here’s a couple of stories that I didn’t get around to reporting…In July carpenters in a Florence library found a sack of dust from the tomb of Dante…Librarians misplaced the dust 70 years ago…Dante, writer of “The Divine Comedy” died in 1321 and someone had scooped some ashes from his tomb during an 1865 ceremony there…
…Also…after living for 11 years inside Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, man-without-a-country Merhan Karimi Nasseri, finally won approval to leave it last July…Belgium said it was okay for him to move that country and a UN commission gave him special refugee status…In those 11 years Nasseri slept on plastic benches, showered in staff facilities, read lots of magazines…Fortunately he didn’t have to eat airplane food…Airport staff supplied him with food, clothes, pocket change…
…Have a safe and sane fourth, er, New Year’s Eve…
