THANK GOD the editors of SNAP POP! listened to WIT MEMO and abandoned their misguided plan to begin '00 with a 'Y2K' ISSUE, as proposed at the November meeting at Arlington's RHODESIDE GRILL. It was touch-and-go there for a bit, but they were finally made to grasp the folly of devoting space to a story that would cease to be of any interest at all by the time that club and record store patrons began picking up copies of the January Snap Pop! because they thought it was THE BARSTOOL. That's what happens when you entrust production of a text-intensive magazine to a bunch of scenester graphic artists -- that, and near-microscopic print crammed into tiny paragraphs huddled forlornly at difficult-to-read angles against a vast landscape of blank space. Even NBC had the good sense to broadcast its hokey-even-for-TV Y2K MOVIE in November, ensuring it'd be forgotten well before the biggest story of the year became, in the passage of a second, as irrelevant as last week's TV listings: Electric filaments burned brightly on, the skies didn't rain jetliners, American urban centers weren't made into charnel houses, and we didn't witness the extinction of all forms of commerce. Beer remained plentiful. (If the supermarkets HAD run out of food, as some promised, WIT MEMO would've just eaten in restaurants.) Y2K was the biggest letdown since New Coke met Comet Kohutek. 

The whole horse opera would have been Light Comedy but for the unwitting light thrown upon a substantial populace that you knew were just ITCHIN' for something bad to happen, and for whom the chance to hunker in a bunker armed to the teeth playing real-life survival commando would have been an answer to prayer. What WIT MEMO described in the August Snap Pop! as the Usual Gang of doomsday crackpots swarming to the Millennium like mosquitoes at a Fourth-of-July picnic. Just last month the Feds nabbed two militia types plotting the explosion of huge propane tanks in Sacramento, and an Algerian national attempting to enter Washington State in a rental car packed with Bin Laden-brand bomb parts. The borders and hinterlands are chock-a-block full of repressed-rage pressure cookers and apocalyptic visionaries looking for Y2K to be the first rock through the electronics-store window of civilized order, ready to pile on at the first whiff of trouble, like the Class Acts who jumped out of the woodwork and into the bar brawl that erupted in the RED ROOM next to WIT MEMO some years back. 

Y2K was also a big turd in the punchbowl of anyone who looked for the Millennial passage to spur hothouse cultural flourishing along the lines of FIN-DE-SIECLE VIENNA. Instead of radio station countdowns of "the top one thousand songs of the last one thousand years" ("that was FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN's 'Symphony Number 6 in D' coming in at number 862, and before that, at 863, we heard LAURA BRANIGAN with 'Gloria'"), we were subjected to inanities like that urban legend about how "the Chinese" had herded "all their scientists" into airplanes for Y2K, with orders that "they can't land until it's fixed." On the bright side, millennial merchandising was nowhere to be seen, event promoters eyeing an excuse to charge three times the normal rate for the same old New Year's Eve bashes took a bath, and, best of all, the Chicken Littles who got off for two years laying bad trips on the rest of us - you know who you are - were finally silenced. With CHARLES SCHULTZ laying down his pen in December we'll never again have to suffer LUCY's admonition to quit dancing and act serious. WIT MEMO's fave PEANUTS moment provides apt Y2K imagery: the saps and dolts who ponied up their hard-earned dollars for generators, gasoline stockpiles, and bomb shelters' worth of preserved food dwarfed amid giant "HAHAHAs," the gales of laughter that always pummeled poor CHARLIE BROWN after he'd humiliated himself before his peers. Like Utah Senator ROBERT BENNETT, whose plans to stockpile water revealed him to be fully attuned to the DC mentality that compels clearing store shelves of milk and bread any time the forecast calls for more than half an inch of snow. Extracting joy from their fleecing shouldn't give anyone any pause, as it's a grand American tradition to admire hucksters, con-men, and outright crooks - witness the crowds cheering JOHN GOTTI's acquittals, and the construction of the NIXON LIBRARY. 

IT'S the end of the year, so what the hell, let's do WIT MEMO's on-again, off-again ANNUAL SONG OF THE YEAR AWARD. Last time we did this the nod went to the SPICE GIRLS' "WANNABE," the monster hit that blazoned the end of casual sex, a theme further mined in this year's winner, "NOOKIE" by LIMP BIZKIT, which we heard a few times on DC's two "alternative" playlist stations. This is the song with the attention-catching chorus, "I did it all for the nookie (the nookie, the nookie), c'mon, so you can take that (motherfucking) cookie and stick it up your, yeah!!" Those few clear words convey more of the song's true meaning than any of the earlier, far less decipherable lyrics ("I think about the day my girlie ran away with my pay") which could mislead one into branding it just another my-baby-done-left-me ditty . . . now THAT would be an original rock sentiment. Anyone hearing this song has to wonder, just what is this cookie, that the singer wants to shove it up someone's ass, and all because of the nookie ? Just a scant few years ago we would've thought he was singing about an actual cookie, a Hydrox, say, because we hadn't yet learned about web cookies, those cyber-bugs that web sites insert into your PC to monitor browsing habits. Could anyone get so exorcized about any other kind of cookie? With that hint it falls into place: he's singing about the web, and the nookie is porn. He's surfing porn sites, they're bombarding him with cookies at every click and he hates 'em for it. The invasion of privacy is endured for the sake of the nookie, probably the only nookie he's getting. And thus Limp Bizkit warrants praise for daring to declare that notwithstanding the Washington Post's lurid tales of suburban junior high "Lewinsky parties," America's youth are no more sexually precocious than at any other time in modern history. Turns out, instead of Getting It, everyone's hunched alone clicking away in the glow of their terminals, and guys really aren't so sexually jaded by age 23 that, when the gal they're making out with takes off their pants, they turn on the TV.

LAST THOUGHT OF THE YEAR: Are things really getting better? In the early '80s, at the beginning of the unsafe-sex/cyber age, RONALD REAGAN's distaste for the poor, as described in a recent review of "Dutch," EDMUND MORRIS' Zelig-like bio, engendered the attitude that those unable to hold their own in the economy were inherently lacking in essential moral fiber. Twenty years later, it's no longer enough just to be getting by: incessant news accounts of hi-tech and Internet billionaires popping up after each IPO like toadstools after a summer rain conspire to make you feel like a contemptible failure if you haven't yet salted away your first million. That's how far we've come. Have a nice century.

FINALLY, WIT MEMO would like to take a moment to honor America's "1999 Substitute Teacher of the Year." Congratulations, Mrs. Horbich!

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