THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS

  The Germans were on French soil on May 12 and encountered little resistance; the Franco-Belgium border was the least defended frontier the French had, and what troops were there had little in the way of artillery defenses or anti-aircraft guns. By the 13th, German troops were across the Meuse; a few days later they were swarming all through France. The French finally pulled some troops out of the Maginot Line, but it was too little, too late. By the time of the German offensive at Somme on June 5, the 49 French divisions not walled in on the line faced 130 German infantry divisions as well as 10 divisions of tanks.

  On June 9, the Germans began driving towards the Swiss frontier, utterly isolating what troops remained on the Maginot Line. The troops in the line could do nothing to stop it. Inasmuch as the French considered the Maginot Line impregnable, all the big guns faced towards Germany. They could not be turned around. The Germans entered Paris on June 14, and after that, it's all just Nazi collaborators, Vichy France, and Charles De Gaulle going, I told you so.

  The few Maginot Line apologists (and there are some) note that the Maginot Line worked as advertised -- indeed, it worked so well that the Germans had to find another way into France! However, one must consider that the point of the Maginot Line was not to keep the Germans merely from attacking through their mutual border with France, it was to keep them out, period. On this ultimate and ultimately solely relevant criterion, the Maginot line is an immense and colossal failure, a testament to what happens when you combine a lack of imagination with a complacent world view. The Maginot Line is, in fact, hubris defined, poured into concrete and set in the ground. You can't look at it without figuring that France had it coming.

  The Maginot line is still there (it's hard to dispose of 150 miles of concrete fortresses). The block houses and fortresses are now used for varying purposes, from homes to wine cellars to discos. One imagines that André Maginot might find it a bit humiliating to see a portion of his grand idea serving as a 180-bpm warehouse for young, coke-snorting Eurotrash. But if someone put in a disco and people actually show up to dance, it's at least finally doing what it's intended to do.

  Best List of Bests of the Millennium.

  The final topics of the TWTMTW series have been posted, and to all you who were wondering: Yes, I will finally get around to telling you the Best Use of Opposable Thumbs of the Millennium, so settle down, already. The final installments will include several topics that were suggested by readers, so let me just say to all of you who contributed an idea: Thanks. It made my job easier.

  My only regret was that I was unable to use all the suggestions sent in by readers. But then I thought, damn it, it's my Web space, and I can do whatever the heck I want. So, forthwith, I am proud to present this List of Bests of The Millennium, with topics suggested by you, the valued, wonderful, oh-so-smart and undoubtedly-amazingly-attractive-to-the-person-of-your-choice reader.

  Bear in mind that due to the high number of topics I'm going to bang through here, I'm not going to be doing much in the way of rationalizing my choices. But life is always a tradeoff, now, isn't it. Ready? Here we go:

  Best Writing Implement: The computer. Because the idea of going back and retyping (or, hell, re-penning) an entire book should fill any writer with suicidal horror.

  Best Candy Bar: Snickers. It really does satisfy, although it galls me to put it like that.

  Best Hat: The fedora. Any hat that can make an ugly man like Humphrey Bogart look good has something going for it.

  Best Method of Execution: The Guillotine. You know, it was created to be a humane way of chopping off someone's head. Someone should have thought that point all the way through.

  Best Inaccurate Prediction of What the Future Would be Like: Any Popular Science from the first half of the century. I mean, really: Where the hell is my rocket car, anyway?

  Best Means of Transportation: The locomotive. Probably the single most important tool in opening up North America, which is why the natives spent so much time wrecking the rails.

  Best Useless Structure: The Eifel Tower. It was built to represent progress. The French hated it. Insert your own punchline here.

  Best Font: Goudy. Serifs rule, dude.

  Best Character Actor: Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs, Daffy, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, et al. Those were characters.

  Best Use of the Wheel: In clocks, to help provide accurate, standard measurements of time. Western Civilization as we know it would not be possible without it; you decide whether this is good or bad.

  Best Phallic Symbol: The Washington Monument. Started in the early 1800s, paused during the Civil War (constructus interruptus), completed thereafter. Its status as phallic symbol was confirmed in a recent "Futurama" episode, in which the Clinton Monument was shown, both higher and taller (although not, consistent with rumor, curved).

  Best Nursery Rhyme: "Ring Around the Rosey." Proof that even the black plague can be turned into a child's game.

  Best Cleaning Material: Soap. Just soap. Around for millennia, its use as a cleaning agent only really picked up in the last couple hundred years. In the 19th Century, Justus von Liebig said that the amount of soap consumed by a nation was an accurate measure of its wealth and civilization. So, you know, pick up an extra bar and let's stick it to the Swedes!

  Best Use of Propaganda: Shakespeare's "Richard III." As it happens, Richard III wasn't a hunchback or a mass murderer (he wasn't a very nice guy, but who among royalty back then was?). Why such the nasty representation of Richard? Could be because the reigning monarch at the time was the granddaughter of the man who overthrew him. Just a guess.

  Best Man-Made Disaster: Chernobyl. On the other hand, it's not like anyone really wanted to live in the Ukraine to begin with.

  Best Dance: The Waltz. When it came out, it brought Vienna into chaos, as people neglected home and business to dance night and day and night again (because people were dancing so close to each other! The horror!). Made the Macarena look like a blip. Which it was, but even so.

  Best Drug: Nicotine. Percentage-wise, it's easier to quit heroin than nicotine. Although admittedly, heroin doesn't advertise in trendy magazines with young men with washboard stomachs sailboarding with hot chicks in bikinis.

  Best Inappropriate Remark: "Let Them Eat Cake." Purists note that Marie actually said "Brioche," which is a sweet bread, and not exactly cake, but, you know, it's the thought that counts.

  Best Superhero: Oh, come on. It's Superman. Nietzsche rolls in his grave with every new issue. Some people hold out for Batman, but Batman isn't a superhero, he's just a psycho with a costume and a lot of money. Spiderman? Crap. Spidey sense ain't nothin' on X-Ray vision. Also, and I'll be blunt here, Marvel Comics superheroes bite. The whole lot of them. And everyone knows it. (I'm betting this last comment gets more mail than anything else I've written in this series).

  Best Board Game: Chess, which was introduced to Europe at the beginning of this millennium. Why is it the best? Because no one gives a damn that a computer can beat a human at Monopoly.

  Best Use of an Unpleasant Climate by a Defending Army: Russia. Russian winters did in Napoleon and Hitler. Not bad. Oh, sure, the Russian soldiers helped. But look how successful they've been in warm-weather wars, and you'll know: It was the snow.

  Best New Religious Movement: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Polygamy! Jesus in America! Building a homeland by a salty lake! Riding bikes in ties! Secret underwear! Not a recipe for success by any sane standard, yet the LDS church (which prefers not to be called "Mormon," if you don't mind), has managed to both thrive and survive. Not the religion for me (I enjoy caffeine far too much), but credit where credit is due.

  Best Proof The Human Race Is Not Merely a Festering Sore On The Face of This Over-Burdened Globe: Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which is quite possibly the greatest artistic achievement the human race may accomplish. If all the universe gets out of us is that one piece of music, I figure we've paid our way.

  However, it means we've peaked.
Let's try not to make the decline too steep, okay? Thanks.

  Best Quest of the Millennium.

  The Quest For Longitude. Yes, I know that a quest for a geographical unit of measurement doesn't have the same romance factor as a quest to slay a dragon. But finding an accurate gauge of longitude opened up the world, whereas slaying dragons never did anybody any good (least of all the dragons).

  Now, you do remember longitude, don't you. Yeah, I know. 4th grade was a long time ago for me, too. Look, find a globe. Now, on the globe, you'll notice the planet is sliced up by a bunch of lines going two separate ways. The horizontal lines are called "latitude." They tell you how many degrees you are north or south of the Equator (if you don't know what the Equator is, you really should just kill yourself now). The vertical lines, by process of elimination, are longitude. They tell you how far east or west you are, using the longitude line that runs through Greenwich, England (for no really good reason) as the prime meridian. By using longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, you can find any spot on the globe.

  The catch is getting an accurate reading of your coordinates. Latitude has never been too much of a problem; humans figured out early on that the sun's path reaches higher or lower in the sky depending on how far north or south on the planet you are on any particular day. If you know what day it is, simply take a reading of the sun's position at high noon, do the math, and presto -- you know where you are, in a northerly or southerly sort of way.

  For a large chunk of human existence, this was perfectly serviceable. As humans and their ships navigated further and further from the shore, however, it became apparent that there was a need for longitudinal readings. The oceans are, by their very definition, without landmarks, and traditional methods of measuring how far east or west one's ship was were laughably inaccurate. Take, by way of example, the method in which distance was measured by counting how many rope knots, spaced about 50 feet apart, slipped out of a sailor's fingers in 28 seconds (thus the nautical term for speed, "knots").

  This would be fine as long as you traveled in a direct straight line and were constantly gauging your speed. But no one on a ship ever did either; the former because of waves, cross-currents and winds, the latter because, oh, I don't know, the sailors were busy singing sea shanties and fondling the figurehead. This way of measuring distance was known as "Dead Reckoning," because frankly, if you reckoned by it, you'd be dead.

  While latitude only required the knowledge of the date and the ability to determine the angle of the sun, longitude required another determining dimension: The knowledge of the exact time at a place that was not where you were (let's call this place "Greenwich, England"). Due to the rotation of the earth, noon comes at different times at different places east and west on the planet. If you spotted the sun at high noon where ever you were, and then noted the time difference between you and Greenwich, you could determine your longitudinal distance from that point. What you needed was a clock, set to Greenwich mean time, that kept excellent time.

  This was no problem if one was on land. By the 17th century, thanks to the principle of the pendulum, there were some reasonably accurate clocks in Europe. However, pendulum clocks aren't practical on sailing ships, particularly the rickety deathtraps people used to cross the seas back then. A ship that's rocking and rolling on the waves is really not the ideal place for a time piece that uses pendular motion.

  (There was a way around clocks, sort of: In the 1660s, French astronomers created a table of the exact positions of the Jovian moons every day at 7pm Paris time. On each day, one could look up, note the time at which those positions were achieved where they were, and then do the math. Of course, this required both a fairly large telescope and a stable base to put it on. Once again, a ship heaving on the seas was not an excellent candidate.)

  After a navigational mishap in 1707 that killed thousands of sailors (English navy ships thought they were further west than they were and tore open the bottoms of their ships on coastal rocks), the British Parliament offered a reward of 20,000 pounds to the person or person who could provide an accurate system of longitudinal reckoning. 20,000 pounds was an astounding sum of money at the time (think about 10 million dollars, which itself was a huge sum until all those Internet IPOs), and the contest coordinators, which included Sir Isaac Newton, found themselves wading through some really stupid ideas.

  For example, one suggested stationing warships in permanent positions across the Atlantic; at midnight Greenwich time, they'd send up fireworks that could be seen for 100 miles around. Ships at sea could take their reading from there. Of course, this solution assumes there was practical method for the "firework ships" to know when it's Greenwich time; obviously, were that the case, there would be no need for the ships at all. The entries became so cockamamie that the Quest of Longitude became a shorthand phrase for insanity.

  The ultimate hero of the Quest of Longitude was a very unlikely fellow indeed: a certain John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker and a carpenter by trade. Harrison did three things: First, he replaced the pendulum with balance springs. Second, he made the springs with a combination of metals to compensate for shrinkage and expansion. Finally, for the wood casings and other wood parts of the timepiece, Harrison used a tropical wood that was self-lubricating to reduce friction. At the end of it, Harrison had created the first timepiece that could keep accurate time at sea.

  He took the first version, the H1, on its maiden voyage to Lisbon in 1734 (and got so violently seasick he never sailed again). Harrison went through three variations of the timepiece before developing the ultimate winner, the H4. In 1761 the H4 went from England to Jamaica and back -- six and a half weeks -- and only lost five seconds. The contest board was so skeptical of the achievement they made the clock do it again. Even then, they only gave Harrison half the prize. It took the direct intervention from King George III (you remember him as the mean, crazy king we got our independence from) for the board to cough up the remaining dough. Cheap bastards.

  Harrison not only created the means to establish positions at sea, he also gave the world the most accurate measurement it had ever seen to that point. He also made the important point that it's not just where you are, it's when you are. In this sense, the Quest of Longitude was also another quest entirely: The Quest for Time. Timing is everything when you're looking for your place in this world.

  Best Cheese of the Millennium.

  Processed Cheese, or, as it's vulgarly called, American cheese. Hey, don't blame the messenger. I'm not the one who is forcing humanity to eat two billion pounds of the orange stuff annually. I'm just telling you that we do. Anyway, cheese is hardly the thing to get snooty about. Any product that is made intentionally to both smell like feet and be put in your mouth, well, honestly. How much respect should it get?

  Cheese is in fact the first and best example that a great many of humanity's current culinary selections are based on bad judgment and/or someone drunkenly daring someone else to eat something entirely inappropriate. In the case of cheese, the going story (found on two entirely different cheese advisory sites, so you know it must be true) was that some 4,000 years ago, an Arab was crossing the desert with some milk in a pouch. What sort of idiot goes on a long journey across a desert with milk in a pouch? Well, see. This is the "bad judgment" part.

  As the immortal song tells us, "in the desert, the heat was hot," so by the time the Arab fellow decided to have a pull off his udder squeezings, the stuff had fermented and became two separate and entirely smelly objects. The first was the runny, armpit-smelling liquid called "whey" (think of the ooze that floats on top of your sour cream before you stir it up -- sour cream, incidentally, yet another dare food from the land of dairy), and the other, a lump of disgusting goo which was the first cheese on record.

  Any sane person would have flung the pouch of curdled mommy juice as far from their person as it is possible to fling it. But we've already established the fact we're dealing with a fellow who's a few camels short of a full cara
van. So this genius eats the goo and drinks the armpit liquid. The cheese flacks who convey the story would have us believe he was "delighted" with his discovery, which makes me want to sit these flacks down and see how "delighted" they'd be to ingest fermented mammal squirts that had been lying in the sun all day, breeding microorganisms in a largely anaerobic medium. The fellow was probably delighted that he didn't die the next day of food poisoning, and that's about the extent of anyone's delightment.

  So why did he do it? I suspect the truth went something like this.

  Cheese-Eater: Damn it, my goat's milk's gone stinky and bad. Look at it (shows it to friend).

  Friend: Wow, that's truly vile. I'll give you a shekel to try some.

  Cheese-Eater: You're out of your freakin' mind. I'd rather tongue my camel.

  Friend: All right, two shekels.

  Cheese-Eater: There's no amount of money you can pay me to eat this stuff.

  Friend: Five shekels.

  Cheese-Eater: Okay.

  (Tries some; doesn't die.)

  Friend: How is it?

  Cheese-Eater: Not too bad. Want some?

  Friend: You're out of your freakin' mind.

  When you think about it, cheese and the process you use to make it is still unspeakably vile. Take milk and let it go bad, either by exposing it to various forms of bacteria or by ladling on an enzyme called rennin, which is obtained from the fourth stomach of cows (this last one is why vegans will have nothing to do with cheese). After it's gone sufficiently bad, you dry it out and shove it in a corner for several months to let it go bad some more, only slower. You know it's done when allowing it get any more bad would actually, you know, cause you to die when you ate it. I imagine they lost quite a few cheese-making monks to this testing phase.