THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS (3 page)

Best Stuffed Toy of The Millennium.

Teddy Bears. Beyond being cute as, well, little tiny stuffed bears, there's also a great story behind how the Teddy Bear got its name. It seems that Teddy Roosevelt was out hunting one day, as that burly, totally manly man did, when he wasn't charging up a hill in Cuba and scaring the hell out of Spaniards, and he came upon a poor, helpless bear cub. A lesser man, say, Ernest Hemingway, would have shot the poor thing and then lied to Gertrude and Alice about how the thing charged him. Because he was covered with honey and salmon. Don't ask.

Not Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy took one look at that wee bear cub, and said, in these exact words (I'm guessing), "Hey, I can't shoot that. It's tiny and defenseless. I will spare its life, and come back when it is bigger and thus able to better defend itself against high-speed chunks of metal, launched explosively from a great distance." Well, word got around how Teddy spared the life of the cub, and a grateful nation, impressed with his
wisdom,
elected him President and called their little stuffed bears "Teddy Bears" from then on. Although neither of these stopped other people from shooting bear cubs whenever they damn well felt like it.

(Incidentally, Teddy Roosevelt despised being called "Teddy," a fact that might surprise many, but which in fact makes perfect sense. He was
President of the United States
, after all. He's supposed to have a little dignity. You don't call the leader of the free world by a diminutive. We did that once --
Jimmy
Carter -- and look where
that
got us. Roosevelt's hatred for "Teddy" casts doubt on a second Teddy Roosevelt story about naming the stuffed bears, in which he christens them himself at his daughter's wedding. However, Teddy
is
responsible for the Maxwell House coffee slogan -- "Good To The Last Drop." That Teddy Roosevelt, he got around
.
)

From the time of Roosevelt forward, it's hard to think of anyone in the North America or Europe who hasn't had a little stuffed bear at one time of another in his or her life (generally during childhood; the 46-year-old CEO who can't ruthlessly trample a foundering competitor without clutching "Binky Bear" to his Wharton-graduated chest is a rare one indeed). My infant daughter has an even dozen, provided to her at her birth by relatives, friends, and a Kay-Bee Toys whose security was just a little too lax that one day I was short on cash (I'm
kidding
. It was Toys-R-Us). She's got other stuffed toys, including lions, bunnies, puppies and a vibrating helicopter (it was a gift. I
swear
). I suspect, however, that none of these will have the staying power of the bears.

Why? At least partially because they have been so popular in the past, and at least as it comes to children's first toys, familiarity breeds success. We all had teddy bears, so our kids will have them too. And of course, there are other nefarious plans at work -- We had to fight to keep Winnie-The-Pooh from metastatizing all over our baby's nursery and becoming a locked-in, just-send-all-your-income-straight-to-Disney theme.
Fight
, mind you. Now, growing up, we all had other stuffed creatures, too, but none of them have the eternal staying power, the claw hold in cultural memory. Two decades from now, when today's first graders start their cycle of reproduction (Parents: Whatever you do, don't think of
your own
first-grader reproducing -- on that path lie madness), their children will know nothing about, say, stuffed Pokemons. And, might I add, Thank God. 

Anyway, darn it, stuffed baby bears are cuter than any other animal known to man -- so much so that they pose a hazard in real life. Forest rangers are always having to tell people to stay away from bear cubs they might find out there while camping, not so much because of the threat posed by the cub (though if you think about it, your average bear cub is the size of a Rottweiler, and just as much a carnivore), but because wherever a cub might be, a momma bear is sure to follow, weighing half a ton, bearing four-inch claws, and being more than happy to gnaw on your dumb-ass skull if you so much as even
breathe
in the direction of her darling cub, which of course you've done -- you've had the kids
pose
next to the thing for a Kodak moment. 

It's hard to feel
too
sorry for these people. Anyone whose brain can't wrap itself around the idea that a wild animal might not be the same complacent stuffed toy they remember from their youth deserves what they get. That's one trait we don't need floating around in the gene pool. Be that as it may, the fact it happens with enough
frequency
that Fox could fill up an entire hour of television with it ("When Bears Attack Stupid Tourists --
4!!!"
) points to the wide-scale influence teddy bears have had. I suppose we ought to be glad Teddy Roosevelt didn't decide to spare the life of a baby Great White. 

Best Science Fiction Novel of The Millennium.

Somnium (Dream of a Voyage from the Earth to the Moon).
In the book, the hero is launched, with the help of his mother, who has magical powers, to the moon. Here's an excerpt (translated by by computer, with some judicious editing by
moi
), in which a demonic tour guide (of sorts) describes the precautions necessary for a moon launch, and the effects of weightlessness on the passengers.

"The initial shock is the worst moment, because the traveler is projected as by a powder explosion... It is thus necessary that he is calmed by opiates; arms and legs must be carefully protected so that they are not torn off, and so the effect of the launch is spread in all his body. The passenger will then encounter new difficulties: an extreme cold and difficult breathing... 

"After the beginning of the voyage, things become easier, because during a so long voyage, the body undoubtedly escapes the mathematical [read: gravitational] force from the Earth and penetrates that of the Moon, so that the latter takes the top. 

"At this point, we release the
travelers
and leave them to their own means: like spiders, they lengthen and retract, and are propelled by their own forces - because the magnetic forces of the Earth and the Moon attracting the suspended body and it together, the effect is as if there were no attraction - so that at the end its mass will turn of its own accord to the Moon."

I know, you've never read it. That's because it was published just  a little before your time. Say, 1634. The author: Johannes Kepler.

Surely you've heard of Johannes Kepler. He was the fellow who, appropriately enough, discovered Kepler's  three laws of planetary motion, in which -- everyone sing along, now: 

(1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; 

(2) the time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and  that arc; 

(3) there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets' periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits.

Not
just
the law, but a good idea. Break the laws of planetary motion, and you get a fine, or, alternately, your planet sinks into the hot gaseous bowels of the sun, while you run about, yelling and screaming. Your choice. Hint: Take the fine.

Somnium
is a little quaint to read today, but then again, what written in the early 17th Century isn't? Even Shakespeare comes across as a little twee now and again. But for its time, man, it had
everything
: Wild, fantastic ideas, a breathtakingly original premise, and, of course, that most important part of any novel's publicity cycle: Controversy. This book was so hot that it couldn't be published in Kepler's lifetime. They waited until Kepler was planted four years before they slipped it onto the shelves.

The controversy regarded the mode of propulsion in the story: Magic, provided by his mother, Katharina Kepler. Nowadays, magic is simply a cheap trick employed by lazy writers who don't want to bother with giving the implausible events in their books a reasonable explaination (we generally call these people "fantasy writers," though they are not the only ones -- every time someone in the "Star Trek" universe discovers a new type of sub-atomic particle to get them out of a scrape at the last moment, it's magic!). But back in the 17th century, if you were thought to know anything about magic, you didn't play birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. You were strung up and tortured until you admitted that, why, yes, you and Satan regularly got together to eat children and do the shag nasty. Was there some sort of problem with that?

Which is in fact what happened to Katharina Kepler: Round about 1619, several years after
Somnium
was initially completed, Katharina was accused and tried for being a witch. Kepler had to travel to Württemberg to defend his mother -- and the reason she was eventually released had less to do with her innocence (and of course she was innocent; like nearly all women charged with witchcraft, Katharina Kepler was at most a screwy old biddy with some practical knowledge of folk remedies) than with the fact that the authorities didn't follow the correct torture procedures ("You idiot! You were supposed to impale her
there
, not
there!
Yeeesh!"). Kepler's use of his mother as a convenient mode of space propulsion was not so very convenient for mom. 

Moving away from the mommy-whipping consequences of the book and turning to the actual contents,
Somnium
has some breathtaking leaps of intellect and imagination. When Kepler started work on
Somnium
, the heliocentric theory (the one that states that planets move around the sun instead of the earth) was still a zany and highly debatable idea, and the minutiae of gravity awaited Newton's
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
in 1687. 

Into this scienti
fi
c void, Kepler lept, and sketched out some tantalizing concepts: Zero gravity, space travel, extraterrestrial life (
Somnium
postulates a race of creatures living on the moon), the environs of space being cold and, if not airless, at least extremely air-poor. It's not a stretch to say that Kepler was the first person to think about these subjects in a manner that did not involve a late-night astronomer's BS session, fueled by pea-soup thick German beer ("Wow, what if there were, like, people on other planets, man?" "Shut up, Kepler! Wanna be burned at the stake like your mommy?"). 

This is perhaps also why, even today, some of the best science fiction writers are also scientists in their right, though admittedly, not of Kepler's caliber: Arthur C. Clarke and Issac Asimov, from the "Golden Age" of science fiction, folks like David Brin who are still writing. Like Kepler, these people are right on the precipice of human knowledge, staring out into the inky blackness and wondering what the hell is going on out there, anyway.

You
may not have read
Somnium
, but Jules Verne and H.G. Wells sure did. They were in turn read by the Golden Era authors, who were read by this generation's writers, who will be read, barring the best attempts by the bookstores to sweep new science fiction from their shelves, by the next. Everyone who ponders and then writes about little green men, space travel and the infinite mysteries of space (including, dare I say, myself) share in the DNA of his or her imagination a small
chromosomal
link to Johannes Kepler, and his dream of a voyage from the earth to the moon. For someone who loves science and science fiction in equal amounts, this is a highly satisfying thought.

Best Crackpot Religious Leader of The Millennium.

Rasputin, and yes, I know, how can I choose Rasputin when L. Ron Hubbard is swinging there, fat and languid, like a low-hanging fruit? Well, for one thing, them Scientologists are a sue-happy bunch. In going after Rasputin, the only people I annoy are the Romanovs, and what are
they
going to do to
me?
They're all down a well in Russia.

Besides, unlike L. Ron and his merry band of celebrity-worshipping Thetans, Rasputin actually had power and influence, though not of any good sort. He was the wrong guy at the right place at the wrong time. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Imperial Russia was like a Jenga tower with one supporting strut too few. Rasputin didn't cause the Tsar to fall, but he sure helped to push.

Grigory Rasputin was his own walking warning label. The name "Rasputin," wasn't his name, it was his condition: in Russian, it means "debauched one," and it was given to him after he built up a reputation, at a young age, for being a horny little turd. You would think that being known as "Rasputin" would be a detrimental sort of thing -- I mean, just imagine trying to meet people here if your name was "Greg Pervert" -- but we're talking about Russia. If the last millennium teaches us anything about Russia, it is:
For God's sake, don't get into a land war there
. But secondarily, it teaches us that the Russians really
aren't
like the rest of us, and you can take that any way you like.

Rasputin experienced a religious conversion at the age of 18, which one could normally assume would have got him and his horndog ways sorted out.
Au contraire
. First, he joined a sect known as "Khlysty," which translates, roughly, as "the Flagellants." Not a good first step. Later he chose to pursue the closeness to God that only comes through what Rasputin described as "holy passion
less
ness," which could only be reached through sheer sexual exhaustion. Or, to put Rasputin's religious philosophy into bumper-sticker form: "Get Laid. See God." This provided Rasputin the theological rationale he needed to hump everything in sight.

Fast forward to 1903. Rasputin is the toast of the St. Petersburg movers and shakers, who, with that sort of spiritual dilettantism that inflicts the bored upper classes everywhere, regarded him the same way celebrities in the 60s regarded their swami, or regard their favorite motivational speaker today. Sure, Rasputin was illiterate and he only bathed once a month, but there sure was something about him (besides the stink). 

Within a couple of years, Rasputin had found his way to the Tsar Nikolas II and Tsarina Alexandra, and he endeared himself to them by easing the pain of their hemophiliac son (historians think by a form of hypnosis). He also told them that his destiny was now tied to theirs; without him, they were doomed. The Tsar, never the world's most spineful person, kept him around.

This is when things got bad. By day, Rasputin was the Tsar's spiritual adviser; by night Rasputin wallowed in the orgy pit. People complained. The Tsar had them transferred to Siberia. Finally the Prime Minister presented the Tsar with a formal report on Rasputin's extracurricular activities. The Tsar booted Rasputin for a couple of months, but the Tsarina would have none of that. Rasputin was back, and the best the Tsar could do was shrug and regard Rasputin as his wife's hairy, scary, smelly pet. 

World War I broke out, and the Tsar, perhaps wanting to feel like he actually was in charge of
something
, went to command the army in the field. The Tsarina was left to tend to internal affairs, and stop that snickering. Rasputin was in the background, advising the empress. His advice on political matters was just about as helpful as you might expect any advice coming from an ill-educated, over-sexed religious wacko might be. The Russian nobles, perhaps suspecting that the Proletariat Revolution was on its way and that Rasputin's "advice" wasn't going to do much to help the nobles keep their lands or their heads, decided to get Rasputin out of the way.

And thus it was in late
December
1916 that Rasputin found himself at the home of Prince Feliks Yusupov, lured there by the promise that he'd meet someone's very attractive wife (no, really). They fed him poison in tea and in cakes. He gobbled it down and didn't blink. Then they shot him and cut off his instrument of theological enlightenment (no, not his
brain
. Yeesh). He managed to launch himself out the door. They shot him again, wrapped him in a carpet, and heaved his body into a river. At which point, of course, he died. Let's see
you
wiggle out of a wet carpet. But he was true to his word; the Romanovs and the rest of the nobility were all dead meat on a stick (in some cases literally) within a couple of years. 

The moral of this particular story is, if you're ever the emperor of the largest country on earth, and a strange-looking monk comes by and offers to heal your hemophiliac son, run. Just run. No good will come of it. It's a valuable lesson for us all.