That Was the Millennium That Was: A Fond Look at the First 1,000 Years

Party Like It’s 999: We are seriously going to barf if we read one more story about the year 2000. That’s why we were pleasantly surprised when U.S. News & World Report recently broke ranks and devoted an issue to the year 1000 and “what life was like in the last millennium.”

The topics included first millennium foods (donkey milk and swan meat were popular), cities (an Indian town called Cahokia was the biggest metropolis in America, and Boston was inhabited by beavers), world trade (Russia was a leading exporter of wax), fashions (sack-like tunics in bright colors were the rage), drug abuse (fungus-ridden grain caused hallucinations--but also loss of limbs), crime (Vikings routinely pillaged and burned settlements) and diet plans (instead of Pritikin, they had the Regimen Santitatis Salernitanum, developed at a medical school in Salerno, Italy).

U.S. News also named a Man of the Year, Pope Sylvester II (successor to Pope Tweety Bird IV).

All in all, the story was quite thorough, but unfortunately it missed a few things, as we discovered when we sent our time-traveling journalist 999 years into the past aboard Caltech’s experimental time machine. Actually, we had to send three time machines because the first two were designed by NASA and lost contact upon landing.

On the final trip, our reporter managed to gather a number of heretofore unknown facts about life in AD 1000.

For example, instead of today’s wall calendars featuring famous paintings, Sports Illustrated swimsuit models or animals, medieval peasants kept time with the popular Sports Illustrated swimsuit model sundial.

In politics, campaigning for the Barbarian Party presidential nomination, Attila W. Hun (a descendant of Attila the Hun) was dogged by rumors of past drug use and questions about his foreign policy expertise after he couldn’t name the leaders of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths or Vandals. Voters eventually chose McCain the Hun, because they figured his fiery temper would make him a better barbarian.

Other highlights from the year 1000:

* The most popular bumper sticker: “Guns Don’t Kill People . . . but Only Because They Haven’t Been Invented Yet.”

* Bestselling book: “Feudalism for Dummies.”

* Politically correct fashion accessory: bubonic plague lapel ribbons.

* Biggest crime problem: mule-jacking, in which thieves would steal a donkey at knifepoint while the driver was waiting at an intersection.

Alarming Trends Bureau: The Spam Museum in Austin, Minn., plans to expand to 16 times its present size, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Great Moments in History: A hundred years ago Sunday, a Boston dentist received the first patent for a golf tee.

Quote of the Day: From Kevin Cowherd of the Baltimore Sun, describing the villain in the new James Bond film: “Renard has a bullet lodged in his head that has--stay with us here--rendered him incapable of using many of his senses (taste, smell, touch), but which will make him grow physically stronger and more psychotic until it eventually kills him. Whew. Try getting your HMO to pay for that.”

Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: “Stupid Dog Fed Intravenously--Because He Won’t Let Go of Ball!” (Weekly World News)

Unpaid Informants: Wireless Flash News Service. E-mail Off-Kilter at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.