This list business is addictive. Last week, made delirious by a touch of millennial fever, I enumerated the 10 most overrated ideas of the last 1,000 years. It was, I discovered, enormously instructive to cast one’s mind back over a hunk of history slightly in excess of the usual terrain (i.e., the last week and a half). Thinking in millennial terms makes one more contemplative, less impulsive, more historically minded and possibly smarter.
To paraphrase the bumper sticker: Think millennially, act pretty soon.
The response to my arbitrary lineup of ideas that once ruled the world, but later found themselves bottoms-up in history’s trash heap, was interesting: Several folks took issue with my dismissal of communism, claiming that its day would come again. Others defended phrenology, the practice of using the bumps on the head as an index of character and mental function.
A few were compelled to defend leeches, the worms formerly employed in wriggling droves to drain the so-called bad blood from the ailing. Who knew that leeches had such a loyal constituency?
To exhibit a more positive approach, I might have come up with the 10 best ideas of the recently concluded millennium (according to popular consensus although not, of course, for real, since the third millennium won’t actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001): civil rights, women’s rights, the recognition of the need to protect children, privacy.
Ideas, of course, are distinct from things. Another useful list might have been the most overrated things of the past millennium — contraptions that looked cool initially but proved unworkable or simply unwanted.
Ideas are essential for inventions, but inventions themselves are pretty darn intriguing. If you love the good-natured arguments that ensue over ranking humankind’s achievements, don’t miss “The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years” (Simon & Schuster), a recently published compilation edited by John Brockman that turns listmaking into a sprightly parlor game.
Contributors from various universities, think tanks and laboratories perched high on remote mountaintops around the world offer their succinct nominations for best inventions in first and second millenniums.
It’s a neat list, dandy in its diversity. A lot of the smarty-pants scientists opt for the obvious stuff: the printing press, the computer, the electric light. But a fair number go out on intellectual limbs and make the case for such offbeat choices as birth control, the horse collar, double-entry accounting, hay and lenses.
Hay?
“In the classical world of Greece and Rome, and in all earlier time, there was no hay,” wrote physicist Freeman Dyson. “Civilization could exist only in warm climates, where horses could continue to graze through the winter. Without grass in winter, you could not have horses, and without horses you could not have urban civilization.”
When it comes to millennially transformative entities, then, forget bytes and bits. Think alfalfa.
Yes, another list: As noted above, listmaking is a powerful human urge about which we need not feel ashamed, especially not when a momentous milestone has just passed.
Onward, then, to this week’s list.
Endings are beginnings — the beginnings of garage sales, that is. Nothing compels us to clean out closets, tidy up attics and empty basements quite like the conclusion of some arbitrary unit of time, be it a season, a year, a job.
Famous folks are no exception. Driving around this week, I happened to notice several garage sales under way at surprising places. It’s remarkable what some people find expendable.
I stopped, looked around and scribbled notes. Here, then, is my report, a partial list of the discarded items spotted at the garage sales of some well-known personages. These are the things they’re jettisoning at rock-bottom prices.
– Bill Clinton:
50 copies of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”
1 telephone headset
– Hillary Rodham Clinton:
1 used copy of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique”
– Bill Gates:
1 crown and scepter
1 Parker Brothers Monopoly game
– Michael Jordan:
287 pairs sweat socks
24 pairs wristbands
1,450 placemats from Michael Jordan’s Restaurant
– John B. McCoy:
Unused portion of CTA transit card
His ‘n’ hers “I Love Chicago” sweatshirts
– Madeline Albright:
57 boxes of Dramamine
1 neck pillow
– Brandi Chastain:
16 sweaty T-shirts
– George Lucas:
3.2 million Queen Amidala action figures
– Ross Perot:
5 million “Vote Reform Party!” bumper stickers
– Monica Lewinsky:
94,567 signed copies of “Monica’s Story”
– Wayne Gretzky and John Elway:
295 unused tubes of Ben Gay
453 sealed bottles of Tinactin
– Jesse Ventura:
234 fuchsia feather boas
