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Matt Cooper and Harry Shearer

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The Great Y2K Heist

By Harry Shearer
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2000, at 11:58 AM ET

First things first: What's a "snow day"? Yes, I did spend all my life in Southern California, except for two nauseating years in New York. Speaking of which, my television viewing (aided by a big satellite dish that allows me to see stuff without hearing all the babble American TV throws on top to "explain" what you're seeing) convinced me that Sydney's celebration beat the Big Apple's by a country mile. I still don't understand all those dancers in diaphanous approximations of no national costume that cavorted through Times Square all day. In the good old, pre-Giuliani days, they would have been mugged and left for carrion before noon.

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The Los Angeles Times ran a long takeout regarding the putative Y2K gyp. One "information analyst" was quoted as saying American industry had been had. This leads me to one conclusion: The vast, exciting run-up in the stock market, yanked along by the (here's a journalistic cliché ripe for the executing) "tech-heavy Nasdaq," may not have been irrational exuberance at all; it may just have been investors' reaction to the tech industry's hundred-billion-dollar holdup of the rest of the country to "fix the bug."

Speaking of the Los Angeles Times, said paper, still smarting from the Staples Center scandal, in which it published a special issue of its Sunday magazine on the opening of the new arena and split the magazine's profits with the arena, published a special section Saturday morning in which it printed in eight-point type the names of all the "members" of its "Millennium registry." These were people who paid good money to get special commemorative editions of Friday's and Saturday's papers, and to get their names printed in that special section. The paper, chastened by David Shaw's long exposé of the Staples scandal, claims to have learned its lesson, but that kind of learniing is supposed to keep you from getting promoted to the next grade. Also, at the bottom of the front page of the special section: "We regret any typographical errors." So don't ask for your money back if they misprinted your name.

The Staples people paid $7 million, incidentally, for "naming rights" to the new arena. You'd think the Times could get them to pay at least a million to get their name off the paper's scandal.

Harry Shearer