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2000: FROM Y2K
TO THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, THE YEAR WAS FULL OF STRANGE NEWS
Greensboro
News & Record
Dec. 31, 2000
Pg.
Life
Welcome
to Strange Days VII, the News & Record's seventh annual roundup of the idiotic,
the ironic and the just plain weird. Speaking of which, the year itself has
been weird: no OJ, no Monica, no Chihuahuas to speak of. So now, more than ever,
you're on your own in trying to figure out what it all means.
Just
don't rely on your computer or weather forecasters for help.
Jan.
1: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT: Computers worldwide fail to crash, fail to plunge
the world into darkness and chaos and, in general, work just fine as 1999 turns
into 2000, thus leaving journalists casting about for a big news story.
Jan.
10: SMELLS LIKE ... VICTORY!: High Point police charge four people after finding
101 pounds of marijuana in a car trunk - so much pot that the cops could smell
it themselves even before the police dog got there.
Jan.
14: HE SAID IT, WE DIDN'T: At a memorial service for his Charlotte Hornets teammate
Bobby Phills, point guard David Wesley calls Phills his "partner in crime."
Wesley and Phills were both speeding when Phills' car collided with another
at 107 mph, killing Phills and hospitalizing two other people.
Jan.
24: WHO DOESN'T WANT PEOPLE TO BE MILLIONAIRES?: The company that insures ABC-TV's
hit game show "Who Wants to be A Millionaire" threatens in court to
drop its coverage unless the show asks harder questions and selects dumber contestants.
Jan.
25: FORECASTING FOLLIES: Many Triad locations receive at least a foot of snow
after forecasters call for just a couple of inches.
Feb.
5: SHOTS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT: Davidson County sheriff Gerald Hege pursues
a fleeing suspect into Winston-Salem and fires shots over the man's head as
he runs away, prompting former Winston- Salem officer Steven Cooper to ask,
"Who's watching this cowboy?" and Forsyth District Attorney Tom Keith
to request an SBI investigation.
Feb.
16: AND YOU THINK GREENSBORO HAS WATER PROBLEMS: The mountain town of Marshall
discovers that 1.5 million gallons of water in its town reservoirs have vanished
overnight. The town's larger reservoir, normally 42 feet deep, was down to 13
inches.
March
14: BUT WE LOVE HIM ... ESPECIALLY WITH WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE: A family in Deming,
N.M., searching for its missing Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, "Tiny Boo,"
finds Boo as the main course at a neighbor's cookout.
April
16: DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO: Oprah Winfrey, who once proclaimed "free
speech doesn't just live, it rocks" after defeating a libel claim brought
by cattle producers, wins in court again when Illinois courts uphold a provision
barring employees of her production company - for life - from talking or writing
about working for her.
April
25: MAYBE NOT: A federal appeals court rules that the Ohio state motto - "With
God, all things are possible" - is unconstitutional.
May
9: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT, THE SEQUEL: State officials ask a nonprofit group
headed by Greensboro City Councilman Earl Jones to return a $35,000 grant, saying
the agency could not adequately document how it had spent the money. Jones later
blames the discrepancy on a computer failure.
May
17: NOT THE COMPUTER'S FAULT: The Greensboro Area Chamber of Commerce, an organization
that promotes business, is nearly bankrupt because of poor business management,
the News & Record reports.
May
18: GLAD TO SEE THEY GOT THAT MISMANAGEMENT PROBLEM FIXED SO FAST: A day after
the Chamber's financial problems are made public, chamber officials say they
may take up a collection to pay Chamber President David Jameson's $30,000 membership
dues at the Greensboro Country Club.
June
4: PARENTAL SUPERVISION AIN'T ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE: Parents of a Page High
School student are cited for throwing a keg party attended by 250 to 300 underage
Page students.
June
7: HIGH STAKES: A Halifax County man is accused of beating another man to death
in an argument over who owned a videotape of "Planet of the Apes."
July
4: TELL US AGAIN HOW THE WAY Y'ALL DO THINGS IN NEW YORK IS SO MUCH BETTER:
A Long Island, N.Y., man is decapitated when he peers inside a 5-inch fireworks
mortar tube to try to find out - prematurely - why it hadn't detonated.
July
10: GONE BUST: Frederick's of Hollywood, famous for push-up bras and sex toys,
files for bankruptcy reorganization.
July
18: GLAD WE CLEARED THAT UP: Guilford County Commissioner Melvin "Skip"
Alston says his lobbying of Greensboro City Council members on a proposed billboard
ordinance makes him not a lobbyist but a consultant paid to inform council members
about his client's position.
July
19: WE'RE ALSO AFTER A BANK ROBBER WHO LOOKS LIKE OPRAH WINFREY: Police arrest
a suspect in the beating and carjacking of an elderly woman after distributing
a description of the suspect that said he looked like corpulent talk-show host
Rush Limbaugh.
July
28: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT III: The state historical site marker erected at
the old Stroh Brewery on Gratiot Avenue in Detroit in 1976, then stolen years
later, turns up for sale on eBay, an Internet auction house.
July
31: DISCRIMINATES AGAINST STRONG WORKERS 21 WAYS: The maker of Wonder Bread
is found liable for $11 million in actual damages after a jury in San Francisco
determines that the company discriminated against 21 workers.
Aug.
9: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT IV: Women are now the majority online, composing
50.4 percent of Internet users, Media Metrix magazine reports, with teenage
girls representing the fastest- growing age group.
Aug.
21: PROFESSIONAL COURTESY: A block of Battleground Avenue in downtown Greensboro
is evacuated after a 2-inch natural-gas line is cut by workers from Piedmont
Natural Gas.
Aug.
24: FORECASTING FOLLIES, THE SEQUEL: Twenty-two days before the Summer Olympics
open in Sydney, Australia, the Olympic track-and- field facility is opened at
a temperature of 51 with wind chills in the low 30s.
Aug.
26: WOULDN'T A LETTER TO THE EDITOR HAVE BEEN LESS WORK?: Guilford school board
member Keith Green throws a chair at John Hammer, editor of the weekly Rhinoceros
Times, after the two exchange words at a school-board retreat.
Sept.
4: BARNYARD DANCE: Before a speech urging his audience to "put plain-spoken
Americans in the White House," Texas Gov. George W. Bush, unaware that
his microphone is on, refers to a New York Times reporter as a "major-league
(bad word)," driving dozens of the nation's best-paid journalists to devote
time and effort to exploring whether Bush's epithet constituted an obscenity,
a profanity, a vulgarity or merely earthy language.
Sept.
7: KATHY LEE WHO?: Regis Philbin's talk show is drawing 26 percent more viewers
in its first three months without former co- host Kathy Lee Gifford than it
drew with her, Nielson Media Research says.
Sept.
18: BLAME IT ON THE ELECTION: After the movie industry's slowest weekend in
three years - 129 films playing in North America took in a combined $54 million,
less than "Jurassic Park" once took in by itself in one weekend -
industry officials blame the public's preoccupation with the TV show "Survivor,"
which ended weeks ago; the Olympics, whose TV ratings are flat; and the presidential
election.
Sept.
20: NATURE STRIKES BACK: A pregnant woman in Mattapan, Mass., tells police that
a squirrel that had fallen into her car through the open sunroof as she drove
had "tried to kill himself by jumping out of a tree." The woman was
treated at a regular hospital, not a psychiatric one.
Sept.
17: NATURE STRIKES BACK, THE SEQUEL: Three monkeys, believed to be escapees
from the Virginia state fair or a shipment headed to a circus in North Carolina,
hurl bananas and crab apples at cars on Interstate 95 in Jarratt, Va., then
escape into the woods.
Sept.
22: CUE OMINOUS MUSIC HERE: The man driving the truck that struck and critically
injured horror novelist Stephen King in June 1999 is found dead at his home
in Fryeburg, Maine. His body shows no signs of trauma, and an autopsy the next
week is inconclusive.
Oct.
3: HOLLIDAY ON ICE: Greensboro Mayor Keith Holliday, expressing concern that
innocent people might be executed for murder, suggests freezing convicted murderers
instead, then thawing them out if they're later found innocent.
Oct.
14: PUTTING MONEY WHERE HIS MOUTH ... WASN'T?: A Vietnam veterans' group offers
$1,000 to anyone who can prove that Republican presidential candidate George
W. Bush actually showed up for Air National Guard duty in Alabama in 1972 after
the unit's commander and executive officer say he never did.
Oct.
25: YUMMY: Duke University football players sick with food poisoning passed
the virus to their Florida State opponents during a 1998 game in the first such
documented case of transmission of the virus in a sports event, researchers
announce.
Oct.
25: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT. NOT: The state tells Greensboro City Councilman
Earl Jones it will permanently stop giving money to the nonprofit he runs after
a state audit finds $700,000 in questionable expenses.
Nov.
5: DEATH: A GOOD CAREER MOVE: Entertainer Steve Allen wins a seat on the board
of the Screen Actors Guild despite having died Oct. 30, two days before balloting
ended.
Nov.
7: DEATH: A GOOD CAREER MOVE, THE SEQUEL: Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who died
three weeks earlier in a plane crash, ousts incumbent U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft.
Carnahan died too close to Election Day for his name to be removed from the
ballot.
Nov.
10: SON OF ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT: Cybergossip Matt Drudge releases a new
book in which he derides traditional media and proclaims himself the cutting
edge of the digital revolution. Then he lists 19 favorite bookmarks, of which
nine are newspapers.
Nov.
13: WE REPORT AND WE DECIDE: Fox News, which promotes itself as less biased
than other network news operations, confirms that executive John Ellis, a first
cousin of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, played a key role in the network's premature
announcement on Election Night that Bush had clinched victory and that Ellis
had spent much of Election Night in communication with his cousin.
Nov.
18: WHEN PIGS FLY: US Airways acted reasonably when it allowed a pig to fly
first class from Philadelphia to Seattle, the Federal Aviation Administration
rules.
Dec.
1: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT. REALLY. Shortly after cybergossip Matt Drudge fails
to win any Online Journalism Awards, he calls contest administrator Sreenath
Sreenivasan to complain. Sreenivasan explains that one must enter the contest
to win and that Drudge never sent in the paperwork.
Dec.
3: FORECASTING FOLLIES III: After forecasts calling for up to a foot of snow,
Greensboro receives ... nary a flake.
Dec.
4: ALL THE COMPUTER'S FAULT, PART XXXVIII: An accrediting agency says Greensboro's
Bennett College could lose its accreditation because a financial audit was late.
Bennett President Gloria Scott blames the delay on a computer software failure
that she said misplaced half the school's annual budget.
Dec.
5: THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD ... The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, having
written and edited a front-page story on the end of a special session of the
Arizona legislature, forgets to run the story in the paper.
Dec.
6: THEY'RE NOT INSANE, THEY'RE JUST TWISTED: The Washington Post publishes a
photo of a music group identified as Insane Clown Posse; actually, the group
shown was Twiztid.
Dec.
8: PRIORITIES IN ORDER: U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms' press aide issues a news release
to reporters denying that Helms is ill, adding, "He is absolutely fine
and will - God willing - be around to torment you for a long time."
Dec.
12: PRIORITIES IN ORDER, THE SEQUEL: The Flamingos will be inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame March 19, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner announces.
Lou Reed will not.
Dec.
15: AT LEAST THEY'RE NOT SAYING IT'S THE COMPUTER'S FAULT: Internet retailer
eToys downgrades its fourth-quarter sales and earnings estimates by almost half,
blaming not only a "harsh retail climate" but also that consumers
have been "meaningfully distracted by the presidential election and its
aftermath."
Material
from News & Record wire services, Salon.com and Poynter.org also was used
in this report.
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