Word: millenniums
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Students of the millennium and historians of the bizarre have long been predicting such a catastrophic event in the twilight years of the 20th century, duly noting the rise in the number of obscure cults and the increasingly fevered pitch of their rantings. And it is not just that time of the century; it is that time of year too, with Holy Week, the vernal equinox and a partial lunar eclipse converging, all heated up by the extraordinary Hale-Bopp comet lighting the night skies. For those who go in for cosmological conjunctions, it was a perfect week...
...only have three years left until the big millennial shift--actually the new millennium doesn't begin for four years, but for the sake of pop culture and a great tradition of miseducation, let's just play along with the year 2000 hype...
From those visions and their successors in Christianity's first millennium, a colorful, sometimes contradictory mystical vocabulary of heaven emerged. It was a garden, a city, a kingdom, a temple or, less often, a nut, a womb, a navel. It featured buildings and streets of precious metals and jewels, doves, palm trees (first discerned by the church father Lactantius), singing stones (a late borrowing from Celtic myth), white clothing, milk, honey, wine, olive oil, harps, fountains and ladders. It also developed a set of intractable controversies...
Hale has found that the arrival of a major comet--especially so near the end of a millennium--is still widely regarded as an omen of upheaval and disaster. Several Christian Fundamentalists, he writes in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer, have proclaimed Hale-Bopp to be one of the "signs of the end times" foretold in the New Testament. They also suggest that the comet might be the object described in Revelation 8: 10 as a great star named Wormwood that "fell from heaven, blazing like a torch." Wormwood, according to the Bible, destroys a third of almost everything...
...Best Actor Oscar, stands as one of the truly great performances in cinema, and his work in films as diverse as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Cromwell (a personal favorite) is outstanding. But in my mind's eye he will always be dueling Darth Vader as the Millennium Falcon, unhindered by the tractor beam, prepares to soar into space. And I'm glad to know he's still around...