Who remembers “Comet Kohoutek”, from way back in 1973?
I do recall that here were some who thought that it would bring death and destruction, but it turned out to be quite a disappointment.
Not many people were expecting death and destruction, but most of us were hoping for a bigger show in the sky.
No, it wasn’t a big crowd, but I did know some new age people and also some very conservative fundie Christians that thought of it as a harbinger of doom. It may have been featured in some tabloids, as well. Fun memories!
In the height of the Y2K hysteria, there was one programmer who so feared the cataclysm and chaos that would follow, that he had himself cryogenically frozen, with instructions to revive him in 200 years (by which time, he figured, things would have gotten worked out).
2000 came and went, but over the next 200 years there was enough other chaos and upheavals that his cryogenic tomb was forgotten, and he stayed frozen for another almost 18,000 years, until he was rediscovered and revived in the year 19,999.
When he awoke, he found himself in a very futuristic laboratory setting, with futuristic people with white coats and big bulbous heads buzzing all around him, all in an obvious state of great excitement.
Upon asking where he was (and when he was), they excitedly explained to him that it was now the year 19,999. AND, they breathlessly added, “… it says here in your papers that you know COBOL!”
My face never did stay like that.
Yet you and I can both read his words. Point made 
the disaster didn’t happen.
Wait, is this Thursday? Where the hell is that Vogon fleet?
Still waiting for the paperwork sequence to complete.
I can guarantee that Canadian seniors and unemployed would have been SOL when they stopped getting payments in January 2000 if not for the several years of work to make the legacy COBOL-based issuing program financial systems Y2K compliant. I was involved as the only accountant in the department who had any COBOL programming experience, and the code would have failed if it hadn’t been fixed.
The publicity of those kind of predictions actually make them be false. I noticed the same effect up here in Portland when half the I-5 bridge across the Columbia River was scheduled to be closed for a couple weeks. This was about 20 years ago. They announced it about half a year ahead of time and they predicted massive jams on the open half of the bridge. It turned out that on the first day, there was virtually no traffic on the bridge because everyone was avoiding it in droves. On the other hand, the I-205 bridge was totally jammed.
Do you think you hve done enough tesing?
People were ANGRY about it too.
“WHY CAN’T THEY JUST PLAY SAFE AND NOT DO THE EXPERIMENT IT’S NOT THAT HARD”
Similarly, 25 years ago, New Haven, Connecticut hosted the Special Olympics World Games. There were dire predictions beforehand of traffic jams, so that local residents avoided the city while the games were in town. As a result, they were under-attended as were the associated events.
NC got liquor by the drink in 1977. Preachers said there would be a bar on every corner. As you might guess that never happened.
Also when bars banned indoor smoking many of them were going to go bust. Also never happened.
They did around here … rural PA.
There used to be five bars in town – now there is one. Nearby towns also lost many bars, even the local “nice” place (white table cloths & cloth napkins) that had been around since I’ve been alive has now been standing vacant for years. One nearby town where my extended family had been gathering for the Wednesday spaghetti special for years closed the week after smoking ended – the bar that had been standing room only all night every night since the 1950s.
There is no way they lost enough business in one week to go under. Maybe they had the attitude of “You can have my cigarettes when you pry them from my cold, nicotine stained fingers”
Islamic Terrorist Sleeper Cells. They were supposed to be in place here in the US, waiting to launch post 9/11 attacks. They were going to cause incidents on the highway and wait for the police to show up and then start gunning people down. They were hiding out in every city in the US. Except it turned out to be entirely fiction, a conspiracy theory that the was believed by the people who we trusted to protect this country.
Huh. According to Wikipedia, there was another one on March 3rd last year. That was the day that 41 tornadoes touched down across portions of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina in a 6-hour period. Disastrous, but not world ending.
I’m not commenting on people’s attitude toward smokers or smoking, just on what happened in a long-standing local business.
One Wednesday night my family had our regular weekly gathering. There were probably about 50 people in the dining room and 50 more smokers around the bar. Later that week the No Smoking sign went up. The next Wednesday night there was NOBODY at the bar and only a handful of people in the dining room. The following Wednesday night the “Closed” sign was on the door and a For Sale sign went up. It was eventually converted to a small apartment building.
At least in this area a lot of bars and restaurants closed and have never reopened, and a lot of them went very quickly. Rush’s Tavern, The Broadway, Majestic, Camelot, Ye Old Sailors Inn, The Hearth, Sunset Inn, Johnny’s, I could go on and on as I drive past the places I used to hang out in my drinking and smoking days that aren’t there anymore – and all closed very shortly after the smoking ban, some having been in business at the same location for over 100 years.