A miscellaneous item or two and a new announcement

Hello, all!

I've been remiss of late, I freely admit it. The "baseball cards" post has been a bit harder to write than I thought, and the Halloween stuff is going pretty well. I think I've got the overall design of the site down, and I only have a few more articles to write.

I've been plowing through the Millennium box-set--one or two discs a weekend--with "Millennium Item status" in mind. I can sense a strong progression from the beginning to the end of the Millennium Era: it started out as a state of extreme tension and fear, and then moved from that to the celebratory phase, which I call the "Millennium Dream" phase.

And now for my announcements: I'm putting a new section onto the Museum, called Side Trips. The items featured in the Side Trips section either don't come from the 1995-2001 period, or else deal with the millennium in a more indirect way. "Storm of the Century" is likely to be the first of these, followed by Ben Bova's 1976 book Millennium, which I've been enjoying at work, on lunch breaks and during quieter moments. Neon Genesis Evangelion, the only anime series I'm familiar with in any depth, is also on the Side Trips shortlist, because it's a story in which the world actually did end in 2000, and the central narrative is about the people who are left to deal with the aftermath of that.

I'm also brainstorming a Museum-themed card game as a highly-compatible expansion pack for most collectible card games.

And now for an item:

Date: c.1999/2000. Manufacturer: unknown

I found this at Flamingo Island Flea Market in Florida, at a stall called Bargain Boutique, Too. As you can see, it's a smallish, rhinestone-encrusted pin reading "2000." It was in a glass display case, so I couldn't get a very good look at it. Having said that, however, I can say with some certainty that the name of the company wouldn't be on the pin itself--it would have come attached to a cardboard backing at the time of sale.

It would have been sold at "boutique" stores like Claire's and The Icing, but as far as Millennium-themed things go, it's fairly disposable.