Read THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS Online
Authors: John Scalzi
THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS (11 page)
Best Accidental Discovery of the Millennium.
Penicillin. The closest competitor is the discovery of vulcanized rubber, which led to our ability to sit around during the hottest part of the day in 5-mile-long traffic jams, listening to radio personalities with the brain capacity of hypoxic stoats. But as much fun as
that
is, not dying a terrifying, stench-filled death at the microbial hands of some bacteria is even better.
Make no mistake, a stench-filled bacterial death was a serious possibility for just about everyone well into the 20th Century. Serious strides had been made in the general sanitation of the planet in the 19th Century (thank Joseph Lister, who among other things, convinced doctors that wearing a perpetually bloody smock as a badge of competence was actually helping to kill patients), but sanitation only goes so far. Bacteria are teeny little things, and they can get into places they're not supposed to be with surprising rapidity, where they are happy to procreate until they kill you. This isn't very smart on the part of the bacteria (killing one's host tends to cause the food supply to tap out), but it's not like bacteria have brains, and anyway, they live for about 20 minutes. What do they care.
Come with me now to the battlefields of the First World War. Nasty little war, that one, with lots of soldiers wallowing in mud and getting shot or bayoneted or gassed every now and again, just for variety. If they were lucky, they'd die right there in the mud; if not, they ran a very good chance of dying in the hospital -- not from their wounds directly, but from the infections those wounds inevitably bred (War isn't just Hell, it's Hell without maid service). Doctors knew bacteria were the culprits to so many soldiers' deaths, and so researchers were assigned to discover antibiotics. Scotsman Alexander Fleming was one of them.
Fleming wasn't much help on the antibacterial front during World War I (neither was anyone else), but in 1928 he noticed an odd thing in one of his petri dishes, which had been swabbed with
Staphylococcus
, the nasty little bug that can cause everything from boils to toxic shock syndrome. One of the petri dishes had been contaminated -- some sort of airborne something had managed to get into the dish before Fleming sealed it off -- and whatever it was that was in there with the staph was killing it off something fierce. Now, if Fleming had been a bug-eyed drone, he would have tossed the sample; contaminated samples were supposed to be ditched. But Fleming was a scientist, thank God, and he knew he had found something.
He had found a fungus among us:
Penicillium notatum
. The penicilli were releasing some sort of chemical (which Fleming, in a burst of stunning originality, called penicillin) that killed bugs dead, and not just a few bugs -- we're talking all sorts of bacteria. Deader than Marley's ghost. How? By screwing with the bacteria's assembly process. In order to bacteria to survive, they have to build a cell wall as they reproduce; penicillin keeps the bacteria from building these walls. The bacteria die, exposed to the elements. It'd be sort of sad if they weren't in fact trying to kill you.
(Incidentally, this is how antibiotics work -- by messing with the assembly process. Penicillin attacks cell walls, erythromycin inhibits protein formation, rifampin goes after RNA replication. The best way to keep bacteria from using your body as real estate is never to let them lay down their subdivisions in the first place.)
The catch -- and there's always a catch with these things -- is that naturally-
occurring
penicillin (known as Benzylpenicillin or penicillin-G) isn't very stable and thus isn't very useful. Fleming has found the wonder drug, but he can't do anything with it. Frustrated, Fleming shelves his penicillin research in 1931. Penicillin has to wait until Oxford researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain manage to synthesize a stable form of penicillin. It performs as promised and in 1940, penicillin debuts and starts kicking microbe ass. Fleming, Florey and Chan get the Nobel in Medicine in 1945. They were all also knighted. Fungus was very good to them.
Fungus has been very good to
all
of us, in fact -- not too many of us die from sore throats anymore. However, don't get cocky. Human beings, convinced as we are that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, have spent the better part of the last 60 years wantonly misusing antibiotics in lots of really dumb ways. We use antibiotics for viral infections, which is pointless (you use antivirals for viruses, dummies). We feed antibiotics to animals to who aren't sick to make 'em bigger and fatter. We take antibiotics only until we feel better instead of following the directed medication course (if you feel better, you
are
better, right?).
The result is that we've bred some amazingly drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We've got some TB bacteria running around these days that is, in fact, resistant to every single antibiotic we can throw at it, even the incredibly toxic
antibiotics
that hurt you as much as they hurt the bug. This may be fine with some of you -- if tuberculosis was good enough for John Keats, you say, it's good enough for me -- but let's see how you feel about it once you actually hork up a lung.
And it's not just TB, of course:
Streptococcus
,
Staphylococcus
, and
Pneumococcus
, heck, all the really popular
coccuses
, all of them have virulently drug-resistant strains out there.
Enterococcus faecalis
and
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
are just waiting to poison your blood. And here's a thought for you: streptomycin-resistant
e.coli
has been found in the diapers of today's infants. Thing is, streptomycin hasn't been used to treat much of
anything
for three decades. It's evolution, baby. Anyone who doesn't believe in the process is going to be mighty surprised when an ear infection sends them to the morgue. But what can I do about it? Well, for one, stop using that stupid anti-bacterial soap. You're just making things worse, you know.
This is perhaps the great irony of the millennium's best accidental discovery -- that all the benefits that we have gotten from it could be wiped away because of our own quite deliberate actions. It'd be like Prometheus giving man fire, and then, after watching man burn down a forest or two, just to see the pretty lights, deciding that maybe he should take it back. It's an accident we got antibiotics, but when we lose them, it'll be our own damned fault.
Best Calendar of the Millennium.
The Mayan Calendar. On which the date, incidentally, is 12.19.6.14.6. That's right, only 5,485 days until the next baktun! Better hit the mall now!
Typically speaking, calendars do two things (beyond, of course, giving "Far Side" cartoonist Gary Larson a way to recycle decade-old cartoons for ready cash). First of all, they provide us with the ability to meaningfully note the passage of time. For example, today is the 226th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the 55th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and the 78th-month "anniversary" of my first date with my wife (we were obviously not married at the time). One week from today will be my daughter's first birthday. Send gifts.
All these events are contingent on our calendar for their notability relative to the time in which I exist; If we noted weeks and months differently, it might be the anniversary of something else entirely different. Months and weeks have no basis outside us: We made them up, or, if you prefer, God made them up, and we went with his basic plan (don't we always).
The second thing calendars do is notify us of the cyclical nature of our planet. Thanks to a more or less fixed tilt of the earth's axis and a regular period of revolution around our sun, our world gets hot and cold on a predictable schedule, and the patterns of life take note. Flowers bloom in the spring. Animals hibernate in the winter. Leaves fall in autumn. We get re-runs in the summer. It's the circle of life. For various reasons primarily relating to food, the planting and harvesting of, we've needed to know when to expect the seasons to come around again.
The problem has always been that humans have picked bad ways to note that passage of time. The biggest culprit has been the moon. It has a cycle, of course, about 29 days from new moon to new moon. Alas, that cycle has no real relation with the earth's position in its orbit. So while creating months relative to the moon (the word "month" is in fact etymologically descended from the old English word for "moon"), is perfectly fine for recording subjective blocks of time, it's rather less helpful in keeping track of when the seasons are coming. Sooner or later you'd get snow in July. And that would just wreak havoc on your baseball schedules.
Some of your smarter civilizations switched to a calendar in which the year was demarcated by the path of the sun (in the case of the Egyptians, they used Sirius, the Dog Star. Those crafty
Egyptians
). This was better, as there was, in fact, a direct relation of the sun's path and our year. But the rotation of the earth does not correspond exactly to its revolution. There's an extra quarter of the day (but not exactly a quarter of a day) thrown in for chuckles. Give it enough time, and your seasons and your months will still get away from you.
So you keep fiddling. Our current Gregorian calendar deals with it by inserting a leap day every four years, except in years that end with double zero, except those years which are cleanly divisible by 400. Like 2000. Don't worry, scientists are keeping track of these things for you. Be that as it may, there's
still
slippage. Calendars aren't an exact science.
Enter the Mayans, who, it should be noted, were the kick-ass mathematical minds of the pre-computational world (they used zeros before zeros were cool!). While everyone else was looking at the sun or the moon as a guidepost for the passage of time, the Mayans looked a little to the left of the sun and discovered...Venus, which as it happens, has an exceptionally predictable path around the sun that takes 584 days. Five of these cycles just happens to coincide with eight 365-day years. Thrown in a couple of additional formulae, and you can keep time that's damn near perfect -- The Mayan calendar loses a day about once every 4000 years. Consider
we
can't go four years without having to plug in a day, and we've got atomic clocks and everything.
So why don't we switch to a Mayan calendar? Well, this is why:
First bear in mind that the Mayan kept track of two years simultaneously: the Tzolkin, or divinatory calendar, which is comprised of 260 days, demarcated by matching one of 13 numbers with one of 20 names (13x20=260 -- you can do at least
that
much math), and also another calendar of 18 months of 20 days, with five extra days known as the "Uayeb," for Days of Bad Omen (probably not a good time to do much of anything).
These two calendrical systems linked together once every 18,980 days (that's 52 years to you and me): this period of time was known as a "Calendar Round." Two calendar rounds, incidentally, make up another time period in which the Tzolkin, the 365-day calendar, and the position of Venus sync up again. Think of this as a Mayan century, if you will.
With me so far? Okay, because, actually, I lied. There's another calendar system you need to keep track of as well: The Long Count. Here's how
this
one works. You start of with a day, which in Mayan is known as a kin. There are 20 kin in a unial, 18 unials in a tun, 20 tun in a katun, and 20 katun in a baktun (so how many days is that? Anyone? Anyone? 144,000 -- roughly 394 years). Each of these is enumerated when you signify a date, with the baktun going first. However, remember that while kin, tun, and katun are numbered from 0 to 19, the unial are numbered from 0 to 17, while the baktun are numbered from 1 to 13. So if someone tries to sell you a Mayan calendar with a 14 in the baktun's place, run! He's a bad man!
And thus, combining our Long Count calendar with our Tzolkin and our 365-day calendar, we find that today is 12.19.6.14.6, 6 kan, 12 mak. Now you know why we don't use the Mayan calendar. And the next time you plan to cheat on a math test, sit next to a Mayan.
What happens after you reach the 13th baktun? I don't know, but it's going to happen pretty soon --the Mayan calendar rolls over on December 23rd, 2012. Maybe then we'll get a
real
apocalypse. Until then, let's all party like it's 12.19.19.17.19.
Best Gay Man of the Millennium.
Richard I of England, otherwise known as Richard the Lionhearted. He's here, he's queer, he's the King of England.
Although, certainly, not the
only
gay King of England: William II Rufus, Edward II, and King James I (yes, the Bible dude) are reputed to have indulged in the love that dare not speak its name (On the other hand, rumors pertaining to the gayness of King William III have been greatly exaggerated). Women, don't feel left out: Anne, queen from 1702 to 1714, had a very interesting "friendship" with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, who was her "lady of the bedchamber." Which was apparently an actual job, and not just some winking euphemism.
The difference between Richard and the rest of the reputedly gay monarchs of England is that people seemed to think fondly of Richard, whereas the rest of the lot were met with more than their share of hostility -- though that hostility has less to do with their sexuality than it did with other aspects of their character. William II Rufus, son of William the Conqueror, was known as a brutal tyrant who smote the weak and raised their taxes; he took an arrow in the back in 1100, in what was very likely an assassination masterminded by his brother, Henry. James I, who had been King of Scotland before he was also made King of England, spent a lot of money and lectured Parliament about his royal prerogatives; they thought he was a big drooling jerk. Queen Anne had a weak will which made her susceptible to suggestion, a point that Sarah Churchill, for one, exploited to its fullest extent.
(However, then there's Edward II. Not a very good king to begin with, Edward further annoyed his barons by procuring the earldom of Cornwall for Piers Gaveston, Edward's lifelong very good friend, and the sort of fellow who wasn't a bit shy about rubbing your nose in that fact. The barons continually had him exiled, but Edward continually brought him back; finally the barons had enough, collared Gaveston, and in 1312, lopped off his head. Edward himself met a truly bad end in 1327; having been overthrown by his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, he was killed by torture that included a red-hot poker as a suppository. You can't tell me
that
wasn't an editorial comment.)
On the surface of things, there's no reason that Richard, as a king, should be looked upon any more favorably than these folks; in fact, as a king, Richard was something of a bust. During his decade-long reign, he was in England for a total of six months, and most of that was given over to slapping around his brother John and the barons, rather than, say, handing out Christmas hams to the populace. Richard wasn't even very much interested in being King of England. His possessions as the Duke of Aquitaine were substantially more important to him, enough so that he went to war against his father Henry II over them. Seems that after Henry had made Richard the heir to the throne, Henry wanted him to give the Aquitaine to John, who had no lands of his own. Richard said no and went to arms; this aggravated Henry so much, he
died
.
What Richard really wanted to do, and what is the thing that won him the hearts of the subjects he didn't even know, was to lead the Third Crusade against Saladin, the great Muslim hero who had conquered Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin had taken Jerusalem from the Christians, who had nabbed it 88 years before, and who, it must be said, acted like animals doing it. When Saladin's troops regained the city, it was remarked how much nicer they were than the Christians had been (why, the Muslims hardly slaughtered
any
innocent bystanders!).
In one of those great historical coincidences, Saladin is also rumored to be gay, which would be thrilling if it were true. The idea that both sides of one of the greatest of all religious wars were commanded -- and brilliantly, might I add -- by homosexuals is probably something neither today's religious or military leaders would prefer to think about. Put that in your "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" pipe, guys: The Third Crusade was won by a pansy!
(Which pansy, of course, is a matter of debate. Richard's exploits and military brilliance during the Third Crusade are the stuff of legend, and he did manage to wrest a three-year truce out of Saladin, which, among other things, assured safe passage for Christians to holy places. On the other hand, Richard never
did
take back Jerusalem (which was the whole point of the Crusade), and if you check the scorecards of most judges, they'll tell you Saladin and Richard fought to a draw, so the title goes to the incumbent. However, Richard's crusade was not the unmitigated disaster that later crusades would be -- ultimately the Christians were booted out of the Palestine. So in retrospect, Richard's crusade looked pretty darn good. Way not to lose, Richard.)
Yes, yes, yes, you say, but I don't give a damn about the Crusades. I want to know who Richard was
gay
with. Man, you people disappoint me. But fine: How about Philip II Augustus, King of France concurrent to Richard's reign as King of England. You may have already known about this particular relationship, as it constituted a plot point in the popular play and movie "A Lion in Winter." However, even at the time, the relationship between the two was well-documented. Roger of Hoveden, a contemporary of Richard I and his biographer, has this to say:
"Richard, [then] duke of Aquitaine, the son of the king of England, remained with Philip, the King of France, who so honored him for so long that they ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the king of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the king of England was absolutely astonished and the passionate love between them and marveled at it."
(Other translations -- Hoveden wrote in Latin -- replace "love" with "esteem," toning down the breathless m4m feel of the passage, thereby allowing the nervous to assume Richard and Philip were just really really
really
close buds. Whatever works, man.)
Richard and Phil's relationship, beyond any physical aspect, was tempestuous at best. On one hand, Richard appealed to Philip for help (and got it) when Henry tried to take the Aquitaine from him. On the other hand, once Richard became king, he fortified his holdings in France, on the off chance that Philip might, you know, try to stuff a province or two in his pocket while Richard was away at the Crusades.
As it happens, Philip went to the Third Crusade, where he had a falling out with Richard and eventually headed back to Paris in a huff; once there, he tried to slip some of Richard's lands in his pocket, just like Richard thought he would. The two eventually went to war over the whole thing. Richard was winning, until he was shot in the chest by an archer and died. Legend has it that Richard actually congratulated the archer for the shot, which, frankly, strikes me as taking good manners just a little too far.
You may wonder what about any of this makes Richard the best
gay
man of the last 1000 years. Actually, nothing; when it comes right down to it, Richard's sexuality is one of the least interesting things about him. This is one facet he shares in common with other notable gay men of the last 1000 years, from Michelangelo to John Maynard Keynes.
It's also something he shares, of course, with the vast majority of heterosexual men through the years as well. Although since that's the sexual norm, we don't think about it that way. Rare is the moment in which we say "Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. And, you know, he was
straight.
" One day, if we're lucky, we'll think the same about gay men and women. In the meantime, we'll have Richard to remind us we're more than the sum of our sexualities. That's worth my vote.