the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 202
whose Web site, www.y2kprep.com, gave tips on buying two-way radios
and offered an advice column (“What do I do if my spouse thinks Y2K is
a bunch of hype?”). He also was the author of Millennium Bug: How to
Survive the Coming Chaos, which reached number six on Amazon.com’s
bestseller list. Expert credentials weren’t always necessary: A 1999 video
called the Y2k Family Survival Guide, for example, featured Leonard Nimoy,
of Star Trek fame, presenting the usual advice on amassing emergency
supplies. Publishers churned out an estimated 2,500 books with
Y2K themes. They included Susan Robinson’s Whatcha Gonna Do If the
Grid Goes Down? Preparing Your House hold for the Year 2000, and 1999’s
Catastrophic Cooking by Carol Reid and David Harrington, a cookbook
that promised to show readers how to prepare “tasty, nutritional, well balanced
meals” in the midst of Y2K disruptions. (The book also included
instructions for using tinfoil and an ordinary cardboard box to create a
charcoal-heated oven capable of cooking food at up to 475 degrees.) Investment
adviser David Steelsmith Elliot wrote the 1998 tome Everyone’s
Guide to Making a Million Dollars on the Year 2000 Crash, the original
edition of which retailed for a hefty $44.95.
Y2K mania also created endless opportunities to peddle survival
products. The Web site www.Y2KWatch.com, for example, advertised
hydroponic gardening kits, “non-electric cooking solutions,” and investment
opportunities in gold and silver. A Utah-based company, Preparedness
Resources, which sold twelve-month supplies of dehydrated food for
$1,495, saw its sales rise 1,200 percent in 1999. Another of its hot items
was a $225 kit containing a water purifi er, flashlights, and tools. A Michigan
entrepreneur seized upon Y2K as the perfect opportunity to market
his invention—pizza slices in vacuum-sealed packages, intended to last
for as long as two years without refrigeration or cooking. Some entrepreneurs
developed entire communities, such as Prayer Lake in northwest
Arkansas and God’s Wilderness in rural Minnesota. The latter offered
ten-acre lots complete with an eight-hundred-square-foot cabin, a drilled
well, a stove, a shed, a greenhouse, and an outhouse, for $40,000.