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Wednesday, May 05, 1999 3:53:22 PM EST

In this story: When satire and reality collide Where will the hype take us? What are we celebrating, anyway? RELATED STORIES, SITES

(CNN) -- If you're among those overdosing on preparations for December 31, 1999, Canadian humorist Josh Freed and political cartoonist Terry Mosher have created a millennium-pressure release valve for you. "2000 Reasons to Hate the Millennium," released in the United States this weekend, is a humorous look at millennium mania.

The editors say the book is for those with Pre-Millennium Stress Syndrome or PMSS. Freed, Mosher and 45 other contributors poke fun at the biggest target in 2,000 years, using satirical prose and cartoons.

Freed says the idea for the book came from a party in late 1998, when he and a group of journalists started swapping stories and discovered they were all sick of the millennium and it was still a year and a half away.

As an author and editor of the book, Freed says it was shocking to him that no one had taken aim at such a big target.

"I kept waiting to see a ton of books that were anti-millennium, and instead all you keep seeing is more products, more millennium pesticides, more millennium foot powders, more millenniums air fresheners, and more millennium histories, and histories upon histories, and Top 10s and Top 1,000s and Top 100,000s," he says.

Freed says he enjoyed putting the book together but considered it in many ways to be therapy. "I've got to say it's been a lot of fun to do, and in a way it really has been a protection. Honestly, I think otherwise I'd have stopped reading newspapers, magazines, books and would have had to go and hide on a remote island until December 1999. When, of course, the jumbo jets would have arrived and I'd have had to flee."

"2000 Reasons to Hate the Millennium" contains advice on where not to be at the big moment, lists the worst of the last 2,000 years in books, songs, films and fashion, and makes predictions for the coming 1,000 years.

The book contains a chapter on how to have the first baby of the new millennium. When Freed wrote the segment, he considered it to be pure satire. But now, he says, there are contests all over the world promising great rewards for whomever has the first baby.

"So much of what was satire when we started writing this has become real, that it's very difficult to keep up. When I first wrote this millennium baby story... I just made it up. I made it up in the idea that people would be excited about having a millennium child."

A legal note has been added at the end of the segment stating that the piece is only satire, not a how-to manual.

"It was clear to me that reality was catching up with satire so fast that somebody might read this essay on how to have the December 31 baby and obey it," Freed says.

The book also includes a segment on "How to be the first death of the millennium." That's the one after which Freed says he wrote "quite a legal warning."

"I realize there's such a mania about the millennium, a combination of hype and false excitement -- at the same time as there's a sense of Armageddon and prediction of Nostradamus that the world is going to end," he says.

The Four Horsemen of the Millennium

"If this is the frenzy now, what's it going to be like the last week of December?" Freed asks.

The book predicts the opening of millennium detox centers and the development of recovery groups to help people cope with the passing of the millennium. Freed predicts that with the large industry that's grown around the "millennium bug" alone, the recovery racket is sure to be even bigger.

"I guess what they (recovery groups) will do is take you to Australia where the millennium happens a year later. There'll be tourists going to Australia to relive the experience .... If it works, there'll be countries having it in 2002 and 2003 and we can just keep having millenniums," he jokes.

The competition for when the millennium occurs is big.

As is covered in the book, most sober thought indicates that the millennium begins not on January 1, 2000, but a year later on January 1, 2001. That's because there was no Year Zero. Our calendars today presume a starting point of January 1 in the year 1. Australia has officially adopted this position. But elsewhere, it's a fine point largely lost on the celebratory public and marketers happy to get the big haul a year early.

And on December 31 of this year, the eve of a millennium the calendar says won't start for 12 more months? "2000 Reasons" includes the story of the Republic of Kiribati, the islands so determined to be the first to celebrate that they've declared the entire republic part of an earlier time zone so that they can party before the neighboring Kingdom of Tonga.

It's this kind of jockeying for position that the authors zero in on in the book.

In whatever year you celebrate it, "There's no such thing as the moment of the millennium," Freed points out. "In the first place, Australia says it's a year later and the downside of that obviously is that they have to have a whole year of extra hype they have to live through," Freed says.

He also contends that no one knows what they're celebrating. "Technically it's the beginning of the (Gregorian) calendar, which is Christ's birth. But, of course the 2,000th anniversary of Christ's birth was probably seven years ago, according to scholars, so that's not the event," Freed says.

"He (Christ) wasn't born on January 1, he was supposedly born on December 25. Except that's not true either, he was probably born in March, but no one is quite certain. December 31, 1999, is not the start of the millennium. It's just a marketing moment for people selling 50,000 millennium products to say,'This is the millennium.'"

The book does declare December 31, 1999, absolutely the worst date for anyone to celebrate the millennium since all the interesting places to be will be both overpriced and packed. If you have to celebrate, the authors suggest doing it on what they call millennium savings time, November 1, 1999.

"If the 'millennium bug' has any truth, you're counting down 10-9-8 to zero and at the moment you scream, 'Happy new year!' or 'Happy millennium!' the lights all over the planet will go out," Freed jokes.

"You'll find yourself crawling around in the dark eating canned tuna on your living room floor and not knowing where the champagne bottle has gone. You know, freezing in the middle of winter, you won't have any heat -- a hell of a way to celebrate your millennium."

But then, of course, there's the already depressing story of a celebration-gone-wrong in Ireland, related by Freed in "2000 Reasons." Dublin sank a huge clock to the bottom of the Liffey River, to be raised at midnight with fireworks. Unfortunately, the clock attracted algae and had to be scrapped, a loss of some $500,000.

Locals call it their "chime in the slime."