Passerby bets that Gary North feels silly today (after spending the last three years documenting the inevitability of Y2K-bug-driven societal collapse). I was thinking the same thing a couple days ago and noticed he has climbed out of his bunker to post his reaction to the non-event: "I am indeed perplexed."

Bill points out that Gary is a particularly rare kind of religious nut. Indeed. I saw him speak at a conference a number of years back. Two things struck me: a) He wore a three-piece wool suit for three days in Key West, Florida, where no one even wears ties and where everyone else at the conference was wearing shorts and sandals. b) He mentioned he was writing an "economic analysis" of the bible in his spare time. This was his "calling" in life; he had written 1,100 pages so far, and was something like a third of the way through.

Knowing these things allowed me to take his, admittedly, rather well-reasoned Y2K assessments a little more lightly than I might have otherwise.