scaring people on Y2K

 We are in the Oceania Hotel north of Rennes.  The area surrounding the place is beautiful.  The streets are wide and clean and some are brand new.  When I ran, at 6:30 am, the traffic was light.  I ran straight down one road for some minutes and straight back so as not to lose myself.  Then, down another road and onto a walking path/bike trail that went under a road through a metal pipe surrounded by concrete that reminded me of something from a Terminator movie—the surrounding area was, of course, not reminiscent of a nuclear holocaust.
 The most remarkable bit of this run was my listening selection on my iPod.  It was a Mosaic sermon. Mosaic is an interesting church Los Angeles.  The man, Hank, this morning talked about people’s passions.  He described one of his passions and destructive and terrible; he has been struggling with it for 15 years.  He likes to scare people.  On December 31, 1999, he was at a New Year’s Party.  As the party progressed, he got the sense that people were trying to have fun, but there was an undeniable undercurrent of worry throughout the crowd.  People were not sure if they needed to believe the predictions of catastrophe that would wreck havoc in the computer world, and thereby everything else, when the date became unrecognizable to computers.  Hank asked the owner of the party venue where the master electric switch was located.  At 11:50, he quietly made his way to the master breaker box.  He was jumping up and down with anticipation.  As the crowd counted down to midnight—5…4…3…  As they reached zero, he cut the power to the building.  Instead of singing a cheering, the crowd was silent—you could have heard a mouse cough. When Hank heard people start to scream, Hank decided he should turn on the power before people started to eat each other.