THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS by John Scalzi

creative attempts to mask the click -- in the 8-track version of Pink Floyd's "Animals" album, for example, there's a guitar solo, unavailable anywhere else, that acts as a bridge between "Pigs on the Wing" parts 1 and 2. It was done by Floyd tour guitarist Snowy White. There, now you know something about Floyd that your terminally-stoned, "Dark Side of the Moon"-playing-on-a-continual-loop college roommate doesn't. Even better, he'll hate you for it. And they say there's no justice.)
    The 8-track was dying by the end of 70s and officially declared dead around 1983, when most major record companies stopped making them. After that date you had to get your 8-tracks from the record clubs, which manufactured the things until about 1989. If you look hard, you can actually find an 8-track of Michael Jackson's "Bad" album (but then, why would you). The last major album on 8-track, or so it is said, is Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits collection. This is, of course, entirely appropriate.
    No one misses the 8-track, which is final, incontrovertible proof of its dead ended-ness. Sure, people gawk in awe if you show up at a party with one, and if you somehow manage to get one to play , you'be be hailed as a hero of cheese. But this isn't the same as saying that anyone actually wants to hear music in the format anymore. Unlike old wax cylinders and 78-rpm Victrola records, there's nothing on 8-track that wasn't placed on a better recording medium as well. Unlike vinyl, you'll not hear of some geek audiophile haranguing bored listeners about the supposed sonic superiority of the 8-track, and thank God for that.
    Its only value today is to remind us that not every technological "advance" is a good one, or one that will last.
    * Statements like this inevitably arouse the wrath of audiophiles, who maintain that their beloved vinyl records sound so much "warmer" and better than those cold, sterile digital recordings. To which I say: Sure. If you want to spend $4,000 on a gyroscopically balanced turntable, another $2000 on a vacuum tube-bearing receiver, and God knows what for speakers designed by NASA scientists to transmit sound in cold, deep, airless space, you might theoretically get better sound quality from vinyl than your average guy gets off a CD and a boombox. But if you would spend $10,000 to eke out total sound quality from a 39-cent wheel of plastic, let me just say: You're a big freakin' idiot.

Best Planet of the Millennium.
    Uranus. And stop that. You're not thirteen any more.
    This will come as a painful selection for those fans of Mars, angry red planet and recent eater of NASA landers. But Mars is a sham, a planetary glory hog that owes its notoriety to the poor eyes of Giovanni Schiaparelli, which convinced him there were "channels" on the surface of the planet, and a subsequent mistranslation of the dubious discovery into English, which led the excitable to believe that there were actual canals on Mars, built by intelligent creatures (and what canals they would have been -- to be visible from earth, they'd have to be roughly as wide across as Rhode Island). From then on it's been nothing but little green men, War of the Worlds, and alien conspiracy buffs pointing out that face on Mars' surface. 
    Sure, it's all flashy , but it's not based on anything tangible. There are no canals at all, much less any the width of Rhode Island, and the closest Mars is going to come to little green men are what may or may not be microbes flash-frozen into rocks a couple billion years ago, and even they commuted off Mars as soon as they could -- we found them in Antarctica. As for the mysterious disappearance of all those Mars missions, I mean, come on . Space geeks can't even parallel park.
    Now, gaze, if you will, on the featureless disk that is Uranus (stop that). You probably have not given much thought as to how important Uranus truly is (really. Stop that). But the fact is that the discovery of Uranus ranks as one of the top finds of the