STORY:
Tune On, Tune In and Light Up

California professor offers his own Planet Party

The following is being issued by Robert L. Black, Ph.D., CPA, and business professor at California State University San Marcos:

Are you as tired as I am of hearing what everyone else is doing to celebrate the coming New Year's Eve? You know, the millennium junkets on cruise ships, safaris in Africa, soaking up the sun on the French Riviera, or just a quick trip to Las Vegas -- all of which require you to spend thousands of dollars. And if you're really lucky, you'll get to party with celebrities! Even if we wanted to party-hearty by joining one of these extravaganzas (and could afford to) it's rapidly becoming too late to book anything worthwhile.

Well, if you're planning to stay home or attend a traditional New Year's party with friends to "Ring in the New Year (Millennium)," here's a low-cost suggestion that might easily better most other millennium celebrations.

This year-for this once-in-a-lifetime historic occasion-why not ring in the new millennium with a PLANET PARTY?

What's a planet party? For more than 30 years, I've wondered what it would be like if at the same time we all played the same songs from the same radio stations - and then opened our windows to share the music with our neighbors while also turning on every luminous device at hand. In other words, we could network what might otherwise be mediocre millennium parties into a coordinated millennial event.

To produce such a collective event, I suggest we follow this simple prescription: On New Year's Eve turn on your stereo, tune in to your favorite station, and light up everything in sight. Of course, "tune in" might simply mean log on to one of the multiple-band Web sites with literally hundreds of stations based nationally and internationally.

What would this accomplish? Besides the obvious creation of a lot of synchronized music instead of only amplifying what collectively would just be random noise during the new millennium celebration, we could for the first time send some more coherent signals around the planet and into the cosmos. By adding light to the sound-for example the cumulative effect of house lights, candles, searchlights, lasers, etc.-we would complete the experience, at least in the audio and visual sense.

The possibility of coordinating your local stations' efforts across cities and time zones would most likely produce a "battle of the bands"- or at least a "battle of radio stations"-for millennium-eve listeners. Also, the mega-stations with mega-money and mega-markets to conquer would presumably add a "light up" component to their music offerings.

Please join me by organizing in your town and neighborhood what can be a once-in-a-lifetime millennium celebration. To facilitate this, the non-commercial Web site at www.planetparty2000.com has been established with a listserv, chat room, and relevant millennium links. Only with your efforts can we establish significant participation in networking this event across our country-and potentially the entire globe.

Quite frankly, I hope my inspiration has its own legs and needs no more than this germ of an idea. As far as I'm concerned, it's up to all of you to do the rest. I'll see you in the new millennium-hopefully, at the Planet Party 2000 created by us. Robert L. Black, Ph.D., CPA, is a business professor at California State University San Marcos. Please add your questions, comments and ideas about this planet party idea by visiting www.planetparty2000.com. Personal correspondence to Dr. Black may be sent to [email protected].

DATE: 10/22/99

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