There's been a great deal of misguided information spread about Jan.1, 2000, being the start of the new millennium.¹  From what I know, there was no year "0," so the counting started at one, right? From one to 100, that's the first 100 years, right? From one to 1,000, that's the first 1,000 years. From 1 to 2,000, that's the first 2,000 years. So, we have to get all the way through the year 2000 before the next millennium begins. Do you follow me? We don't start counting dates at zero, from what I can tell, like we do people's ages.

There's also the thought we've already started the new millennium because many years ago, someone messed up the calendar, so we're off track.

Let's just call this Saturday the pre-millennium.

Either way, I've succumbed to the millennium craze and thought I'd write about changes in lifestyles during the past 100 years.

I've been pondering what topics envelop lifestyles. There's food (what we eat, how fast we eat), fads, types of housing, home decorations, clothing, family, fitness and health, technology, people's rights and probably many other topics. I'll touch on some of them.

When I was a child I'd order a fish sandwich and an orange drink there. That's what I liked. The drink was small. The ordering and selection were simple.

That's back when fast food was less complicated, maybe because there was less fast-food competition. Now, there's value meals in three sizes -- medium through super size -- and a large variety of sandwiches to choose from -- Big Extra, Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Big Mac, a sampling of chicken sandwiches, McNuggets and sometimes that bratwurst sandwich and McRib, to name a few.

Please, don't think for a second I don't like McDonald's. In fact, I love the place. I think their french fries are the best in the world, and when I order my quarter pounder with cheese without the bun (wheat allergy), they happily make it that way for me.

I'm just saying things are more complicated in the fast-food arena than they used to be. Another fast-food restaurant has added to the array by not just offering kids meals, but bigger kids meals.²

My point is, the fast-food business is the microcosm of what much of society has become -- we want things fast, we want it now and in a large, complicated selection. Television has allowed us to see what's happening on the other side of the world, but it's also allowed advertisers to bombard us with more information, thus making the competition stiffer.

We expect things to be faster. It almost seems that with all this media technology (television and computers), society has created a bunch of impatient people. There are times when drivers pull out in front of me on the road, causing me to slow down, when they could have waited a few SECONDS for me to pass when there were no other cars behind me.³  I have never done that. (Sarcasm.)

Of course, there are positive and negative sides to everything. A positive of technology is getting our food fast and relatively inexpensively. Technology has allowed us to communicate all over the globe through phones and computers, has saved lives and made lives easier. The computer world even has sprouted its own vocabulary. The terms Internet, e-mail, download, megabyte and hard drive weren't around 100 years ago.⁴

Foods and fads can go hand in hand. Throughout this century, there are fad foods or certain foods we can associate with certain decades. Some foods reflected the times, like the simpler foods of the 1930s during the Depression or the fancier foods in the 1960s that mirrored the Kennedy administration.

Fads just didn't encompass foods. Here is a list of some of the fads during the last century:

• Flappers, the Jitterbug and baseball started to become popular in the 1920s.

 
• "The Grapes of Wrath" and songs about the Depression in the 1930s.

 
• Big band music and zoot suits in the 1940s.

 
• Poodle skirts, rolled-up jeans, tame rock 'n' roll, beatniks, conformity, bomb shelters, Barbie dolls and big chrome cars in the 1950s.

 
• Playboy philosophy, jet set, hippy clothes, communes, flower children, the British invasion, "Valley of the Dolls," free love and going against authority in the 1960s.

 
• Lava lamps, bachelor beads, disco, leisure suits, green and orange home decor, yellow smiley faces, afro hair, Soul Train, The Partridge Family, eight-track tapes, Pet Rocks, "Star Wars," Farrah Fawcett hairdos and disaster films in the 1970s.

 
• Madonna clothes, big hair and big hair bands, New Wave, punk rock, rap, Smurfs, Vanilla Ice, Izod clothes, red power ties, pink shirts for men, hard rock, Valley girls, New Wave music, M-TV, the Princess Di haircut and looking out for No. 1 philosophy in the 1980s.

 
• Home computers, Hollywood country music, gangsta rap, extreme sports, soccer and soccer moms, talk radio, complicated video games, Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, the Simpsons, "X-Files," big hair music without the big hair, Tae-Bo, the waif look, "Blair Witch," computer-generated special effects movies, cigars and "Titanic" in the 1990s.

From what I recall, women used to wear corsets early on. Now we wear blue jeans and comfortable shoes. The 1940s dress reflected glamour, and the dress of the 1950s seemed to be conservative and relaxed. The 1960s saw the emergence of women burning bras and hippie clothes while the 1970s really came up with its own style. Madonna, Hall and Oates, and John Travolta influenced the dress in the 1970s disco era. Until recently, I've been ashamed I ever wore '70s clothes. I even made a dress out of light blue quiana.

Well, happy new year and happy millennium (a year from now). Let's just hope the future doesn't send us any more leisure suits.