That’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it…

It had been a long day at our booth at the Atlanta Convention Centre. If you have ever done the trade show circuit in the U.S., chances are you have been in that room.

from the other side

This trade show, however, was special. There were some random VIPs and celebrities that stopped by to see what we do and say hi. Spike Lee hung around for a while and wanted to see samples of some of the different holographic printing technologies we used. I was trying to act nonchalant about talking to him. Inside, though, I was about as chalant as you could get. I mean, come on. It’s Spike Freaking Lee!

By the way, chalant is not a word. Urbandictionary.com says it is used by illiterate half-wits. I use it.

Spike Lee wasn’t the only famous guy to come over and say hi. Carrot Top was hanging around. “Hi, I’m Scott.” I was stunned. The king of the nerds was jacked and ripped like a pro athlete.

And then Harry came around.

I had no idea who he was. He mentioned he was in a band that was playing one of the parties later that night.

“Oh cool,” I said. “What kind of stuff do you guys play?”

“We play disco,” he said. He paused for a moment. “I’m Harry. Harry Casey. My band is KC and the Sunshine Band.” computer in the world was going to crash at midnight on January 1, 2000? The media had us all convinced that within hours of the turning over of the new millennium, we would be in the middle of a seemingly post-apocalyptic collapse of our society.

Inside, I was chalant all over again.

The trade show wasn’t any old trade show. It was the Super Bowl Fanfest. I was working for a company called Collector’s Edge, an NFL Football trading card company. I alternated weeks between our office in Denver and our head office in Nashville. It was fun at our office, as the Nashvillebased Tennessee Titans were facing the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl.

With the Super Bowl in Atlanta this year, it sparked a lot of memories of that weekand-a-half I spent there 19 years ago. I can’t believe it’s been that long.

And then there were the dot-coms. The term dotcom had the same sexy power that bitcoin did last year, or that anything involving investing in weed does now.

The dot-coms dominated the marketing and the TV commercials. The commercials were humorous and edgy. The previous year, Monster.com had huge success with their ad. In 2000, every dot-com rolled the dice that a Super Bowl ad would be their ticket to success. The cost of an ad jumped to more than $2 million. Cyberian Outpost ran an ad where they shot gerbils out of a cannon. E-Trade had an ad with two guys and a dancing chimp. At the end of the commercial, the screen read, “Well, we just wasted $2 million.”

The trade show ended early on the eve of the Super Bowl. The big party we had been invited to had been cancelled due to weather. However, there was a big party in our hotel’s big ballroom. We walked in, and guess who was pumping out the music? Yes, KC and the Sunshine Band. I weaseled my way to the front. KC saw me and nodded right in the middle of ‘That’s the Way (I Like It).’

The game was one for the ages. Kurt Warner and the Rams beat Steve McNair and the Titans 23-16.

After the game, though, things went surreal. In Buckhead, an area of Atlanta north of the city, there were two men killed at a party. Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis had been arrested for a double murder.

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The first memory is the weather. There were two ice storms that hit Atlanta during that stretch. The roads were sheer ice almost the entire time we were there. We took shuttle buses from the hotel to the convention centre, and we may as well have been on bobsleds. At one point, close to 400,000 people in Atlanta were without power. Traffic was at a standstill.

The game had a lot of hype and excitement. But the game, as great as it was, was almost an insignificant distraction from Super Bowl Week.

The world was a different and changing place in January, 2000. Do you remember that time? How many of you did what we did and invested in Y2K survival kits. Do you remember the panic about how every

The incident grabbed every headline and cast a dark shadow over the game. The charges were eventually dropped against Lewis, but it remains a mystery exactly what his involvement and connection were in the incident.

And now, the Super Bowl is back in Atlanta for the first time since that crazy week. Kurt Warner is a retired Hall of Famer. Steve McNair was shot and killed in Nashville, the city that loved him, in 2009. And Ray Lewis would be the Super Bowl MVP the following year and go on to a storied career as an NFL player.

Most of the dot-coms that advertised in the 2000 “Dot-Com Bowl” went out of business within a couple years of airing their $2 million commercials.

But most importantly, Harry Casey and his band are still going strong.

That’s the way I like it!

The Editor, Last week’s editorial by Brian Griesbrecht [“Time to un-cancel diversity of opinion”] probably stands as one of the most troubling examples of extreme right-wing propaganda ever to grace the pages of the Barrhaven Independent.

Amazingly, Griesbrecht sees himself as some kind of frontline soldier in a battle to promote “diversity of viewpoint” that – in his mind – is a battle not unlike the Civil Rights movement. His concern is that he sees an intoler-