THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS Read Free

script pitch of a desperate hack screenwriter to a development minion for Roger Corman. Ginghis, pampered son of a clan leader, found his life shattered when his noble father Yesügei was poisoned by the evil Tartars (it was in the Yak's milk!). Abandoned by his clan, Ginghis' family was reduced to eating roots and fish. Ginghis swore, with God as his witness, that he would never be hungry again!
    Later, Ginghis would go to claim the woman to whom he was betrothed by his father as a small boy, only to find that she had been kidnapped and ravished by the nefarious Merkit people!  Enraged, Ginghis allied himself with an old blood brother of his father, gathered an army together, and crushed those nasty Merkits like the fiancée -ravishing worms they were! While he was away, the Jürkins, supposedly his allies, plundered his lands! Those Jürks! He squashed them too, and killed every member of the clan taller than a wagon axel, leaving only children and Dr. Ruth Westheimer alive!
    Thus Ginghis began his conquering ways. It wasn't all murder and pillage, mind you. Ginghis actually had a plan. It had been the old clan system that contributed to his father's death and which kept the Mongol people set against themselves; Ginghis changed all that by scattering the members of conquered clans amongst his troops, and by arranging those troops into divisions that were arranged numerically rather than by clan. Advancement in the army was thus tied to a soldier's loyalty to Ginghis, not to his former clan; soon enough, everyone was sucking up to Ginghis, and of course he liked that just fine.
    By 1206, Ginghis and his highly -regimented not-at-all-a-horde horde was ready to kick some serious non- Mongol booty, and off they went. They were almost all on horseback, which gave them exceptional mobility and range, since all the horses needed to eat was the grass they found on the way to clobbering some poor foes. The Mongols also made use of whatever technology they found; they were extremely happy to use a nation's own knowledge against it. Ginghis himself, despite his current reputation for crazed, baby-eating dictatorship, actually took advice rather well. For example, he had planned to turn the whole of northern China into a horse pasture, until it was pointed out to him that it might be better to raise food there and then profit from the taxes and trade. Only after he made that decision did he eat any babies (no, not really ).
    It was in fact this combination of ruthlessness and adaptability that made the Mongols the invaders to beat -- literally-- this entire millennium. They were smarter, they w ere meaner, and they could ride circles around you on their little horses. Their empire ultimately reached from China to the Russian steppes.
    (And they would have gotten Japan, too, were it not for a fortuitous typhoon that sunk their attacking ships -- the fabled kamikaze , or "divine wind," which would serve as a motivation for Japanese fighter pilots to ram explosives-laden fighter planes into American battleships in WWII. Alas, it was America who ultimately brought death from the skies, but that's another installment, somewhere down the road.)
    The Mongol's problem was that they were better at conquering than they were at actual empire ruling; aft er the death of Ginghis's grand kid Kubla Khan in 1294, it all sort of fell apart. But who cares? When they knocked on the door, and said "Hi! We're the Mongol Horde!" you just knew they weren't selling magazine subscriptions to work their way through college. It was trouble with a capital "T," and that rhymed with "G," and that stood for "Ginghis." That's what it took to be the best invaders of the millennium, and the Mongols had it, with plenty to spare. 

Best Plague of The Millennium.
    It's The Plague, that funny little infection we like to call the Black Death -- bubonic plague. Other plagues have killed more people more quickly (just this century, in 1918, a mutated swine flu erupted out of