Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien have moved on from making fun of NBC, so now they’re taking jabs at each other.

Jay Leno

Conan O’Brien

If you thought you had no idea what was going on, it seems like they don’t either.

Maybe there was something to that whole Y2K panic after all.

There were warnings our wired world would crash the moment we flipped from 1999 to 2000. “It didn’t happen at the stroke of midnight, as the Y2K alarmists feared,” Alan Murray noted in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. But soon after “the millennium turned, reality set in,” he said.

The market plunged when the Internet bubble burst in early 2000, and this ended up being the worst decade ever for U.S. stocks. In 2001, there was 9/11, followed by two wars, recession, corruption, scandal, natural and man-made disasters, political polarization and the proliferation of reality TV. As Michael Hirschorn portrayed it in “The 00’s Issue” of New York Magazine, this was a decade in which it seemed no one was in charge — when the bottom fell out of just about everything. Or, as the cover of Time magazine described it: The Decade From Hell.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll quantified the general sense of gloom about the ’00s. Nearly 6 in 10 people surveyed said the decade was either “awful” or “not so good.” Only 12 percent rated it “good” or “great.” The rest picked “fair.”

Three-quarters said economic prosperity declined, and two-thirds said America lost ground on moral values during the decade.

A Pew Research poll came up with similar results — and didn’t find a whole lot of nostalgia for recent decades, either.

There were a few bright spots in the NBC/WSJ survey. Nearly half of those polled said we’ve made advances in science and technology. Take the Internet, for example. In 2000, high-speed access was a rarity. Now, it’s the norm. AOL itself went through revolutionary changes. Sphere is the next generation of AOL News, debuting just in time for the end of the decade.

But is this really the end? After a decade marked by discord, people can’t even agree on when it’s over. One camp says it’s the end of this year. The other insists it’s not until Dec. 31, 2010. If that’s true, it could mean another year like the ones we’ve just lived through. (Not to mention another round of wacky “decade lists.”)

Judging from the poll results, most of us can do without one more year of the ’00s.

Check out artical and poll here.

Talk about a bad call! There’s a job opening at a major investment firm in Texas because the last guy was sacked – for playing fantasy football at work.

According to a report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a “relationship manager” at a Fidelity Investments regional office was recently let go from the company because he organized a fantasy football league at work.

Cameron Pettigrew worked at the office for 2 and a half years. He’s a smart guy – he has an MBA and expected to retire working for Fidelity, which is one of the nation’s largest mutual fund companies. When managers found out about the office games, they explained there was a strict rule against gambling at work. A one day suspension turned into a full-on firing for him, and three of his co-workers.

The interesting part is that Pettigrew was careful not to use his work email for anything related to the extra-curricular activities. His managers found out about the league because of fantasy football keywords they intercepted as he chatted with friends through an instant messaging program.

According to a Fidelity spokesperson, the company has clear policies that relate to gambling, and wants its employees to be focused on “customers and clients,” not the first round draft pick.

The firing sends a mixed messages to offices around the nation, where cubicles are filled with folks checking their stats and making trades during the work day. Holiday parties often involve raffles and come Super Bowl time, everyone is picking squares.

Before you bail on your buddies, you might want to read up on US Code 31 Section 5362 to shed some light on the subject, or if that’s too dense for you, Pettigrew sums up the situation pretty well.

“Firing a guy for being in a $20 fantasy league? Let’s be honest; that’s a complete overreaction,” he told the Star-Telegram.

Story by: Ed Orum on aol.com

The popular online social networking site Facebook helped lead to an alleged burglar’s arrest after he stopped check his account on the victim’s computer, but forgot to log out before leaving the home with two diamond rings.

According to court records, Deputy P.D. Ware of the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Department responded on Aug. 28 to the victim’s home after she reported the burglary.

She told police that someone had broken into her home through a bedroom window.

The victim later noticed that the intruder also used her computer to check his Facebook status, and his account was still open when she checked the computer.

The victim later noticed that she was missing two diamond rings from her dresser in the same room as her computer. Source

Just when I thought the world couldn’t get weirder…Meet Gregory, a 10 year old from Illinois who is obsessed with vacuums. Yep, vacuums.

I bet he listens to JACK FM too!

Miss the Air Show this weekend? Or just wanna see some planes do awesome tricks? See photos, video, and more all here!

Hoping to send tourists — and spending — up, up and away, Navy Pier plans to open a new balloon ride as early as this year.

New York-based AeroBalloon will operate the new attraction, a tethered-to-the-ground balloon that, according to the company Web site, would allow tourists to “See Chicago as Never Before — Floating 35 stories above Navy Pier!”

Up to 14 passengers, plus the operator, would go up on any given ride. Passengers would be required to wear a harness attached to the gondola to prevent them from falling out during the 15-minute rides.

The picture above is of the AeroBalloon in the Boston Commons. To read more about the new attraction, including pricing, click here.

Don’t forget to check out the 104.3 JACK FM RCN Connection Crew at Navy Pier EVERY WEDNESDAY for music, prizes, and fireworks!

Michael Jackson may be thrilling audiences in theaters around Halloween.

Sony Pictures, which is finalizing a deal to acquire concert rehearsal footage from the singer’s “This Is It” tour from AEG Entertainment, is eyeing an Oct. 30 release date for the film.

The opening bid for the performance footage started at $50 million, and Sony is said to be ponying up close to $60 million for the 80 hours filmed.

The footage was meant to play in 3-D, but it’s unclear as yet whether the feature film will present it that way.Source

It must be hard to be the least successful member in a family of superstars. Like Kevin Dillion, Robert Wahlberg, and the three other Cusak siblings who are apparently “actors”, Stephen certainly got the short end of the Baldwin stick.

How his classics like One Tough Cop, Dark Storm, and The Flinstones: Viva Rock Vegas aren’t keeping his bank account padded with royalties is beyond me. But it seems Stephen Baldwin has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York with $1.2 million in mortgage payments, $1 million in back taxes, and $70,000 in credit card debt.

Something tells me the Labor Day picnic at the Baldwin household is going to be awkward…