SO IT'S CHOCKS away, seat belts fastened, lavatories unplugged and wheels up for the New Millennium. To get things going, I'm dumping New Year's resolutions down time's own garbage disposal in favor of a new tradition of Ye Three Wishes, which by year's end could see a start toward peace on earth, music you can hum and me in an electric chair.

The whole idea of making promises to yourself once a year to give up any one of an extensive range of venal sins is about as practical as bicycles for cats and as useful as mammary glands on a boar hog. The only one I ever managed to keep was never to envy an Eskimo's diet or a billionaire's tax bill.

New Year's resolutions are, by their very nature, manifestations of negativism - just the sort of thing you could expect of a millennium that gave us Adolf Hitler, chastity belts, cellphones and chewing gum that loses its flavor after five minutes. The entire concept should be boiled down and turned into glue for yo-yos.

Which is precisely why I propose that the end-of-year ashes and sackcloth business that constitutes New Year's resolutions be trashed and replaced by something more cheerful and upbeat, not to mention a lot less wearing on the conscience as the agony of sobriety awakens body and soul to grim reality.

That's where my freshly minted tradition of Ye Three Wishes comes in. What the New Millennium needs and deserves is a soupcon of the positive - and what could be more positive that the alluring prospect of dreaming up three of your favorite items of greed and turning them into gin-fueled holiday wish machines?

After all, good things do come in threes - witness the three most famous presents of gold, frankincense and myrrh (and what the devil is myrrh anyway?), plus the Three Musketeers, triple scoops of Grandma's banana pudding and Tinker to Evers to Chance, not to mention triple points for "quizzical" on a Scrabble board.

(Well, yes, awful things can also come in threes, like lobster bisque that is three weeks old, bidding three no-trumps at bridge when your highest card is the 8 of clubs, and Newt Gingrich with two clones.)

To get Ye Three Wishes launched into the Y2K firmament, I open with peace on earth. Actually, I really don't anticipate global peace anytime soon, at least not before 4:45 p.m. on June 27, 2001. But nations can take major steps toward that goal, starting with making their armies provide their men with victuals that don't taste like they came out of the "How to Marinate an Aged Marmoset" guide to cookery.

It has long been my conviction, based on personal experiences in Vietnam, Iraq and other joyous locales, that the wretched grub ladled out to the captive audience that are the troops renders them miserable and moody and apt to do awkward things, like make cold cuts out of their fellow man three trenches away on the other side.

The sole useful purpose for the ham and lima beans that the US military doled out in the guise of food would have been as missiles which - still inside the cans - could be lobbed in the general direction of any stray Viet Cong. I suggest that if the troops had been fed, say, T-bone steaks, tempers would have remained unfrayed and there would have been no reason to get into a pistol- or rifle- or bazooka-packing snit.

(The same could probably be said for the VC. Surely a day-after-day diet of rice flavored with more rice, followed by rice pudding for dessert could have done nothing to ease the homicidal tendencies that they felt toward the round-eye heathens on the other side of the rice paddy, doubtless munching away happily on their ham and limas.)

My second wish is rather in the nature of self-defense. What the world lacks, I am convinced, is music with proper notes in recognized keys, accompanied by words that bear a nodding acquaintance with the English language - and an overall tune that one can, well, hum, something I last recall hearing with "Supercalifrajalisticexpialidocious" as Mary Poppins soared away beneath her umbrella across the skies of London.

Alas, the New Millennium has not seen a sudden disintegration of Celine Dion's dread-awful "Titanic" theme ditty into masses of smoldering CDs, nor ditto for the Turner woman's screeching about loving some poor and obviously quite deaf soul for always and ever. As the world's collective ears grow more tinny under this caterwauling and the relentless pounding of drums, the problem is ... CAN YOU HEAR ME??? ... is probably going to do nothing but get worse.

But there is hope for my third wish. For years now, I have longed to own my own electric chair. It is a desire, I should add, that is not shared by my wife Elizabeth, who has strong doubts that it would fit into the Scottish motif of the dining room, and there is concern lest our cats take to snoozing on what she views as a sort of open-plan electric oven.

This dream was triggered on a journey several decades ago, when I stopped for a break at a rural grocery store deep in the rolling hills on the Alabama side of its border with Tennessee. There, situated majestically among the Heinz baked beans and Campbell's tomato soup and the sardines and RC Colas, was as handsome an electric chair as you'd ever hope to see.

Determined to have this item as my own (and unmindful of where I would put the thing in a T-Bird convertible with trunk space big enough for a briefcase and a paperback novel), I opened what I hoped was bargaining with the storekeeper, at 50 bucks.

"Nope," he replied laconically. A hundred? "Nope," came the response through a wizened, white beard. How about $200? I offered, desperation blinding me to the truth, that my balance at the Cocoa Beach State Bank stood at $13.94. "Nope - ain't innerested, ain't gonna be," the old gent insisted in a tone that made it final - no sale.

So that was it. I drove away unhappily toward my parents' home in Knoxville, never knowing how that electric chair came to be dumped in the middle of a two-bit grocery, nor ever finding out what became of it. My dreams of owning a hot squat seemed to be doomed forever (you don't find that many stores stocking them these days).

Until now. I've discovered a supplier, a cyberspace market called the Stupid Gift Shop, that is offering full-sized electric chairs, in which "you and your friends can actually strap yourself into Old Sparky." It's made from Canadian alder wood, it comes with wrist, ankle and chest straps and lots of wires, and something I'll bet the working model down at Huntsville, Texas, doesn't have - a padded vinyl seat and stereo headphones.

Now all I need is $1,095 to pay for it, a cooperative postman to haul it up three flights of stairs, and an understanding wife. Perhaps I should rethink those three wishes...

Thought for the Week: The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

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