I've been hearing nonsense about how the planets are going to align on May 5, 2000 and the resulting gravity pull wreaking all sorts of havoc on the earth. To repeat, it's nonsense. Even if all the planets lined up on the opposite side of the sun -- or the same side, for that matter -- the resulting gravitational attraction would still be negligible. Of course they won't be in exactly a straight line, just close to it. Even if they were, as viewed from above, they still wouldn't be exactly in a line because all the planets don't orbit in the same plane. Pretty close to it, yes, but not exactly.
As some of the links below point out, we've had other planetary alignments in the past with no horrible effects, so why should this one be any different? Ah, but the purely human convention of our dating system puts this one in the year 2000. Surely it has to be special....
These images were produced with Redshift 3.
This last image was created with Skymap Pro, and shows the positions of the planets as viewed from earth. The hollow circle near the center is the sun, and the moon is the hollow circle in the upper left. As you can see, the moon will be just past a new moon. The star cluster near the top center is the Pleiades.
Thanks to Tony Matthews <tonym@glinx.com>, another participant on the Skeptic list, for these links. They have much more information than this page. (So why did I bother? Well, why not? <grin>)