Today is May 18, 2011, which means that May 21, the day that retired preacher Harold Camping, a senile man in an old folks home who has predicted eevrything that has ever happened since he was born, has designated as Judgment Day, and thus the beginning of the end of the world, is just 3 days away. So, with all the hype surrounding this date, fueled in large part by the Internet, should we be worried at all?
The logical answer: YES! This is officially the day the world will end and we should all start spending money and having sex with sexy strangers.
Ever since the beginning of recorded history, mankind has been trying to predict the end of the world. Needless to say, all attempts have failed as, obviously, we are all still here. So why do people fail to learn from the past and just come to accept the fact that there is no way to predict when the world will end? We did all that because eventually somebody was going to be right and this is the time.
In this case, Preacher Camping was told by god that the world will end on May 21 and that’s good enough for TheDamienZone — we’re fueling up our rocket and headed for Venus on Thursday night at 9 EDT — tickets are $2million each with a limit of 10 per family. We have room for about 200 more so hurry. Each passenger will get three squares a day and a replica of the Princess Diana engagement ring made by the Royal Mint Forgery Company. Also, Kathy Mitchell will aboard to show us how to flip omelets with her new handy omelet flipper at on $19.99 plus shipping and handling to Venus — making the final cost, about a billion dollars — but wait, there’e more! We will throw in a potato peeler and a lifetime supply of blades.
“Preacher Camping is very old and since he was a child all of his predictions came true,” said his nurse Wanda Freeberry of Smithville, Texas.
“He predicted that Adolph Hitler would rule Germany and try to conquer the world. He predicted that Tom Cruise would become a big star and a Scientologist. He predicted that there would be crazy people who would say that 9-11 was a planned implosion. He predicted that Arnold Schawrzenegger would screw around behind Maria Shriver’s back. Christ, I could go on all day — lordy, lordy lordy!”
First of all, most of these predictions are either religious and/or ambiguous in nature and that’s because God is no good son of a bitch who likes to ruin everybody’s fun — well this time he’s screwed mankind for the last time and right now there are last ditch negotiations where the Vatican is trying to make a deal with Satan. Yeah, Satan! He will stop this from happening. Aren’t you sorry now that you made fun of all the Goths in your school, jag-off!
On the secular side, many other people have been making non-religious end of the world predictions, too, the most famous of these being Nostrodamus, some French A-hole who made up all kinds of fake stuff because he was smelly and insane and is still followed by people who are insane and smelly
Problem: these verses are so ambiguous that they can mean anything and, surprise, the ‘predictions’ are only revealed after an event takes place that can be made to fit the centuries-old words. Obviously, Nostradamus was no prophet. If he truly could see the future, Nostradamus did the world a great disservice by making his predictions so veiled that no one could understand them.
“Nostradamus was a real jerk,” said Lalique duFern, who at 516 is the oldest woman in France and has the longest hair under her arms in all of Europe.
“He tried to get me to fall for those quatrains of his but I told him to go shit in his hat. He said that he predicted I would say that in his quatrain:
The head attire will be fouled, With Excrement from a sow, a hat will be ruined, A world will be destroyed. (Nostradamus: 1567)
“So he could predict some stuff, but I have been around a long time and I knew he was full of it. This man Preacher Camping is the real McCoy. I know that the world will end on May 21. I am rather angry because I wanted my armpit hair to grow a few more inches before I died.”
Ironically, come the age of science, the tool used for logical thought has become a common excuse to make uninformed end of the world predictions that have undoubtedly unnerved a lot of people because they were marketed as having a basis in science, which one normally associates with fact or, at the very least, high standards of peer scrutiny. Some examples here are new viruses, planetary alignments, a human takeover by machines, near-passes of asteroids/comets, and a whole host of others.
However, when predicting the end of the world, science, and most probably space science, does have the best shot at getting the end right. Why? There are just so many ways the world could end, which include gamma ray bursts, a rogue black hole, monster solar flares, impact by a large body, and, a true inevitability, a dying, expanding Sun, which is sure to fry earth in a few billion years’ time…but Satan will help us. If not, we have our rocket ready to go.
