World Ends Today
Good morning, folks, and welcome to the end of the world.
As you have undoubtedly heard, a Millennialist self-styled prophet has predicted that humanity will be wiped out today by a massive nuclear war. Only the prophet's own merry band of polygamous followers will be preserved on their compound just outside Abilene, Texas.
For some reason, this particular prediction of imminent apocalypse has captured a good deal of public imagination. In the past few days, this blog has received a tremendous number of hits from people searching the variants of the phrase "world ends on Thursday" on Google. These people are not exclusively Americans, either. A small but significant proportion of the hits have been coming from Korea, Australia and Western Europe. I don't know what the motivation behind the searches is; there may be people sitting back and laughing at the prophecy as well as those who are genuinely concerned that today is the day that the feces meet the fan.
What are you doing to mark the end of the world today? As for me, I'll be in the lab dissecting and sequencing beetles. I have two DVDs coming from Netflix today — Superbad and Raiders of the Damned. The Netflix plot synopsis of the latter of these is:
In the wake of a cataclysmic global war that saw widespread use of biochemical weaponry, flesh-eating zombies are overrunning the planet -- and a helicopter transporting scientists who are working on an anti-zombie serum is humankind's only hope for survival. When the chopper crashes and strands the researchers in the midst of Zombieland, the onus is on a special-ops squad (led by Richard Grieco) to bring them back alive.That sounds like appropriate viewing for the apocalypse. Provided that the world is here by the time I get home from the lab tonight, I'll be watching Raiders of the Damned.
