Another end of the world. No really. We mean it this time. Totally going to happen.

Never let it be said that the Reverend Harold Camping, who brought you the Rapturous non-event on Saturday, is anything other than tenacious.  Not to be defeated by a clearly fickle deity who can’t be bothered to meet his own deadlines, Rev. Camping says the Tribulation is still on for October 21st!  Mark your calendars, kids, cuz it’s gonna be a really rough ride, and you might want to wear your asbestos sunglasses and underwear!!!  Popcorn and jumbo-size Big Gulp optional.

Camping says he wasn’t wrong, it was an invisible Judgment Day, which means, I

For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as a hot chick shall ride astride a mighty Triceratops, and verily, the stench of its dung shall be an abomination." 1 Thessalonians 5:3

don’t know, the Elect were invisibly Raptured, which might have been a last-minute decision by the Divine Board or something since everyone was supposed to leave their clothes behind when they went up.  Can you imagine the embarrassment?  You just know that creepy-looking dude who’s always hunched over his cigarette on the street corner would be totally ogling you.  Even if it’s the last day of both your lives, you really want to enjoy your Rapture, you know?  I mean, you get to go to Heaven and live with God and everyone else gets to die in the horrible Tribulation.  Nyah nyah nyah, neener neener neener.

I have an alternative theory.  The Rapture really did happen on Saturday, in the sense that it was totally scheduled to happen, except that God looked around and went, “No @#$%ing way are any of these @#$%s coming to live with Me.”

Now here’s the thing.  I imagine in some parts of the world, namely the U.S. where stupidity is practically the law now, there were folks running around loose for months warning people about the end of the world for the umpteenth time, blissfully oblivious to the straight-on 100% mind-blowingly complete epic fail of all previous prophecies of the End Times.

As useless as a Betamax.

(Assuming, of course, that there wasn’t any such thing as a totally spiritual and clued-in gerbil or something 65 million years ago who was all like, “You guys better get right with evolution because there’s a massive meteor headed this way and it’s going to murder every last one of you, who will soon become a metaphor for anything that’s old and outdated and utterly useless, and us little furry bastards that you’re always laughing at and trying to step on are going to inherit the earth, and then you’ll be really sorry.  Ha ha ha, your dead ass is going to wind up in a museum!”)

Okay, I think those of us who have evolved brains know what Rev. Camping and his

Toronto, totally not being Raptured on Saturday

happy band of Kool-Aid drinkers don’t know: October 21st is going to come and go just like Saturday did, and so, for the record, will December 21st, 2012, which the Mayans just came up with to mess with us.  I mean, Nostradamus was wrong, wasn’t he?  So what we need to do is start fighting back.  We need to engage in Extreme Defensive Witnessing.

When people stop us on the street and try to warn us about the end of the world, we need to speak to them seriously.  Say something like, “How many times are you guys going to embarrass yourselves like this before you realize that God gave you a truly phenomenal brain and He expects you to use it, dammit, so don’t insult Him by wasting your mind on this stupid crap when you should be going forth and doing good works, making the world a better place to be.  Go help a homeless guy out the gutter or help a ghetto kid get through college.”

Or, “You don’t have to be stupid to be a Christian.  St. Augustine warned Christians not to say and do things that brought ridicule upon the new religion.  Take a cue from the Catholic Church, they only just recently admitted Galileo was right after all, and now they’re very careful not to contradict science because they know how stupid they’ve looked in the past.  They will never live down that Galileo thing.”

I’m in favour of religion.  I was raised in a nice, normal, mainstream Lutheran church (two, really – one in Florida and one in Ohio) and even though I’m a Pagan today, I still support Christianity as a religion.  My mother, brother, sister-in-law, and their kids are all nice normal Lutherans, and they’re not required to believe anything stupid.  And you know, I’m not even saying you’re stupid if you believe in a forthcoming Judgment Day – just if you think you can nail the date and time.

A lot of Christians live as though the Rapture or Judgment Day could happen at any moment, so they want their souls to be prepared at all times because you really don’t want to be caught with your sins hanging out when it does, as the Bible does state that no one knows the day and time for it.  The problem is, too many of these Rapture-believing Christians live in an irresponsible manner, refusing to deal with all our human-created problems here on Earth, because of a fairly infantile spirituality which tells them that they don’t have to worry about that stuff, Jesus is coming back Real Soon Now, and Big Daddy In The Sky is going to fix all our problems, just like your earthly daddy fixed your dolly or G.I. Joe when you broke it. 

Since Jesus has famously been a no-show for 2,000 years now, one can assume that if there IS in fact a Judgment Day in our future, it may well be another 2,000 years before he gets around to Rapturing us (or searching, rather a lot like Lot, for ten honest people who are worth saving).

This means no more denial about global warming, no more declaring wars willy-nilly on any country who dares to be brown, no more ignoring the problems of pollution or turning away and whistling in the dark when banksters loot the world’s economy and destroy the lives of millions, while taking trillions into their coffers, including hundreds of billion dollars in government handouts because they’re ‘Too big to fail.’  (WTF?!?!) 

Many of these ‘Bible-believin’ Christians need to GROW THE HELL UP.

A glimpse into the future of the REAL End Times - 5,000,002,011 A.D.

They need to start living like HONEST ADULTS, and not only treat their lives as though Jesus may show up right after lunch, but also that he might not show up until, oh, I don’t know, three weeks before the Sun turns into a giant red dwarf and sucks up our planet like Homer Simpson at a Dunkin’ Donuts.  Which will be in about five billion years, and that, my friends, is a prophecy you can set your watch by.

Our planet is already hell on earth for billions, and may become so for many more of us if we have another global financial meltdown as predicted by many economists, because no one wants to throw the world’s biggest crooks in jail.

People need to step up to the plate, and most of all those so-called ‘Bible-believin’ Christians’ are still living in a spiritual crib where Daddy spanks them when they’re bad but will always be there to change their diaper.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of it!  Slap down the next ‘Christian’ (with your almighty wit and nothing else) you see with a giant cross and a barely-coherent religious tract and push them relentlessly on this.  We need all hands on deck right now!

Due To Lack Of Interest The Rapture Has Been Canceled

At 6PM I was in downtown Toronto just wandering in the general direction of a bar so I could have a few drinkies and get some writing done.  I confess, I totally forgot the world was supposed to end this afternoon.  I mean, I was making jokes about it at 2PM while talking to a friend on my cell phone but then I got involved in sushi-searching and incense-buying and finding summer shorts that didn’t make me look like an aging wannabe teenager, so come 6PM my interest was in, like, plot lines and a Blue Lagoon (the drinks they make at the St. Louis Bar & Grill, not the really plodding tedious ’70s movie).

Then I see some poor slob holding a big wooden cross (thought I had somehow transported back to the States there for a minute!) and suddenly remembered it should be Rapture Time (not to be confused with Miller Time).

And then some dude says to me, “Blahblahblahblahblahblah.”

And I said, “Huh?”  And then remembered I had my iPod headset on.

So I take them off and he says, “Have you thought about where you’re going to spend eternity?”

And I go, “Is this about the end of the world thing?”  I pointed to my watch.

Definitely not downtown Toronto at 6pm on May 21, 2011

“Because right now, the Lord is three minutes late!”

“No no,” says he, “but where will you spend eternity?”

“I’m a Pagan,” I said, “so I expect to be reincarnated.  Which means I’ll probably be right here.”  [I didn't mean Toronto, specifically.  I just meant, like, you know, Planet Earth or whatever.]

His face kinda fell.  You could almost see the thought running through his head.  Oh God, not another one of those.

So he gave me some literature which of course I threw away without reading when I got home.

In retrospect, I’m kinda sorry I didn’t take the opportunity to witness to him.  About how you don’t have to check your brain at the door to be a Christian.  About how this Rapture/End of the world crap just makes Christians look really, really stupid.  About how I was raised as an intelligent Christian and we didn’t have to be afraid of science books.  Or history books either, for that matter, which, if Christians of this sort read enough of them, would realize that there is a long and stupid history of people, particularly of a brainless variety of Christian, predicting the end of the world and failing miserably.

We’re here.  Still.  And so are you.  Get over it.

And stop worrying about 2012.  The Mayans were wrong too.

Oh No, It’s The End Of The World Again.

I’ve been shambling around on this planet for fort—er, I mean twenty-nine years so far and if I had a dime for every time I heard the world was gonna end and Jesus was gonna take up all the faithful, I think I could buy my own ticket on the space shuttle to join them since crashing the party is the only way I’ll ever get into Heaven.  What with being a pro-education Pagan skeptic and all.  Jesus hates thinking if you believe some of the nuttier Fundementedlists.

Growing up in Ohio, I heard a lot of weirdness from certain Christians.  Not the normal sort of Christians I grew up with since birth, you know, nice mainstream Lutherans whose idea of radical was switching from the Red Book to the Green Book sometime in the ’70s.  In college I interned for a couple of summers at a Christian TV station, and only because the local indy station already had an intern.  And boy oh boy did I hear some crazy shit from people both summers, including Rapture weirdness and anti-evolution talk and faith healing and blah blah blah.  (Then there was the episode with the wine in the fridge, and everyone looked to me and Curt, the staff heathen.  Heathen only because we were the only ones who weren’t born-again.  Even we suspected the other had put the offending alcoholic beverage in the fridge.  “I didn’t do it, Curt, I thought you did it!”  “It wasn’t me, Nicole, I thought you did it!”)

Periodically, nutty religious types would warn that The End Is Near.  If you’re old enough to remember the 70s you might recall hippie types (a/k/a “Jesus freaks”) toting around signs that warned the end of the world was coming.  (I, um, read about it.  Yeah.)  Of course, it never happened, unless you count the day Nixon resigned, and no one was upset about that, believe me.  Mostly folks just heaved a sigh of relief.

It happened in 1988 and the end didn’t come.  The nutbar who’s started the latest fuss predicted it in 1994 and he was wrong then too.  Ever read The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey?  (There was also a cheezy movie of the same name.)  Well, it kept predicting the end of the world with all the ‘signs’ pointing to it and he had to revise it every few years or so to keep up with the irritating lack of the end of the world that stubbornly refused to happen.

Man, I’m so glad Canadians aren’t into this shit.  There’s been remarkably little interest and in the alleged Rapture tomorrow here, including a lack of bus signs and billboards warning everyone to get right with Jesus before it’s too late.  Please, we prefer our religious nuts to plan stuff like beheading the Prime Minister.

However, in the event I’m wrong and the Rapture does, in fact, happen at 6pm tomorrow, I encourage you to join me and my fellow sinners for the Post-Rapture Looting spree.  Maybe throw a party to herald the dark days ahead, although maybe they’ll be a little better when you can watch the CNN coverage on your new 80-foot high-def 3-D TV screen.

And chin up, in case you were expecting the Rapture and it didn’t happen.  There’s always December 21, 2012 to look forward to!  (Or not…)

Me, in a rare blast from the future tomorrow night, *not* getting Raptured

DSK: Mais qu’a celà ne tienne en France!

"Mais non, Charlie Sheen, you are not aging as well as I am. And my goddesses are French!"

“But eet’s not a problem in France!”  One can only imagine what hosemonster Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known as DSK in France, said after he was arrested in New York for allegedly assaulting a chambermaid in his hotel.  France’s leading horndog, and this is a country where the sitting President divorced his current wife and married a chanteuse, must have been le shocked et l’appalled to find that it’s not, strictly speaking, acceptable or legal to force your disgusting old-man attentions on a woman half your age who is clearly resisting.  Le WTF? the rest of us might ask, because DSK’s horndoggery goes above and beyond anything pulled thus far by Arnold, Jude, Tiger or Toronto’s own Giam-boner, as the lady in question was hardly willing, and apparently, she wasn’t his first victim, ‘victim’ being defined as, ‘unwilling’.

It’s raised questions once again about sexual harassment, which is defined much

"She ees mine as soon as his back is turned"

more liberally, it seems, in the U.S., where Monsieur pulled the wrong peckerdillo, than in France, where it’s accepted that men will be a bit more, ah, aggressive in their courtship. I mean, they don’t call him le seducteur for nothing…

Now here’s something I didn’t know, courtesy of a column in the Toronto Star earlier this week: Confident, outspoken women in male-dominated environments are more often sexually harassed than quiet, deferential woman in more traditional (read: low-paying) jobs.  All I will say is, hmmmmmm, that sure sheds some light on something in my past.  Yup, colour me uppity.  And no, he didn’t get away with it…that’s the problem when you harass strong, confident women.  They make sure you never do it again and they keep their job in the process.

What it comes down to, the pundits are saying, is that DSK thinks he’s entitled to do anything he wants because he’s rich and powerful.  I think that’s grossly unfair.  A lot of men think they’re entitled to do anything they want even if they’re not rich and powerful.  Crap, who in hell would ever think to schtup a loser like Joey Buttafuoco?

But, it always helps if you have money and power.  Women gravitate to it like flies to you-know-what, and then act all hurt and stuff when they find out that Darling Hubby has been schtupping strippers or impregnating the help or sexting, like, everybody.  And when they put up with this merde, yeah, I’m looking at you, Madame DSK and also Mrs. Clinton, it just sends a message that this is okay behaviour.

See, that’s the price you pay for being with a rich man.  You have to share him with a lot of bimbos, and he in turn will share his STDs with you.

"Oh la la. My life le suques!"

Honestly, ladies, don’t waste your time with rich and powerful men.  Become rich and powerful yourself and marry a himbo who makes less money than you who will have to stay faithful if he wants to be kept in the style to which he’s become accustomed.  And for the love of pete, file charges against any dickhead who forces himself on you!  Don’t listen to your mom when she discourages you from doing otherwise.

Osama is dead, let’s see for ourselves!

He's dead, but so far this is the best photographic evidence we have of it...

For once, my conspiracy theorist friend Alex and I agree on something for a change: Release the death pics of Osama Bin Laden, Mr. President!

Alex, of course, doesn’t think Osama bin Laden died last weekend.  He thinks Terrorist Boy died years ago in Afghanistan, or something.  I’m not sure what evidence he has of this but he still hasn’t produced any actual evidence for 9/11 being an inside job that hasn’t already been refuted perfectly by a Popular Mechanics article several years back, so I’m guessing my buddy’s evidence is as non-existent as, thus far, the genuine Osama Death Pix.

Sorry, Fox News viewers, but the President is still at large

Jon Stewart made a case for releasing the pictures on his show recently.  “We’re back, baby!” he says, but that’s not the reason why I want President Obama (not to be confused with the dead guy, if you’re a Faux News viewer to release them.

(Speaking of Faux News, I regret to inform to those viewers who are still dancing in the streets in celebration that Fox reported the wrong guy as being dead

No, the reason I want the President to release those photos is because, well, I think the world needs to see that Falafel-For-Brains really is kaput.  Blotto.  History.  Pushing up daisies. (Or, more accurately, getting pooped out by sharks.)  It’s not going to convince the conspiracy theorists but seriously, man, we’ve got to stop offering media time to every whack job group with a silly opinion.  That’s what the Tea Party is for.

Even Al Qaeda says he’s dead, and who are we to argue with Al?  Now they’ve got to find a cool new media spokesperson for their movement, and how often do you run across a guy like Osama bin Laden with the looks, brains, and total charisma for being a world-class terrorist?  I mean really, all those terrorists look alike to me.  What a total pain in the ass.  This is totally gonna hose their plans to blow up a train or two this fall.

Plus, eff it, we wanna see those pix.  So what if Mr. Fish Food had a hole the size of Glenn Beck’s mouth in his face when he died?  What, like that’s any worse than anything you see in a Saw or Hostel movie?  Am I really supposed to believe that releasing the photos will, like, radicalize the terrorists and encourage them to bomb us or Amtrak or something?  They’re already radicalized!  They already hate us!  And whatever they were planning before, minus the train-over-the-bridge thing, will go ahead as planned, or not, depending on what intel we get from Osama’s mansion, because, well, that’s why they’re terrorists!  Do neo-Nazis in Germany today fret about the fact that their boy has been dead for 66 years?

Not really the Bin Laden Death Pic. Badly Photoshopped if you look real closely. Or even if you only give it a passing glance.

Americans need to see the death photos of the guy who killed 3,000 of our people on September 11th.

Middle Eastern Muslims need to see who killed countless members of their own apart from September 11th.  Bin Laden’s star had long since fallen in the Middle East, once folks there recognized he was as poisonous to them as he was to us infidels.  (Cool marketing graph of Bin Laden’s declining appeal to Islamic consumers here.)

Normal Muslims who always knew what a loser he was probably want to see his dead ass too, as he was the worst possible advertisement for Islam, for intelligent-minded Muslims anyway, in the history of the world.  Kind of like abortion doctor killers for Christianity and extremist right-wing Israeli Zionists for Judaism.

And if Bin Laden’s fanboys have a problem with the photo release, eff ‘em.

“Baby, we’re back!”