Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 1/22/06

Year Begins with Mundane Destruction of Prophets
By, Grey Events

As always the end of the year was marked with prophesies of the end of the world. Though hardly in number, force or support of the millennial announcements of doom these ramblings still maintained enough of a following for a number of people to be very disappointed with continued existence.
As has happened before the apparent continuation of life as we know it has left so many red faced believers of various doomsayers are taking out their hurt and humiliation on the supposed messengers.
These theoretically prescient individuals, long proponents of a three strike program of punishment when they err slightly, typically fail twice, once in the prediction of the end and again when they are brutally murdered, having taken no precautions against this event. The latter is especially surprising, hence it is the second error, they really should have seen this sort of thing coming.
While the most colourful prediction was one where grass would turn purple, the sky would yellow and the earth would open up and spew forth scalding purple ooze to eradicate anything not located in the prophet’s own temple.
This poor fellow, upon the failure of any of the technicolour alterations, was grabbed by his former supporters and ironically was dumped into a vat of boiling grape jelly.
Don’t ask where that came from.
Another, admittedly less thrilling prediction was that delivered from the heart of Rome no less. Several Italian scholars pointed to Nostrodamus’ theories and claimed that time was up, the Catholic Church would be useless and that now was the time to spend everything.
That they had just opened their own online and televised shopping company should have been a warning to most, however when the world did not end they quickly found themselves fleeing in their own shoddy products.
It is unfortunate that the Italian’s amphibious car industry will undoubtly be hurt by the sight of felling con artists using a badly constructed vehicle to escape a vengeful mob.
That the combined car and boat started to fly cannot possibly make matters better.
Nor was the Western world the only area plagued with these occurrences. Even sophisticated Singapore residents were taken in by a woman stating that the entire island would fall into the ocean at 1am on New Years Day, a mere hour into 2006.
Coincidentally she knew someone with a reliable boat dealership.
While this woman managed to escape with the ill-gotten funds from a dozen wealthy families the boats at least were reliable, and several will be converted into luxury yachts.
Faring less well was a suicide pact by a group in Vancouver Canada. Convinced by their leader that any souls remaining alive by the New Year would suffer torment at the hands of devils and a resurgent Dixie Chix the two hundred cultists isolated themselves in a warehouse and attempted mass suicide using Pepsi mixed with Coco Cola, preferring that dire fate to what they believed would happen.
Police found more than five hundred people in the warehouse later. Where the extras came from no one knows, but no one died and so this is going into the record books as the single worst mass suicide attempt ever while the cult leader undergoes therapy.