But when you think about it ...

Well, here it is, long past the hour when the end of the world was supposed to have begun and nothing much has happened. This is what always happens, but one assumes someday by chance, bad luck or whatever, someone will have predicted the end of the world and it will come.

I'm not holding my breath.

On the way back from Madison today I passed a restaurant sign that said, "Happy Doomsday!"

So poor Mr. Camping is being set upon by various media outlets who helped create this (non) story in the first place. American news corporations that claim they do not have the personnel to cover the actual situation in Afghanistan or the impact of unemployment on the working families of America and so on were nonetheless able to send thousands of reporters, camerapeople and analysts to London for a royal wedding. Wow! We all know how great those marriages work out, don't we? (One does hope this one does well, of course. Not sure how those two kids are supposed to make it, given all the junk they face, but one can always hope.)

Likewise news programs are able to find experts to point out the many fallacies in the good Mr. Camping's twisted interpretation of what he asserts are revealed Biblical numbers. Yet they seem unable to find any impartial experts to do any kind of helpful analysis of the conflicting stories put out by politicians about the financial realities of our own country, financial numbers that affect just about everyone living here.

Meanwhile Tennessee is protecting its school children from learning anything about homosexuality because, as we all know, if you don't mention things, they are not there. (This explains why states that have abstention-only sex education have the highest teenage pregnancy rates.) Texas has made it illegal to lie about the size of your fish, but then, Texans never lie -- we just tell more truth than there is. (Sure, school superintendents there are resigning in the face of having to lay off 100,000 teachers, but at least they won't be lying about size of the catfish they can now legally catch with their bare hands. They may have to eat those fish, anyway.)

Oh well, as lots of people are saying today, nothing to get in a stew about. It's not the end of the world.

Is it?