The End Is Near … Relatively Speaking

We've hit on signs of the end times here before, but we haven't stirred the pot in a while, so I thought I'd have a go at it. I've applied a completely scientific method to my reseach and analysis. And by that, I mean that I used a computer, which I'm told runs on science. Here are five signs that the end is nigh:

1. Every guy wants to see a movie about a talking teddy bear, and every girl wants to see a movie about strippers.
On their opening weekend, Seth MacFarlane's Ted, about a man who grows up with a talking stuffed bear, edged out Magic Mike, in which Channing Tatum teaches the art of being a mimbo to a talking stuffed bear. (OK, I'm hazy on the details. I haven't seen it. …Yet.) The ladies have flocked to Mike the way my high school pals became experts on the comedy of Adam Herz. (To the next step, gentlemen.)

2. Ice cream is blowing hydrocarbons out of the planet.
The Houston Chronicle recently reported that ice cream prices are nosing up because a crucial ingredient, guar gum, is shooting en masse into the earth's crust to dislodge oil and natural gas during hydraulic fracturing. Leaving the environmental debate aside entirely, I think it's time we address the hidden cost of fracking – these bumps in ice cream prices are hitting us where it hurts.

3. Colorado is on fire.
There's really nothing funny about this one, but it's happening. Residents across the Southwest are now engaged in a calculus that we know all to well – balancing the costs of storage and evacuation against the cost of moving out of the line of fire.

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4. We may have found God – and he's tiny.
Let me back up the blasphemy express a few stops. A few years back, physicist Leon Lederman nicknamed a then-theoretical particle, the Higgs boson, the "God Particle." (It got the name Higgs from Peter Higgs, a leading proponent of the theory.) Now, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) think they just might have isolated the little bugger. This particle is ostensibly the secret to understanding the formation of matter and, by association, life, the universe and everything. Which sucks for me, since I had my money on "42."

5. This exists.
I can't actually write what it is for fear that you, dear readers, will tear your hair and rend your garments, driven mad with the sheer insanity. The fools. The bloody fools.

All right, fine. It's a burger made of ground bacon. No, it's not war, famine, pestilence or death – unless you consider congestive heart failure – but it paints a new, more slippery picture of Revelation. Surprise! We like bacon too much.

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Dr. Steve Nelson

Dr. Steve Nelson, Chancellor of LSU Health New Orleans, has been a cornerstone of medical leadership in Louisiana since 1984 when he joined the...

So there you have it: My totally science-y prediction that the world will end at precisely, oh, let's say 11:59 p.m. April 14, 2013.

I wonder how many people I can convince …?

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