Thousands of "Maya Apocalypse" Books Now Fractionally More Worthless

With the world once again failing to get destroyed in a horrible, fiery apocalypse, tens of thousands of Maya Apocalypse–related books are now even more worthless than they were just scant days ago—something that, given how worthless they were before, is difficult to comprehend.

“Sure, we knew they were shitty before,” stated a dozen different publishing-house representatives who wished to remain anonymous, “but now they’re shitty books that won’t even sell.”

“I can’t believe how badly the Earth screwed us by not being destroyed.”

A small selection of the Maya Apocalypse books that aren’t
worth the bullshit that’s written in them.

These publishers are stumped by the difficulty of selling books about an apocalypse that nobody sensible really believed in to a reading public that wasn’t annihilated by it. “Frankly,” says one, “it’d be a lot easier to sell these books now if everybody were dead.”

“Imagine trying to sell Twilight in a world where people are actually literate. That’s what we’re up against here.”

This book, on the other hand, stood
behind the daring hypothesis that almost
all of us would be alive and well today. Buy it now
while there’s still time!

November 11, 2011: A Mystically Portentous Date, If You Believe In That Sort of Crap

  
Today—November 11, 2011—is the eleventh day of the the eleventh month of a year that ends with “eleven.” Or, to put it in big orange letters,

11/11/11. 

Kinda neat, huh?

For those who don’t pay particularly close attention to this sort of thing, or have little patience for certain brands of semi-mystical baloney, this is a nifty, neat-looking little coincidence, but nothing more. Sure, time itself does in fact exist,¹ and it is concrete and unchangeable, except of course when it’s not.² But our systems of measuring and recording time are just as arbitrary and subjective as most other human inventions, so there’s no reason to view a particularly interesting alignment of dates as being intrinsically more important than any other day. 

To illustrate this point of view, what follows is today’s date³ according to several different calendars, all of them created by meticulous observation of the sun, moon, stars, and seasons, but nevertheless ending up with different and decidedly non-mystical ways of indicating the very same date:

• Chinese calendar: Cycle 78, year 28 (Xin-Mao), month 10 (Ji-Hai), day 16 (Geng-Wu)
• Coptic calendar: 1 Hatur 1728     
• French calendar: 21 Brumaire an 220 de la Révolution
• Hebrew calendar: 14 Heshvan 5772  
• Indian calendar: 20 Kartika 1933   
• Islamic calendar: 14 Dhu al-Hijjah 1432
• Julian calendar: October 29, 2011  
• Maya calendar: 12.19.18.15.4; tzolkin = 1 Ix; haab = 2 Ceh   
• Persian calendar: 20 Aban 1390   
• YOOB calendar: February 2, Year 3⁴

It’s hard to imagine that the ancient Romans, for example, are all excited about today being October 29, 2011. Granted, the ancient Romans are all long dead, and so aren’t very excited about anything, but we argue that another reason for this is that there’s no more mystical significance to a Julian 10/29/2011 than there is to a Gregorian 11/11/11.

If this doesn’t blow your mind,
try reading it backwards.

 
For other folks, though, this rare coincidence of numbers signals an event no less momentous, certain, and undeniable than the apocalypse that didn’t happen on May 12, 2011, or the next one that won’t happen in late December 2012.

The 11:11 Spirit Guardians, for example, offer an e-mail list to which you can sign up “to receive the beautiful uplifting messages from various types of Celestial Beings.”⁵ Their website also offers a section on poetry related to the 11:11 phenomenon. “Forever . . .,” for example, promises the reader that 

During the time it will take for this poem to be completed,
. . . no animals were either killed or injured in the production
by either this writer, or his immediate friends.

We feel obligated to point out that not once did Shakespeare, Poe, Tennyson, or Maya Angelou promise not to use their poetry to kill animals.

The web page for The N Visible explains that “in May 2004, the 6th Gate Activation turned the Doorway of the 11:11 inside out,” and that “11:11 is a pre-encoded trigger placed into our cellular memory banks prior to our descent into matter.” We can’t pretend to know what any of this means, but we do like that the website features photographs of warm and inviting rituals that could be mistaken for a reenactment of the end credits to The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
 

Definitely not serious.

   

Apparently serious.

As much as we like the idea of receiving messages from Celestial Beings, frolicking on well-manicured seaside lawns while waiting to become part of the emerging universal One Being, or refusing to kill animals with the power of the written word, we’re inclined to take a more practical view of today’s date. According to an online author going by the name paradigmsearch,⁶

Even when taking into account the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, nothing significant appears to have happened 900 years ago during the year 1111; nothing significant appears to have happened 1,000 years ago during the year 1011; [and] nothing significant appears to have happened 2,000 years ago during the year 11. 

So November 11, 2011, will probably be just as dull and un-momentous as those other momentous dates. Except that we have iPads, because this is the future.

If today does indeed turn out to be as mundane and uneventful as we expect it to be, we hope that the mystical optimists among us don’t take it too badly. We suspect that, rather than despairing, many of these folks will latch onto something that happens today—whether it’s a flat tire, a long look from an attractive co-worker, or a free fourteenth donut in their baker’s dozen—and fill it with an entire belief system’s worth of significance that it doesn’t really deserve, much like they did with the date itself.

On the other hand, Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, is scheduled to be released today, and if that doesn’t make this a momentous, mystical date, we don’t know what does.

Way, way cooler than a
new spiritual awakening: eyelashes.

NOTES

1. As far as we know. We’re not sure if we’d trust us, though, if we were you. Frankly, we’re idiots.

2. Thanks a lot, Einstein.

3. All dates taken from http://isotropic.org/date, http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar, or both.

4. Year of Our Blog. We started on October 10, 2009.

5. Bulk e-mail having been long ago established as the message medium of choice for celestial beings. 

6. Seriously, how weird is that? What kind of oddball uses a fake name?

 

Food for Thought for Our Optimist Friends

     

 

Just because you can pretend things aren’t as bad as they seem doesn’t mean they’re not actually much, much worse.

 

Doomsday Turns Out to be Way Less Apocalyptic than Expected

May 21, 2011, Harold Camping’s iron-clad-guaranteed beginning of the end of the world, turned out to be far less apocalyptic than initially anticipated, with a jaded handful non-Raptured skeptics attempting to convince themselves that Doomsday had completely passed them by, and even the stoutest believers in Camping’s predictions going to bed slightly worried at the slim chance that they’d somehow missed out on witnessing the deaths and damnation of several billion people.

When reached for comment on the day’s events, every human on Earth observed that they didn’t feel a single damned thing out of the ordinary at 6:00 local time. “You’d think that a worldwide earthquake signaling the end of all creation would have been, you know, noticeable,” said everybody, “But, then, what do we really know about science?”

The answer there is, of course, nothing. Over the past five hours, expert physicists from the Family Radio Institute of Fantastical Science have meticulously concocted scientific evidence that proves that this absence of any sort of evidence is in fact guaranteed evidence that the apocalypse has indeed begun just as predicted, except for all the things that had actually been predicted to happen but clearly didn’t. According to their official statement released just minutes ago,

“When the entire planet is shaking at the same time, it’s physically impossible for anybody on the Earth to notice the movement. Think of the Earth as a giant hula dancer, its entire surface moving, gracefully and somewhat seductively, in all directions at once. You never actually see the hula dancer move, do you? Of course not. The Earth is just like that, except made out of rock and water, very very large, not particularly Hawaiian-looking, and without the flowers and the grass skirt.

“Therefore, to actually witness the tremor that hit the Earth today at precisely 6:00 in twenty-four different time zones—that is, in a single, perfectly simultaneous instant occurring over the course of a twenty-four-hour period—one would have to view the Earth from a distant, stationary viewpoint such as, for example, heaven, or the moon.  Since no living human is in heaven, and the only human to have visited the moon is Jimi Hendrix, the lack of human witnesses to the apocalypse proves that it did, in fact, happen just as predicted.

“So now that that’s settled, please send your remaining assets, in the form of cashier’s check or money order, to the Family Radio Phenomenally Embarrassing Failure Relief Fund. You will receive your reward in heaven on October 21, 2011, when the end of the world has been, for the first time ever, mathematically guaranteed to occur.”

Yep, everything's swell here. Well, except for all the usual death, disease,
poverty, drugs, murder, hate, pain, bad dental hygiene, and reality
television. But still, no apocalypse, so we're good. Thanks for asking.

Today’s Calendar: Bruins vs. Lightning, 11:30 am; Apocalypse, 6:00 pm

The Boston Bruins look to take a commanding 3-to-1 series lead against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Saturday’s NHL Eastern Conference final. Game time is 11:30 Mountain Daylight Time, check your local listings for cable and satellite availability.

In other news, the Apocalypse is set to make its long-awaited debut at precisely 6:00 pm with a global earthquake that will signal the second coming of Jesus Christ, as predicted and guaranteed by Harold Camping of Family Radio in Oakland, California. Camping is confident in his calculations, having used his in-depth knowledge of the Bible and complex mathematical techniques that have proven to be infallibly correct, unless you count that one time when the world didn’t end at all, not even just a little bit, back in 1994 when he said it would. He took his Doomsday Mulligan on that one, however, and we’re fully confident that we should be pretty sure that he definitely might have it right this time around. Totally.

It has to be true. Says so right here on the internet.

Having made our own calculations, however, we strongly suspect that Camping has failed to take into account the necessary adjustment for Daylight Savings Time, which is a modern-day concept not to be found in the Bible and therefore probably overlooked in during his otherwise rigorous number-crunching. 

And that spells deep, deep trouble for Harold Camping, because when the Rapture happens at 5:00 local time instead of the 6:00 he predicted, boy oh boy, will his credibility be shot.

Appetite for Destruction

WARNING: The following half-assed review of the half-assed movie 2012 contains a ton of spoilers, most of which you've probably already guessed. But if you haven't, and you don't want me to ruin the movie, here's a summary: don't go see it.

It’s with some shame that I admit to having recently seen 2012, director Roland Emmerich’s latest enthusiastic effort to destroy civilization. I do take some pride in the fact that I didn’t pay to see it—my boss paid for the tickets as part of our office Christmas party—but at the same time, my ticket was still paid for, and I feel bad about that.

My conscience would have been less troubled if we’d snuck into the theater for free, and managed to ruin the film for a big crowd . . . but what I would have needed to do to actually ruin this particular movie, as it turns out, is a little too disgusting to even contemplate, much less describe.

I’d like to say that I went into the theater unbiased and open-minded, but astute Bowling in the Dark readers would realize this was bullshit. I did my best, though, to keep an open mind—which in this case amounted to telling myself maybe it won’t be as shitty as you expect.

Boy, do I hate being wrong all the time.

Some might say—and, for all I know, may already have said—that Roland Emmerich is simply Austria’s answer to Michael Bay, infatuated with special effects rather than story, car crashes instead of credibility, explosions instead of, uh, something good that starts with “e.”

This is patently untrue. Emmerich is German. But he, like Bay, has shown that he’s dead set on blowing shit up regardless of the consequences to common sense, steadfastly and nobly refusing to let mundane details of science, logic, plot, characterization, or good dialogue get in the way of telling a bad story.

While Emmerich has directed at least a couple of movies that don’t feature the end of a major city, or a continent, or human civilization as we know it, he clearly has what can only be described as a raging, mega-huge boner for the apocalypse. For your reading pleasure, I’ve compiled a partial list, in no particular order, of things and places Roland Emmerich has damaged or destroyed in his movies and, in parentheses, what destroyed them:

• New York City (monument-destroying alien lasers)
  
• White House (ditto)
  
• Less awesomely-explosive parts of Washington D.C. (giant laser-induced fireball)
  
• New York City, again (giant lizard)
  
• Los Angeles (alien lasers)
  
• Area 51 (alien lasers)
  
• Los Angeles, again (tornadoes)
  
• New York City (water, then cold, then ice, then Russian freighters, then wolves)
  
• Al Gore’s credibility¹
  
• Two British helicopters (cold, more cold, and one dumbass opening the door to let in the cold)
  
• Los Angeles, again (earthquake, falling into the Pacific Ocean, insufficient buoyancy)
  
• That guy who played Bilbo Baggins (more cold)
  
• Yellowstone (volcanic explosion)
  
• Las Vegas, Nevada (earthquakes, liquid hot magma)
  
• Paris Casino, Las Vegas (budget constraints—too difficult and expensive to destroy the real Paris)
• Other less-important, non–New York City parts of the Northern Hemisphere
  
• White House, again (crushed by aircraft carrier)
  
• Woody Harrelson (volcanic explosion)
  
• Washington Monument (gravity, earthquake, tsunami—take your pick)
  
• Hawaii (liquid hot magma)
  
• Delhi, India (tsunami)
  
• St. Peter’s Basilica (heavy-handed anti-religious symbolism)
  
• Thousands of Italian Catholics crushed by toppling St. Peter’s Basilica (see above)
  
• Unsportsmanlike-Conduct Jesus statue, Rio de Janeiro (director’s need to destroy something religious in the Southern Hemisphere)
  
• Poor old bell-ringing Himalayan Buddhist monk, some 600 miles and 14,000 to 20,000 vertical feet from the ocean (tsunami, somehow)

The repetition in the above list suggests that human civilization really ought to build new photogenic monuments for moviemakers to destroy, but redundancy isn’t the biggest problem with 2012. And it’s not the convenient falling back onto one of its director’s favorite stock characters, the sniveling weasel politician—although he does that as well. (See below for examples, and see if you can pick out the Mad Scientist character!)


The biggest problem with 2012 is that it’s completely, utterly preposterous. And yes, I expect and even look forward to a tiny bit of preposterousness in my movies. Even a good disaster movie requires our willing suspension of disbelief, but this one asks for two and a half hours of suspension of thought . . . which is about fifteen minutes past my limit. The lowlights include, but are not limited to, the following examples:

• The Earth’s core overheats thanks to neutrinos. In real life, these particles pass through our bodies harmlessly by the tens of trillions every second, but in the movie they're dangerous because they’ve mutated. Mutated neutrinos. And they’ve mutated so that they heat up the core of the Earth, but nothing they pass through on their way to the center of the Earth—like, say, air, land, people, the oceans. 
• John Cusack’s limousine can outrun earthquakes, which may explain why it can make the a thirty-six-hour round trip from L.A. to Yellowstone and back—including a night’s stay—in what appears to be about twenty-four hours. 
• A twin-engine prop plane and a thirty-year-old camper outrun a pyroclastic flow.² At one point, John Cusack's character outruns it on foot. 
• The hellish volcanic firestorm that obliterates Yellowstone National Park, drops ash on Washington D.C. (2,200 miles away), and blots out the sun worldwide, musters only enough of a breeze locally to knock apocalypse nut Woody Harrelson giddily off his feet.³ 
• The entire surface of the Earth (which is, by my math, very large) shifts by thousands of miles in a matter of about twenty hours, conveniently placing the lost, crippled, low-on-fuel Russian cargo plane directly above its desired landing spot, without causing the slightest bit of catastrophic air turbulence. 

If you see this movie in the theater, that dull thumping you will hear is not a sub-woofer, it’s the sound of logic being kicked repeatedly in the crotch for 158 minutes.

All that said, though, I can’t bring myself to simply warn you away from this movie. It scored off the charts on the Unintentional Comedy Scale—I haven’t laughed so hard at a movie since The Hangover—and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy myself. But when you leave a movie about a global apocalypse and the near-end of the human race, is enjoyment really the right thing to be feeling? I don’t think so, which means either I’m a bit sick or 2012 was crap. So go check it out and let me know if I’m a bad person for getting a good belly laugh out of the end of the world. Do me a favor, though—if at all possible, sneak in without paying; you’ll help me sleep better tonight.

NOTES  

1. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth apparently re-used glacier footage from The Day After Tomorrow. The problem is that the glacier footage was wholly computer-generated—i.e. fake, made-up, not real—which strikes me as kind of a no-no in a documentary. And, of course, it should be noted that this particular fake footage was taken from a movie that had nothing to do with weather that could happen in the real world.  

2. A pyroclastic flow (a “fast-moving current of hot gas and rock” occasionally thrown out by erupting volcanoes) can travel at speeds up to 450 miles per hour—faster, even, than an American RV.  

3.The film tries to redeem itself a few moments later by incinerating Harrelson’s character on the spot, but I’m sorry, that’s just too little, too late.

The End of the World is Nigh, if We’re Lucky

Recent events have led me to consider the possibility that the apocalypse may well be upon us after all, despite my previous confident statement to the contrary. The good news (if it can be called that) is that, given the horrific nature of this particular tragedy, it’s likely that at least some folks will actually start looking forward to the end of time.

There’s no good way to sugar-coat this, so I’m just going to come right out with it: Bob Dylan has released a Christmas album.

Quibble if you want with the fact that this “news” is actually more than a month old—the album was released on October 13, 2009—but to do so runs the risk of missing the fundamental point here, which is, at the risk of repeating myself, that Bob Dylan has released a Christmas album.

Now, before I get carried away, I should take time to make a couple of things perfectly clear:

1. I don’t hate Christmas music. I do wish that, even during the heart of the actual Christmas season (not to be confused with the Christmas retail season, which is roughly fifteen months longer), the stores I have to visit would sprinkle in a non-Christmas song every ten or twenty minutes. The universal Department Store Approved Christmas Song playlist is only about six songs long, and for me the repetition gets very old very quickly. And I do get more than a little irritated when I hear Christmas songs in stores well before Thanksgiving, or even before I’ve even finished my Halloween candy.¹

2. I also don’t hate Bob Dylan. I’m not especially familiar with his work beyond the tracks that would end up on a greatest hits album,² and I’m certainly not one of those self-important fans that humps his leg by calling him a prophet, but he’s not bad. In fact, I’m listening to him as I write this, in the hopes that I’ll be inspired by whatever the hell it is he’s trying to say.

Bob Dylan is, without a doubt, an intriguing and insightful lyricist and a gifted songwriter. “Shelter from the Storm” is one of my all-time favorite songs; “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street” seethe with fascinating anger, and “Highway 61 Revisited” has that awesome Sideshow Bob whistle in it. “It Ain’t Me Babe” is great, too, although Johnny Cash did it better.³

I may be wrong here, but my assumption is that people who listen to Christmas music—and, more to the point, buy Christmas music—do so not because they want to hear an original, brand-new Christmas tune (name a good Christmas song that’s come out in the last thirty years) but because they want to hear an old, old, old song reinterpreted and revitalized by a gifted musician.⁴

And the obvious problem with Bob Dylan—and, thus, the main reason that I fear his Christmas in the Heart album is a sign of the apocalypse—is his voice. I’m not quite deluded enough to believe that I’m the first person to notice that his voice tends to suck, but yes, his voice does kind of suck.⁵ But even Dylan’s biggest fans, in their best efforts to put a positive spin on a voice that sounds like a man swallowing a clump of burning hair, can’t do much better than to use words like unique, distinctive, or unorthodox.

Good for these folks for their positive outlook and for having access to a Thesaurus, but let’s be honest, you could also use the words “unique” and “distinctive” to describe the sound of, say, a rhinoceros making love to a tuba, and that wouldn’t make me any more inclined to listen to it.⁶

You know who else has a distinctive and unique vocal delivery and enunciation? This kid here. He can barely stand, can’t remember to sing into his microphone, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t speak any English.⁷

If you’ve been waiting to hear a rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” by a guy with a live, seizure-prone chicken shoved up at least one of his nostrils, now’s your chance. And if it’s narrow-minded for mocking this album without listening to it, I can accept being narrow-minded.⁸ The way I see it, the one thing that makes Dylan’s music truly interesting—his writing—is gone, and if my other option is to listen to him struggle his way through songs I’ve heard (by my count) around 1,600 times each, I’d prefer to hide out in my secret, soundproof underground bunker, crossing my fingers that Emmerich’s 2012 is actually a documentary.

NOTES

1. I’ve been coming home with less and less Halloween candy since I hit my mid-thirties, but the songs seem to start playing earlier and earlier every year, so the change has been minimal.
2. Like, for example, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, which, not coincidentally, is the one Dylan album I have.
3. Johnny Cash had chunks of guys like Bob Dylan in his stool.
4. Which explains why Pat Boone’s In a Metal Mood was so totally, totally awesome.
5. And I’m the first person ever to notice it.
6. “Unorthodox” would apply if it’s the tuba that’s making love to the rhinoceros.
7. Of course, we all know that Paul is dead, but if he wasn't, I'm sure this video would make him feel good.
8. Which is a pretty broad-minded thing for me to say, isn’t it? Clever, huh?

2012: The End is (Not Actually) Near!

Less than two weeks remain before director Roland Emmerich barfs up his latest disaster film, 2012, onto a helpless and undeserving public, and I’m wondering what the reaction will be. I’m not talking about the critical reaction—I doubt it will fare any better than Stargate or The Day After Tomorrow, and probably worse—and I couldn’t care less how it does at the box office.¹

No, what I’m wondering about is the reaction from the crazy batshit bananas segment of the population, and whether that reaction will spread to the somewhat more reasonable but often still-fairly-silly general public.

Granted, nobody who watched Godzilla actually believed that a giant radioactive Pacific lizard was going to emerge from the ocean to lay waste to New York City. (Possibly because attacking, say, Los Angeles or the Bay Area would have made much more sense, geographically speaking, except in that weird movie-and-television world where everything on Earth (1) happens in English and (2) happens in New York City.) And I doubt that anybody who saw Watchmen left the theater worried that Dr. Manhattan had it in for all of us.²

But 2012 might be different.

First, because it pretends to be based on the alleged predictions of an ancient society, in this case, the Maya³. For whatever reason, we as a society seem to latch onto—and give some extra sliver of legitimacy to—stories that come from us from ancient peoples and/or the dimly lit, poorly understood corners of the world (and for most Americans, myself included, the world consists primarily of dimly lit, poorly understood corners). Who curses us ominously when we insult them, or with their dying breaths after we run them over with our cars? Clevelanders? Heck no—gypsies. Does Indiana Jones have to return crystal skulls to, say, Enid, Oklahoma? No, he has to take them to deepest, ancient, mystical South America.⁴ Warren Zevon sang about werewolves in London⁵ but it wasn’t a scary song. But if he’d sung about werewolves of Sczangdzk, the tiny haunted Czech province that I’ve just made up, we’d have gone nuts about it, assumed it was based on some Czech legend that was in turn based on a true story, and would have bought scads of tickets to the movie adaptation.⁶

Second, this movie is not just about ordinary run-of-the-mill everyday stuff like violence, widespread destruction, huge explosions, robots disguised as cars, horrific and logically impossible weather conditions, or Egyptians from outer space. 2012 is about the apocalypse. Now, the apocalypse is not a uniquely American obsession—as Dr. Stantz once observed, every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the world, and I’m sure that (for example) plenty of Europeans got plenty worked up about the end of the world, way back when Europe actually gave a shit about things—but lately our end-of-the-world fascination seems to have a bit more polish than anybody else’s. I’m thinking here of the worries about the Y2K bug, or the fact that LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind series of books sold something like 65 million copies, despite being—based on the book(s) I read one afternoon—crap.⁷ I’d have plenty more examples if I weren’t so terribly lazy, but in short, America seems ripe for a explosion of 2012 mania.

Maybe I’m wrong about this. I’d be happy to learn that I’m not giving the American people enough credit, and 2012 will be easily dismissed as a breezy, lighthearted, fun little movie about the deaths of billions of people, rather than a prediction of it. Maybe this won’t spark the smoldering embers of lunacy you can find everywhere you look on the internet. Maybe, just maybe, we won’t have to endure three years’ worth of listening to everybody from obvious crackpots to supposedly rational people sound off on their fruitcake theories about how it’ll all end.

It’s not really going to matter to me, though; I won’t be able to hear any of it from my secret Armageddon-proof bunker, deep beneath the Earth’s crust. I’ll let you in if you can find it, and you bring Twinkies.

NOTES

1. Grammar note: if I wrote that “I could care less,” like a lot of people would, that would imply that, to some degree, however small, I actually do care. And I don’t. As the Squid Bandit would tell us, words have meanings.
2. Frankly, I left the theater wondering why Visionary Director Zack Snyder spent so much time digitally rendering Dr. Manhattan’s meat weasel, instead of just panning up a few inches (To soothe the good Doctor’s ego, let’s call it seven inches). For Dr. Brainsmart’s insightful review of Watchmen, please click on these words here.
3. Not “Mayans.” Maya. Honest!
4. I think. I’m not willing to watch the movie again to find out for sure.
5. I forget what it was called. Possibly “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.”
6. Directed by Roland Emmerich or, God help us, Michael Bay.
7. I realize it’s possible that the other eighty-seven books in the series may be better than the one or two I read. But I’d be quite surprised. And I’m not knocking the Bible or Christianity here, so rest your sphincters. I think that, in the right hands, a fictional series about a Biblical end of the world could be a fantastic read. But the Left Behind series was not in the right hands.