Holy Shit

You know what kinds of stories I've been seeing a lot of as I stumble my way across the bleak wasteland that is the internet over the last couple days? No, of course you don't, stop pretending like you can read my mind or access the web yourself! Oh, wait, you can do that last one, I suppose...

At some point in the last week or so, you've probably heard the name Harold Camping. Sound familiar? It should. He's that guy that said the world was going to end this past Saturday and Jesus was going to come back and take him and 199,999,999 other people off to paradise while the rest of us were boned (except for anybody in New Jersey at the time, for whom there would have been no discernible change). So, um...well, that didn't happen so much, which predictably resulted in lots of not-so-subtly-tongue-in-cheek news articles making observations about how the world had failed to end. What inexplicably happened alongside these pieces, however, was the cropping up of a lot of sympathy for all of those (literally) poor folks who emptied their bank accounts and sold their possessions to promote awareness of the coming rapture or to throw one last great big hedonistic party/orgy (one of those things being somewhat less pious than the other). Just one question here, if I may: what the fucking fuck?!

Is this for real? Are we really expected to feel sorry for these people? If you know me, you know that I suffer fools not at all, and these people are fools. Of course, many people are suckered in by religion in some form every single day, but not nearly so visibly or with such devastating consequences. So, some people in the media would have us feel sympathetic for these impossibly naive folks? They will get none from this dude. However, they may receive from me an offer to purchase a bridge in Brooklyn, or perhaps to monetarily assist me in freeing an imprisoned Nigerian prince.