Friday again already, and a little Christmas cheer is due, I think.

Aside:  I don’t much care for the generic “Happy Holidays,” although the holiday season does include New Year’s Eve and Day along with Christmas.  While I am no more Christian than I am the King of Iceland, the holiday is called Christmas; it is a national holiday and a national tradition, and I see no reason not to call it what it is.

A Denver-area radio talk maven I enjoy listening to points out that there are two Christmases; the religious Christmas, and the (secular) Santa Christmas.  At the Casa de Animal we celebrate the latter.  Many other Americans celebrate the former, and that’s fine.  Each cat its own mouse, and all that.

A long day beckons, with a half-day consulting work and a plane ride home to Colorado, so let’s move on to the news.  And leading today’s news:  The end of the world!  Excerpt:

Thousands of students will have an extra long holiday break after school administrators in at least three Michigan counties decided to cancel classes because of talk surrounding the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and rumors connected to the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world.

Five districts in Lapeer County and 20 districts in Genesee County posted announcements Wednesday evening cancelling classes Thursday and Friday.

Thursday afternoon, Monroe Public Schools announced they were cancelling school for Friday.

Also:  How might the world end, presumably later today (since it evidently hasn’t happened yet?)  Again, an excerpt:

Dark comets, famine, super-volcanoes, catastrophic climate change, and a plague of cancers are just some of the ends that could fulfill the prophecy.

Astrophysicist Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars, believes the most likely disaster that could pencil Doomsday into Friday’s diary is a black comet.

Such an end would match that of the dinosaurs who after walking the planet for about 165 million years – homo sapiens has been around for a mere 200,000 years – were killed off by a 10km asteroid or comet that slammed into the planet.

Professor Bell Burnell believes if the world as we know it is to end on December 21 it would have to be a dark comet that strikes.

Dark comets have little of the ice and snow that most comets have, and a lot more dust which makes it much more difficult to spot them as they speed through Space.

‘Comets normally are big, dusty snowballs. A dark comet has not much snow and a lot of dust. They are much harder to get a handle on,’ she said.

And, finally, a sane reaction to the apocalypse:  Mayan Apocalypse Believers Search for Sex Before The World Ends.

Mayans aside, various kooks have been predicting the end of the world for some time now, and somehow the earth just keeps on ticking on over.   Doomsday prophets have always been wrong (so far) and the hand-wringers agitating over the Mayan calendar are wrong as well.  Here at Animal Magnetism we will be posting Saturday Gingermageddon as usual, tomorrow, the day after the world was supposed to end.

Prophecy would appear to be a tough business at first glance.  One would expect that the followers of said prophets would expect them to, I don’t know, actually be right once in a while; but failure to accurately predict trivia like the end of the world never seems to deter some folks.

As President Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time.

And you can fool 51% of the people enough to get elected to Congress.  Or the White House.