Following up on all the thoughts about Revelation and the obsession with the “end times,” we can all rest easy. Waiting in the grocery line, I saw that the tabloid The Sun has the scoop we’ve been waiting for. “New Dead Sea Scrolls Shocker! 7 SIGNS END TIMES BEGIN IN 2007!”

Oh, thank heaven. The suspense was killing me. So I thought as a service, I’d save everyone else the $2.99 and just tell you what to look for:

1. February - N. KOREA LAUNCHES NUKE ATTACK. “North Korea will launch a nuke at the U.S.” Really? North Korea’s last test was pretty puny. Don’t we pretty much think if they launched a nuke at us it would come down about eight blocks away? Anyway, Kim Jong Il will declare himself the Antichrist, and I think everyone will consider that a bit of a disappointment.
2. April - 900,000 U.S. TROOPS DRAFTED. Bush is going to say that John the Baptist told him to reinstitute the draft and enlist 900,000 troops to “combat the armies of Satan.” Top-ranking Democrats will have a hard time keeping a straight face because they’ll know it was only Charlie Rangel in his John the Baptist rubber face mask. Okay, so that last part was mine.
3. May - DEADLY TSUNAMI KILLS 400,000 IN U.S. - A tsunami will hit the west coast. A prominent evangelist will say she had a vision that it was caused by God’s wrath. Prominent evangelist - she? C’mon, now we’re getting far-fetched — all the top evangelicals are dudes, right? And anyway, why is all the bad stuff just happening to America? If we got nuked in February, isn’t it time for another country to get some end times? How about Greenland for a change?
4. July - IRAN INVADES ISRAEL. Ahmadinejab will invade, take over the Dome of the Rock and tell everyone he’s linked up with Antichrist Il (”A.I.” to friends) so they can ash-can Judaism and Christianity. And the 900,000 troops we drafted will be doing what all this time, making daisy chains? And the prominent girl-evangelist, she couldn’t give everyone a heads-up about this?
5. August - COMPUTER SCIENTIST CRACKS 666. (Okay, s-p, you’re going to feel sooo silly that you missed this.) A computer scientist from MIT will figure out the 666 riddle — turns out that it’s a binary thing. It was no good us turning down phone numbers and license plates with 666 on them; the number we really should have been looking for was 1010011010. Hey, wait! That’s my license plate number! Yaaaaaa! [Phantom of the Opera organ chords]
6. September - NASA FINDS KILLER ASTEROID. Astronomers will find an asteroid the size of Manhattan that will land in Chicago on the 29th and cause “a tragic death toll.” Well, no duh. But what are they using for brains over at NASA? They couldn’t give us a little more warning? Good grief, something that big, most people were probably pointing to it and saying, “Hey, rocket scientists, what’s up with the enormous thing hurtling at us from space?”
7. October - JESUS RETURNS IN A BLAZE OF GLORY. “The fiery Jesus” will appear over the Holy Land and declare that He’s come to redeem humankind (what - again?) and cast sinners into hell. Oh fine. So here’s the first good news in the whole list and it can’t happen in America? We’re the ones who’ve lost a coast and been hit in the Chicago with an asteroid. I just think that’s kind of unfair.

So … that about wraps it up, then. Nuke’s coming in February. I hope it gets here before Lent starts so I can pack BLT’s when we’re fleeing all the wrath to come. I better write a letter to The Sun and see if they can get the Dead Sea Scrolls to get a bit more specific. This stuff’s important!