After yesterday’s thoughts, I guess it doesn’t surprise me that there are communities of people on the web rooting for the end of the world. If there are online communities for people who wish they could have sex with mermaids, wish really, really hard, then a Seventh Seal Openers chat room almost goes without saying. This is what happens to a society when too many people spend all day in cubicles; the prospect of all the world’s landmarks being blown up by the whore of Babylon sounds like a welcome alternative to another team-building exercise.

I am suddenly reminded of a televangelist whose show used to be shown in syndication late Sunday nights on channel 11. He and his wife used to do a “news” show that looked like a fifteen-year-old tape of a local newscast, except every story was followed by a Biblical citation that proved the story was a portent of the end times. “Viacom announced today that the WB and UPN are merging to form a single global network. As it says in Revelations 6:14…” I watched this show as often as I could, and my favorite thing about it was that it had been on for years and years and years. How long can you do a continuing broadcast about how the end of the world is right around the corner before you lose your credibility a little bit?

I, for one, know the end of the world is nigh because I am about to finish my Netflix queue. That frosty breeze you feel is coming from hell. There are more movies I want to rent, but a few months ago I decided to put myself on a Netflix diet. I realized that there were certain things that kept getting moved to the bottom of my list every time they threatened to show up in my mailbox, and that as long as I was adding new stuff they would always be down there. I needed to either shut up and watch them or admit that I just didn’t like Apocalypse Now (see above) and delete it from the queue.

Yes. I even procrastinate on fun. Our people are aware of the problem. What can I say? I hate lists. Every item on a list looks like a bar on my cage to me; even when friends try to plan a night out with me more than three or four days in advance, there is always at least a split second when I think, “Great, now I’m obligated to do that. Suffocation!” The Netflix queue took a bunch of things I was interested in and turned them into Stuff I Have to Finish faster than you can say “anxiety disorder.”

But finish them I have! And now it’s Netflix’s turn to freak out. There is only one thing left in my queue that isn’t a “Long Wait,” and apparently when that happens Netflix starts to behave like that end-of-the-world site. The pop-up is polite but stern. (As polite as anything called a “pop-up” can be, anyway.)