So you replace it with ramming Sports Utility Vehicles through Sports Bar picture windows and crying out, "can't we all just be sports about this?" when the owner tries to break your ass with a crowbar.

But that fades too and, one day, in casual conversation with the rest of the world population, you compare notes and realize there's nothing worth the expenditure of one more fucking joule of anti-entropy matter.

I.e., the tyranny of possibly missing something is finally over.

And that's when, despite our internal lifelong reservations, everybody suddenly unanimously agrees that the only thing the world could possibly have left to offer us now, at this late stage, is its own fucking END -- the end that's received so much affectionate buzz in story and song for so many generations that isn't it about time we got to meet her?

So, OK, let's have the end of the world. Clearly, by definition, it'll be the Greatest Show on Earth -- and just in time, too, cause we really cannot take one more day of the Lesser Shows on Earth, let alone the Least Show on Earth, which is pretty much all we get in our Show places these days.

But so how is the world gonna end now in such a way as to provide the best show for the largest number of people (preferably everybody), and at the lowest possible price?

Our supercomputers tackled this problem while we went off to argue over the glowing platitudes we'd utter to describe whatever they (the supercomputers) came up with.

But when we got back, our supercomputers had decided that the end of the world could not be designed by man or even by his fucking machines (how's that for nonpartisan selfless egolessness) and that the details of the end of the world should be left entirely in the hands of the world itself, especially given how long (all its fucking life -- billions of years supposedly) and assiduously the world had been preparing for just this moment.

Man's role in this, according to the supercomputing machinery, is simply to tell the world, "OK, we're ready for you to end now," and, if need be, to cajole it or goad it into ending, if it initially balks at the idea of doing so at our behest.

And, as a last resort, there's apparently a switch in physical reality that tells the world to simply power everything down for good and call it a history -- no questions asked.

And this switch, we've learned, is embodied in the signal to noise ratio of the planet.

Currently this ratio is greater than one, as it has always been since the world began. But when noise increases and/or signal decreases to the point where the ratio becomes LESS THAN one and stays there uninterrupted for a day -- then the switch is flipped...

...and the world, in its infinite wisdom, starts the countdown to the beginning of the series of simultaneous global events which -- regardless of who looks up to see, when they look, where they look, or how -- will be far beyond the ability of any early 3rd millennium human or machine cognition to predict, describe or comprehend.

And, apparently, relative to this Johnny-come-lately eschatological scenario, we are now no more than just a few radio talk show hosts, political commentators, superstring theorists, and partygoers away.

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