Roger Moroney: Can apocalypse wait until Monday

The end of the world is nigh ... apparently.
The timing is not the best, because, as it has been with other predictions of the apocalypse, it falls on a weekend.
Why can't the great fires and tremors and flocks of pestilence or whatever do their worst on a Wednesday or a Thursday?
At least that way the Lotto winner, or winners, on Saturday night get a few days to go ballistic with their dosh.
But no, some eerie church leader in California (you know the sort ... they can't stop smiling) has decreed that he's done all the sums, he's read between the thousands of lines in his holy book, and he's come up with May 21 ... this Saturday.
Besides wrecking the Lotto winner's one chance of accomplishing avarice and gluttony, this also steps on the footy at McLean Park where the Crusaders (a most fitting Biblical term, one has to concede) take on the Chiefs (surely not the leaders of the tribes of Israel?) in a Super 15 clash.
According to 89-year-old Harold Camping the earth will begin the shake and shudder on Saturday and the first great tremors will be in ... New Zealand.
He is not, however, talking about the first scrum being put down.
He is talking earthquakes. Earthquakes he says will spread throughout the earth causing the ground to quake "universally".
Clearly Mr Camping is hedging his bets a tad here.
As apart from being a church leader he is also a multimillionaire member of a media group which has a network of 66 radio stations across the USA.
So he will have been very aware Christchurch has been hammered by earthquakes, and continues to be rattled by nerve-wracking aftershocks.
Harold has said that after the universal quakes 12 million people will ascend to heaven ... so where did they get the tickets from because I've just been on the phone to Ticket Direct and they know nothing about it?
So anyway, the rest of us will all suffer and burn and everything (just like when we got tipped out of the last Rugby World Cup) until October 21 when "the last trumpet sounds" and she's all over Rover.
Clearly there is some room for error here, though.
Because all the talk of the town in terms of the last great full stop appearing in the story of earth is centred around December 12, 2012.
The Incas, the Aztecs, Nostradamus ... all the heavyweights ... they've all marked their calendars for that time.
Then, of course, one has to take into account the fact dear old Harold once predicted the world would end (unlike M*A*S*H re-runs) back in 1994.
He called that a "misunderstanding" and says he's got it on the head this time.
So, May 21. Saturday.
Out of this terrible thing I have to take some solace.
We all must.
At least it'll remove the dark cloud of the mortgage, and I won't have to keep raking up and bagging up bloody leaves.
And it will save the Hurricanes the embarrassment of posting their worst season ever.
It will also save me a few bob in that I won't need to replace the leaking fuel pump seal in the old Telstar.
As for timing, well, Harold has done the southern hemisphere a huge favour in calling an end to proceedings 12 days out from the first day of winter.
It's been a pretty fair sort of a summer and autumn, despite the terrible rainstorms of late April and the recent high winds, so I thank him for getting his sums right and not stamping things out in December like the party-pooping Incas and Aztecs intend to do.
No, make that "had intended" to do.
Harold has got in first.
He also had the good sense to inflict this event upon us a week after the FA Cup Final, although for the good folk of Stoke, I think the world did actually end last weekend.
Don Brash will be annoyed ... he really figured he was back on a roll for the elections later this year.
And all those who put down a batch of home brew yesterday will of course be filthy at the prospect of not knowing whether or not the lump of licorice they dropped in the barrel will have made any difference or not.
For the record, Harold Camping's prediction (which his slightly fanatical flock are staunchly standing by) makes it about the 50th "end of the world" declaration since 1960.
I guess it's like Lotto ... keep picking a number and the time must surely come.
But oh dear ... that will surely be of little solace for those who get the six numbers right this Saturday.
Footnote: I shall report on the apocalypse in next Tuesday's column.
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.