Rapture is SUCH a pretty word!

It's worth doing another post on it, isn't it!  Tomorrow's Rapture!  "The end of the world is nigh!" I'm so excited I can hardly wait. 

But here's a thought: It's been a long time since I read my Dante, but doesn't Virgil stand at the gates of hell saying "The end of the world is nigh"?  I wonder if these American preachers know the company they're keeping?

Anyway, all this ridiculous chatter is reminding me of back in 1999, back when I was a humble history teacher, with all my classes getting sillier and sillier and all "we're all gonna die!" by the day ... but, bless 'em, they were just kids so they can be forgiven for being this DAFT!!! 

I put the blame in the right place: The Media! Yeah, it was all down to them with their beat-up Doomsday 2000 Millennium Doomsday Stupidity-Fever!

It was pretty darn stupid, so, back then, when I had access to some pretty amazing books, I found and distributed to my history classes all these wonderful first-hand accounts of Build-Up to the PREVIOUS Millennium Doomsday Stupidity-Fever!  The 1000AD Millennium!  

Do you know about that one?  The Doomsday Cults from 990sAD?  If you want to know true Doomsday Madness, you can't do better than these.  Yup, in the university library there were several wonderful books that had translations of various 10th century monks first-hand accounts of how England and Europe were dissolving into an abyss of insanity out of their belief that "the end of the world was nigh". 

It was good, good stuff, and I selected and photocopied the very best-of-the-worst I could find ...

... good stuff like how self-flagellation was the order of the day and how just about everyone was whipping themselves senseless, and how the makers and sellers of hair-shirts were making a fortune, and how dogs and cats were killed as secret sacrifices to earlier more Pagan gods, and how there were Doomsday Cults of such enormous proportions that just about everyone belonged to one, and how just about every single one of these Cults had a different belief about the best way to get ready for the End of Days ...

  ... but totally my favourite of all these wild and crazy beliefs was the wide-spread belief that, to stop the world ending, you had to lick boils, and not your own either.  These boils had to be, by preference, the boils on the more-normally covered-up areas of beggars. 

Naturally, all my history classes thought it was sublime and wonderful stuff! Nothing like 30 kids doing a simultaneous "EEWWWWWW!" to make history interesting, and there wasn't a single photocopied page they didn't all devour, and, seriously, if I'd done a pop-quiz on the subject, not a single kid would have failed!

And it certainly cured them of Millennium Fever and I was most proud to hear that, if anyone raised the Millennium Fever subject around them, their retort was always "Oh, go lick a beggar's boil!"

So, with the childlike wisdom I learned from my students, that's my response to this Rapture Fever!  You tell me "The end of the world is nigh." and I'll say "Honey, go find yourself a beggar with a serious crop of boils, preferably in their nether regions, and give them a great big fat lick!"