INSULT TO INJURY: HERE COMES 1999: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

Back in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and the onset of my pimple-filled adolescence -- when the youth of the nation at large and my own hormones within raged against what we perceived to be an all-too-restrictive world -- I paused briefly enough from my protest to buy a cheap paperback from the corner Rexall drugstore in my hometown.

The book -- written by a self-proclaimed oracle and seer who went by the sobriquet "the Amazing Criswell" -- detailed Criswell's predictions for the last 30 years of the century. Among his many prophecies was the revelation that during this next year, 1999, the world as we know it will come to an end.

What he actually said was that a huge black rainbow -- a magnetic disturbance of some sort -- will appear in the skies on Aug. 19, 1999, and suck the oxygen off the face of the earth. This magnetic disturbance and the corresponding loss of oxygen will, he proclaimed, somehow divert our planet from its orbit and send it plunging rapidly into the sun whereupon everyone on the globe, presumably already dead because of the lack of oxygen, will burn to a crisp.

Sheesh! As if we don't have enough problems.

For those of you who got calendars for Christmas and have nothing better to do with your time than to itemize your comings and goings for the upcoming year, skip on ahead to Aug. 19 and mark the day "Apocalypse Now." For the rest of you, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Mind you, I don't pretend to understand much, if anything, about astrophysics and the celestial effect of black rainbows -- whatever they are -- on the earth's atmosphere. Still, I'm not overly concerned about Criswell's prediction of impending doom and gloom, or of my immediate chances of becoming cosmic kindling. So, if it's all the same to you, I'll just keep my galactic escape pod squirreled safely away at its undisclosed location for use some moment in the far distant future.

Why am I not too worried?

Well, first and foremost, good ol' Criswell is best known not as a prophet of any real substance, but as the narrator of arguably the worst film ever made -- Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space." He also appeared as a featured performer in other such Hollywood blockbusters as "Night of the Ghouls" and "Orgy of the Dead." Sagacity and prescience, at least in terms of his own film career, were not, it seems, his strong points.

In fact, his overall batting average as a prophet and seer is, shall we shall, less than stellar. He was, after all, the same man who predicted that the Great Lakes would dry up by 1977; that flesh-mad, blood-crazed cannibals would wander the streets of Pittsburgh in 1980 looking for victims to munch; that female baldness, caused by "gaseous fumes polluting the city's air," would plague St. Louis in early 1983; that London would be destroyed by a meteor in 1988; and that Des Moines, Iowa would become the homosexual capital of the world.

Des Moines!

In terms of sheer prognosticative ability, the Amazing Criswell was, well, hardly amazing.

Yet, Criswell certainly isn't alone in looking at the end of the century as the threshold to the apocalypse. And as the next 12 months creep in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time -- or till the year 2000, whichever comes first -- we're likely to hear more and more predictions that the end of the world is nigh.

It's not surprising, I suppose, these predictions of the apocalypse, these eschatological yearnings.

It seems that whenever we humans find our personal worlds awash in tumult and confusion, or when we become dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and yearn for renewal, then we begin to proclaim that the old world is passing away and a new heaven and a new earth are about to be born.

So here we are again, on the brink of yet another new year, yearning for renewal and poised as always to make resolutions for a new and better life -- to lose weight, to exercise more, to eat right, to spend more time with our families, to save more money. Here we are again, longing for our old world to pass away that a new world might begin.

I kept that book for many years, dog-earing the pages and rereading the predictions. Why? I suppose that even then, in a world gone mad, I longed for some sense of permanence and predictability and hoped that the book would be able to provide what the world couldn't.

It didn't. Amazing.

Jeffrey Jackson is a writer for the Southeast Missourian.