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While we impatiently await the promised appearance of Bette Midler in Part or Act 3 of the saga of Seattle’s brush with the Rock Opera titled Tommy and “his” creator, guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, it occurred to me that I might have some information worth sharing in this season of change, with the Winter of our discontent coming soon after that…

1) This is a Public Service Announcement… There are only 80 shopping days left till Christmas. You get to that number by including all the intervening Saturdays and Sundays… meaning: No rest for the weary of heart or foot, and the wary of wallet.

However, if Thanksgiving Day is disallowed--as a national holiday, and one in a handful of such days which see most shops and stores, banks and businesses truly closed--then the days-left total becomes just 79. Either way, we really must get cracking because…

2) This is the Panicked Disservice Announcement… Civilization as we know it, indeed the world itself, will soon be terminated by the earth-wide cataclysm that Mayan seers and Mat-Hema-Tikal stone-calendar makers seem to have predicted thousands of years ago as coming on the Winter Solstice—i.e., December 21st--in the year 2012. (Hmm… could be a bad moon

a-risin’ ‘round here.)

In which case there are only 76 (or 75) days left until all the Chichens come home to roost and all the bills come too.

But wait! Various scientists and archeologists and Mayan elders have come forward over the past year or so to debunk the End-of-the-Worldsters; seems the latter group’s interpretive

readings of glyphs, graphs, and guffs were just so much serpent-feathers—the end of a cycle, yes, but more on the order of the millennium markers we left along the roadside some years back. Apparently we’re meant just to amble on, resolutely, like a Cormac McCarthy hero.

Maybe; maybe not. Here’s my prediction: we’ll mostly have a holiday season like always, full of tension and receipts, sports bars and family spats, lots of almonds and some joy.

But just in case…

Merry Cataclysmas and Hapocalypse Now.