The world is scheduled to end — again — on Saturday. Mimosa brunch at my house on Sunday!

Christmas came early this year. After weeks of racial tension and hurricane-related stress, we’ve been rewarded with yet another end times prophecy. This one comes tight on the heels of the rapture of 2024 and the Mayan apocalypse of 2024.

This year’s schizophrenic rambling du jour comes from David Meade, a self-described ‘Christian numerologist,’ who claims on his YouTube channel that the world will end this Saturday — which is impossible because Slayer doesn’t have a show this weekend.

According to the Book of Revelation, as interpreted by someone with access to After Effects, a woman clothed in the sun will appear in the sky with a crown of nine stars and give birth to a boy who will rule the world with an iron scepter. And then a many headed dragon will show up — because dragons are awesome, I guess — and try to eat the baby and take the stars out of the sky.

Now Meade doesn’t interpret this literally, because taking things from the Bible literally is just silly. Instead, he thinks this is all fancy talk to describe the arrival of Planet X, a.k.a. Nibiru — the long-awaited 9th, 10th or 15th planet (astronomy isn’t exactly Meade’s strong suit, and — to be honest — neither is counting).

Nibiru/Planet X is well-known to connoisseurs of the crazy, it’s supposedly a rogue planet that will pass close to Earth and destroy all civilization. If that sounds familiar, and it should, that’s because it’s the intro to the 1980-1981 cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian. Yes, this theory was plagiarized from a Conan the Barbarian knockoff that only managed to squeak out 21 episodes.

The Nibiru cataclysm was first proposed by some random Wisconsin woman named Nancy Lieder. In the prehistoric days of 1995, Lieder had this novel thing called a website that she used to tell people that she thought aliens were talking to her. Lieder was also a frequent caller to the paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM where she told anyone who would listen that the aliens told her about Planet X.

In 1997, Leider’s delusions somehow became part of the hype surrounding the Hale-Bopp comet (Note to anyone under the age of 30: there wasn’t a whole lot going on in 1997). As Jon Ronson mentioned in the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, Leider’s claims helped feed into the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult — which was led by a former University of St. Thomas professor.

When Hale-Bopp turned out to be a comet and not a rogue planet, Lieder started saying that Nibiru was going to show up in the year 2024 (Note to anyone under the age of 21: When we all found out that we could really party like it was 1999 in 1999 we went pretty crazy).

When the millennium came and went and Planet X didn’t arrive, Lieder decided that the world was going to end in 2024. And that was pretty much the last anyone heard from Lieder, until Meade’s video grabbed 2 million views on YouTube and showed up in your aunt’s Facebook feed. Now NASA scientists and Evangelical preachers are both saying that Meade has no idea what he’s talking about.

Regardless of whether Meade is right — and he isn’t — a predicted apocalypse calls for an Apocalypse party!