Word: doomsday
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...budget sci-fi flick, but thousands of Californians now actually believe that these horrible events will soon happen. For months, astrologers, fundamentalist preachers, telepathists, clairvoyants and assorted mystics have been predicting the imminent demise of California by a giant earthquake; many of them are convinced that doomsday will occur some time this month...
Where Can We Go? Last week doomsday talk reached fever pitch. Disk jockeys were spinning a hit calypso tune called Day After Day, which asks: "Where can we go when there's no San Francisco?" A book called The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, which gives a jolt-by-jolt preview of the disaster, was a bestseller...
Naturally, the vast majority of Californians are treating the doomsday talk as a huge, macabre joke, but the fears of the gloomy visionaries are not entirely without justification. Seismologists say that California has been long overdue for a major earthquake, although a fissure that would split the state in two along the length of the 600-mile San Andreas fault is in their opinion inconceivable. Nor, they add, can anyone predict the time, place or magnitude of the quake with absolute certitude. In fact, one of the quake dates predicted by soothsayers, April 4, passed last week without a tremor...
...time has come. Writing slightly bad-tasting novels (Myra Breckinridge) and bland-tasting plays (Visit to a Small Planet) is just the start for Vidal. He keeps busy as an opinion maker, staging shoot-outs with William Buckley on TV and churning out some of the liveliest doomsday journalism ever, mostly in today's essay form, the book review...
Throughout history, prophets of doomsday have compiled a notoriously bad record. Now two scientists, influenced more by precise data than by intuition, have picked a date when life on earth may be seriously threatened if not doomed. By A.D. 3991, they say, the earth's magnetic field may have substantially disappeared. The result, some scientists think, could be catastrophic mutation of plant and animal life and widespread climatic changes...