THE WORLD WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE COME TO AN end recently.  In case you haven't noticed, it didn't.

Some sort of religious author had predicted something called "The Rapture" was going to take place, and all believers were going to be whisked off to heaven, while the poor souls who didn't believe were to be left to face seven years of fires, famine, and daily reruns of The Newlywed Game.

I'm not certain what went wrong with the prediction, but there must be a lot of angry people out there who believed the end was coming.  There were reports of believers getting rid of their homes and earthly belongings.  I even heard of one guy who sold all his Kroger stock.

The next day, fueled by reports of a new Kroger reorganization to fend off a takeover bid, Kroger stock jumped through the ceiling.

"The next time somebody tells me the world is going to end," the unlucky fellow said, "I'm going to wait until it actually happens before I call my broker."

Sound financial advice, indeed.

As for me, I was a little skeptical of the whole thing from the beginning.  Somebody is always predicting the world is going to come to an end, but so far it hasn't happened.

There was a man in my hometown, Luther Gilroy, who claimed he was out plowing his field and saw a sign in the sky that said THE END IS NEAR.

Luther let his mule and his cow out of their pens, gave all his chickens away, and climbed on top of his house to await the end.

When it didn't come, he pouted and refused to come down off the roof.

Finally, his wife called the deputy sheriff, who came over and said, "Luther, you idiot, I saw that same sign.  It didn't say, 'The end is near.'  It said, 'Go drink a beer.'  Now come down off that roof before you fall off and break your neck."

I didn't do anything differently on "Doomsday."  I went ahead and had breakfast and lunch, tuning in Cable News Network only occasionally to see if it made any sense to make dinner plans.

I even went out and played eighteen holes of golf, and I won a few bucks from my opponent.

He waited for seven o'clock - the precise time the end was supposed to have come to pass - and then wrote me a check.