I think that’s the correct order of things to come. And me with a frothy $368 left in my checking account. I’m not sure exactly how much credibility I should attach to this latest revelation about the world being slated to end on May 21 of this year, but the confluence of that announcement with birds and fish seemingly throwing in the towel in Arkansas and Brett Favre insisting with genuine conviction this time that he’s going to retire has got me a little alarmed.

I put the order of events – birds, fish, Favre and planet – thusly because we all know you’ve got to give Brett a little time to recover from his wounds at the end of another grueling NFL season before we start taking him seriously about hanging it up.

Still, out of a nicely honed sense of nostalgia, I’ve run a picture of him in a uniform from earlier in his career. Coincidentally, it’s also the team with whom he gained his greatest fame, as opposed to his curious but certainly entertaining final three campaigns with the New York Jets and Minnesota Vikings.

I’ve interviewed Favre a couple of times, and he’s certainly a likable enough down-to-earth kind of fella, arguably the kind of guy that you would like to have a beer with. As a criterion for selecting professional sports stars in whom to invest your rooting interests, that seems like a useful enough tool, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it when picking candidates to be President of the United States. But I digress.

Assuming that Favre actually does retire – it seems like a much better bet this time than in previous attempts, but I’ve said that before, too – then we’re left trying to make sense out of those birds dropping dead in mid-flight over that town in Arkansas. And then the fish keeling over, assuming that you can keel over while swimming.

All those nasty secular humanists in the various fish and game agencies insist there’s no connection between the two eerie events, but, of course, that’s what they would say.

And then the very next day I read about these ostensibly religious folks saying that not only is the end near, it’s so near that they’ve nailed down an exact date. And here I’d geared myself up for the December 2012 deadline from the Mayan Calendar, only to have some outfit come along and unceremoniously lop a full 19 months off my time remaining on Mother Earth. If I sound a bit annoyed, then so be it.

The only consolation I have is that the Chinese, what with their legendary aversion to the Internet and having their own markedly different calendar, just might miss the significance of this quartet of biblical signs.

We do owe them old boys a tidy sum of money, and as it stands now, they are going to left holding a mighty empty bag on May 22. I doubt that their PayPal account could handle a last-minute transfer of $900 billion or so.