Tag Archives: apocalypse

165 – Apocalypse When? More Adventures with Tea Krulos

Freelance writer and adventurer Tea Krulos is back this week with Wendy, Allison, and I to give us an update to what he’s been up to over the past year. In the past, Tea has written about Monster Hunters and Real-Life Super Heroes and now we catch up with him as he researches his next book, The End.

Hanging with Tea Krulos at the Riverwest Public House

The End is all about what you think. That’s right, we’re talking the end of the world, from doomsday preppers to climate scientists. Tea’s been having some wild adventures this Summer as he catches us up with his trips to ZombieCon, which is the worldwide meetup of the Zombie Squad, who are not exactly what you think they might be… while they use the symbolism of being ready for a zombie outbreak, they know it’s ridiculous. Sorry Charlie, George Romero-style Walking Dead zombies just ain’t real and aren’t really possible.

But there’s all kinds of emergencies, from hurricanes to floods to a terrorist strike, that could lead to a similar situation as a zombie apocalypse. The power goes out, cell phone service is down, it’s dangerous to be out at night… you don’t need a horde of the undead for that to happen. The Zombie Squad teaches disaster preparedness by using a zombie nightmare as the example, it’s a fun way to handle a serious topic.

Tea Krulos in front of the Luxury Doomsday Condos!

We get the real skinny on Tea’s trip to the Doomsday Luxury Condos in Kansas and hear all about what happens in that giant 14-story abandoned missile silo that might eventually serve as something like Fiddler’s Green from Land Of The Dead, a place where people can enjoy luxury comforts even if the world is burning around them. It sounds amazing and Tea got to take the grand tour.

Tea Krulos at the Wasteland Weekend

Finally, we hear about his trip to Wasteland Weekend which bills itself as the World’s Largest Post-Apocalyptic Festival. And it sounds like a real blast (a Master Blaster!) to hang out with people living their Mad Max fantasies and partying like they’re in the video for “California Love”.

Finally, we get a preview of the Milwaukee Paranormal Conference 2017, which is shaping up to be an amazing weekend full of awesome events, including a performance by Wendy and I at the Jabberwocky’s Ball on Saturday night, haunted history tours in Waukesha and Milwaukee, and recent guest David Parr doing a seance magic show at the haunted Brumder Mansion on midnight Friday the 13th!

Two things not to miss on Sunday’s event…

Our beloved Allison Jornlin is doing a new presentation on Milwaukee Forteana. This time she’s rediscovering the work of some of the area’s greatest paranormal researchers and she’ll be bringing that to life 10am on Sunday.

The Haunted Road Trip panel hosted by yours truly at 1pm, that’s going to be discussing awesome places that you can goto in Wisconsin to do some legend tripping for a day (or night)trip! That’s 1pm on Sunday and it’s in the bar, so we can knock one back.

Tobias from The Singular Fortean Society will be going after the Chicago Mothman at 3pm. There’s tons of new information out there about the sightings and our very own Allison has been hunting that sneaky bastard down all over the Windy City. If you want a quick refresher, just take a listen here!

Click here for more information and we’ll see you a at the convention!

One of the commonalities about all these people preparing for the end of the world, is that they’re expecting something to happen. Apocalypticism has been with us for a long time. The expectation that some huge defining moment is going to happen in our lifetime, from Charles Manson anticipating a black versus white race war to Coast To Coast AM-fueled Y2K fever, it’s a desire that some great thing will happen in our lifetimes where we can prove ourselves, where we can test our mettle. It’s the ultimate rite of passage, can you survive the end of your species?

This Sunspot song is about that feeling, where you’re waiting for a moment to change your life, like when you hear about your grandfather and World War 2 or the Great Depression. It’s wanting to be a part of history that can change the world and therefore it changes your life. Well, sometimes you just gotta do it for yourself, like in this song off our second album, “Don’t Tell Me I Missed The War”.

All my heroes are on MTV,
they’re on a movie screen,
and they like to eat Wheaties.
And I don’t trust the President,
and hate the government,
and I’ve been waiting all my life,
for one defining moment.

Tell me what to do with,
all this aggression I feel,
because self-repression just leads,
to more depression.
And I don’t want to be another,
wheel in human traffic,
I want to prove myself,
but I am just a demographic.

So tell me what to believe,
and I will follow.
Just tell me what to think,
I know you’re always right.
Disillusionment is payback,
for never having to put up a fight.

Don’t tell me I missed the war,
don’t tell me that it’s all over now.
Don’t tell me I missed the war.
And I don’t know how,
I got so jaded.
And I don’t know why,
independence is so overrated.
Don’t tell me I missed the war.

All my heroes have been,
programmed for me,
so they could guarantee
my complacency.
And I still don’t trust the government,
even though it pays my rent.
And I’m still waiting for that,
one defining moment.

So tell me what to believe,
and I will follow.
Just tell me what to think,
I know you’re always right.
Disillusionment is payback,
for never having to put up a fight.

Don’t tell me I missed the war,
don’t tell me that it’s all over now.
Don’t tell me I missed the war.
And I don’t know how,
I got so jaded.
And I don’t know why,
independence is so overrated.
Don’t tell me I missed the war.

58 – End of the World As We Know It: Missed Apocalypses Throughout History

For some reason, humans love to believe that the end of the world is coming soon and with September 28th being the final Blood Moon of the Blood Moon Prophecy and (even CNN is getting in on the apocalyptic clickbait), we thought it would be good to explain what the Blood Moon Prophecy is and tie it to the multitude of missed apocalypses that have been prophesied through history.

Less scary than it is awesome!

During a lunar eclipse, we see the earth’s shadow on the moon. Sunlight gets scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere and it filters the other colors of the spectrum out except for red and we see that on the moon. It’s the same reason that sunsets are red.

Under The Cherry Moon
Prince predicted this before anybody…

A couple of fundamentalist Christian preachers were saying that this latest Blood Moon was going to be a big deal because there was a series of four lunar eclipses (tetrads) that cause the scattering of light to create the “Blood Moon” and that they matched up with the Jewish Holidays (Passover of 2014 to the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles on the 28th.) 

John Hagee
John Hagee… Preacher…
…or secret Sontaran invader!

Mark Biltz is a pastor in Washington State and John Hagee is in San Antonio, Texas. Biltz originally proclaimed on his website in 2008 that the fall of 2015 would be the “Second Coming of Jesus”. A few years later, Hagee seized on that and a passage from the Biblical Book of Revelation where “the sun becomes black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon like blood” and turned it into an apocalyptic book called Four Blood Moons. That book eventually made it to the New York Times’ Bestseller List and there’s been a “documentary” film made about it. Biltz then released his own book in April of 2014 to get in on some of the bestseller list action and his publisher is suing Hagee to recognize Biltz with the discovery of the Blood Moon phenomena.

Biltz has deleted the “Second Coming” language from his website now, but Hagee has continued with saying that the series of Blood Moons during the Jewish Holidays is God showing that he is displeased with America’s nuclear deal with Iran and mad that we have turned our backs on Israel. While he doesn’t specifically say that the world is going to end, he does say that something major is going to happen involving Israel and it probably has to do with Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon (and blaming the Obama administration for the Iran Nuclear Deal that will lead to the development of the weapon.)

Don’t forget about me! I’m Mark Biltz and I’m crazy too!

Online news sources love apocalypse headlines so there’s been plenty of links to these “blood moon prophecies”, Biltz has been featured on Coast to Coast AM (which doesn’t have a crazy-filter, but to be fair, either do we), and the desire to sell books as well as the controversy between who “discovered” the Blood Moon tetrads is helping to fuel the flames. Mark Biltz and John Hagee are getting headlines which gets more views for their churches and eventually more dollars in their coffers.

The apocalyptic rumors on the Internet were gaining so much momentum that even NASA felt like they had to say something about itThat’s ridiculous in its own right, that the US space agency had to quell rumors of a coming asteroid strike just because a couple of preachers were trying to sell books and get attention, but that’s the world we live in.

Of course, before this one, there was the entire 2012 end of the Mayan Calendar thing, which was even predicted in The X-Files as the date of the coming alien invasion (I wonder how they’re going to explain that in the new series!)

Mayan Calendar 2012
That Mayan Calendar looks so sweet though, how could it be wrong?

Before that, the big End of the World prediction was in 2011 when Harold Camping, a preacher from California, predicted the end in May of 2011. When that didn’t happen he revised the dates to October, but when it comes to the end of the world, the media only gives you so much leeway and people stopped caring shortly thereafter.

Harold Camping
The end of the world is coming and I’m totally stoned…

Over a decade ago, it was Y2K that was scaring the crap out of everybody. The idea that because of the first two numbers in the year field were going to change and the computers weren’t ready for it, that the power grid would go down, nuclear facilities would melt down, the banking system would go kablooey, etc… Even our man, Leonard Nimoy, hosted a video about the upcoming disaster.

A few small systems in various countries went down for a very short time but the worst thing that happened was that the bug caused a UK hospital to calculate some patients’ ages wrong and that resulted in giving the wrong test results to pregnant mothers for indications of Down’s Syndrome in their babies, which well, that was pretty horrific.

The first episode of Family Guy is even all about the Y2K fallout, and it’s pretty hilarious.

But that’s just the apocalypses that didn’t happen that we can remember, in fact, they’ve occurred throughout history from the Jehovah’s Witnesses predicting it would happen in 1914 to the Norse myth of Ragnarok. We’ve always thought the world was going to end in our lifetimes, in fact the earliest Christians thought that Jesus was coming back sooner rather than later (and in the podcast, we talk about this Mad TV sketch that was my favorite thing they ever did…)

We are a hysterical species that for some reason is always caring on like it’s the end of the world (just check out this list of dates for an example of the hundreds of missed apocalypses.) We love apocalyptic thinking, maybe because we’re hoping for some kind of world renewal, maybe because we just want to be alive when it all comes down, maybe it’s because we hate the idea of the world going on without us after we die so it’s a sour grapes kind of thing. So I think we’re going to be just fine, but if the world ends next week, well, I guess I owe everybody a beer.

The featured song this week is “2012” by Sunspot.

The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the whimper,
that sounds the end.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the death rattle,
of the condemned.

I spent my life high on the notion,
that I could do something great.
But I bravely ran away,
and gave myself a Section Eight.
Daydreaming my life away,
and bored with everything,
Slouching towards Bethlehem,
and tied to apron strings.

This is the end,
of the bloodline,
that had a purpose,
that had a spine.
A generation,
on the bread line,
runs out of purpose,
runs out of time.

We’re picking up the pieces,
of the Baby Boom chaos,
who navel-gazed in a purple haze,
and became the new Boss.
We Ragnaroked and Rolled,
and passed the buck and pissed the time,
the revolution was webcast,
the execution was half-assed.

This is the end,
of the bloodline,
that had a purpose,
that had a spine.
A generation,
on the bread line,
runs out of purpose,
runs out of time.

The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the whimper,
that sounds the end.
The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the death rattle,
of the condemned.

This is the end,
of the bloodline,
that had a purpose,
that had a spine.
A generation,
on the bread line,
runs out of purpose,
runs out of time.

This is the end,
of our time,
We ran out of rope and The Cosmic Joke,
has hit its punchline.

The fault lies not within our stars,
This is the whimper,
that sounds the end.