Oh Maya God!!!!

And to think I was embarrassed when, upon finding out marshmallows contain gelatin, which apparently comes from pigs, I thought maybe folks could tap dance around the whole kosher problem. It never occurred to me that rocky road ice cream could be sinful in such a literal sense.

"Well it's not as if they have to kill the pig for that," I suggested, grasping at straws. All those years at a predominantly Jewish summer camp, evenings spent spearing fluffy white marshmallows with long twigs and blackening them to a crisp in the fire, could those camp fires have been no less barbaric than your average pig roast?

"Well they don't give it up voluntarily," my friend pointed out, hoping against hope that I had been joking and that I couldn't possibly be that stupid. After all, as they say, you are who you hang out with. Or if they don't say that, they should. Anyway, I tried to save face, suggesting that maybe the gelatin came out of something like pig udders, but needless to say, this particular friend no longer hangs on my every word.

But I digress, to the extent that you can digress before you even set out on a particular path. This is a post about people who seem to know stuff saying stuff that just makes no sense. Like the weather reporters yesterday -- or, as they like to call themselves, meteorologists, giving themselves an imprimatur of expertise -- who went on and on and on about the approaching storm that was about to create blizzard conditions in the Chicago area. Plans were cancelled. People rushed to the store to stock up on comfort food so they could hurry home and ride out the storm in front of a cozy fireplace. We all spent hours gazing outside our windows, certain every once in a while that a lukewarm raindrop had finally morphed into an icy and menacing snowflake. Armies of "snow fighters" spent the day waiting for the call, their massive plows gassed up and stocked with rock salt.

As it turns out, we got little if any snow, and "blizzard conditions" may have been a bit of an exaggeration. Unless they were trying to tell us it was a great night to go out to the local Dairy Queen, which, as far as I am concerned, is hardly newsworthy, since I can't really think of a night that wouldn't be a perfect night to go out to the Dairy Queen. Although I will have to rethink my order and avoid anything with marshmallows.

I understand that even the smartest experts can sometimes get things wrong, and I am pretty forgiving about it, particularly if they own up to their errors. So when I watched one local television meteorologist yesterday evening (who must have felt pretty stupid when he looked out the window and saw nothing white) taking the time to explain why it looked like there would not be a blizzard after all, I softened and I just felt thankful that I would be able to get my car out of the garage in the morning even though I had forgotten to send a deposit to the guys who plow my driveway. Thank goodness for weather people who can't get it right.

Later, though, as I listened to the rather spooky sounding howling of the wind all night, I thought maybe the whole blizzard thing was a ruse, a clever way to make us all forget the real disaster that was about to unfold, which was the end of the world. I had officially stopped worrying about that yesterday morning when a friend pointed out that it was already December 21st in New Zealand, and nothing had happened. Talk about a theory with holes in it, although I should have known better than to be taken in by my friend's reasoning; he doesn't call himself an ologist of any kind. Worse still, he's Canadian! The Mayans never even knew New Zealand existed, so why would they base their calculations on New Zealand time? Frankly, why would anyone base calculations on New Zealand time?

In real time, December 21, 2012 has arrived. No blizzard, but the jury is still out on the apocalypse. Will I ever believe a weather reporter again? Maybe when pigs fly. Or maybe when they give up some gelatin voluntarily. But if there's even a slight chance that the Mayans didn't just run out of paper and were trying to tell us something, I'm heading to the Dairy Queen for a gelatinous blizzard. The conditions are perfect.