As the satanically auspicious date of 6/6/06 came and went last week, New Yorkers could be forgiven for suspecting the end of the world might well be nigh. Hospitals reported that mothers were rescheduling Cesareans so that children would not be burdened with numerologically unsound birthdays. The American edition of the Times of London, the new tabloid from media dark lord Rupert Murdoch, premiered on the same day as the remake of The Omen (also a Murdoch production) to somewhat better reviews. Yankees manager Joe Torre, faced with an injured list reading “Jeter, Matsui, Sheffield, Rivera, and Giambi,” likely considered penciling War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death into the lineup against the Red Sox. Downloaders wondered if they were damned to hell when they discovered that an advance copy of Paris Hilton’s debut single, “Stars Are Blind,” leaked on the Internet was actually kind of catchy. (The Book of Revelation prophesied this, noting that “the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.”) Ann Coulter accused Jersey’s 9/11 widows of the deadly sin of self-promotion, then went on the Today show in a slinky black dress to flog her new book, Godless. Leszek Kuczera, a 59-year old homeless scavenger, who’d been burning insulation off electrical wires to get the copper inside, was arrested for starting the Apocalypse that burned fifteen warehouses in Greenpoint last month. While New York’s politicians attacked Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff like a seven-headed beast and argued over whether Nebraska or Wyoming was less likely to be hit by terrorism, Canadian Mounties uncovered a plot to blow up that country’s Parliament and chop off the prime minister’s head. Somalia’s capital fell to Islamic fundamentalists with ties to Al Qaeda, tilting the globe one inch closer to a possible Armageddon. The nation’s born-again leader, President Bush, responded to this new international crisis by redoubling his efforts to ban gay marriage. And an instantly slim Janet Jackson appeared at the CFDA awards looking fabulous in a revealing—well, by most people’s standards, anyway—red gown, inviting speculation that she’d cut a deal with the devil.

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Mark Adams
• Table of Contents: June 19, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!