Dark days in Crystal City, Texas: Less than a week after Mayor Ricardo Lopez was arrested by his own police department at a city council meeting, residents are reporting that black water is running out of their taps. Not dark or murky water—black water.

The weather doesn’t care how you feel about it. So the question of how you ought to feel about the weather—specifically, about the wave of warmth that covered the eastern United States this past weekend, and that promises to linger through Christmas—is a human question. What does a warm December signify?

The Boy Scouts of America, a paramilitary children’s organization inspired in part by the exploits of the young Mafeking Cadet Corps during the Second Boer War, has forbidden its present-day members to shoot squirt guns at one another. A blog post for adult Scout leaders on the Scouting Magazine website reports that under the rules in the 2015 Boy Scouts of America National Shooting Sports Manual, “Water guns and rubber band guns must only be used to shoot at targets, and eye protection must be worn.”

Three days after Ross Douthat denounced the "corrupt" brand-driven corporatist ideology poisoning higher education, Thomas Friedman writes that the elite "Davos Man" must "[m]ove over" and bow to the masses who are mobilizing all over the world. Revolution now! On the center-right of the Times op-ed page!

If you missed last night's meteor in California, or last winter's exploding asteroid in Russia, you'll probably have another chance soon: Scientists now believe large asteroids, like the one in Russia, could strike Earth far more often than previously studies had indicated.

Labor advocates are promoting a shocking (edited) recording of a phone call between a longtime McDonald's worker and the company's 1-866 McResource Line, in which an operator advises the worker to bolster her $8.25-an-hour wages by signing up for food stamps and Medicaid. Good for McDonald's! Why should they keep pretending that our economy isn't completely ruined?

It has been a busy week for the Machine-Human Alliance. Sorry! The Human-Machine Alliance. Humans will always take precedence. First there was the deployment of South Korea's autonomous jellyfish-killing aquatic robot swarm. Now, in a completely unrelated development, the engineers at Boston Dynamics—working on behalf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—have released video of the WildCat, an untethered version of their quadrupedal Cheetah robot, capable of standing and running freely under its own power.

One British hotel has decided to do away with the traditional bedside Gideon Bibles — and replace them with complimentary copies of mommy porn book Fifty Shades of Grey.

A new poll conducted for Reuters found that 1 in 7 people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime. 10 percent think the "end" of the Maya long count calendar could mean it will happen in 2012, an interpretation disputed by Maya scholars but not Maya gods.

Just after 5am this morning, Mineral, Virginia was once again rocked by an earthquake — this time a 3.4-magnituder. NBC Washington has the details:

To celebrate its Independence Day, Ukraine yesterday officially opened the first, and most likely only, nuclear missile museum in the world there, the Pervomaisk Strategic Missile Forces Museum. Visitors can check out intercontinental ballistic missiles like "Satan" and "Sandal", as well as have a look around original bunkers. In the ITN video tour above, you also see a Soviet shitter that was used when the present day museum site was an active nuke silo. I'd go.

Greetings, faithful reader. We assume you are reading this on Sunday, after the Rapture did not occur on Saturday as you believed it would. How do you deal with such a stunning turn of events? We're here to help.

Sure, it's a thinly-veiled promo for disaster preparedness, but we can't help but be comforted by the CDC's blog post "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse." Turns out they know exactly what to do in the likely event of a zombie invasion.

All these scary bird, crab and fish die-offs have prompted many to wonder if the world was coming to an end, a whole year before it's officially supposed to. But so-called "scientists" say these massive die-offs happen all the time.

Days after thousands of blackbirds died in Arkansas, 500 blackbirds and starlings fell out of the sky along a Louisiana highway about 300 miles south. There's still no explanation why this is happening—other than the Apocalypse is here.

[A bird eerily sits in view of Seattle's Space Needle just days after thousands of birds dropped dead from the sky over an Arkansas town. We're screwed. Image via AP]

A small French farming village is facing an influx of UFO watchers and assorted New Age idiots who believe aliens are hiding underneath a nearby mountain, waiting for the 2012 Apocalypse. The mayor wants the army to be on call.

This time, it's really happening. On May 21 of next year, Jesus Christ shall swoop down from the heavens on a white steed to snatch up all True Believers. That's right — the Rapture is coming! Where do you stand?

European scientists are still trying to destroy the Earth with the Large Hadron Collider Doomsday Machine, this time by creating a "mini Big Bang" that shot reactor temperatures up "a million times hotter" than the Sun's core. We're so screwed.

Newt Gingrich is preparing for Armageddon and he suggests you do, too, by purchasing his new movie America At Risk (just $19.95, plus $4 shipping). "This is the end of times. This is the final struggle," the film warns.