A Mayan mask in jade mosaic from around 500 AD

As most people predicted — quite uncannily, I think — the prediction last month by astrologer Lak Rekhanithet that July 2 would be “a day of hell”, Thailand’s worst day in 30 years, with death, explosions, fires and combat, reaching a climax at 11.07pm, turned out to be, uh, wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nothing much of anything happened in Thailand on July 2, even in the Deep South, where mayhem is an almost everyday experience.

This was excellent news, of course, for all the people who would have died and been injured had Lak’s prophecy proven correct, but it’s a major disappointment for the rest of us who were counting on something dramatic to happen.

I’d taken heart in an Associated Press story on June 21 headlined “Everything is spinning out of control”. It began, “Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Airfares, college tuition and healthcare border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.”

An American angle to be sure, although the saga did point out the far direr news from China (more than 69,000 dead in the earthquake) and Burma (78,000 killed and 56,000 missing thanks to Cyclone Nargis and the junta).

But July 2? Nothing, even with Thaksin Shinawatra’s endorsement.

I’ve written before about the body blow that Comet Kohoutek delivered to my gullibility by remaining invisible in 1973 when it was supposed to illuminate the night sky as if it were day. And yet somehow I still wish to believe in a greater force.

So what’s next? Perennial faith in the Church of the SubGenius, which also awaits Doomsday, seems misplaced now that I’ve quit drinking. The Doomsday List of likely dates for horrifying apocalypses that’s provided by 2Think.org is far too cynical, and besides, a lot of the links lead nowhere.

According to A Brief History of the Apocalypse, we can next trust our belief to prophetess Lori Adaile Toye of the I Am America Foundation (Google claims to have never heard of it either). She’s promised that a series of planetary changes that began in 1992 will culminate next year with much of the world underwater and two-thirds of the US population dead.

If that doesn’t work out, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn has been saying all along that the end is coming in 2010. And then of course there’s the Mayan calendar staring fixedly at 2012.

It wasn’t that long ago that the last holdouts from among the 30 members of the True Russian Orthodox Church emerged from the cave in Russia’s Penza region where they’d sealed themselves up for six months to await the end of the world this past May.

The sect’s founder, Pyotr Kuznetsov, sent them into their hole with food — and explosive material in case anyone tried to force them back out — and then stayed above ground himself.

They’d trickled out in bunches, for medical reasons, out of fear that the roof was about to fall in, and finally, on May 16, because of the stink from the corpses of two members who’d died.

What a disappointment for them after half a year’s hell! Perhaps, though, they could return to their homes and join their Siberian neighbours in worshiping ex-cop Sergei Torop as the reborn Christ. For me, no such luck.

But it seems too pat to simply give up on astrology. After all, there are still a few days left before Mars has its fateful rendezvous with Saturn on July 10.

And coming up next month (last I heard), the boffins in Geneva will finally be ready to flip the switch on the Large Hadron Collider, the mammoth physics experiment (see a post here) that some people think will not only destroy the planet, it will shred the universe.

Fingers crossed, then!