Thank God for the skeptic in me.

If it hadn't been for that tendency to question everything I read or hear, I would have likely spent the past evening in some sort of hedonistic debauchery or at a cathedral praying for eternal salvation.

That is, if I would've watch FOX News and the story about how an enormous particle accelerator was about to bring Armaggedon upon us all, causing some kind of cataclysmic event that would swallow the earth in a matter of seconds.

But according to a report by the New York Times this morning, the world didn't end overnight. The bad part about that is that now I have to write my column this morning.

One thing for certain about this prediction of the end of the world: It wasn't the first, and it won't be the last - even when it comes to the particle accelerator. There are some folks that say doomsday will take four years to come to fruition, with the tiny black holes created by the Switzerland experiment to finally eat up all of Earth's energy (i.e., you and me.)

Hey, that would be 2012. But more on that later.

The other thing that is certain is that the search engines are getting a thorough workout in these troubled times as theories about end times are tossed about like celebrity gossip.

And they've been getting a thorough workout by me, too. Here's a few of my favorite End Times discoveries hiding out there on the "you better believe everything you read" Internet.

5. The big picture (an antidote for those Armageddon blues)

Whenever I get that feeling that the sun is about to turn as black as sackcloth any moment and the four horseman have left the barn, I like to check out this site.

On the surface, there isn't anything enlightening about it. I mean, there is the full page ad in USA Today from October 1992 in which the Hyoo-go predicted billions of deaths from earthquakes, World War III and general mayhem. And I mean, there's Isacc Netwon's note that the scientific date for the Second Coming was certain to be 1715. Heck, even Christopher Columbus had an opinion.

But after reading through literally hundreds of End Times predictions (and these are only the greatest hits), one starts to ease up a little about all the big news about the current fave, the particle accelerator.

4. The Chicken of Doom

If you can't have a little fun talking Armageddon, then what good is it?

No doubt my favorite tale of end times is Mary Bateman's Chicken of Doom.

Bateman, a highly esteemed fortuneteller known as the "Yorkshire Witch"who was later revealed as a charlatan and, even worse, a murderer, rose to prominence with a magic chicken that produced prophetic eggs.

The most renowned of the prognosticating eggs proclaimed that Jesus was on the way and that the Rapture was just around the corner. Unfortunately for Bateman, she was caught forcing eggs with pre-determined messages up the magic chicken's rectum. Needless to say, she lost much of her flock after this.

Of course, that isn't nearly the worst thing Bateman did in her snake oil saleswoman-type of career. She was later convicted of poisoning of Rebecca Perigo,, who had come to Bateman to try to ward off a spell she believed she was under. Bateman's cure was to feed her poison-laced pudding. Perigo later died.

In March of 1909, Bateman was found guilty of fraud and murder and was hanged.

3. Doomsday cults - they're not just for the 20th century anymore

Perhaps the most famous of modern day doomsday cults is the one led by Jim Jones and his Jonestown mass suicide that led to more than 900 people taking their own lives in November 1978.

And then there was the Heaven's Gate suicide of 39 people in 1997 in which they believed end times were at hand and that their UFOs were on their way to take them to the Rapture.

But if you think apocalyptic cults are a phenomenon of the our current society, think again. Shortly after they are formed, the Old Believers in Russia began preparing for the Apocalypse. So convinced they were that end times were at hand, tens of thousands burned themselves to death between 1669 and 1690 to protect themselves from the Antichrist.

2. The biggest end times scam of our generation: Y2K

The year 2000 is the responsible for two of my all-time favorite pop-culture movements: the movie "Office Space" and the Y2K scare.

The aforementioned are interconnected. As you recall, Initech is the company featured in the movie about disaffected work life in current day America. Initech was responsible for software to address the Y2K problem.

The Y2K problem was on the tips of everyone's tongue throughout 1999 as computer programs dealt with flaws that they believed might cause computers to shut down when the new year - 2000 - rolled around.

Of course, the Y2K scare may be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated.

Preparations for the event cost about $300 billion to companies and public sector entities who wanted to ensure that systems didn't fail because of the programming error. Some say the cost is justified in that noncompliant systems were brought up to date and that redundancies created by the process helped in times of crisis such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Others say many entities failed to get up to compliance in time for Jan. 1, 2000, and basically nothing happened.

Even worse though, it sparked an underground movement of families and communities who took to Cold War-era tactics of building bunkers, stockpiling supplies and weapons and prepared for the end of the world as we know.

The good news: Unlike the Old Believers in Russia in the 17th Century, they did not take to burning themselves to death.

1. The Mayan Calender, i.e. the galactic apocalypse d'jour

The Mayan civilization have been getting a lot of press lately for being a civilization that essentially came to an end in the first century.

Virtually all of the recent hype is related to its calendar system, which is winding down to an end of two significant cycles, one that comes to an end every 5,125 years and another that comes to an end every 26,000 years.

On Dec. 21, 2012, they both will end. What happens next is anyone's guess.

In Mayan culture, it marks a new beginning, when the old things are put away and a new era begins. Today's doomsayers say that certainly means the end, with either the Earth reversing its rotation, the Sun undergoing some cataclysmic changes or an unforeseen fate too horrible to imagine.

Regardless of what happens, though, the calendar is a remarkable astronomical feat for a civilization whose physical tools were limited. It does put our solar system at the center of the galaxy at this point and there is much conjecture on whether the poles will reverse.

For the most part, though, it is a calendar. But hey, who am I to say will happen?