You Missed It: Backfire edition

"I've asked Batman here to personally train all of the volunteers."
“I’ve asked Batman here to personally train the volunteers.”

So, when’s the next Doomsday estimate? Does anyone know? For a couple years now, it’s been one after another. We had the crazy guy with the church (which could be said for pretty much any End of Days prediction, really), saying the world was going to end two different times. Today, we proved the Mayans wrong. At some point, waiting for the world to end turns into wanting the world to end. If you were raptured this week, odds are you missed it.

A cop on every corner
Exactly one week after 26 people, including 20 elementary-school students, were murdered at the hands of a crazed shooter with legally-acquired assault weapons, the NRA broke its silence. The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre blamed the media, video games, movies, music videos, natural disasters, the Obama administration and more as the cause of the shooting. But not guns. The group called for an armed police officer to be assigned to every school in the U.S., and if funding can’t be found, have armed volunteers patrol instead. Because the only thing that can keep an armed stranger from roaming the halls of our schools is an armed stranger roaming the halls of our schools.

The long, strange lives of Olympians
Olympians may live longer than the average human because they lead active lifestyles, according to a study released this week. In unrelated news, The Smoking Gun found that former Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton has been making money lately as an escort in Las Vegas, charging $600 an hour. Favor Hamilton said she looks forward to outliving her coworkers.

Person of the Year: The Year
TIME named President Barack Obama its person of the year, the second time he has won the honor. Obama beat out the Higgs Boson. After naming “the protester” the person of 2011, I’m just glad that the venerable magazine remembered to give the award to a specific person, rather than a group of persons, or you know, a theoretical particle.