When my sister—let’s call her Victoria—was young, she used to complain that everyone died on her birthday. Not everyone actually did, but the percentage of our relatives and friends who left this world on the anniversary of the day she entered it was astoundingly high. I think she still holds her breath until her birthday is over. If I were in her shoes, I’d move my birthday to another day. Hell, I’d subtract some years while I was at it.

While nobody has died recently on her day, it is unlikely that anyone ever will again. That’s because, according to the Mayan calendar, the end of the world is going to occur on December 21, 2012, the day before her next birthday. I recently saw a cartoon of Mayans carving a calendar. They ran out of room for more days and one of them said, “This is going to freak people out in 2012.”

Now that our purported last year is rapidly approaching, I thought I’d poke around the Web to see if there were any last-day parties or car sales planned. I didn’t find any, but what I did find was the Mayan Last Day site, http://www.mayanlastday.com.* On the site, you can buy a Countdown Clock, available on a keychain or refrigerator magnet. When the end of the world as you know it is coming up, you certainly don’t want to have to dig around in your junk drawer to find your Countdown Clock; you want to know exactly how much time you have left at any given moment.

The Mayan Countdown Clock people considerately manufactured portable and stationary clocks so you’ll never be without one. The best part is that the clocks come with a three-year limited warranty. So, two years after the world is gone, you can still get your money back under certain circumstances. The warranty might be limited by the decimation of our planet; the website didn’t list the exclusions. I guess their legal department is still working on the wording. They’d better hurry up.

*This website has been disabled. The owner probably didn’t want to keep paying for a site that wouldn’t exist as of December 22.