Judge Reinhold’s 54th Birthday Is REALLY Gonna Suck

Wow. Cee Lo’s voice is not nearly as good without Autotune.

This guy was making the rounds outside my window for a few hours on Thursday. Although the clip is less than a minute, trust me when I say you get the gist of it. He proceeds mainly in that vein for quite some time. It took me a while to decipher what he was saying — at first I thought it was an out-of-rhythm chant of “USA!” — so in case you’re missing it, he’s yelling out “You just wait!” He’s also occasionally interspersing an ejaculation of “FIRE!!” which I’m sure was not alarming at all to the passing motorists. Some of the other gems he belted out during his patrol on 4th Avenue were:

• “He’s gonna do it again!” (To me, this sounds more like a tag line for Billy Madison II: Billy Gets His Baccalaureate than a warning about God descending to Earth to judge the living and the dead, but then again, I’m no harbinger.)
• “Save yourself!” (This he would yell to individual drivers stopped at red lights, while making eye contact and pointing menacingly. Again, I’m sure this did not alarm any of the operators of the 2000 pound, gasoline-filled steel vessels. I feel confident in saying we were fortunate not have a cataclysm happen 16 days early, right in front of my favorite 99 cent store.)
• “There’s gonna be a huge earthquake!” (At least we’ll get a warning. Not like seeing the “May 21” printed on our calendars won’t be enough. Which reminds me: is there a specific time this is set to begin? Is it right at midnight, or will God wait until sunrise? What time zone is Heaven in? Where can I find more details on this? Oh right, that’s coming up next…)
• “Matthew 24!” (This he screamed at someone who calmly asked him what book of the Bible he was getting his information from. He then worked this into his repertoire of randomly shouted phrases, along with “Fire!” and “Earthquake!”)
• “Read my lips!” (Right then I knew he was lying.The last time I heard this phrase, it was uttered by a Bush, and I don’t trust that family any further than I can throw the collected lot of them. Nor do I mess with Texas, for that matter. Side note: how awesome is it that the “no new taxes” clip is on YouTube? God bless the Internet.)

I’ve mentioned the May 21 Crusaders (that’s what I’m call them now) before, although at the time they whole notion was foreign to me. As I would have guessed, efforts have ramped up since then, as we approach the deadline for Judgment Day. What started (for me) as just a lone man in a windbreaker on the A train has since become a message which I cannot shake from my consciousness despite my best efforts.

You see, a few weeks after snapping covert pics of the dude in the above linked post, my girlfriend was handed a pamphlet in Target detailing the 5/21/11 apocalypse. I read some of it, but both the logic and the underlying Biblical math were shaky at best and I stopped reading after a few short paragraphs, lest blood shoot out of my nose. Last week, I saw two men wearing signs decreeing this prophecy parading around my local corner store. Then, on Wednesday, I ran across a Gothamist article about a billboard that was recently constructed alongside the BQE. Apparently our Lord has an advertising budget now. (I recommend taking a look at that Gothamist link. It’s brief and gives a bit a background on just where this craziness comes from. Turns out the same “prophet” who is preaching the May 21 date also predicted that Judgment Day would occur in 1994. Unless he was talking about the fashion abomination that was the grunge trend, I think he was a bit off on that one.)

Eventually this guy ran out of steam, although I can’t imagine why, what with being in such good shape and being imbued with the divine power of the Almighty and all that. He left his post along the 4th Avenue median and went on about his day, laughing all the way to the bank at the thought of those unenlightened fools who splurged on calendars that go beyond the first five months of the year.