Left Behind club... I recently got my first e-mail bulletin from the Left Behind club. After wondering how they knew I had acquired a copy of the first "Left Behind" book ( I got one as a forced Christmas present), I clicked on the free button for five of the ten signs that we are living in the end of days. But, the free button took me to a LB Club web site with only one puny sign of the end days- the death of Arafat. Nothing about the Jews being back in Israel, unrest in Babylon, or the Pope's death. The free offer for the other four signs required my email and account numbers. If I elect to join the LB club, I get all ten signs, and email bulletins updating me on our progress towards world's end. I've always been a sucker for apocalypse stories and alternate universes since reading A. Merritt's "Dwellers in the Mirage" at the Kensington branch of the Buffalo Public Library as a kid. The "Left Behind" book extends the predictions in the biblical book of Revelations, exploring similar ground as the "Omen" movies. But unlike "Omen" movies and Merritt's 1930's pulp fiction novels, LB purports to be a fictionalized version of true predictions contained in Revelations that are actually going to happen. Much like the Omen, the LB novelist has taken material from Revelations and liberally translated it into the humdrum world of malls, airplanes and highways, extending the predictions to modern day people caught in the intricacies of an end war between good and evil and the second coming. The LB club catches the wind, and invites us all to join the club, follow the score card, and breathlessly apply the implications of end war to our own lives. A year or so ago, the paper of record carried an account from a survivor who was on the very floor where the second plane hit the south tower. He recalled seeing the terrorists through the window in their final moments as they drove into his office, and they were smiling.