This week we asked ourselves the World’s Most Important Question: Why do these 12/21 End of the World Nibiru cataclysm folks get so much attention? How did they score such a massive PR coup? (Oh, a quick note because you asked: The reason that the world will supposedly end tonight instead of tomorrow night is that it all begins in New Zealand, which is a day ahead of us. Or something like that.)

Well, all this nonsense pretty much comes down to one woman who is—get ready for a shocker—slightly insane.

The whole “Mayans predicted the end” deal isn’t new, but the idea that an “interplanetary object” known as Nibiru (which might be a star or a planet) will bring about the end by crashing into the Earth came to us in 1995 courtesy of a nice lady named Nancy Lieder, who claims to communicate with aliens and started an awesome site called ZetaTalk to let everyone know that the end was near.

She initially predicted  that the date of judgment would come in 2003, but she quickly revised her calculations after that didn’t happen, claiming that the “government” conspired to conceal the real date so it could implement martial law, trapping citizens in cities and ensuring their slow, painful deaths. Believable!

But the most annoying thing about this lady isn’t that she is a nut or that her theories have spread, like a viral video, around the End of Times community since the mid-90’s.

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We were more than a little amused yesterday to read news of one Angus T. Jones, an actor better known as “that kid on Two and a Half Men”, pulling what looked like an outright effort to sabotage his own show.

Jones appeared in a bizarre YouTube video that just happens to double as a promo spot for The Forerunner Chronicles, a multi-media project pushing the “end times” Seventh-day Adventist movement. He makes his new-found allegiance to God quite clear in the pseudo-interview while bemoaning his current gig, telling viewers to “please stop watching Two and a Half Men” and “filling your head with filth” and encouraging the public to “do some research on the effects of television and your brain” because “it’s bad news.”

This little incident provided the Internet with more awkward chuckles than a Charlie Sheen rant while creating a huge headache for anyone who makes money producing, promoting or performing on what remains one of TV’s top-rated sitcoms (and that’s quite a few people). Based on follow-up reports, it seems like the only folks happy with Jones’s online outburst are his friends at Forerunner Chronicles and the Valley Crossroads Seventh-day Adventist Church–because everyone loves free PR from a semi-famous “soldier of truth.”*

Anyway, we had to ask: why would a massively successful actor pull a stunt like this? And how can the show’s PR team contain the damage done?

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