Unless you've been in submerged in a mine shaft lately, snacking on spiders and lapping up water drops off of stalactites, tonight is the eve of wonder. --- Beginning at 4:12 a.m. Friday morning, the Winter Solstice officially burst on the scene, and the Mayan calendar officially ceases to track the days of our lives. So, we'll either have more stories to tell about our excellent adventures on the big blue marble ... or we won't.

Earthlings are a doomsday-loving crowd. We like to scare ourselves. Maybe you hear a little worrisome voice inside your own head timidly whining, "But what if it really happens?"

It's ludicrous, of course. But still, if you have a trace of anxiety that's not entirely going away, City Weekly has assembled a list of watering holes that have big shindigs planned for the end of the world on Friday night. Go ahead, seek the company of men and women toasting to the Solstice and harkening back the sun. It's an age-old tradition.

That should just about do it, right? How much more "End Times" can you bear to read, contemplate and/or give a baktun about? Well ... just in case you have some unused mental capacity on the subject, consider this:

First, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of our fellow alternative papers, published a lengthy and informative world's-end story by Steven T. Jones titled, "The end of the world as we know it: Pondering the alarmist, the mystical, the way-out-there ... and the surprisingly hopeful sides of Dec. 21, 2012"

The reporter even convinced his boss (and I must give him credit for this) that he needed to go to Tulum, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula, to cover this week's Synthesis 2012 Festival. So far, he's sent two blogs from the sunny Yucatan that suggest festival logistics are a tad sketchy, but who cares? He's on a sweet Yucatan vacation (except for his sweetie's food poisoning). So, check back at sfbg.com over the weekend to see if things pick up, blow up or fizzle.

OK, and now for realsies: those nimble-fingered gents wearing the Guy Fawkes masks had planned to leak “unprecedented amounts of data” between Dec. 10 and Dec. 21, for their Project Mayhem 2012. So far, they've done a few things, not a lot, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be backing up your computer if you haven't done so in a long time. Always a good idea.

And finally, should we survive this Mayan thing in one piece, there are always new things you could worry about, one of them being an electromagnetic pulse. According to a press release from WND Books, "the United States is more vulnerable than ever to an EMP attack that could shut down the country overnight, resulting in tens of millions of deaths and a 19th-century lifestyle for Americans for the foreseeable future."

A Nation Forsaken, written by longtime national-security expert F. Michael Maloof, will break down the threat, one that "doesn't just come from terrorists, but from unpreventable solar activity -- and a new peak period is on the way, threatening the economic and national security of the entire country."

Nothing like a little EMP to really reset our clocks.

Be well, readers. And maybe check out that bar list.