THREE MONTHS and counting! Three months from today, Dec. 21, the Mayan long-count calendar ends.

Three months from today is when followers of Nostradamus say he predicted the world would end.

Three months from today Native American scholars say that the ancient Southwestern Indian culture predicted that human purification would occur and that the Fifth World would emerge.

Woooooo! That's Stephen King stuff, maybe even Edgar Allan Poe.

For four or five years now, I have been counting down to the apocalypse and now the moment is almost upon us.

I don't know if you have noticed, but the History Channel, which has run countless shows in the past several years regarding the Dec. 21, 2012, prophecies, has backed off in the past few months.

Do they know something Nostradamus didn't?

Not me! I'm not backing off! If the world is going to end on Dec. 21, I want to be there to cover it. That column should get me a Pulitzer Prize.

But I have to know where to be in order to get the story and a picture and video for the Internet, if possible. To get myself in position, I suppose I first must figure out how the end will occur.

Will we get baked by an intense solar flare? There has been a great deal of sunspot activity this year. Maybe that's how the end comes.

If so, the safest place to shoot a picture might be from the North Pole--with a really long telephoto lens. The equator is Earth's closest point to the sun, so that's likely where the flare will hit and I don't want to be anywhere close to that.

So, the North Pole seems like a good spot. The ice up there will keep me and my equipment cool when global warming to-the-max comes.

Will it be a meteor or an asteroid that gets us? Some say a huge chunk of outer space is going to plunge down in a fiery ball and the ensuing blast will send us the way of the dinosaurs.

If that is true, a suite on the space station will be about the only safe place to set up a tripod.