WHEN IT COMES to choosing a headline for Surrealing in the Years, some weeks pose more of a challenge than others.

This is especially true when some other publication has beaten me to the punch. After all, how better to summarise the events of the past week than the Daily Mail’s thoughtful and considered headline: ‘Four biblical signs the world has entered the end of days as US bombs Iran’.

I haven’t read that article, because I try to avoid needlessly poisoning my brain whenever I can, but one assumes the apocalyptic signs they’re pointing to include the Saharan dust cloud coming our way, or the blood moon that appeared overhead, or the tearing down of a pint-wielding St Patrick statue in Temple Bar as though it were Saddam Hussein. 

Yes, in fairness to the Daily Mail, things have begun to feel a little more apocalyptic than usual. Indeed, at the end of January, the Doomsday Clock people moved the hands on the clock so that it’s 85 seconds to midnight — the closest the clock has ever been to midnight, with midnight symbolising the end of the world. There’s probably an argument to be made that we don’t need to be bossed around by some pushy, nagging clock, and also that a clock is not a good visual representation of a variable that fluctuates in a non-linear way, very much unlike the hands on a clock, but whatever. The situation is bad, and we all know it. 

Perhaps the most horrifying act to emerge amidst the expansion of Israel and the United States’ trail of destruction in the Middle East is the targeting of an Iranian girls’ school in Minab. As of Friday, Reuters was reporting that the US was behind the massacre, which left more than 160 people, many of whom were children, dead. 

For all the panic that tends to ensue in the Western world over ‘World War 3′ in moments........

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