So I just now got around to assembling the prize for winning last week’s Jason + Tank caption contest. Long-time reader (and Washington state math teacher) Travis Thompson won with his RISK-savvy, Kamchatka shouting-out submission.

He wins the never-before-assembled Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse Fun Pack (TM). It contains the following nuggets of End Times goodness:

1 signed copy of Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse, published in 2005 by the now-defunct Relevant Books.

2 blank PGTTA promotional postcards, which Travis may use as he pleases.

1 signed PGTTA promotional postcard, which he may also use as he pleases but which, due to my big scrawling signature, has now been rendered virtually useless.

1 printed page from the original PGTTA manuscript. This is the first page of the book’s introduction, and, thanks to Word’s “track changes” function, it still shows a few of the edits and revisions made to that page by me and my fabulous editor Cara Davis. (Though she may have been Cara Baker at that point. Correct me if I’m wrong, Cara.) Travis, you may hold onto this for 10 years. After that time, you will probably have to donate it to the Smithsonian, if my master plan for worldwide publishing-industry domination eventually comes to fruition.

1 copy of an awesome book I read for research. And by “awesome,” I mean completely eschatologically craaaazy. It’s called 2000 A.D. Are You Ready? (How New Technologies and Lightning-Fast Changes are Opening the Door for Satan and His Plan for the End of the World.) It was published by Thomas Nelson in 1997. In it, brothers and end-of-the-world film producers Peter and Paul Lalonde outline how the combination of the Internet, the information superhighway, and the coming significance of the Year 2000 are about to change our lives…forever!

If you’ve read PGTTA, you’ll remember that — in my Endie Awards section — I give the Lalonde brothers a Lifetime Achievement Award for their role in combining high production values with Rapture thrillers in creating Cloud Ten Pictures, a successful indie film studio. (Cloud Ten’s breakout hit was Left Behind: The Movie in 2000.) These guys are apocalyptic gold, and despite the corny alarmism of the book’s title, it’s actually a pretty funny and entertaining read. If you can past the fact that the year 2000 didn’t, you know, actually open the door for Satan and his plan for the end of the world.

Unless it secretly did, only we don’t know it yet because we’ve not yet gone through that door. Dun-dun-DUUUUN!

Congrats, Travis. Your Fun Pack (TM) should arrive in a few days. Watch for more Fun Pack contests in the future.