Imagine what the money could have been spent on

Family Radio and their gullible adherents wasted an estimated $100 million promoting the ludicrous fanatasy that May 21st, 2011 would be the end of the world. One individual reports spending $140,000 of his own money in order buy posters and advertising to get the word out. Imagine if the $100 million had been spent on targetted charities. It might have helped children, prevented domestic violence, housed homeless people, and even been used in various kinds of medical research. Given that the present use of the money accomplished nothing, any good it did would have been notable. However, the reality is that, not only did this money promote nothing but a falsehood, it also accomplished the opposite of what these people intended. It made religious extremists look foolish anew. It destroyed the "Family Radio" brand, and probably means that it will go out of business or be sued into bankruptcy and those working for it will likely lose their jobs. More importantly, it make people more skeptical. Perhaps that is the only good that it unintentionally did, though true believers wouldn't see skepticism as a good thing.

ApocalOOPs and other terms for failed predictions

A lot of people are busting out the jokes today to mock the doomsday dud predicted by Harold Camping and Family Radio. It does seem like we should have words to describe this scenario when a prediction, particularly one of this magnitude fails to occur.

Two that I have been promoting are ApocalOOPs and Flop-pocalypse. I've also been promoting the Load of cRapture and NostraDumbAss themes to describe a prophet who gets things like the date of the Christian Rapture wrong. What funny terms have you heard today to describe the epic failure of a prophecy like the one on May 21st, 2011?