One week left for Planet Earth?

Forget the Halloween decorations. Something far scarier is coming next Friday - and it's not the opening of Being Elmo at theaters nationwide.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

That is, if California radio-preacher Harold Egbert Camping is finally right.

You'll remember that he was wrong about May 21, even though some believers squandered their careers and life savings to spread the warnings of tsunamis and cataclymic earthquakes.

No fair counting that Oprah Winfrey ended her show a few days later.

Those keeping score note that his book 1994? was incorrect about doomsday happening that year, though, as the question mark suggests, he left room for doubt.

May 21, 2011, though, had to be kiss-your-lass-goodbye day, Camping reckoned, because of calculations based on numbers in the Bible - ignoring the part where the Book of Mark insists God alone knows when time will run out: "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father."

Two days later, a "flabbergasted" Camping had a new spin: May 21 was just "an invisible Judgment Day," soRt of with God, like Santa, making his list and checking it twice. The real delivery date would be Oct. 21, when "the world is going to be destroyed all together ... very quick," he said.

He's sticking by that story.

On his FamilyRadio.com website, Camping, 90, talks in a podcast about being happy to be recovering at home from a mild stroke suffered in July, and reaffirms: "I do believe we are getting very near the very end."

"There are a lot of things we didn't have quite right," he admits, but also calls May 21 a "tremendous event."

Expect the Lord to be gentle, as billions die.

"We must believe that probably there will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God," Camping said. ". . . I really am beginning to think as I restudy these matters that there's going to be no big display of any kind. The end is going to happen very, very quietly. . . . It will happen, that is, by Oct. 21."

Or not.