New York City and its ball drop has nothing on the town of Beebe, Ark., where a dead bird drop on New Year’s Eve is becoming a distressing annual tradition.

For the second year in a row, blackbirds dropped from the sky after Beebe residents began setting off fireworks to greet 2012, CNN reported.

Arkansas Game and Fish Commission spokeswoman Ginny Porter told CNN that between 50 and 80 birds were reported dead.

Remember those Mayan heiroglyphics that were supposed to forecast the apocalypse for next year? 

Turns out somebody got the translation wrong.

Oops.

A German archeologist, Sven Gronemeyer, has been studying this tablet. He says it talks about a transition to a new era, not the end of the world. 

Poor old Harold Camping. The radio host and preacher predicted the rapture would come on May 21, 2011. It didn't. 

Now Camping says the real day of judgment will be October 21, 2011. "Probably."

Camping, 90, has admitted that his previous prediction of a May 21 apocalypse was wrong due to an error in calculation. He also previously said the end of the world would come in 1994. When that date came and went, he said he made a mathematical error.

In a recent audio statement, Camping predicted the October 21 rapture with a little less certainty than in his previous proclamations, according to the Washington Post.

Camping said “the end is going to come very, very quietly probably within the next month ... by October 21. Probably there will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God,” he said, according to the Post.

“We can become more and more sure that they’ll quietly die and that will be the end of their story.”

More from GlobalPost: Harold Camping's "real" rapture, October 21, is upon us

In June, shortly after revising his apocalypse prediction, Camping suffered a stroke, and he has since been playing a less prominent role with the Oakland, California-based evangelical Family Radio network.

Camping told the San Francisco Chronicle he was "flabbergasted" when the predicted End Times did not materialize on May 21.

He decided that May 21 was actually "an invisible judgment day" in which a spiritual judgment took place, and the real apocalypse will take place October 21, he said in a radio broadcast.

And the latest apocalyptic mass animal death is... 800 tons of fish, whose lives spontaneously ended in the Philippines.

According to the ABS-CBN TV news channel, the fish may have died from a sudden temperature change brought on by rainy season. Another outlet, Manila's Inquirer, reported that locals are paranoid that dead fish dredged up with backhoes will end up in market stalls. The government has warned shady fishmongers that this will bring criminal charges.

The stench of rotting fish has permeated towns around the body of water, Lake Taal. Officials have dumped lime on the mountains of dead fish to limit the smell. The International Business Times has lots of photos.

2011 is fast becoming the year of sudden fish deaths. Still, this "fishkill," as the Filipino media called it, does not marks the phenomenon's 2011 Asia debut. That honor goes to Vietnam, where 150 tons of tilapia died spontaneously just seven days into the year.