Maybe you saw the ads during the NBA playoffs when LeBron James put some kind of radioactive-looking flavor strip on his tongue and nodded sagaciously. The strips are called Sheets. They contain as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, along with a few vitamins so we can all pretend this isn't a bad idea and 10-year-olds won't gobble five or six of these things and get all hopped up and start gouging their eyes out with Allen wrenches. Because you wait. It's going to happen. And it's going to happen soon. James and his business partners today announced that they will be rolling out automated Sheet kiosks in malls, office buildings, stadiums and arenas in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Florida.

Here — no joke — is how their press release begins:

"Taking a Sheet™ at the mall just got easier."

When you consider how easy it already is to take a "sheet" at a mall, the implications of this statement become truly terrifying. People will be taking sheets without compunction whenever they feel like it. They will be sheeting all over themselves. Societal breakdown will follow. Even the kiosks James plans to deploy sound scary, as if they just rolled off the Cyberdyne assembly line:

The highly advanced, non-human retail experience educates consumers through two plasma screens embedded in the machine and allows for messaging to change daily.

There's not one thing about this that's not fucked up. This could be how the world ends in 2012. In one giant cataclysmic sheet-storm.