Friday, May 11, 2012

2012 M(a)y(an) Ass


Damn, damn, damn. I don’t know about you but I was planning to enjoy my final months on earth as the Mayan calendar came to an end on December 21, 2012. I got a reverse mortgage on my house, sold the movie rights to all my books, took out massive cash advances on all my credit cards, and received large advances on books I have no intension of writing but whose due dates are December 22, 2012. I was certain that the Mayans were right and the world was coming to an end. I was planning to live life large. I was even going to vote for a third party candidate for president in November just to screw with the two-party plutocracy that runs this country. But all that is over now.

Headline in today’s USA TODAY: “Mayan calendar goes beyond 2012.”

Are you kidding me?! It turns out that some archeologists found a new room in the Mayan ruins of Xultun. On the walls of this room the Mayans calculated dates of festivals that would fall after the year 3500. That’s over 1500 years from now! We’ve got over 1500 years left to this civilization, and it is going to take me every last one of them to pay back all the money I owe.

I don’t know whom to sue first: Daniel Pinchbeck for writing his doomsday scenario, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the archeologists who have been excavating Xultun for years and only just now found the updated calendar, or the Mayans themselves for writing their stupid calendar on walls rather than on large boulders along side highways where everyone could find them.

Well, I guess I should be thankful that the world isn’t ending in 2012, but to be honest, I was looking forward to it. After the disappointments of Harold Camping’s end of world prophecies on October 21, 2011 and May 21, 2011 I had given up on Christian doom and opted for what I assumed was the more reliable Mayan doom. But no, they too have failed me.

I don’t know whom to trust in the doomsday fantasy world anymore. S o I am asking you, my friends, if you know of some other prophecies I can rely on, please write them in the comments section of this blog. I just can’t bear the thought that there is no end in sight. 

3 comments:

Lyn Baker said...

You think you've got problems, I borrowed a $100,000 from a loan shark named Vinnie and promised a hooker by the name of Stella that I would marry her if we actually survived! I don't know what I'm going to tell my mother. Wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't spent all the money already (spent some of it on whisky, some of it on Stella and the rest of it I wasted) or if sweet Stella would have saved some of that money I was paying her for a rainy day. Then we could have bought a plane ticket to Yemen or something. Can you lend a brother a hand? :-)

Michael Dowd said...

Fear not, my friend! While not exactly a prophecy, science itself offers a wonderously glorious end of the world fantasy. My science writer wife (Connie Barlow) and I regularly watch the Discovery Channel and BBC movie, "Supervolcano", which is about Yellowstone and what will happen to the world when it blows again (a supervolcano is roughly 2,000 Mt. St. Helen's size volcanos all at once. Yellowstone (America's supervolcao) has blown roughly every 600,000 years for the past two million years, and it's been 640,000 years since it last erupted. So when politics and such get too insane, Connie and I remind ourselves "Don't worry. Yellowstone could blow at any time" and it just calms us right down. :-) It's our absolute favorite disaster film. You'll love it! See here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/supervolcano/ Here's the wiki page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano_(film)

Rabbi Rami said...

For Lyn: STELLLLLLAAAAAAA!

For Michael: My Christian friends keep reminding me that He is Risen, and now my science friends are reminding me that She is Rising. I'm not sure which one is the more comforting in both cases I am going to burn.