Another year, another year-end story.
Yawn.
However: If you believe hundreds of books and 1,000-plus websites and blogs this will be the last year-end ever. Nothing boring about that.
The end really is near, they say. Dec. 21, 2012, to be precise. That’s the day the Mayan “long count” calendar ends, and as the calendar outlasted the civilization, there are no Mayan calendar guys around to tell us what that means.
That hasn’t prevented a parade of self-declared Mayan calendar experts from speculating that the world will end on that day, just shy of a year from now. For example, the movie 2012 featured a killer solar flare, a biblical flood, a really bad script and wooden performances. Scary.
That’s the glass half-empty crowd. The half-full gang, starring people like bestselling really bad writer William Gladstone, author of The Twelve, prefer the New Age interpretation. “Greed and materialism will have a lesser role in this new era. There will be a greater emphasis on harmony among all living beings.”
If you use that Prophet-y voice, it sounds more convincing.
There’s more. For the first time in 26,000 years, the centre of the Milky Way and our sun will be in alignment. How cool is that? Not to mention the fact that Dec. 21 is the winter solstice and witchy stuff happens on the solstice.
Finally, that glyph of a Porky Pig-like character on the calendar, going what appears to be “Duhbeeya-duhbeeya-duhbeeya that’s all, folks” in Mayan is somewhat troubling.
Just kidding about the pig.
After extensive research (er, Google), I can authoritatively declare it’s all a bunch of “zotz,” which is Mayan for “bats,” which is as close as I can get to “crazy.”
The world will not end on Dec. 21 2012, say the usual humourless scientists from NASA, et cetera, any more than it will end on Dec. 31, 2011. Plus there’s no way the Mayan astronomers could have known about that alignment of the sun and the galaxy thing. It’s just a calendar, people. Get a life.
Before we go (but not for good!) let’s raise a New Year’s glass to Harold Camping, who, using his own zotz calendar, predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011, and when that didn’t work, went all out for Oct. 21, 2011. That didn’t work either, probably because he ignored the significance of the solstice, the equinox and reality in general.
Still, you never know. But to leave you on an upbeat note, John Cusack, the star of 2012, when asked what he would be doing on Dec. 21, 2012, replied: “Skiing.”
Nothing zotz about him.
