When I was in eight grade I had a history teacher, Mister Humphries. He was a good teacher and an interesting guy. The interest did not come solely from his astonishing resemblance to Santa Claus, but in that this guy was a really weird dude and every so often he'd inflict the weird on the class. We ate it up. On Halloween he showed up in a robe with a staff looking somewhat like a stout Gandalf and told us all about things like witchcraft and urban legends and things that go bump in the night. Of course this would get him fired today. He also brought in his Civil War reenactment gear and watched us squirm as we sat outside the school in the yard and he, in full costume, waved an old pistol around. The kind you had to stuff the powder into to. The thing worked too. Of course that would get him fired today too.
There was another thing that stuck with me. He showed us a documentary on Nostradamos, the ancient prophet. You probably seen his name in some of the check out lines at the grocery store while glancing at the tabloids. We watched this video in 1988. I couldn't tell you when the video was made. In this video, going by the writings they figured as near as they could that something was going to come out of the sky and strike most like likely New York City in perhaps 1994. It also said a man in a blue turban would play heavily into this. Pretty freaky stuff to see when you're 13. Keep in mind that I was viewing this in the twilight of the Cold War so the assumption was Russia nuking the Big Apple. I do admit to having the contents of that video in the back of my mind during a good chunk of 1994, only to make it 1995 and felt some relief.
I don't have to remind anyone what happened in 2001.
Now fast forward to yesterday's newspaper in which it reports on the front page that 2012 theory is gaining followers. For those who don't know, the Mayan calendar runs out around the Winter Solstice in 2012, and people are thinking that means the end of the world. That's right. The people who didn't have enough sense not to dump the bodies of their human sacrifices in the same river which they got their drinking water out of were able to predict the end of the world over a thousand years later. That's right, the calendar is over a thousand years long. Most likely the folks making the calendar died or got bored or something.
I swear. This is like Y2K all over again.
There's reports of planetary alignment also going on around the same time, so obviously all the planets lining up will destroy us all. Do I need to go into how stupid that is? THEY'RE MILLIONS OF MILES AWAY! Yeah, it cool that planets line up, but eclipses are cool too, and unless you're watching HEROES they don't mean nor do anything aside from getting us to look to the sky and say "wow".
Maybe the Mayans knew about man made global warming. OMG! AL GORE IS RIGHT!
Perhaps the Earth's magnetic poles will switch. There's some solid science stating that this does happen. It would get pretty bad if this happened, but it's survivable, especially with our knowledge and know how. This is science the Mayans did not have, so the chances of a Pole swap going down when the calendar ends is pretty thin.
Ooo, what if it's the Second Coming? The Rapture and all that. Could the Mayans have divined the time table of the events of Revelations? We're still relatively close to the year 2000. People get freaked by big numbers. They thought Jesus was coming back in the year 1000 too. There is some interesting Biblical prophesies that are currently coming into play, but the odds of these two things being relayed are slimmer than my lotto chances.
Remember when I mentioned that the calendar ends on the Winter Solstice? That's the longest night of the year. That's some pretty easy to figure out even in ancient times. It also makes a pretty solid spot to start and end a calendar year. They made a calendar over a thousand years long. Isn't that long enough? Can't we cut them some slack. I'm sure they had lives to, albeit short ones with those dead bodies in the river.
You know what I do when my calendar runs out? I buy another calendar. Next year's might have Batman on it!
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