No, it’s the news that the world may not end on December 21st
according to this newly unearthed Mayan calendar, something that I view with
somewhat mixed feelings. Okay so it’s nice to go on living, but I’m also a little
disappointed. A good all-consuming cosmic apocalypse is always tons of fun. I’m
not sure quite how many of them I’ve lived through already. I do recall there
were two in 1999 alone. July of that year was supposed to bring holy terror of
Nostradamus’ bad boy in the blue turban but he failed to materialize. And, of
course, at the end of the year, there was the Y2K scare in which every computer
on the planet would malfunction and we’d all be hurled back into a very
unpleasant stone age. But that too never came to pass, although, merchants in
Middle America made a killing – so to speak – selling portable generators,
canned food, and pump-action shotguns to a paranoid populace. That’s the charm
of a good End Time. First comes the panic verging on farce, and then the
sheepish climb-down when we wake up find ourselves still alive. If the Mayan
calendar is really out of the running, roll on The Rapture.
“One array of numbers would be particularly intriguing to
doomsday debunkers: lists that appear to denote wide ranges of accumulated
time, including a 17-baktun period. "There was a lot more to the Maya
calendar than just 13 baktuns," Stuart observed. Seventeen baktuns would
stand for about 6,700 years, which is much longer than the 13-baktun cycle of
5,125 years. However, Stuart cautioned that the time notation shouldn't be read
as specifying a date that's farther in the future than Dec. 21. "It may
just be that this is a mathematical number that they find interesting, kind of
floating in time," he told me. "But it certainly is expressing a
capacity of time. If they were calculating something from their time period,
around 800 A.D., yeah, this would have gone way beyond 2012. But again, we're
not sure exactly what the base of the calculation is." Click here for more.
The secret word is Exit
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