Now I know we don’t get a vote, but we can air an opinion. Assuming the event will go off as planned1, and that we do not brave the Fiscal Cliff but instead careen headlong over the Edge of Doom, what are your thoughts?
My initial inclination was to vote Good Riddance. No more the endless toil of drumming up consulting! No more outlet malls! No more hip hop, acid rock, Beatles, Carpenters, or musak! More than a few who finally get their well deserved comeuppance. The end of cars, banks, tiny airline seats, IRS agents, and petty totalitarians like Hizzoner.
But then no more black pudding, Guinness, or whiskey either. No Mozart or Oscar Peterson or Bach. Quiet walks in the woods or along the quay in a light drizzle: gone! Cigars and pleasant conversation would be no more! All those books finally consumed! And what about cheese!
No, not good riddance, but a sad good bye. My first reasoning to throw the good out with the bad was wrong. The world being in a fallen state, the latter will always outnumber the former, but the good always outweighs the bad by an infinite amount.
Since we have assumed the Event will occur, my last feeling is one of melancholy regret.
But perhaps all this is brought on by my knowledge that I yet again have to squeeze my bulk into a seat designed for a super model on a diet and hurtle myself through space in a thin aluminum tube towards a destination I do not wish to be at. Sigh.
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1This means those who argue “The Mayans were wrong!” cannot follow instructions and thus deserve oblivion.
I’m always for a big bang. Bring it on man.
Of course, for more than 150,000 people the Mayan prophecy will come true and everything will end on Dec 21st.
Personally I would prefer not to be one of them, though as it’s a cold winter where I am and I’m getting on in years the chances that I will be are greater than most.
The Maya didn’t predict doomsday for Dec 21 2012 (or any other date), so “The Mayans were wrong!!!” would suggest that doomsday will occur on Dec 21 2012.
The present-day Maya have issued a statement saying that their ancestors did not predict doomsday, and they’re sick and tired of people camping out on their territory to wait for it – or something like that.
Isn’t there suppose to be a better world after for believers?
Rumor has it the date for the Mayan doomsday prophecy was misinterpreted. The numerals in the day of the month were inadvertently reversed. The actual date is 12/12/12. You might consider crawling in a hole and covering your eyes before today’s time reaches 12:12:12.
I can see where the Mayans might be a bit upset by this whole “Mayan end of the world thing”. But it won’t matter after December 21st, so they only have a week left to be annoyed.
The whole universe will disappear on December 21st and be immediately replaced by another one identical in every respect and indistinguishable from it. We should hope and pray that our duplicates – who will erroneously believe that they are we – will live better and more fulfilling lives than we would have.
Smoking Frog is correct. The Mayans did not predict doomsday. The doomsday predictions come from modern misinterpretations of their calendar.
My understanding is that you read the Mayan calendar in a spiral patter working out from the center. The doomsday idea comes from the fact that on 12/21/2012 we get to the end of the calendar. This is the misinterpretation.
The Mayan calendar like the modern Gregorian calendar is cyclic. The Gregorian calendar has a finite number of unique one year calendars and these repeat in a very specific pattern. It would be possible to construct a Gregorian calendar that covers the full cycle and simply use the one calendar starting over when you get to the end of the cycle.
The only thing that happens in the Mayan calendar on 12/21/2012 is that you start over in the center on 12/22/2012.
Xmas cards will be sent our as soon as possible so my loved ones will receive them before Mayan apocalypse. I’ll stop coming to work so I can start checking off my bucket list. Not going to get a tattoo. Not going to a shopping mall.
Oh… the sausage looks deviled.
haha, very nice.
I’m all for it, though I think I’ll miss listening to Karen’s quintessential voice. Maybe playing “We’ve Only Just Begun” will be appropriate on Dec 22 should it happen.
“… no more black pudding, Guinness …”
Sounds like a vote in favor of ending it all if I ever heard one.
Complete nonsense.
This is the kind of rubbish one would expect watching the History channel.
When our calendar recycles on December 31 every year, there’s no yearly prediction of the ‘End of Times’ – we celebrate the coming year instead.
Just remember. if the world ends, women children and minorities will be the most seriously affected.
Agile.Aspect,
Rubbish? You have no fond memories of Y2K?
Luis Diaz, the end of times will be a gnab gib.
Rich, The universe will be destroyed and replaced by one that very similar but slightly more bizzare and inexplicable.
Someone that I know is thinking of delaying her Christmas shopping… no need to spend cash now if there will be no Dec. 25th. Altho, the reverse reasoning would be to spend it all now… for there will be no bill collectors tomorrow, or rather, the week after next.
Dad-gum Mayans! If they’d ended it a week earlier I could skip shopping for wife’s birthday gift. As it is……….. Dad-gum!
Doug, let’s go see it at that famous restaurant. I heard their steaks are quite willing to be eaten.
This video, “The Known Universe,” might be appropriate…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U
It’s even worse than that Matt, the whole idea comes from the fact that the Mayans had a calender that went on for centuries in advance and just stopped on December 21, 2012 (our calender). Because it was cyclical and the Mayans were decent astronomers the calender could have been used to calculate to any point, but it just stopped on Dec. 21, 2012.
My own personal theory on why this is involves a couple of priests. I suspect some junior Mayan priest was in charge of handling a high priest’s schedule, and one time too many he caused problems for his boss by mentioning something coming up on the calender. This upset the high priest and he said to the junior priest something like “you can go and set up my calender until the end of time for all I care, just get out of here and never let me see you again.” The junior priest, not wanting to leave his priest job (among the Mayans it was a pretty good gig with no heavy lifting), decided to take the high priest’s comment as am independent job reassignment. He spent the rest of his working career coming into the office and adding onto the calender for a few hours each day before knocking off early. It just happens that December 21, 2012 was the last day he got to before his retirement party and the end of his career.
This is slightly off-topic, but I’m sure most readers here will be able to interpolate, or extrapolate, as the case may be, an amazingly hilarious end-of-the-world joke:
A man happens to run into his lawyer in the bank. While they are chatting, two armed robbers burst through the door and clean out the cash drawers. The robbers then line up all the people in the bank and start working their way down the line taking wallets and jewelry. Before the robbers reach them, the lawyer surreptitiously hands the man something.
“What’s this?” the man asks.
“It’s the $100 I owe you.” the lawyer responds.
@Max
Here are a couple more explanations,
Probable
The Mayan calendar is cyclical but happens to have a very long cycle. 12/21/2012 is just the end of the outermost cycle.
Silly
The Mayans write in a spiral pattern. High priest went to the stone cutter and asked for a round stone of a large size. Then the high priest took the stone to the calendar maker and told him to write out a calendar on the stone. High priest forgot to tell the calendar maker to use a larger font size than normal so the calendar could be read from a distance. Calendar maker used normal font size and just ran out of space on 12/21/2012.
I am against. I must be because I just read a list of events taking place in Toronto and my children would never forgive me if we missed Disney on Ice taking place here just after the supposed end of the world. Actually that would be the real end of the world for me and the biggest catastrophe for my family. 😀
All I can say is it felt like one of the longest nights of the year waiting for dawn this morning.