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Don't Worry, the World Is Still Doomed

Saturday, 22. December 2012 - 16:25

Now that the Mayan calendar's prediction that the world would end Friday hasn't come to pass, most people probably think it's safe to relax.

I personally never thought that the portents of doom were anything to worry about. When I was studying English literature at St. Joseph's University, I had a minor in ethnographic studies and spent a lot of time researching Mayan history. And for me that ditsy end-of-the-world theory just never held water.

The reason the world did not come to an end Friday is because of a fairly basic mathematical miscalculation that the harbingers of doom made in studying the Mayan calendar. Despite what so-called experts claim to know about the transit of the Zenithol Passages and the peristaltic devolution of the 13th Bak'tun, the fact remains that when you divide one chickchan (the Mayan number eight) by the square root of etz'nab (the number 18), it doesn't mean that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012. It means that the world will end one week before the dawn of the next piktun. Which could be anytime over the next 500 years.

If the knuckleheads on TV who propagate this nonsense had simply gotten some high school kid with a good head for math to run the numbers, they would have realized that there was no chance whatsoever that the world was going to end on Friday.

That said, it doesn't mean that the crisis has passed for good. The Mayan calendar is only one Mesoamerican calendar that purports to be able to pinpoint the day the world will end, and it is by no means the most revered. There's also the Toltec calendar, the Olmec calendar and the Zapotec calendar. (There's an Aztec calendar, too, but calendar buffs view it as a joke.)

The Toltec calendar says the world will end the day all reruns of "Murder, She Wrote" stop running, though it doesn't give a specific date. The Zapotec calendar says the world will end right around the time Libertarians admit that they are actually Republicans, only they like drugs. The Aztec calendar says the world will end within 24 hours of the New York Jets winning their fourth consecutive Super Bowl, which is why it is not taken seriously.

But the other calendars, where the kuapecs and migetks and chap'uans all seem to add up, are definitely something to worry about.

Most people do not realize this, but Mesoamerican calendars are not the only calendars that predict doom. The Jute calendar, a copy of which can be seen in the British Museum, correctly predicted that Mickey Rourke would self-destruct; it was off by just 48 hours. The Hittite calendar predicted the Zumba craze, though it was 2,500 years early. And the Numidian calendar predicted that when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, Macbeth was in big, big trouble.

Just because the Mayan calendar has proved to be such a dud doesn't discredit all the other prophetic calendars out there. Not by a long shot.

Specialists in apocalyptic studies stress that a number of more obscure calendars have proved to possess astonishing predictive powers. The annual calendar distributed to customers by McGee & McGrory's Automotive Diagnostic Center in Amherst, Mass., in the 1930s correctly predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

A calendar handed out by Aunty Edna's Old-Fashioned Home-Style Merrie 'n Luverly Chocolates in Bath, England, was right on target in predicting the Berlin Wall's collapse. And the Accordion Babes Calendar, published in San Francisco, not only predicted the 2008 stock-market crash but also issued the more ominous prediction that pigs would one day fly. The Accordion Babes Calendar has never been wrong.

It's true that the Toltec calendar was last on target in 1754 when it predicted the invention of low-fat corn muffins. But these prophecies cannot be ignored. I just ran the numbers on the Olmec calendar, which predicts that the world will end next March, probably right around St. Patrick's Day, and unless I'm off by three bh'ats and a kuapec, this planet is in serious trouble. That's why I'm not terribly worried about how going over the fiscal cliff would affect my taxes. I won't be here to pay them.

BY JOE QUEENAN

Source: 
online.wsj.com
Tags: 
end of the world
Mayan calendar's