2012

Well, maybe not.

Theoretically, the Mayan calendar ends in December 2012. For some ungodly reason (pun intended), some people took this to mean the END OF THE FRIGGIN' WORLD! It makes as much sense as my current Playboy calendar denoting the end of the universe...every year. What happens after the calendar runs out of days? Why, you cut out all the hot pictures, put them in an album or put them up in the garage, then go out and buy the next year's edition. Maybe it is the end of the world if your wife finds it, but otherwise it's the end of a cycle.

One of the interesting things is that the planets will be lined up. Disaster upon disaster! The end is nigh! Oh, yeah, except it happens every 23K years or so. Ho, hum.

But wait... supposedly the Sun will pass through the galactic equator. Oops...that actually takes place for decades at a time. Oh, and it's an arbitrary thing that has no real meaning. Galactic stuff moves in a different time scale. Trust me, I paid for a movie ticket and sat through Big Trouble in Little China, so I know.

It now appears a Dutch team has re-calculated the calendar, and the end of the cycle is in 2200, not 2012. But since when does that matter to Hollywood? It doesn't! So Yes, there is a disaster flick called 2012, and it has so many disasters it turns into a comedy. Morwen likens it to Populous: The Movie. Personally, I'd much prefer to watch Morwen's other disaster movie: Volcano Full of Starving Bears. It makes Snakes on a Plane seem like Snakes on a Plane, except good.

Well. I know it's been a while, but remember the world ending on December 21, 2012? If not you probably remember the hype around the "Mayan Apocalypse" in 2012, a hype that started building way before the presumed date. One of the proponents of this hype was Roland Emmerich's "just one more" disaster movie, creatively titled 2012.

What fascinates me about doomsday scenarios is how people deal with them. As the date was getting closer, people around the world started panic buying things like candles (China) or kerosene (Russia), and the market for bomb shelters suddenly exploded in the United States.

All these preparations for a nonexistent disaster provide a lot of hilarity especially in hindsight. My favorite reaction to the doomsday scenario however came from a person refuting it. Of course this was on the internet, in a "review" of the 2012 movie. Unfortunately I couldn't find said review anymore, it's probably been deleted, but I remember it well. It's necessary to mention it was written before December 2012.

The "reasoning" in the review was the following: The scenario the film lays out, with the apocalypse hitting by the end of 2012 is improbable because the reviewer had checked Wikipedia, and Wikipedia said there are movies planned for release in 2013! Why would movie producers invest in projects they will never be able to release? Ergo, the film's premise is not just wrong, but insincere, which makes it a bad movie.

This is the kind of thinking that's so perplexingly out of touch with reality it becomes inspiring.