ENJOYING THE END OF THE WORLD

If you’re planning to mark the end of the world with a trip to Mexico in 2012, I’d suggest making reservations now! The end of the world is making for big business south of the border with an estimated 52 million tourists expected to visit Mexico next year. Part of the influx of tourists is attributed to Mexican President Felipe Calderon's tourism campaign: "Mundo Maya 2012" (Mayan World 2012).

A few days ago, I mentioned Tapachula, the Mexican town on the border with Guatemala that started a countdown to Doomsday clock on December 21. It is expected to attract many visitors interested in, well, yes, the clock, but also local Mayan monuments.

The tourism board at Cancun and Playa del Carmen says that regardless of a person’s beliefs regarding the end of the world, “…come and be part off a very historic experience.”

If the world does blow up, won’t that be historic as hell?

Seriously, Cancun and Playa del Carmen offer great tourist sites including the Tulum, Palenque and Chichen ruins. In addition, resort visitors are being invited to place photos and messages in time capsules that will be opened in 2062. Write clearly, please, we have no idea what or how people will communicate in half a century. Some schools have already abandoned cursive writing as a subject.

The good folks at Cancun and Playa del Carmen suggest, however, if you plan to go there, make reservations soon.

Whether or not it will be ready for Doomsday, the Mexican government is building a tourist hotel at the Calakmul reserve in Campeche to accommodate visitors to the Calakmul archaeological site which was a prevailing Mayan city and now is a popular tourist destination.

Also just in time for Doomsday, the Yucatan government in June plans to open its $30 million Maya museum in Merida that will house 750,000 Mayan artifacts.

And finally, CNN Global reports that the good people at Xunantunich, an historical stone site in the Cayo District of Belize, will hold a festival and concert inside the Xunantunich ruins. A highlight of the event will be a “torch run,” featuring torches arriving from four directions to “usher in the next 5,125 years.”

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

END OF THE WORLD OBSERVATIONS FROM EVERYWHERE

The Guardian in London covered an art exhibit entitled “Apocalypse,” a showing of the doom-and-gloom, end of the world art work by 19^th-century artist John Martin. The works on display depict great vistas of cities aflame, falling skies, crushing boulders and so on and so forth. The exhibit has been on display for months and has attracted large crowds even though visitors pay £14 (just shy of $22) for tickets.

In Belize, according to PRWEB, the town of Chaa (sic) Creek is planning to host a year of events leading up to the magical date of December 12, 2012. According to Lucy Fleming of Chaa Creek, over the coming year there will be special tours, activities, events, seminars and workshops celebrating the Maya culture and civilization. It all kicked off on this past December 21 with a Maya breakfast featuring food from Chaa Creek’s Maya organic farm along with steaming mugs of Xocoatl, “the earliest form of hot chocolate made from roasted local cacao beans.” Basically, Chaa Creek saw a buck to be made from all of the nonsense and is putting together tourist activities while promoting Mayan history and culture.

GoGirlfriend.com, a site dealing with travel, issued a challenge to those believing the world will end: “…since you believe in the demise of the world on December 21^st, 2012, and that you will no longer be in need of money after that date, that you donate your savings to GoGirlfriend. We, who believe this is but a "Mayan New Year's" celebration, will take the gamble that we'll be around after the Dec. 21^st, 2012 date, and spend your donated funds on travel. Deal ?” A PayPal donation button is included.

WCPO, Channel 9 in Cincinnati, quotes Dean Regas of the Cincinnati Observatory: "Forget what you read on websites. Don't believe movies or the History Channel. The world will not end on December 21, 2012." And, if you go to the Cincinnati Observatory you can get the insights into the “unique astronomical events happening on that "fateful" day on the 2012 Winter Solstice.”
 

And finally, according to PR Newswire and just in time for New Year’s Eve, Serralles, one of the country’s oldest businesses, which has been producing Don Q rum for 145 years and in the spirit of, well, spirits, offers three new drinks to celebrate the coming apocalyptic year:

“Enlightened” starts with 1 1/2 oz. Don Q Gran Anejo rum 3/4 oz. orange curacao liqueur 2 oz. sour mix 1 orange wedge Sugar and cinnamon mixture Orange peel twist. In a cocktail shaker, add rum, orange liqueur, sour mix and ice. Shake vigorously. Rim a martini glass with the orange wedge and then dip in the sugar and cinnamon mixture. Strain cocktail into the martini glass. Garnish with an orange peel twist.

“Apocalypse Punch” requires 1 750 ML bottle Don Q Cristal rum 1/2 bottle red wine 6 oz. fresh lime juice 6 oz. triple sec liqueur 6 oz. simple syrup 2 limes sliced in thin wheels 2 red oranges sliced in thin wheels. Add all ingredients into a large punch bowl and place in the refrigerator for at least two hours before serving. Serve over ice in a punch glass.

BlackBeard's Rapture (aka:Dark & Stormy) calls for 2 oz. BlackBeard Spiced Rum 3/4 oz. lime juice 1/2 oz. ginger juice 1/2 oz. simple syrup (dissolve equal parts sugar in hot water) Ginger beer. In a cocktail shaker, combine the first 4 ingredients, fill with ice and shake vigorously until well chilled. Strain into an ice-filled highball glass and fill to top with ginger beer. Garnish with a lime wedge and candied ginger.

I offer these recipes because all of this end-of-the-world baloney requires a certain amount of libation to wash it down.

DOOMSDAY AS A TOURIST TRAP

The city of Tapachula in southern Mexico has hopped onto the Doomsday 12-21-12 bandwagon in a huge way. On December 21, they began counting down on their official doomsday clock. Manolo Alfonso Pinot, regional director of state tourism in Chiapas was honest about their motives.

"If people are interested, we have to take advantage of this," he said. He also added that he doesn’t believe that the world will end. Whew! What a relief! I’d be super-bummed if the head of tourism in Chiapas was luring people to his state knowing that the end of the world was just around the corner. Talk about cynical!

Of course, poor Tapachula needs a positive image boost – wait, that’s a little ironic, isn’t it what with the end of the world and all? – since it is a border town through which Central American migrants pass on their way to the US.

On the other hand, doomsday tourists can also visit Izapa where a number of Mayan monuments – known as stelae – have been discovered.

And this additional tidbit from The New Zealand Herald (this end of the world stuff is viral).

“At Izapa, close to the Tajumulco volcano, Pinot says a Mesoamerican ball court, a carved stone and the throne of the Izapa ruler face a straight line that on Dec. 21, 2012 is expected to align with the planets.”

Wow! Those crafty Mayans.

December212012.com (http://www.december212012.com) tells us to watch for signs and indicators of dramatic…and devastating changes” that will announce the end of days. The site lists these “rare” events: epidemics, political upheavals, natural disasters and uncommon weather patterns. Rare, right?  We haven’t seen anything like that in 2011 or 2010 or…okay, you get the picture.

Of course, in fairness, December212012.com also mentions such rare calamities as “asteroid or meteor impacts” and – I love this one! – collisions with other planets.

¿YO, HOMBRE, ES ESTE EL EXTREMO DEL MUNDO?*

On December 4, the Spanish-language channel of the Discovery network premiered “Apocalipsis Maya,” a three-part series on the end of the world according to the fabled Mayan calendar. In addition to talking with contemporary Mayan priests, archaeologists and true believers, they interview people across modern America who believe an apocalypse is coming, and visit small communities where bunker engineers and ark builders are running booming businesses amid fears of an impending catastrophe.

If there is one common thread that runs through the end of the world scenarios, it’s “the world is coming to an end and I’m going to make a buck in the process.”

Of course Ark architects and bunker builders will happily take people’s money to build boats and shelters. The customer is always right. And if they’re not, well the ark can be a weekend getaway in 2013 and beyond and that new bunker will make a swell cellar. (OK, if there’s a Great Flood, an ark will be swell, but a bunker? Phooey! It’ll just be a big, dark fish bowl in your backyard.)

The Internet is chalked full of bunker builders. Bunkers are available for commercial, military, government and, of course, residential purposes. Some bunkers appear to be worthy of Cold War paranoia and others ideal for narco-traffickers to hide from other narco-traffickers or anti-narco-traffickers.

Ark builders are out there, but not as visible. However, one fellow in Russia, an engineer named Evgeny Ubiyko, has designed and built “an $80,000 emergency pod that can survive magma and magnetic storms.” If the pod rolls down a hill, people inside will survive. It floats, too. But most importantly, Ubiyko believes his design is vital to the survival of, well, if not the world, certainly select Russians, and he is beseeching Putin’s government to buy thousands of them as soon as possible.

However, Valdimer Putin, the most interesting man in the world (and if you don’t believe me, just read up on what the guy does, it’s truly inspiring – well, as inspiring as an old KGB agent can be; however, he is a worthy successor to Jimmy Bond’s Blofeld) would likely look at Ubiyko and laugh and tell him “The world will not end until the vodka is gone!”

*Yo, man, is this the end of the world?

RUNAWAY PLANET X WILL SMACK EARTH

(AND IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, BUY THE DVD, VHS OR BOOK!)

 

A lot of doomsday gobbledygook is so convoluted it’s mind numbing to attempt to sort out. Take the Planet X scenario. Simply put, a giant planet or red star on an elliptical orbit that brings it near earth every 3600 years, will smash into earth in…yes, you guessed it…2012, maybe around December 21 and but possible earlier, perhaps in the spring and summer. Apparently the doomsday prophets need a nice, wide margin for error.

Supposedly, Planet X is our solar system’s 10^th planet and has been photographed by the Russians, but it was discovered by the Sumerians oodles of years ago! That’s right, the Bronze Age Sumerians were aware of the mysterious Planet X/red star bound to crash into earth. Of course, there are some believers that the Sumerians left evidence that they communicated with being from another world…Planet X. If that’s true, then maybe the aliens told them to watch the heavens for a big round object that’s going to smush us like bugs under an iron boot.

To give credence to the Planet X theory, some doomsayers use a biblical reference to support their claim. And, naturally, the reference is from Revelations.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp…And the name of the star is called Wormwood…and many men died… (Revelations 8:10-11)

On one website was this: “Some cite other names for Planet X, including ‘Wormwood.’ This is prophetic since the Holy Bible does, in fact, prophesy catastrophic earth changes to occur due to a star by this name.”

Neatly packaged, eh? Prophetic, not so much. The Bible mentions a star called “Wormwood” and, lo and behold, some doomsayers conveniently say that Planet X is named Wormwood, although its older name is Nibiru.

There’s another bit of conspiracy theory connected to this. It seems that the Freemasons have been waiting for Planet X for a long, long time. Now, my father, uncle, some cousins, the local mortician, our next door neighbor and a ton of men I knew growing up were Freemasons. They met twice a month, had a terrific venison banquet each fall – members donated meat from their October deer hunt – and performed many civic activities, such as building parks and raising money for scholarships and charitable projects. If my father, as pragmatic a man as I’ve ever known, was alive and I went to him and said, “So, the Masons have been waiting for Planet X to come and collide with earth.” He would look at me over the top of his reading glasses and ask: “What? Where did you hear that nonsense? Have you been drinking? Did your brother drop you on your head again?” (According to family legend, he did drop me on my head when I was two.)

Like I said, it’s very convoluted. Texe Marrs (yip, that’s his name) has written a book about it. I haven’t read it because I’m not about to buy it with my own money. However, in his pitch, Marrs concludes with this:

“(Planet X)…teaching is at the very core of the Secret Doctrine of Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy, of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology, and of Freemasonry's Sirius mystery teachings. But as I show on my startling new video, the events surrounding the return of Planet X—The Dark Red Star on a Collision Course with Earth (Available in VHS or DVD), are much, much more unsettling than what the expectant world has been duped into accepting as fact.

“The truth, my friends, isn't "out there somewhere," as they proclaim on the popular TV series, The X-Files. It's found only in the prophetic pages of the Holy Bible. Isn't it time therefore, that Christians asked, what does God have to say about the tumultuous coming of Planet X?”

At the risk of sounding blasphemous, might God be asking: “Planet X? What’s Planet X?”

DOOMED BY A SOLAR FLARE!

A solar flare will destroy earth! That’s one of the prevailing doomsday scenarios. We’re all going to end up as barbecue!

Talk about nonsense! Solar flares occasionally screw around with satellite transmissions, but thus far, they haven’t turned any of our planets into grilled treats.

According to Rise Earth (http://www.riseearth.com/ ), this paranoid fantasy about solar flares sees the sun ending an “11-year cycle known as solar maximum. When it does reach this peak on or around Dec. 21, 2012, the sun will unleash giant solar flares toward the Earth, causing unparalleled havoc.”

On November10 of this year, NASA issued a press release declaring that a solar flare WILL NOT destroy the earth. "Most importantly, however, there simply isn't enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth," the space agency explained.

NASA also points out:

“The explosive heat of a solar flare can't make it all the way to our globe, but electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles certainly can. Solar flares can temporarily alter the upper atmosphere creating disruptions with signal transmission from, say, a GPS satellite to Earth causing it to be off by many yards. Another phenomenon produced by the sun could be even more disruptive. Known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), these solar explosions propel bursts of particles and electromagnetic fluctuations into Earth's atmosphere.  Those fluctuations could induce electric fluctuations at ground level that could blow out transformers in power grids. The CME's particles can also collide with crucial electronics onboard a satellite and disrupt its systems.

“In an increasingly technological world, where almost everyone relies on cell phones and GPS controls not just your in-car map system, but also airplane navigation and the extremely accurate clocks that govern financial transactions, space weather is a serious matter.”

Rest easy my friends, you may die in 2012, but it is very unlikely you will die simmering like a brisket in an oven as the result of a solar flare. Fear not the moronic prediction of death by solar flare!

Oh, and by the by, not to be complete obnoxious, but if a solar flare creates chaos with cell phones or GPS devices, I’m safe; I own neither!

MERRY CHRISTMAS! ENJOY IT, IT MAYBE OUR LAST ONE!

Well, Doomsday may be looming next December, but for now, it’s Christmas 2011. It’s a time for family and friends and celebrating however you celebrate. It’s a time for laughter and love, good food and good drink and it is not a time to worry about or discuss all of the nonsensical Doomsday baloney!

ENJOY THE DAY!

PEACE AND GOOD WILL TO EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE!

REMEBERING Y2K

Y2K!

Wow, what a pain-in-the-ass.

Here’s the thing, Y2K – the Millennium bug – was a problem primarily in digital records. Most records were dated, say, 96 rather than 1996 or 85 rather than 1985 or whatever. When 2000 rolled over, 99 would become 00 and everything would be fouled up.

I remember a woman on the Nightly News showing a reporter her basement filled with food. Why? Because Y2K was going to shut-down computers and cause world-wide panic and bla, bla, bla!  

End of Days!

I was working for the Colorado Community College System doing PR and we put our two or three Y2K press releases during the waning months of 1999. Some time earlier, a group of techs started going through the system’s files – tens-of-thousands of them – and changing the two digit numbers to four digit numbers. By the time the dreaded Y2K rolled over to 01-01-2000 there was nary a hitch.

That held true, so far as we know, throughout the world when 2000 became a reality. I recall a video rental store somewhere in New England changed few thousand dollars for a rental due to a Y2K error, but not much else; at least not much else that was reported. There is speculation that big companies with Y2K problems never made them public. Still, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Harken back to December 31, 999. The Apocrypha (biblical) proclaimed that the Last Judgment would come one thousand years after the birth of Jesus (which was, by the way, ironically in 04 BC due to some early miscalculations). Some reports say that farmers planted no crops, after all, why bother if the world was ending? Apparently, many public documents of the time opened with "As the world is now drawing to a close . . ." The James Randi Foundation Website reports that “Pope Sylvester II and Emperor Otto III momentarily mended their considerable political differences in anticipation of a certain leveling of those matters.” That is, the end of days!

It’s not hard to imagine a lot of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth and wailing as 999 came to an end. And it’s also not hard to imagine that more than a few farmers felt like asses when New Years Day 1000 dawned and the grain bins were shockingly low. Planting season in 1000 must have been a busy, busy time.

Y2K or the Apocrypha or whatever, some people always seem to be looking for any excuse to end the world.

WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE WANT THE WORLD TO END? Part II

                                            OR, WHO GOT DROPPED ON THEIR HEAD?

PART TWO

So back to the main point: Why do people want the world to come to an end?

I’ve asked myself that a hundred times. It really doesn’t make much sense. In searching the Web, though, I’ve found a few tidbits.

Some people don’t mean the literal destruction of earth and the eradication of humans, but rather they want “a new way of life.”

Not the End Time™ Ministries, apparently. Its website has an interesting set of explanations for the end of the world as we know it and the return of Christ. Just an aside, End Time™ Ministries offers a DVD “Understanding the End Time” for a mere $99 and, according to the promo, lesson six explains the “Time-line of the End.” Awesome! Not $99 awesome, but still…

End Time™ Ministries refers to a Fox News article – and we know how reliable they are – entitled “Welcome to the Apocalypse” which proclaims that “the end of the world will be painful, ugly and bleak for those on Earth…”

The article is a pitch for the Web-based series “How Will the World Really End?” at BigThink.com. The site features a series of comments by scientists discussing possible scenarios for the abrupt and brutal end of humanity and our world. Cheery things like the oceans turning to sulfur and emitting noxious poisons or an asteroid smashing us or the sun becoming a Red Giant and swallow earth and so on and so forth.

Now, I don’t want to come off as anti-Christian. I was raised a Methodist – which my father described as a people particularly adapt at “eating fried chicken and passing the plate.” Of course, he was raised in a stiff-as-starch Baptist church and he once told me that marrying my mother was an excellent excuse to exit the Baptist Church and become a Methodist. “I was sick and tired of all that hellfire-and-brimstone.”

What I can glean is this: Some people want the world to end because they’re bored or trapped in a bad life or convinced everything is going to hell in a hand basket anyway or they want an early meet-and-greet with Jesus. Whatever the reason, it all strikes me as negative, mean-spirited, selfish and defeatist. I think the world gets incrementally better every day. Sure there are wars and tragedies and mayhem of all sorts, but there, too, are advances and astounding achievements that improve the world and change it for the better.

WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE WANT THE WORLD TO END?

OR, WHO GOT DROPPED ON THEIR HEAD?

The idea of the world coming to an end is as popular as those asinine claims that the government has secret towns tucked away in remote areas of the West where they incarcerate dissidents or that Denver International Airport is going to be the capitol of the new world order. (I’ll discuss the DIA conspiracy theory at length later).

In late 1959, when I was eleven, some crackpot declared the world was coming to an end on January 1, 1960. I worried about it all through Christmas. End of the World anxiety, I suppose. It seems to me that more than a few people suffer from it. And in late ’59 I was asking myself, What if he’s right? Well, New Years Eve came and went and the world continued to survive, even though the Cold War was fairly intense at that time. Hey, let’s face it, the only time I’ve ever really thought about the world coming to an abrupt end was in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My brother was in the Navy and his ship was dispatched from the Pacific through the Panama Canal to join the blockade. Now that was a scary time. No one wanted the U.S. and the Soviet Union to start swapping missiles over the North Pole.

A blogger on ModernSurvivialOnline.com addressed the question: “Do preppers want the world to end?” (Preppers are, I assume, people preparing for the worst.)  The blogger stated, categorically that he believes the “…VAST majority of preppers out there do not want some major disaster or event to occur.”

Well that’s good news.

He continued that he stockpiles food, ammunition, medical supplies and other items in case something bad does happen and “I would want it to happen while I am still alive so that I can help my family and friends through it.”

Once, back in the late 1970s, an old friend came by the house to see us. At one point, he took me out to his car, opened the trunk and showed me an M-15 rifle. Now, for those familiar with the M-16 rifle used by U.S. troops in Vietnam, you probably know that the M-15 is the exact same rifle, but is not fully automatic. I asked my friend why he had it.

After explaining that a gunsmith can easily convert an M-15 to an M-16, he told me: “I’m going to be a leader in the Great Food Wars.”

“What Great Food Wars?”

“They’re coming. There’ll be rioting in the streets, fighting for food…”

Holy Crap! My friend’s train had derailed or at least taken the wrong spur. Thirty-plus years later and no Food Wars in America. Maybe in Africa and parts of Asia, but not here.  

My point is this: It is a good thing to have a disaster kit in your house. Some water stockpiled, food, candles, flashlight, etc. The Center for Disease Control has a nice section on its website about surviving a zombie apocalypse as a frame of reference for people to become “preppers” for disasters that might hit: floods, tornados, hurricanes, fires, etc.

However, many people squawking on about the end of the world appear to have a hero-complex; they want to world to end so they can to emerge from the ruins like Charleton Heston in Omega Man or the Wolverines in the highly improbable Red Dawn.

Oh, and it’s also about getting morons to spend money on an endless parade of end-of-the-world crap.

Welcome to the Countdown to the End of the World...NOT!

Well, folks, here it is, December 21, 2011! A year from now, a mere 366 days – remember 2012 is a Leap Year – the world is coming to an end…or an interesting new beginning…or our Reptilian Overlords are going to rise out of Denver International Airport and drive us before them while they gleefully listen to “the lamentations of our women.”

Wait, maybe it’s not Reptilian Overlords or even our Republican Overlords, maybe it’s Free Masons or Knights Templers or the Luminati or worse, Egyptian Luminati! …Oh my God! What if it’s Planet X - Nibiru - no longer just screwing around with Uranus and Neptune but with the whole darn solar system and taking aim at earth?

Run for your lives! For heaven’s sake, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!

As a target date for Doomsday, December 21, 2012 is a conspiracy buff’s masturbatory delight. It’s the whole enchilada all rolled up into one giant paranoid fantasy, one enormous delusion! It is purported that there are Bible codes delineating it and it was the last thing Nostradamus wrote about. Some predict that the earth’s poles are going to shift in 2012 and that on the magical date – December 21, 2012 – a galactic alignment in the heavens and it’s going to be “hello, oblivion!” And, of course there’s the biggie of all biggies: The Mayan Calendar ends on 12-21-2012!

OH NO, SAY IT AIN’T SO! Not the Mayan calendar! Holy crap! Those Mayans were clearly on to something. Yes, sir. They had their calendar and…and their bows and arrows and their bronze axes…and…and…well, whatever else, so surely they knew! You betcha! It’s the End of Days!

And if you don’t believe me, there are T-shirts and books and Websites where you can buy survival supplies and oh so much more!

Okay, okay I jest. I don’t take all this hoo-ha seriously. However, a lot of people do. There are scads of Websites and blogs and books and, I suppose, street preachers and prophets purporting to know that the world will end December 21, 2012. That means this Christmas is our last! What a rip-off! Why couldn’t it come on December 26, 2012? The day after Christmas is always depressing anyway. So the world ends, a lot of us would be too hung over or bloated on pie and candy and cake and turkey or ham or meat-like-veggie-substitutes to really care. But, no, we have to sacrifice Christmas 2012 to appease the fates that have marked us for extinction. That really blows!

Thus, for the next 366 days…until the world ends…I’m going to blog about the world ending and related nonsense. If it does end on 12-21-2012, won’t my face be red? Believers can thumb their noses at me and point and laugh and… Oh, no, wait. They won’t be able to do any of that because they’ll be gone and I’ll be gone. Ha! So for me it’s a win-win situation. If the world ends – KA-POW! – no one will be around to mock me and I won’t be around to be mocked and if it doesn’t end, I can mock the believers and point at them and laugh for years to come!

See you tomorrow…