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Mayans Now Say They Were Only Predicting The End of the Republican Party

12/26/2012

Statue of Mayan prophet

It is more than seventy two hours since the Mayan Apocalypse was supposed to render the earth uninhabitable and from the view outside my window, it looks like we're going to have to wait for global warming to do that after all. Looking for a little post-Armageddon analysis I headed over to Berto's Breakfast Drive-Thru where the only Mayan I know personally, José (Joe) Mayan works as an egg cook.

Demand for eggs falls off about mid-day, so around noon Joe and I each grabbed an adult beverage and sat outside by the grease trap. I expected him to be embarrassed by the fact we were still fully encased in our mortal bodies enjoying a cold Carta Blanca the day after his people had predicted a final fiery end for Earth, but Joe was nonplussed.

"We Mayans never said the world was going to end anyway. We said it was going to mark the start of a new era for Earth and now it is apparent that my wise ancestors, who were making sage predictions when your ancestors were living in medieval mud, meant that on 12/12/21, the Republican Party would end."

That's a pretty convenient alternate explanation, Joe. Aren't you a little self-conscious about all these people panicking about the Final Day and then it just turns out to be a bad day for John Boehner?

"And some bad day, huh? Turns out the rest of the Republicans would have serious reservations about following him backstage at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, let alone passing Plan B. Don't forget last week, when Mitch McConnell filibustered himself. It's like the Democrats said 'Make our day. Go filibuster yourself, Mitch.' That's something a Mayan would never say."

Most Mayans don't even know what a filibuster is.

"Neither do most Americans, but mostly we wouldn't say it because there are no Mayans named Mitch."

This is all pretty weak, Joe. You sound like Karl Rove explaining how he actually won when he lost the election.

"I like to think of myself as being more like Newt Gingrich explaining how cheating on his wives brought him closer to God. But the accuracy of the prediction isn't the most important thing. The important thing is that we are going to be living on a Republican-free Earth! Do you know what that means?"

You tell me.

"People who holler about American exceptionalism and then threaten to secede when they lose the election can turn in their elephant hats! People who think it's perfectly ok for everybody to have car insurance but a ghastly form of Bolshevism for everyone to have health insurance can drive their cars off the nearest cliff! Women who are raped can get pregnant again!"

That all sounds great, Joe, but...

"But what? It's a brand new world! And my far-seeing ancestors predicted it! Maya! Maya! Mayans! We rock, dude."

Sounds great, Joe, is what I said, but I was already starting to have doubts. No more transvaginal probers, no more lawmakers who spoke of God's will as if they golfed with the Guy, no more UN army resisters or dinosaur riders. No more lobbyists who claimed that a milllion "armed volunteers" would keep our kids safe in school while that icon of armed volunteerism, George Zimmerman, is awaiting trial for murder. I sensed a yawning shortage of material in the new era. Sure, I'd still have the Democrats, but what good are they now that Spitzer has sworn off hookers and Anthony Weiner keeps his underwear and his Twitter account in separate locations?

I started to be overcome by a feeling of depression. It felt like the end of the world.

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Doing the Apocalypso

12/21/2012

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It is morning on the Left Coast, on the latest predicted day of the Earth's end and so far everything looks disturbingly normal, here at least. We Apocalypse aficionados can only hope and pray that God is playing Whack-A-Mole with the Himalayas.

Wait, was that a tremor?

So what if it was? We Californians have earthquakes on a regular basis, some of them disturbingly large, but none large enough to end the world. So far. Anyway, it was just a trash truck.

Look! Something is hovering outside my window! Is it the phantom planet Niburu, come to shatter our Earth into uninhabitable chunks?

No, it's just another process server. Now I have to finish this blog post hiding under my desk while he knocks away at the door. The guy must have calluses on his knuckles the size of donut holes. It's the price I pay for living in this litigious society, rather than in the Central American rain forest, where many Final Days fans are gathered to witness the Earth's end among my spiritual ancestors, the ghosts of the ancient Mayans. Certainly if I had been alive in those times and found a giant round rock in the jungle I would not have hesitated to carve a prediction for the end of the world on it, because playing a massive practical joke on people a thousand years in the future is one way to show you're having a worthwhile civilization.

But if the world doesn't end, and it looks distinctly non-Armageddonish right now, we are looking at a bleak, no Apocalypse future, at least until somebody else adds up the ages of the Prophets plus the number of letters in the New Testament plus the bust sizes of Kardashian sisters in centimeters or some other such soothsaying arithmetic and comes up with another Biblically inspired date for the air to be let out of this balloon we call Earth, or they find another ancient race that had predicted Doomsday for we moderns long after their civilization had safely sputtered out. Barring that, we humans will have to live in a world with no scheduled planetary collisions or Raptures. A lot of people are going to be disappointed by this, although my creditors have been betting on it.

The only hope remaining for the end of everything is the Computer Game theory of this universe's existence, which is that the entire known cosmos is a computer game being played by advanced beings. The German scientists who are testing this theory seem to think that our universe is being played by a giant, responsible government agency in the Uber-Universe, but there's no way they can know that. It might be being run on the computer of a sneaky, cheating ultra-advanced alien husband, who's just screwing with it until his wife goes to bed so he can resume checking out profiles on plentyofadvancedaliens.com. Or a lonely, shy, physically unattractive Superior Being who hasn't had sex for several billion of our years and is about to click "Exit" on the entire human experience in favor of some incomprehensibly futuristic alien porn.

That Apocalypse is even worse than the current one. It lacks all drama. To be a truly great Apocalypse, the event needs a prophet and believers. Even if you believe in the computer-game model of existence, you can't claim to know when the entire universe is going to go blue screen. There are no Four Horsemen, no moon dripping blood, no creepy ancient predictions, no eternal flames for the wicked, no heaven for the pure of heart. Jesus wouldn't come back. Of course, according to the theory, He was never here in the first place.

We'd merely wink out of existence, to be replaced by the words "Permanent Fatal Error." Which might be appropriate, but the feeling here is that it's not going to happen today.

We'll just mutter something much less self-aware, like "TGIF," and go about our business.

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Santa Claus Versus The Mayans

12/10/2012

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World-class sleigh rider

World class world ender

Now that we are just a few days away from the most boring Apocalypse of all time, it occurs to me that it actually happening would be the only victory we anti-Yuletide warriors could ever hope for over Christmas.

Not that I am in favor of either the Mayan end times or Christmas. It shows a total lack of cajones on the ancient Mayans part, them predicting the world to end a thousand years after all of them would be safely dead. If you're going to predict Armageddon, at least stick around to be engulfed by it is the feeling here. Still, I was at Trader Joe's this morning and Joe was playing "Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart" on the store soundtrack and I thought that if there ever was a good time to be hit by the phantom planet Nibiru, it would be before that song was over.

For those of you who have never heard of the phantom planet Nibiru, some of the Mayan world enders theorize that it is going to clean our clocks on December 21st. Regular astronomers point out that if some planet was going to plow into Earth on the 21st, we would be able to see it in the sky right now. With a telescope you could probably read some hostile graffiti painted on it, like the kind airmen scribble on bombs they plan to drop. "Terra Firma You're Gonna Squirma," for example, or "In Your Face, Human Race."

For those of you who have never heard "Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart," it is a song that was mined from the vast treacle mines that lie beneath the North Pole.[1] Lyrically sappy and musically deficient, like all Christmas music, or at least all Christmas music written since the Middle Ages, it is an auditory offense of the first order. And it is far from the worst Christmas song. That honor belongs to Alvin and the Chipmunks "Christmas Don't Be Late." The feeling of paralytic despair that can overcome a person after listening to just one chorus of this song can only be cured by going out to a forest and blowing actual live chipmunks into bits with a shotgun. As many as you can, until you run out of ammo. Only then will the ringing in your ears drown out the awful otoscopic memory. I've tried this, and it works.

Even the Mayan Apocalypsos can't make up their minds whether the Earth is going to be crushed under the cosmic wheel on the 21st or whether the day is going to usher in a new era of human awareness like the Age of Aquarius was supposed to do back in the day, as if there was barely a difference between the obliteration of the planet and all the Syrians suddenly dropping their guns and hugging each other.

Both seem equally unlikely, but on the off chance that the Mayans are /were right, and the Earth dissolves like a taco shop napkin in a hot sauce spill on the solstice, you'll never have to deal with your credit card balances, take down your Christmas lights or pay a guy with a pickup truck to take your tree to the dump again.

Of course, you will miss Christmas Day itself, the only day in the last six weeks that nobody tries to sell you anything, your kids are at least momentarily grateful to you for spending your life wallowing in debt on their behalf, you've got a refrigerator full of beer and a cabinet full of grog and there are seventy-eight or so football games on.

So the end of the world would be worse. If you don't believe that, I've got some real estate I'd like to sell you. It's on Nibiru.

[1] Actually, the Arctic Ocean lies beneath the North Pole, but if any of you Christmas crazies want to go up there and try to dig in the treacle mines, be my guest.

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Mayan End of the World Lousy So Far, Apocalypse Critics Say

1/28/2012

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Leading connoisseurs of End of Days predictions say the Mayan-predicted final days of earth in December of this year are one of the most dismal, anticlimactic anticipated apocalypses ever.

"What you'd expect from the Mayans," one critic said. "They gave up a once-great civilization to just hang around in the jungle. The original pre-Columbian slackers is what they are, blithely predicting the end of the world in a couple thousand years and then just going back to planting squash and beans. Pretty damn irresponsible, if not outright boring."

Another end-times savvy savant agreed, although in the Mayans' defense, he added, "We're only a year away from one of the greatest apocalypses ever, the Harold Camping 2011 scheduled Rapture. We had people buying ads on billboards, people selling their homes and driving around the country in RV's all trying to persuade us that Jesus was standing on the doormat of humanity's destiny. Sure, they gave us great entertainment value, but these were Americans with high-speed Internet connections and what they regarded as pointless retirement accounts to spend. The Mayans are poor, Third World subsistence farmers. Probably many of them don't even know they've predicted the end of Earth."

Another expert was less charitable. "So what? Anybody can talk the Armageddon talk, but they've got to walk the Doomsday walk. The Hale-Boppers set the standard there, buying new Nikes and poisoning themselves to get their message across. The Mayans have plenty of old pyramids that could be spruced up in time for human sacrifices to celebrate the final ka-boom! Clean out the old blood-gutters and sharpen up those obsidian knives! Just do it!"

Although a genuine Mayan could not be located to comment on these allegations, a travel agent noted that bookings for trips to the Mayan heartland were sharply up starting in December 2012. "Apparently, some people feel that Mayan country is the place to be when the cosmos implodes, although it seems logical to expect that you're going to have a nice view of Earth's final moment wherever you happen to be. The Mayans are traditionally a very hospitable people. Just remember, if they start slinging squash at you, you're probably standing in their yard. Don't be offended. They're entitled to make a few bucks off of their End Times. Nobody paid them for that lousy movie, and they don't make a dime off those all those rambling websites. They've finally got the rest of humanity's attention with their uniquely Central American tale of final annihilation, and it's their fifteen minutes, even if it happens to be the last fifteen minutes. The final cataclysm could be great for the Mayans. It's their chance to cash in. If they don't, it's a shame, but…"

Go ahead, say it.

"But it's not like it’s the end of the world."

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The Bright Side of the Apocalypse

5/8/2011

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Apparently, the end of the world is scheduled sooner than both of my readers have been thinking. Most of us, especially those of us who keep up with the latest movies, felt we had until December of 2012, when the ancient Mayan calendar predicts the wheels will come off the cosmos. A school of thought has now surfaced indicating that the Mayans were full of ancient feces. Now it develops that the world will end on May 21st of this year, at around six pm, according to Harold Camping, the founder of a Christian radio network called Family Radio.

That's less than two weeks away. Mr. Camping makes the six o'clock call, saying that monstrous earthquakes will begin then "around the Pacific Rim," where this author happens to live, and only about ninety or a hundred feet from it, depending on the tide. It will circle around the globe with the sun until the Apocalypse is complete about a day later. The surface of the Earth will pop like corn in a microwave while all believers will be Hoovered into Heaven in the process called the Rapture. Sinners will be left clinging bleakly to the ruined soil, watching the special effects ordained by the Book of Revelations, including the Antichrist, the battle of Armageddon and the end of all HBO miniseries forever.

Mr. Camping makes his prediction based on the premise that, among other things, 5/21/2011 will mark the day that it has been exactly 7,000 years since Noah's flood. If you've been keeping count at home, you'd know if he was off by a couple weeks, but at this location we're going to take his word for it.

Upon hearing of the imminent End of Days, this reporter contacted a spokesman for the Universal Church Triumphant of the Apathetic Agnostic (formal motto "We Don't Know and We Don't Care") for a reaction from the opposing camp and found it surprisingly positive. When asked about the Rapture, the spokesman replied "Well, we're a tad doubtful about the six PM call, since the Pacific Rim comprises about half the time zones on the planet and Mr. Camping did unsuccessfully predict the end of the world back in 1994, but we're praying he's right this time."

Is that true?

"No, that was irony. Let's just say we're hoping for it optimistically."

Really? The end of time? The utter destruction of all humanity?

"Had to happen sooner or later anyway. If you'll check your facts, you'll note that while the Rapture is scheduled for May 21st, the final dissolution of the cosmos isn't until October 21st. That gives us 153 days days of peace and quiet with Camping and hopefully, the rest of born-again Christianity having been slurped up into Heaven by the giant straw of God's mercy. That's a hundred and fifty-three days we can sleep in on Sunday, tolerate homosexuality, believe in evolution, fail to pray in public schools and use the Lord's name in vain when we injure ourselves accidentally without having to listen to some pious hemorrhoid tell us we're going to Hell for it."

But won't we, in fact, be going to Hell?

"There is that. On the other hand, we've got six months to plea-bargain our way out of it. Certainly, most of the attorneys on earth aren't going to get beamed into Heaven, so we'll have all the legal talent on the planet with which to seek a lighter sentence. Instead of an eternity of fiery damnation, maybe we can get off with supervised probation."

According to the Bible, isn't that what we have now?

"And so far it's worked out fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Condemning seven billion living souls to Hell at once is bound to cause logistical problems. No matter how hot they keep the place, adding that many room-temperature souls to it at once is bound to cool things off. I'm not saying it's going to freeze over, but…"

But what about the people who have devoted their lives to spreading the word about the end? Like Adam Larsen of Kansas, who's driving an RV around the country warning people of their coming doom. He's quoted as saying, "My favorite pastime is raccoon hunting, I've had to give that up. But this task is far more important."

"So, Armageddon is going to take the pressure off the raccoons as well. More good news. We're only worried that when Mr. Larsen gets funneled up to eternity, nobody's going to be behind the wheel of that RV. The end of the world is going to be dangerous enough without a lot of unmanned machinery rolling around. I expect the Mothers Against Raptured Driving will have a spike in donations on May 22nd."

The spokesman's other line was ringing in the background, and he excused himself to answer it. "Got to go," he said upon his return. "That was the Mayans. They're so ticked off about their eschatological fifteen minutes getting pre-empted, they're moving up their end of the world to this weekend. Hate to cut you short, but it's our responsibility to start not caring about that, either."

But which of the predictions is the correct one?

"Can't tell," he replied. "Just don't buy season tickets to anything is my advice."

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