Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Primitive people and prior civilizations get a lot of respect from us here in the US, where we have the least amount of primitive people and possibly also the least amount of civilization ever achieved. The Native Americans we nearly exterminated so we could consummate the real estate deal that made us the Leader of the Free World are held in deep admiration, as people who lived at one with nature, just killing the bits of it they needed to survive.  Their descendants are allowed to operate casinos that swallow most of our elderly population’s Social Security checks every month, and in nearly every national park or monument through which they once freely roamed, there is an exhibit of Native American clothing, canoes and a recording of some of their most boring legends that the seeker after ancient lore can suffer through.

Likewise in other parts of the world. The more vanished the civilization, the more respect it gets. The ancient Egyptians are credited for inventing written language and pyramids and the Sumerians beer. We think of these peoples as utterly gone, because from what we know of their history, they don’t seem much like the jihadi types that inhabit their old neighborhood now, who blow up ruins and behead you for drinking beer.

The equally ancient Hindu civilization gets no love. Why? They haven’t vanished, and every time you step out for a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, check into a motel or visit your proctologist, you are reminded of that. The Mayan civilization’s cred is so huge they nearly caused the end of the world a few years ago, something they couldn’t have achieved if they still existed, whereas the many Roman doomsayers of their late empire can’t even make the back pages of the National Enquirer. That is because everybody knows that the Romans quit ruling the world to become Italians and devote their lives to arguing with the French about who has better food.

The achievements of the ancients, creating sweeping empires, discovering new lands, and leaving us crumbly old stuff can be intimidating to the average American, most of whose best moment on any given day is throwing out those leftover breadsticks from the Olive Garden instead of dipping them in butter and having them for breakfast. This column is here to help. Below you’ll find a list of ten things the wisest Pharaoh or the most magical Inca couldn’t figure out if their civilization depended on it, but every twelve-year-old American knows like the back of his or her hand:

Putting the tray table in the upright and locked position.

Pressing ESC to exit full screen.

Any TV remote.

Spray cooking oil. Hell, spray anything.
 
How to open a bag of microwave popcorn without burning your fingertips. I mean, hand old Ramses a bag of the stuff right after the microwaves dings and watch him howl.  

Tip 20% or your waitperson is going to tell everybody else in the restaurant that you're a jerk.

Anything about gluten.

Digital enhancement, Adobe Photoshop, or green screens.

Upskirt videos. Not invented by the ancients, in spite of the fact that many of them wore skirts.
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What to do when your password is too weak.

I could go on and on. What did the ancients do with their time, anyway? Invented civilizations out of sheer boredom is the theory here. 

Prestidigitation has always been a popular sport. The foretelling of the future is attempted every day by everyone who buys either stocks or health insurance. There have been famous seers in the past, like Nostradamus, who is said to have predicted many future occurrences, but if you research the guy's actual foretellings, you'll find they are couched in pretty vague terms, so they could apply to just about anything that could happen. Nothing really specific gets envisioned. For example, the Nostra-man never said, "On September 25, 2015, a man named John Boehner, whose name can be comically mispronounced "boner," will resign as Speaker of the US House of Representatives, leaving behind only a note saying 'F*ck all of you,' written on a cocktail napkin."

This is wisdom on the part of that ancient, because the one thing that can be said for certain about the future is that it is unknowable. Nobody can say for sure what will happen in it, but I'm willing  to stake my reputation here on predicting things that won't happen, even though many people think they may. Here are twenty of them:

An "I don't care" button for Facebook

The race war

Most porn actresses

Final season of Game of Thrones anytime soon

Capri pants for men

The Trump Administration. Or the Cruz Administration. Or the Christie, Jindal, Paul, Fiorina et al Administrations. Especially the reign of Bush III. None of them. What a bunch of mentally forlorn ass-clowns. It's not even funny anymore.

FEMA death camps

A return to the gold standard             

Benevolent aliens

Hostile aliens

Aliens who don't give a crap

Jesus

Something that will replace video games

People stopping telling you their mutt is a "rescue" because they don't want you to think they're too poor to spend a grand on a purebred dog with crippling genetic defects.

Monochrome Skittles

Cell phones that warn you when you ought to look up.

The Grope Cam

The President videoed at the White House chillaxing with a huge fattie.

People finally paying so much attention to Caitlyn Jenner that she shuts up and goes away.

The Keystone XL Pipeline

There you have it.  Eat my dust, Nostra-D. You'll notice most of these are timed so that the verity of the foreseeing can be determined in the none-too-distant future. Most of the stuff you predicted was too far ahead for people to see if you were right or not until after you were dead, so you didn't get to be famous for it until then.

You think you would have predicted that.  

As both of my readers know, there is nothing this column enjoys more than end of the world predictions and the bitter undertone that sometimes creeps into these usually sunny pages has lately been caused by the current lack of Doomsday prophets worthy of national media attention. This is after a surfeit of them in recent years, complete with two actual dates set for mankind's appointment with final judgment, one by ancient pagans and one by modern Christians. In the egalitarian way of the cosmos, both came to nothing.

Fortunately for our general morale around here, someone named Francis Horn has produced a video called"The Last Pope." This entertainment features babbling crackpots dressed up as academics spouting off about the medieval prophecies of one St. Malachy, the archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1148.

This Malachy, perhaps to get even for being made archbishop of a place named after the sound one makes into the bushes outside the 7-11 when one has had too many shots of Jagermeister, prophesied that there would be exactly 112 more popes after the then current Pope expired, after which Rome would be destroyed and Jesus would come to judge the world. Critics of Malachy have pointed out that he made the coward's choice of predicting the final dust-up for long after he personally would be dead, sometimes called the Mayan method by Apocalypse connoisseurs, and thus escape being roasted by the final flames and also criticism if he was wrong.

"The Last Pope" seizes upon the words of Malachy to suggest that we all get ramped up for Doomsday once again, because GUESS WHAT the current Pope's number is regarding the dead Archbishop's prophecy? If you said anything other than 112 you can stop reading this now (and probably moving your lips while you are doing so) and resume playing Angry Birds.

I am sure that the producers of "The Last Pope" do a fine job of glossing over the inconsistencies in St. Malachy's visions, the most prominent being that the Archbishop predicted that the last Pope would be named "Peter of Rome" when he is actually "Francis of Argentina." Other than having the wrong name, critics of the Church agree Francis would make a fine Last Pope, although the more severe among them point out that you could have said the same thing about any Pope in the last fifteen hundred years. Francis at least seems a kindly sort, holding out the olive branch of peace to atheists and gays and proclaiming his concern for poor people, as opposed to the policies of previous Popes, which were to burn atheists, condemn gays and bleed poor people out of their last penny so they could build statues.

So if he's the last Pope at least the race of Popes is going out on a high note. As for the rest of us, I have my doubts. People experience apocalyptic events at an unfortunately high rate already. Whether it is a tanker car full of liquefied natural gas blowing up at their local train depot, an earthquake that flattens all the huts in their village, or Krakatau going off in their back yard, many people have experienced, if the majority of them only briefly, the sensation that they and everyone else around them was going to die. I am sure some of them looked around for Jesus then, and He was a no-show.

So when the big blow comes, and scientists, in their dreary way of telling us things we don't want to hear, like we're all going to be replaced by robots or that we have the same chemical composition as bathtub rings, assure us it will, the one that wipes out most of humanity, whether it's during the reign of Pope 112 or Pope 1,112, I predict there is going to be no obvious divine involvement. If there's one thing for certain about God it is that He keeps His existence on the down low. If the end comes as the explosion of the Yellowstone super volcano, Jesus is not going burst out of the top of the ash cloud; if a ten-mile wide asteroid comes gunning for us from the orbit of Jupiter, the Son of God is not going to be riding it like it was the Formula One Racecar of Doom; if it's a gamma-ray burst from a nearby supernova, those death rays are not going to assume the shape of the Cross before they fry us all into protein powder.

Because once Someone's two thousand years late, you have to at least consider the possibility that He's not coming at all.

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.