2008 Woodie Awards
Is the end really near?
Andy Downs
Issue date: 1/28/08 Section: Opinions
I recently saw a commercial for some electronic superstore offering no interest on payments until the year 2012 and thought to myself, "Why would I pay interest when the world is going to end?"
Better yet, why would I make any payments if Doomsday is on its way?
Hell, why not max that card out and not pay a dime, right?
This might be a viable option if Armageddon theorists are right about the big Dec. 21, 2012 date.
Scary as it seems, it isn't just a bunch of long-haired lunatics holding cardboard signs on street corners predicting the end of the world in the near future, but a whole litter of folks throughout civilization have been thinking the same thing.
Ancient Mayans were skilled astronomers who came up with a calendar that not only looks cool, but has been extremely accurate at predicting lunar movement thousands of years in the future. With the profound accuracy of the calender also comes some slight paranoia. The calendar stops Dec. 21, 2012, supposedly giving the world a major change.
On the other side of the world in the 16th century, an intriguing prophet from France was making predictions of his own. Nostradamus made his share of vague prophecies throughout his lifetime that can be interpreted to mean some pretty amazing, accurate things. But depending how you look at his prophecies, you might find him to be as convincing as a 40-year-old in women's lingerie. Either way, Nostradamus predicted 2012 would bring global destruction and the third "Antichrist." I'm shaking in my seat.
If you aren't buying a French prophet or a skilled ancient civilization, try another source for 2012 predictions: the Internet. The Web-Bot Project is a program that is scary itself for the fact that it does massive Web searches using crawlers, which in turn brings back predictions about the future. It was designed to predict the market flow of stocks, but like a bad sci-fi movie, it started predicting other things. For instance, Web-Bot predicted a terrorist attack in June 2001 to happen within three to six months, as well as the devastation caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Guess what Web-Bot picks for doomsday: Dec. 21, 2012.
Better yet, why would I make any payments if Doomsday is on its way?
Hell, why not max that card out and not pay a dime, right?
This might be a viable option if Armageddon theorists are right about the big Dec. 21, 2012 date.
Scary as it seems, it isn't just a bunch of long-haired lunatics holding cardboard signs on street corners predicting the end of the world in the near future, but a whole litter of folks throughout civilization have been thinking the same thing.
Ancient Mayans were skilled astronomers who came up with a calendar that not only looks cool, but has been extremely accurate at predicting lunar movement thousands of years in the future. With the profound accuracy of the calender also comes some slight paranoia. The calendar stops Dec. 21, 2012, supposedly giving the world a major change.
On the other side of the world in the 16th century, an intriguing prophet from France was making predictions of his own. Nostradamus made his share of vague prophecies throughout his lifetime that can be interpreted to mean some pretty amazing, accurate things. But depending how you look at his prophecies, you might find him to be as convincing as a 40-year-old in women's lingerie. Either way, Nostradamus predicted 2012 would bring global destruction and the third "Antichrist." I'm shaking in my seat.
If you aren't buying a French prophet or a skilled ancient civilization, try another source for 2012 predictions: the Internet. The Web-Bot Project is a program that is scary itself for the fact that it does massive Web searches using crawlers, which in turn brings back predictions about the future. It was designed to predict the market flow of stocks, but like a bad sci-fi movie, it started predicting other things. For instance, Web-Bot predicted a terrorist attack in June 2001 to happen within three to six months, as well as the devastation caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Guess what Web-Bot picks for doomsday: Dec. 21, 2012.