Posts Tagged ‘mayan apocalypse’
On his last Meet the Press appearance of 2012, host David Gregory broke Washington D.C. gun laws by waving around a high-capacity magazine in front of the cameras, after NBC had already requested and been denied permission to do so by D.C. police. The prediction for 2013? Despite over 16,000 signatures on a White House petition to press charges, anti-gun crusaders higher up in government will convince the police and the D.A. not to seek charges (after all, those anti-gun laws were always intended for the little people, not the ruling elite, right?) So much for equality under the law, Gregory breaks the law on national TV and walks away scot-free.
On February 3, 2013, Peyton Manning leads the Broncos to victory in Super Bowl XLVII. In what looked like a risky trade in putting all the Broncos’ hopes on the surgically repaired neck of an aging veteran, John Elway ends up looking like a genius. A great cosmic wrong is also righted in Peyton’s having had only one Super Bowl ring to brother Eli’s two.
After global temperatures have been in standstill for the past fifteen years, we will see a slight decline in global temperatures in 2013. Even with temperatures declining, global warming alarmists will continue blaming each catastrophic weather event on man-made emissions, shelving their former term of “warming” in favor of the all-encompasing “climate change”. We could point out to the alarmists that hurricanes and floods and droughts have been ravaging the planet for all human history long before there ever was an industrial revolution, but what would it change? There will always be a group of people making a racket out of blaming the weather on all the other people. Before the industrial revolution, these same kinds of people would go around telling anyone who’d listen about the undeniable evidence that we were praying to the wrong gods or the clear consensus that we weren’t sacrificing enough virgins.
2012 saw the death of Twinkies as Hostess was unable to work out a deal with striking union workers to keep the company solvent. 2013 will see the brand sold to a Chinese company. Unlike urban legend might lead you to believe, the actual shelf-life of a Twinkie is only twenty-five days, so the company doesn’t ship from China but instead buys bakeries in Mexico. The former American icon will then be owned by the Chinese and shipped from south of the border. Thanks, unions!
While Windows 8 was released to rave reviews from many users of touch devices, many PC users were less than thrilled over the new operating system, with the step towards a tile-based interface and an emphasis on single-screen apps causing some to quip that Microsoft’s new OS should be called Microsoft “Window” instead of “Windows”. 2013 goes a long way to vindicate Microsoft’s strategy of a unified platform between all devices however, as Windows 8 makes modest but steady inroads on phones, tablets and hybrids while PC users begin to adapt and see the wisdom of one OS to rule them all.
After Microsoft flooded 2012′s holiday TV programming with ads for their Surface devices, Apple will focus their efforts in 2013 to address the one thing that keeps the iPad from being an all-in-one replacement for desktops and laptops, namely, the lack of a self-contained keyboard. 2013 will see Apple release an iPad / laptop hybrid with slide-out keyboard, just in time for the holidays.
While many complained that 2012′s breakout TV show, Honey Boo Boo, marked a new low in reality show exploitation, the televised exploitation pales in comparison to the meager $5,000 per episode TLC was paying the Boo Boo Clan for the channel’s highest rated show. Give credit to TLC, however, they stepped up after season one and approached the Shannon / Thompson family with an offer giving them a raise to between $15,000 and $20,000 an episode. It might not curtail the family’s love of dumpster diving and coupon shopping, but it sure beats a sharp stick in the eye! So what’s in store for the family in 2013 and what will they do with all that newfound wealth?
Mama June’s buying lap band surgery and by season’s end, she’ll be almost one-hundred pounds lighter and totally unrecognizable.
Looking back on 2012, we may have survived the Mayan apocalypse (as I predicted we would) but we also were witness to tragedies we won’t soon forget, from Aurora and Sandy Hook to the natural and man-made disasters of Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. But 2013 is a brand new year, it’s the only year numbered 13 most of us will ever live to see, so call it a lucky 13 and make it a good one.
The end of the world came, and then it went, and yet the world still exists! The exact moment of the winter solstice occurred at 6:12 a.m. EST (1112 GMT) this morning, the “end” of the Mayan calendar. Of course, once a year we pass into the winter solstice, but what was special about this solstice was the fact that it marked the point where the Sun is aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.
What an incredibly advanced society of astronomers the Mayans were to forcast this alignment of the Sun and the center of the galaxy in a calendar which stretched back thousands of years before their time, beginning their “Long Count” on August 12, 3114 B.C. and looking forward to the end of the calendar 5,126 years later on this date, December 21, 2012.
What it really amounted to however, was not the end of the calendar but the end of the thirteenth baktun and the start of the fourteenth, as the “odometer” of 12.19.19.17.19 yesterday rolled over to 13.0.0.0.0 today. The world is still here and tomorrow will be 13.0.0.0.1 on the Long Count.
The reason I became somewhat transfixed with today’s date was that I began my own countdown to today’s date in 2008 as I added a new feature to my date reminder software program that had always worked as a handy reminder for yearly occurrences such as birthdays and anniversaries and created a new event type which allowed people to track a specific date years ahead or years in the past. To test the new feature, I added an event marking The End of the Mayan Calendar on December 21, 2012. I’ve been watching the approach of today’s date for over 1,700 days.
One of the benefits in watching the end of the world approach for years in advance is that you get a real sense of how the time we have on this Earth is a finite thing and you develop a sense of urgency in realizing that we cannot count on an endless expanse of days to accomplish the goals we were born to achieve.
Of course, there can be unintended consequences of half-heartedly convincing yourself the end of the world is just around the corner, you might find yourself maxing out the credit cards or convincing yourself with a wink and a nudge that there’s really no need to quit smoking today because the world’s going to end in a few months or years anyways, but if and when December 22nd rolls around and you and I are still here to enjoy it, we can tell ourselves hey, the world was supposed to end yesterday, all our remaining days are just gravy – an unexpected bonus.
My wife worries about my obsession with the apocalypse and the end of the world. When I told her the solstice came and went and the world’s still here, she replied simply, “Life is beautiful if you make it beautiful.”
Enjoy the overtime period, my friends.
We’re three days in on the new year, but nothing much of note has really happened so far, so still not too late to unload my psychic powers on the world . . .
Spun Honey’s Predictions for 2012
1. Coming off the 9-6 LSU victory in the regular season, in the LSU – Alabama rematch for the BCS Championship, someone finally manages to score a touchdown. The way those defenses are playing, forget picking a winner, that’s a bold enough prediction right there.
2. Drew Brees manages to outgun Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field in the NFC Championship, taking his Saints to the Super Bowl. The Ravens, who had a regular season record of 6-0 against playoff teams, beat both the Bengals and Patriots, but end up losing in the big one. They never need an excuse to party down on Bourbon Street, but it’s Super Bowl number two for the Saints and the people of New Orleans.
3. The day before the vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook launch a black page protest, shutting down service and asking their loyal users to tell Congress to get their cotton-pickin’ hands off the Internet. Congressional phone lines are flooded beyond anything the Capitol has ever seen, and in a stunning reversal, SOPA bites the dust.
4. Hollywood will earn $500 billion less in domestic box-office sales from the previous year, just as they did in 2011, and the movie studios still remain completely in denial, crying about piracy when the real problems Hollywood faces are a dearth of new ideas (nothing but remakes, sequels and comic book adaptations) a public that prefers their own home theater experience to over-priced movie tickets and the fact that video games are drawing more and more people’s disposable income.
5. Video game sales will break records again, hitting $20 billion and doubling Hollywood’s take for the first time ever. While video games are just as easy to pirate as movies, you hear very few calls from the video game industry for the government to have an Internet kill switch.
6. London Olympics are smashing, baby! Security is tight, no terrorist attacks, and the only incident is when a bunch of hooligans get out of hand with the celebrations as Great Britain pulls off the upset Gold Medal in football.
7. The Israelis will not and cannot allow the Mullah Hitlers to have nukes in Iran and the much anticipated airstrike is launched. Thankfully, predictions of oil at $250 a barrel are exaggerated, with oil maxing out at $198 a barrel. Gasoline rises to an earth-loving $8 a gallon, and the Obama administration couldn’t be happier.
8. Documents come to light proving what everyone already knew, that Attorney General Eric Holder was guilty of perjury when he denied having knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious. Fortunately for the Obama administration, all the news channels outside of FNC decide the story is not as newsworthy as the reports on Katy Perry’s second divorce and whether Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so the story is never even mentioned.
9. On a personal note, I’m able to stay on the straight and narrow with no cigarettes and I get back down to my target weight of 200 pounds this year, but it doesn’t matter because . . .
10. December 21, 2012 lands most conveniently on a Friday, and Mayan apocalypse parties are going off all across America. When everyone else wakes up hungover on December 22, they realize there is no Mayan apocalypse, we survived to suffer a fate far worse, because just a month previous, Barack Obama was given another four years.
