Have Shed, Will Travel

Check out Wikipedia's page on predicted events for the year 2012: all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff such as Passover, the London Olympics, the end of the contract for Saturday Night Live, a couple of solar eclipses, the last solar transit in the 21st century for the planet Venus, the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, and this:

December 22 — Possible date for the end of the long count of the Maya and Aztec calendars and therefore, the end of the world.

End of the world? Event of the year, methinks. Nine days later comes the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Well, they'll have a damn good reason for backing out of it by then.

We all know, I think, about the old Mayan prophecy of the end of the world: those cheerful despots of South America created a calendar that documented things yet to happen. They went into great detail about most things, going quite some way into their own future. And then, when they came to the winter solstice of the year we in most of the world call 2012, they stopped. No more. Silence. It could just be that they ran out of chisels, or got bored, or they all got beheaded by visiting Spanish missionaries, but I think the Experts have eliminated all those possibilities. No, the Mayans found out when the world is going to end, and slipped into a terminal depression about it, probably invigorated only by the fact that their own prophecies had pointed out that their civilisation would be dead and gone long before that, and the murderous scum who saw to it would fall foul of something much worse. Yay!

I only very recently found out about another prophecy, made here in Europe, about the popes of the Roman Catholic church. Some chap with too much time on his hands evidently hinted at details of some past popes and all the future popes in pithy cryptic Latin phrases; finest Nostradamus style. He numbered them all, right up to 111, adding on the end (or someone else added it later) a numberless one with the catchy name Petrus Romanus (Peter of Rome) who would evidently be seeing in the fall of Rome, the fall of the Church, the fall of civilisation, etc. The usual stuff. Some clever boffin in later years then lined up all the popes in the prophecy with the actual popes, and quite a lot of them matched quite neatly the Latin phrases. Now, guess which number in the sequence the current pope, Benedict XVI, is. Remember there are only 111 of them.






That's right! He's number 111! Depressing, isn't it? With the Mayan end of the world only six years away, and the various leaders of the world (official and otherwise) playing at silly buggers, some other old prophecy turns out to be pointing towards an imminent end. Popes tend to last a good few years in office, and this current one has no particular reason not to last another six years. There will either be another one after him, who shall be the named Petrus Romanus, or Benedict himself will be Petrus Romanus, and see the fall of Rome, the fall of the Church, the fall of civilisation, etc. Just like the Mayans predicted.

And over in Tibet, a group of Buddhist monks have also discovered through meditation or somesuch that something potentially cataclysmic is galloping over the horizon. Their version of it all, though, is that some divine aliens will descend upon Earth and usher in a new age of peace, love and understanding.

I hope the Tibetan monks are right and everyone else was wrong.