Stop! That’s enough! This has gone on long enough! The world is coming to an end next year and this is the best we can come up with? This is the pinnacle of human endeavour? The human race has been on this planet for so many years that to think about it in any great detail is enough to make anyone but the most eminent anthropologist’s brain burn but all of that might come to an end if those wacky Mayans are right.

Fair enough, the chances of that actually happening are slim but still. The human race has invented powered flight, television, the wheel, the idea of forcing others into poverty to expand your own bank balance, Victoria Sponge; not to mention the rest of the fantastic things that man has come up with.

We’ve all but wiped out certain diseases that used to kill people in their millions and fought wars against injustice and greed. That is what humans are. Inventive. War-like. Destructive, yes but bloody marvellous all the same.

However, imagine if you will: it’s 2012. The world has all but ended. Seas have risen and earthquakes have devastated most parts of the planet with only a few strongholds of humanity left alive, clinging on by their fingernails to the crust of an earth that they never thought would forsake them.

Imagine that you’re one of these people. The struggles of just living are becoming too much for those around you to bear. Food and water are running low as a result of the droughts that came before the tsunamis. The animals were washed away with everyone’s homes and valuables. Everything that you’ve ever needed or loved. Gone. Wiped out by the prophecy of a people who couldn’t even survive until the end of their calendar.

You’re devastated.

Everyone’s devastated.

The world is devastated.

With your last whisper of electricity, the last survivors of humanity decide to lift their spirits. One television, an invention of power that enthralled millions. One DVD player, a symbol of man’s constant struggle to improve on the existing innovations of their time. One DVD. A DVD means so much to so many. It can be a favourite film, a treasured family reel of a child in one of those little plastic cars going round and round in circles on a patio. It can remind us of simpler times, happier times.

So much is at stake, layered onto that tiny, shiny disc. It’s unmarked. It could be anything. Everyone is hoping for a landmark moment in film. They’re looking to the greats. Kubrick, Hitchcock, Spielberg, even a Mel Brooks film would cut it at this point. They’re praying to a God that they no longer worship that it’s not John Cusack’s 2012. No-one needs to see an apocalypse created with better CGI than the real one.

The disc slips into the player. A breathless silence falls over the huddled mass. The DVD starts.

It’s an advertising reel, designed for Ad Execs to put across their ideas to clients. Still. It could be a reel of the world’s greatest and most iconic adverts. That would remind them of the glorious world that had been torn away from in front of their very eyes.

It isn’t.

It’s this. An advertisement in which two jacket potatoes discuss having unprotected sex on a night out. It’s an advertisement where they then engage in a threesome with a bottle of juice drink after a series of lazy puns and weak chat-up lines. It’s an advertisement where regional accents are used to provide the comic relief in a style derived from 90s late-night television staple Eurotrash. It’s an advertisement where the tagline is used to imply both sexual promiscuity of the juice drink and the fact that it can be consumed with any meal regardless of what it is.

It’s an advertisement where TWO JACKET POTATOES GET FUCKED BY A BOTTLE.

Is this tripe what we want the human race’s legacy to be? These people who have created and recreated the world in their own image only to see it ripped away by an apocalypse which is, admittedly, unlikely to happen. Is it a risk that we as humans can afford to take? If this is indeed the pinnacle of human innovation then we might as well detonate the world’s nuclear weapon cache right now and solve all our problems for good.

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

The world’s end has been predicted more times than we can count. Personally we feel that civilisation as we know it will meet its end at the hands (ironically) of a giant ostrich sometime in September. That’s what our dream journal strongly seems to indicate.

Others – like the ancient Mayans – had a different opinion. They think we’re all going up in flames come 2012.

What are you reading this for when you should be in telling your mom just how much you love her? Seriously – get to it. Because as of Dec 22, 2012 you won’t be able to because you’ll both be dead. As will everybody else for that matter – at least according to some.

You see there are an awful lot of people who think 2012 will be the year wherein Mother Earth and Father Time both suffer unavoidable heart attacks. A big chunk of why people believe this lies firmly in Mayan alleged prophecy. The Mayans, a civilisation that lived in the America’s starting around 1800 BC, were geniuses – they had the only completely developed written American language before Columbus landed on their salty shores, and they were so in tune with the stars that they somehow used them to decipher the future or something.

And they made crazy complex calendars with interlocking parts. Wikipedia puts  it this way:

“The Maya calendar is a system of distinct calendars and almanacs used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and by some modern Maya communities in highland Guatemala. These calendars can be synchronized and interlocked, their combinations giving rise to further, more extensive cycles. The essentials of the Maya calendric system are based upon a system which had been in common use throughout the region, dating back to at least the 6th century BC… Although the Mesoamerican calendar did not originate with the Maya, their subsequent extensions and refinements of it were the most sophisticated. Along with those of the Aztecs, the Maya calendars are the best-documented and most completely understood.”

The great Mayan calendar mystery puts people on edge because the calendar itself allegedly stops at the end of that year. Some argue that it’s just because they ran out of stone – others say its because those ancient people knew something we don’t. Whatever the cause – it’s not the only indicator of an apocalypse that year. Some Buddhists seem to agree. We pulled this next bit off of Cogwriter.com:

“The Tibetans Kalachakra contains a prophecy that 860 years after its introduction into Tibet, which happened in 1127, the conditions would be fulfilled for a twenty-five year period that would culminate in the appearance of the Tibetan version of New Jerusalem, the hidden city of Shamballa. Eight hundred and sixty years after 1127 is 1987, and 25 years after that is 2012.”

The same website also says the Hopi Indians had similar legends:

“The Hopi prophecy is an oral tradition of stories that Hopis say predicted the coming of the white man, the world wars and nuclear weapons. And it predicts that time will end when humanity emerges into the “fifth world.” The Mayan calendar predicts a similar end in 2012; some Hopis have said their prophecy roughly coincides with that time. The tradition says the years after 2012 could be a golden age with humans at peace. It also says the world will go through a time of trial, suffering and purification before a time of “one-heartedness”"

You may find yourself astonished to learn that the Mayan calendar maker who lived all those years ago may not have intended any sort of prophetic poise. After all – the calendar itself makes no predictions. Not only that – the entire calendar doesn’t even end in 2012 – it seems to speak more of a major worldwide transition. Perhaps some take that as an indicator of the second coming. Maybe others believe that’ll simply be the time when cable prices finally get regulated to a scale poor people can afford.

Whatever the case – an awful lot of folks are expecting something major to go down. As for us – we’re digging a large pit in our backyard and intend to fill it full of Twinkies and a cockroach roaster. That ought to tide us over until the major turmoil ends.

Speaking of which – if someone could please invent a cockroach roaster by that time we’d be ever-grateful.

Just make sure it’s portable.

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