A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
Can you believe it? It’s January already (I’m assuming that the Mayans were incorrect). Another New Year is underway. I had thought about waiting until December 21 to start this article, but decided to stick with my normal schedule.
I’m thinking that way back then the Mayan king probably had a warped sense of humor and told his calendar maker to end it all on December 21, 2012. He probably said something like, “That will scare the heck out of everyone in the future.” It could also have been an honest mistake. Maybe there was a transcription error and we have to worry in 2102 instead of 2012.
There have been so many other calender “end of the world” scares. Remember Y2K? That didn’t happen either. I can tell you now that it was me that saved the world. I changed the clock on my network time so that all of my electronics never did change to the year 2000. After two years, when the scare was over, I finally allowed my clocks to update.
June 6, 2006 was another one of those days that the world was supposed to end. When you write the date as 6/6/06, it supposedly was the mark of the Devil and he was coming to destroy us all. I’m guessing he probably had a bad satellite signal and his GPS wasn’t working. That minor electronic problem probably caused him to get stuck in traffic.
The decade of the 1980’s was going to be the end of the world several times. It seems like everyone from Pat Robertson to the Jehovah’s Witnesses had proof positive that the “rapture” would be here soon. Is it a coincidence that is the same era that personal computers started to become popular? I can’t remember what George Orwell thought about it.
Google search has informed me that in the next hundred years, the world will end at least 42 different times. It appears that computers have been pretty useful in analyzing data and helping the predictors predict the inevitable.
Now for the good news. You don’t have to worry about the end of the world for a while yet. Nostradamus made a detailed list of future predictions. His prophecies end abruptly in the year 3797. That’s when I’m going to worry.
That’s all for this month. Thanks for reading.