March 28, 2024

Calendars . . . FREE . . . and worth it!

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If you are reading this, then you know, as I do, that the world did not end on December 21, 2012.

Conspiracy theorists, New Age nincompoops and a cabal of defrocked priests with Internet divinity degrees have been saying for the last few years that life, as we know it, would cease to be on that auspicious date. The source of their purported knowledge was a calendar composed some 5,000 years ago and, according to scholars, distributed in hardware stores throughout the Mayan world, for free.

I’m not sure if the prediction was based on the calendar itself or something that one of the owners of a calendar wrote on it. I’m sure the Mayans, like my wife Esmeralda, used their calendars to remind themselves of dinner dates, appointments at the veterinarian’s office and decide when are the best times to go fishing.

It occurred to me this whole end of the world shtick may have started when someone trying to interpret a long lost Mayan calendar misread a note chiseled into the square marked December 22, 2012. What was meant to say “remind future generations to go to the hardware store and get new calendar before end of the 2012” was read as “remind future generations that the hardware store won’t have any more free calendars after December 21, 2012.”

Who knows? After all, who can read Mayan? I seriously doubt that any one of the idiots who have been predicting the end of the world can. In fact, I doubt any modern day Mayans can read a Mayan calendar chiseled out some five millennia ago. I can’t even understand Shakespeare and he supposedly wrote in English less than three centuries ago.

Whatever the case, the misunderstanding didn’t stop modern day goofballs from chartering plane rides to Chichen Itza so they could stand around where old Mayans once stood around and wait for something they were told would happen, but had no firsthand knowledge of. It certainly comes as no surprise.

A prediction about the end of the world, which according to Excentric fact checker Ronaldo “Keno” Schwartz happens on average every 26 months, is a focal point for those who, for lack of a better way of describing them, seek hidden knowledge. The notion of doomsday beckons to a larger audience than just those who want a jump on the end times. It’s like a casting call for anyone with a notion that world is not as it appears to the rest of us.

Here is just a taste of what mankind came up with when faced with its most recent demise:

  • In Bugabach, France, Mayor Jean Pierre Dildord was forced to close off access to a local mountain said to be a garage for alien spaceships because so many “hippies” were headed there. According to the “hippies,” the mountain was the one place on earth where aliens would be picking up hitchhikers. When one of the visiting hippies died from a fall, after ignoring the mountain’s closed sign, Dildorde is said to have quipped, “The end seems to have come a little earlier than he expected.”
  • Hundreds of Serbs (remember them?) reportedly gathered at Mt. Rtanj, a mountain that is said to have housed the soul of an evil sorcerer for the last thousand years. They believed that on doomsday the sorcerer would spring forth and lay waste to the rest of the world. Supposedly, the idea was to climb into the mountain when the sorcerer left so they would be safe. The only problem was that, after a thousand years, the place was a wreck and said to have reeked of bad cheese. Most of the Serbs had reportedly left by Christmas Day, saying they would take their chances in one of the local bars.
  • In Russia, Stalin’s bunker was opened to anyone willing to shell out $1,500 dollars. All 1,000 spaces sold out in less than two hours. The 165 foot deep sanctuary, with its own water and power supply, was generously stocked with vodka and cheese (hopefully better than what the sorcerer ate), and a fifty percent refund was offered if nothing happened. It is reported that several dozen are still down there, less interested in the end of the world than they are of consuming $750 worth of cheese and vodka…and who can blame them.
  • In our own country, NASA was inundated with phone calls and emails last month from worried Americans wanting to know if a rogue planet was headed our way or if the sun was going to explode. When I contacted a NASA spokesman on the 21st, his only comment was, “I wish it were tomorrow.”

Editor’s note: If the hardware store doesn’t have any free 2013 calendars, the Excentric does. We only ask you to think twice about what you write in those little squares. Future generations may not be as rational as ours.

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