the annoying thing about 2012

I’m not usually one to mock superstitions, since we don’t really know what the hidden connections between things might be. Nor am I one to mock gullibility of any sort, since I’d prefer a gullible person to a pseudo-sophisticated, condescending hyper-critic any day of the week.

That said, I find the whole Mayan 2012 Doomsday thing to be almost unbearably stupid, and can’t stand hearing about it even peripherally. The archaeological evidence seems so utterly ambiguous as to whether they even predicted it, let alone the extremely scant likelihood that such a prediction would be accurate just because the Maya said so. And besides, there’s about one of these Doomsdays per year at this point. At least Y-2K was a one-time, falsifiable thing.

However, The Onion actually predicted the future with ominous correctness in this January 2000 story:

Millennium Actually Starts In 2001, Terrorists Note
JANUARY 19, 2000 | ISSUE 36•01

DAMASCUS, SYRIA–With the world breathing a collective sigh of relief following the violence-free passage into the year 2000, an international coalition of terrorists issued a reminder Monday that the new millennium does not actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001. “Technically speaking, we are now in the last year of the 20th century,” said Mahmoud al-Habib, a spokesperson for the terrorist organization Hamas. “Since there was no year zero, next New Year’s Eve is the real time to detonate bombs in Times Square and blow commercial airliners out of the sky.” Speaking from a secret bunker in the Kashmir hills, Osama bin Laden agreed. “We were all set to blow up the Eiffel Tower,” bin Laden said, “when one of my suicide bombers pointed out that it should actually be done next Jan. 1, not this one. I suppose we’ll just have to wait.”