It has been widely proposed that the world is hell-bent for some great time-ending cataclysm in the year 2012.  I don’t keep up with all of the details but apparently Nostradamus, the Mayans, a coven of witches, some Korean mathematicians, Billy Baldwin, Al Gore, the RNC and the Devil himself sat down for cocktails and came up with a fire and brimstone schedule for this decade’s most famous year.

The world is going to end people, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.   

Now don’t get me wrong.  In 2012 I’ll have my lawn chair all set up, and a six-pack of beer at the ready just in case another crazed asteroid comes screaming through the atmosphere, or the five fricking stoned ponies of apocalypse come thundering down my drive.  But I’m not going to cancel any golf dates or have the dog put down in advance just because of it.  

But there is some good news.  My thirteen-year-old daughter has a fix on what the problem is with the Mayan calendar.  And since the fact that the ancient calendar is set to end in 2012 (thereby causing The End Of Time) is one of the signature pieces of evidence in this catastrophe, I thought her ideas might be helpful.  If we can dispel the Mayan notion, we might be able to cancel the entire Apocalypse. 

Whadda we got to lose?

But here, why don’t I shut up and let her tell you herself: 

“Well, the Mayans were making their calendars back, what, like THOUSANDS of years ago, right?  And there was a whole room full of little calendar maker guys whose only job - for their entire life - was to make the calendars.  Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, century by century, millennium by millennium…  These little calendar maker guys sat in rooms with scrolls and scrolls of calendars, some rolling out the door and down the steps of the temple as they worked.  It was never ending.  It was a boring, dead-end job.  But every time one of them became exhausted and asked the bosses how much farther into the future they had to go, the bosses would crack their whips and snarl: ‘until the end of time’.

 “The calendar maker guys tried to look WAY out into the future and pick a year that time would NEVER get to… something so far into the distance so as to be impossible.  Eventually they settled on 2000 – Two Thousand.  TWO THOUSAND!  Nobody would ever get to 2000!

 “By miraculous coincidence, on the very day that Mayan civilization suddenly and mysteriously ended, the little calendar maker guys passed 2000 and continued to press on: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004…   The agent of their doom (we don’t know what that was) entered the village.  2005, 2006, 2007…  It entered the temple and ascended the steps of the little calendar maker guy’s workshop.  2008, 2009, 2010… It burst into the workshop and found one last frightened little calendar maker guy holding a completed 2011 in his hand.  In an act of defiance, the calendar maker guy whipped out one more year – 2012 - but before he could finish it, the agent of doom consumed him, the calendar ended and 2012 stood forever as the End of Time.”

OK.  So I added a little bit… but it was her basic idea. I like it.  It explains a lot.  It’s a good story.  It’s our story and we’re stickin’ to it.