I haven’t posted anything for a while. I’ve been busy making plans for the end of the world, which, as your Mayan friends will tell you, is scheduled for December 21^st, 2012.

I typically don't buy into 'end of the world' scenarios, since, it seems to me, they're usually wrong. The biblical book of 'Revelations' always seemed a little too over the top to be realistic. I mean, i don't think god's gonna waste a lot of time with signs and warnings if we're gonna be wiped out--no need for turning the moon blood red and all that other showmanship.

But the Mayans were a pretty savvy bunch. Not only were they way ahead of the curve in math and astronomy (sort of a Pre-Colombian Silicon Valley vibe), but they played this cool kinda basketball with stone hoops, wherein the captain of the losing team was beheaded by the captain of the winning team. Talk about your extreme sports--if the NBA adopted this rule I would SO buy season tickets.

The Mayans were, by all accounts, a truly advanced and visionary culture, so you gotta figure if they did any predicting, there might be something to it. Although, to be honest, they didn't exactly predict that a bunch of Spaniards on horseback would wipe their own two-thousand year old culture off the map within a couple hundred years. Nor did they predict a horrible Mel Gibson movie based on their culture.

Now to follow, if you don't have a Mayan pocket calendar, just get out your iPhone, because there's probably an app for that. There isn't, to my knowledge, an app for calculating exactly how many minutes of your life your wasting playing around on your freaking iPhone instead of interacting with other people. I think it's interesting that they keep finding ways to add all sorts of geegaws and doodads to cell phones, and yet they still haven't perfected the actual TALKING part of the phone. Cell phones have been around for twenty years, and I still have parts of my apartment where my calls drop out for no particular reason. I imagine guys in R&D saying "yeah, we still don't have a good connection, but look--we added a function that lets you translate recipes into Esperanto!"

Anyway, back to the end of the world. The Mayans actually used three calendars. They had a 260-day calendar composed of 20 day-signs, each of which has 13 variations; they also used a 365-day calendar called the Haab, and a Venus calendar. They measured long time periods by means of a Long Count, in which one 360-day year, consists of 18 20-day "months" . It occurs to me that their civilization may have ended simply because everybody became confused. Mayan day planners must have been huge, and since they were probably also made of stone, you couldn't carry them around. "When were we supposed to build that wall to keep out the conquistadors?" "Uh...I have no idea."

I'll spare you the math, but suffice to say, the end of the Mayan's 'Long Count' will happen in 2012, which is also when Earth will be in the exact center of the Milky Way for the first time in 26,000 years. And that's when the unimaginable will be unleashed. Solar flares, invisible planets colliding with Earth, another sitcom for Tony Danza...

A little over three years. Enough time for six more Republican governors to be disgraced. Enough time for North Korea to develop a missile that can reach California, but not enough time for California to get out of debt. In three years, Angelina Jolie and Madonna will have adopted everyone on the planet except each other.

Like with anything, the world ending in 2012 has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, we'll be starting Obama's second term, which will mean everyone might be able to afford health care just as we're being eliminated as a species. On the other hand, if it turns out to be the first year of a Palin administration, a massive fireball followed by nuclear winter won't seem like such a bad turn of events.

The destruction of life as we know it is scheduled for the third week of December, meaning we won't have to hassle with Christmas shopping, but it will also render the 2012 NFL season fairly meaningless. It also means only a few hundred more episodes of "The O'Reilly Factor," the last several of which will blame the apocalypse on the liberal media. And, sadly, nobody will get to see "Monsters, Inc. 2," scheduled for release in 2013.

All told, pretty scary stuff. But maybe hitting the cosmic reset button isn't such a terrible idea. We've had a good run, we humans. Built a lot of things, destroyed a lot of things, invented things that could be built so that we could more efficiently destroy the other things that we built. Didn't quite get a handle on the peace and harmony thing, but at least we figured out global warming in the nick of time. I could go on, but I have a lot of shit to get done in the next three years.