Decoding the End of Days
Stock up on candles and hoard non-perishables: the world will cease to exist in 56 months
by: Vinay Menon
Source: http://www.thestar.com

Spoiler alert: the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012.

This is not a joke. Repeat: THE WORLD WILL END ON DEC. 21, 2012. THE PLANET WILL BE DESTROYED. ALL LIFE WILL BE EXTERMINATED.

HANG ON.

Sorry, my elbow accidentally hit the Caps Lock key. It's a little cramped down here under the basement stairs. But after watching a rebroadcast of Doomsday 2012: End of Days (CLT, 8 tonight), this is where I plan to spend the next 56 months.

Though I'll probably leave for a few days to stock up on supplies, befriend survivalists, cash in my RRSP and build a bomb shelter that's finely appointed with ottomans, dinette sets, leather sectionals and anything else I can "buy" with the kind of in-store credit that doesn't require a payment until 2013. (Suckers!)

Can I just say something? How dare those ancient Mayans! Why did they have to stop their long-count calendar on Dec. 21, 2012? Why did they have to predict a galactic cataclysm for the winter solstice of that year?

According to tonight's program (let's not use the word "documentary"), the Mayans believed the Earth would be in perfect alignment with the sun and the centre of the Milky Way on the dreaded date.

Such an event, we're told, happens once every 25,800 years. So, naturally, a few fringe authors are enlisted to speculate on the possible consequences.

This alignment could result in a "pole shift" and wreak havoc on magnetic fields. It could trigger rapid continental drift, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires, hurricanes, gamma ray bursts, plasma discharge and the sudden explosion of Ryan Seacrest's head, which by then would be as big as the moon, causing widespread destruction.

In short: "It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe!"

(Side note to future doomsday TV producers: if the world is about to end, you really don't need to sensationalize with alarmist narration, hokey sound effects, low-budget re-enactments, thumping music and countdown clocks.)

Are you familiar with I Ching, the ancient Chinese text of symbols? It seems the now-deceased theorist Terence McKenna once used I Ching hexagrams to plot time – people, there's no time to explain! – and discovered surprising spikes that correlated to major events throughout history.

But here's the weird part: McKenna also found this timeline ceased to exist on ... Dec. 21, 2012. You know what this means? We're all going to die on Kiefer Sutherland's 46th birthday!

Doomsday 2012 also examines various oracles, prophecies and texts from the past, including the Oracle of Delphi, the Prophecies of Mother Shipton, the Sibylline Oracles, Merlin, the Book of Revelation and the Hopi Prophecies.

Then there's the unsettling segment on the Web Bot Project, a software program created in the late '90s to envisage stock futures by scanning the Internet and attempting to "read the subconscious mood of the world."

Yeah, I have no idea. Whatever it does, the Web Bot Project has allegedly made a number of accurate predictions in recent years, including the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the massive East Coast power outage in 2003, the Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But, again, here's the weird part: it's now forecasting escalating upheaval, including "limited nuclear war," which will reach a catastrophic peak in, yes, 2012.

So there you have it: the end is nigh. For details, watch – this just sounds wrong – Canadian Learning Television. Shouldn't this program be looped continuously on all the cable news channels for the next four years?

But sitting here under the basement stairs in my gas mask, contemplating The End as I duct-tape water bottles to my trouser legs, I am comforted by one fact: every previous doomsday date has come and gone without incident.