The Mayan calendar was off the mark today.
December 21, 2012 is here and so are we. What a JOKE. On the plus side, at least after the end of the world doesn't happen today, we can stop reading about it, right?
One wonders why we ever even did.
"There's no real prophecy that says this is the end of the world," said Christopher Powell, a noted Mayan archeologist, told ABC. "Not from the Mayan ruins, anyway."
The Archaeological Institute of America adds, "Whatever the significance of the date is, it is significance we put on it; it's not the significance the Maya put on it."
"It's not coming from anywhere in literature or hieroglyphic writing."
Over at Discovery, physicist Ian O'Neill wrote "there's no evidence to suggest the Mayans believed the end of their Long Count calendar would spell doomsday."
NASA's apocalypse video also totally shoots it down hardcore.
So how did this global obsession/nonsense even start?
The Maya, who lived in Central America between A.D. 250 and 900, had a cyclical calendar that ran approximately one human lifetime, or 52 years (life was shorter back then).
To account for events more than 52 years away, they devised another calendar, one that ran 5,126 years, and apparently began in the year 3114 B.C.
The math: 5,126-3,114 = 2,012.
"I believe the Mayan calendar was based on some incredibly good astronomy, said Lawrence Joseph, author of Apocalypse 2012. "They were really good at knowing when."
"They weren't so good at saying what's going to happen then."
But does any Mayan calendar really predict anything?
Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said, "Western messianic thought has twisted the vision of ancient civilizations like the Maya."
It said the Maya believed time started and ended with regularity, with nothing apocalyptic.
O'Neill blames the marketing campaign in 2009 that promoted the Roland Emmerich disaster movie 2012 for propagating the Mayan Doomsday legend.
"It's almost like you're out there looking for evidence of a looming apocalypse," said anthropologist Wade Davis of the National Geographic Society."
"I think it also ties into a lot of uncertainty that exists in our world today."
That uncertainty is definitely real, and it is called the fiscal cliff.
It'll still be there in the morning, too, most likely.
