Looking forward to 2012...? (From Watford Observer)

Looking forward to 2012...?

11:22am Monday 16th November 2009

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I love a good disaster movie. From the star-studded excitement of The Towering Inferno to watching the black and white gloomfest of On the Beach one afternoon back in the 1970s when I was off school and recovering from the flu, there’s nothing quite so life-enhancing as watching other people having a really bad day.

The latest in a long line of films featuring mankind having a collectively bad day hit the big screen last week.

Blockbuster 2012 is from the same team that brought us feel-good productions including Independence Day (planet Earth bombarded by unfriendly aliens) and The Day After Tomorrow, (planet Earth bombarded a nasty cold snap), so you can probably imagine where this one is going.

From the clips I’ve seen, it looks like they’ve really upped the ante this time as 2012 features planet Earth bombarded by pretty much everything available to the Hollywood masters of CGI.

This is full-on apocalyptic stuff. In Rome, St Peter’s collapses on thousands of praying pilgrims; in Washington, a giant tidal wave plonks an aircraft carrier on top of the White House; in California, Los Angeles slips into the Pacific Ocean; and in London Cheryl Cole experiences a wardrobe malfunction.

(I’ll leave it to you work out which one of those doesn’t actually occur - although if it did you could bet your bottom dollar that it would wipe those other cataclysmic events off the front pages of the red tops.)

The idea that 2012 - to be absolutely precise, December 21, 2012 - will mark the end of recorded time as we all know it has been knocking around for ages. In fact, it’s been out there for nearly 3,000 years, having been pin-pointed by the Mayans as the end of their astronomical calendar.

A cheery group at the best of times, when they weren’t building giant stone pyramids on which to sacrifice thousands of virgins to the sun god, or actually employed in the act of sacrificing thousands of virgins to the sun god, the industrious Mayans liked nothing better than to settle down in the shade with an abacus and do really difficult sums.

For a civilization that hadn’t invented the wheel for itself, it’s pretty remarkable that the Mayans - who lived around Guatemala, Belize and Mexico from about 1,800BC - created a beautiful, highly complicated and astonishingly accurate astronomical calendar.

Without the help of a calculator or a computer, those clever Mayans produced a mathematically precise system designed to identify the exact date of the end of the world.

As I said, they were a cheery bunch.

The good news is that the Mayan calendar is accurate to within 34 seconds of what we know a lunar month to be today. The bad news is that it runs out on December 21, 2012 or 13.0.0.0.0 in what is known as their ‘Long Count’.

(It seems that even the Mayans thought that 13 was an unlucky number!)

According to ancient legend, each Mayan age was said to end with a cataclysmic event. The last one ended in water and this time, apparently, we’ve got earthquakes and Earth changes to look forward to.

And here’s a thing. Before you smile indulgently and file this nugget of information away with other harmless end-of-days oddities such as the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Millennium Bug, it might just interest you to know that on December 21, 2012, for the first time in recorded history, astronomers agree that the Earth and Sun will move exactly into line at the mathematically calculated centre of our galaxy.

At the same time, NASA boffins expect a cycle of Sun spot activity to peak. These magnetic blasts from the Sun can damage satellites and wreak havoc on electronic devices. They can even affect the Earth’s magnetic field which protects us from the Sun’s killer radiation. This 2012 cycle is predicted (by sober astronomers, not soothsayers) to feature huge activity - so maybe sacrificing all those virgins to the sun god wasn’t such a bad idea after all?

Whatever the truth of the matter, there are just over 1,000 days to go before the arrival of this potentially fatal date, so, if I were you, I’d just try to forget about it and enjoy yourself.

(Although if you are locked into any really long-term contracts for things like Sky TV, broadband or mobile phones you might want to take a quick look at the legal small print in the ‘acts of God’ clause.)

Speaking for myself, although I wouldn’t go as far as prognosticating the end of the world for December 21, 2012, there are several things I feel that I can predict with some confidence.

 Jordan will be crowned I’m A Celebrity’s’ queen of the jungle for the third time after seeking peace and refuge in the Australian outback following the very public breakdown of her marriage to one of the Jedwards.

 Simon Cowell will be Prime Minister following the country’s first ever, X-Factor-style phone vote General Election.

 Dawn French will regenerate as the 12th Doctor Who for a series that really stretches the Time And Relative Dimension In Space capacities of the TARDIS.

 Peaches Geldof impresses Strictly’s Len Goodman with her paso doble

 Victoria Beckham is temporarily crippled by a bungled bunion op.

 Jonathan Ross hosts a new tea-time chat show, My Agent Also Represents…

 Britain is bankrupt again as the true cost of the summer’s London Olympics fiasco becomes apparent.

 Charter Place will be still be an abomination at the heart of Watford

NB. You don’t need a crystal ball to spot the fact that at least three of the above are quite likely!