Is this the end?

So in case you haven't heard, the world didn't end yesterday like the Mayan calendar seemed to predict.  So you can stop stockpiling toothpaste because Crest is still around.

So what happened?  Remember Y2k?  It's the same thing really.  A bunch of people learned and think they are wise start trying to give ancient civilizations more credit than they deserve.  The fact the the Mayan calendar went all the way to 2012 is pretty amazing when you consider that the collapse of the Mayan civilization happened around 1000 AD.  That would be like you having a desk calendar that went to 3024 and somebody finding it 900 years and assuming that the fact that it doesn't keep going must mean some wold calamity will take place.

My favorite is that NASA was getting inundated with  phone calls and e-mails to the point that they had to make an official statement about it.  It's good to know that the highly paid scientists employed at NASA had to tell us that.

I have a theory about the whole Mayan calendar.  Imagine if you will a young lad, a Mayan lad.  One day the king is in town.  The king walks up to the lad and asks him what day it is because he has a sacrifice that needs to be made by Friday, but he can't remember if that's today, or if he has a few more days to find a virgin.  But the lad doesn't know, because he is just a farmer.  The king becomes furious with the lad and throws him in prison.

Nobody knows how much time passed because nobody knew what day it was, but one day the king visited the overcrowded prison.  When he came to lad he asked him "What day is today?" to which the lad answered "Today is Wednesday your grace."  The king was so pleased to know it was Wednesday that he let the lad out of prison

But not long after that the king forgot the day again.  So he traveled back to the lad and asked him "What day is today?" to which the lad replied "Today is Wednesday your grace."  And the king was pleased.  On the way back home he had a thought, I need some sort of carving where I can track the days myself so I don't have to travel 3 days to ask this lad.  So the king summoned the lad to his city and told the lad that he must carve a day tracking system onto a rock so that he will always know what day it is.

Years went by (we know this because of the calendar) and the king forgot about the lad and soon he was an old man.  Every day he would go up to the Mayan calendar and continue his work.  On "bring your son to work day" (according to the calendar) he brought his eldest son with him and showed him his work and told him "one day you will take over when I die."

One day the old man died and his son picked up his father's tools and went up to the calendar to work.  He looked at the calendar to determine where his father stopped and found that is was done through 12/21/2012, over 1000 years in the future.  He thought "This is dumb!  Surely somebody will add on more days when we get close to that day, so he went home and never went back.

Well nobody ever did continue the calendar and that's why we ended up worried about that particular day.  And all because of some lazy teenager who didn't want to do his job.