You think real-life Mayans are just going to admit that this is it? DO YOU? Fools.

Anyway, the real survivors know that the secret gathering place is going to be Safford, AZ. Keep it under your hat.

Me! Me! Send me! I'll write a really great, in-depth report on all the crazies, complete with photos and everything! It'll be the greatest thing The Stranger has ever published! Unless, of course, I find a bar with a bottle of rum in it; then I'll just drink til I pass out and wake up with the world's stupidest blistering sunburn on my back. God, I hope it's my back.

An archeological dig in Turkey recently was discovered to be a five thousand year old fortified village where salt was made. Salt was extremely valuable. You have to think we humans always lived on the precipice. Just a moment from annihilation from unseen forces. It's in our nature.

@1 exactly. We all know only certain places will survive.

Surprisingly, with the exception of most of "downtown" Seattle, we'll be relatively unscathed.

@3 actually, the crucible of being at the edge of annihilation forged the DNA which is humanity from our ancestors.

I'm more interested in why Westerners in general continue to latch on to such "millinarianism" and periodic 'end of the world' fantasies -- that to date, have yet to come true, of course.

We've been doing this to ourselves for centuries now (not millenia, I don't believe), and STILL we haven't caught on to the rather obvious truth that it's not actually going to happen.

Oh sure, each of us individually will die, and that will be our personal 'end of the world'; but people in other cultures don't fetishize "total doom" like we do. It's just us. It's a cultural sociopathy I think.

Also, fuck all those people trying to capitalize on this B.S. Cynical assholes.

LOL at "hundreds" of people being a public safety crisis. Might cost One Million Dollars!

There was a NASA scientist giving an interview on Science Friday a few weeks ago, and his piece was about adolescent aged kids being scared about the Mayan 2012 event. He get's emails from scared kids, some even saying that they are considering suicide so they do not see the end of the world. He mentioned that these kids are just getting their dooms day info from crack pot websites because no one of authority is saying it is not real, at least not enough or in a manner that would penetrate into the world of a kid.

BUT my friends and I have toyed with the idea of our holiday party being Hannahpacolypse themed, I read somewhere the end of the world is supposed to have on Friday, December 21st, too perfect. Our holiday party is always Hanukah themed.

It's my birthday and I'm using it as an excuse to buy obscenely priced whisky to celebrate with. I will not be deterred.

@5,

Why not millennia? Christians have been anticipating the end of the world for nearly 2,000 years. Early Christians thought Christ's return would happen very soon after his death. Some Byzantines thought their war with Persia would bring about the apocalypse, and they had similar sentiments about the Islamic conquests.

Cthulhu don't need no stinkin' Mayans to tell His Tentacliness when the stars are right.

On the more serious side, we can't tell what the weather will be in a frigging week with supercomputers and weather satellites. I'm getting tired of people telling me a bunch of guys without basic dentistry knew when the world was going to end. Especially since their civilization couldn't be bothered to stick around for it.

Lee Camp's riff on Mayan EOW fetishists, positing that maybe it was actually an ancient Mayan suggestion, not prediction, given the advent of beer enemas, poop tea, etc.:
http://youtu.be/gHFRdYksBys

@11: snark and all I get it. But, really, Mayan calendrics are pretty friggin amazing. Most accurate calendrical system until after the advent of the telescope. And, of course, anyone with even passing knowledge of Mayan calendrics would know right away that the end of the world bullshit was just that: bullshit.

I would hesitate to take either this prophecy or its denial seriously, were not "felipe gomez, oxlaljuj ajpop" such a transparently obvious anagram of "peep le poof jox, llama jiz jug".

I keep calling it "The Hippy Y2K"...
The mystery of this civilization's "golden age" remains: how did Mayans -who had incredibly advanced knowledge of astronomy, especially solving the calendar problem of the solar year, and predicting eclipses- Get through the beginning and end of a grand civilization (and building pyramids!) without having invented the wheel?!

@15,

I'm pretty sure they did invent the wheel, or so says Jared Diamond. The Mayans used wheels for children's toys. The thing is, they lived in incredibly dense jungle which, without a massive system of paved roads, makes wheeled transportation completely useless.

When there are mysterious beings living in the mountains, that not usually the place you'll want to be congregating... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Moun…

The maintenance schedule in the owner's manual of my car goes up to 160,000 miles. Once past that point, start over, it says. Same deal with the Mayan calendar...

Are any of these people bothering to book reservations beyond December 22? That wouldn't show real commitment.

Good job Mayans for calling out all the bullshit that has been created around the Dec 21 EOTW.

Intriguing!

How do you feel about giving anthropologists the chance to report, perhaps alongside their simultaneous professional of scientific study? Oh, wait, they are. Cite cite cite.

The corporate media just doesn't care.

It would be nice if the millions who have informed ideas had a voice in mass communications, you know, beyond the so-called professional journalists, pundits, and their sources/guests.

Anyway, interesting idea. I don't know if my research proposal hits home here, but perhaps it can in other intriguing spots where the interests of serious journalism and science coincide.

Just a question, when is the Jewish millenial year? Isn't it something like 5454 or something like that right now?

I figure Y6K is going to be big.

@9 for Best Response to Calendar Fetishists.

@9: Hey, it's the day before my birthday!
The day after the world ends, I reach the legal drinking age. Lookout, y'all.

@23,

Consider me warned. Cheers!