whew!!!

Errol Morris has a terrific photo blog in the NY Times. In my recent Civil War obsession, I got sucked in to this fascinating piece about an unknown solider. I really love the way Errol Morris exhausts every possible angle of a subject, until no more information can be gleaned (and the way he responds to this curiosity in others.) Anywho, there was a side tangent about the 2012 endtimes meme, which should serve as a major relief for people who already have plans made for three years from now:

ERROL MORRIS: Did the Mayans really predict that the world would end on December 21, 2012?

DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: No. It’s based on a false assumption.

ERROL MORRIS: Please explain.

DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: They are 208 years too early. [The correct date is December 21, 2220 – E.M.] I wrote a long article on various ways of solving this problem. I included in a footnote that you could almost get things to matchup correctly, if you used correlation 660205, the Julian day number of the base state of the Mayan calendar. Which is also the interval between the translation of the number in the Mayan baktun, katun date, if you add that number to that date you get what we would consider to be the equivalent date. Ha! A bit complicated but I think you can follow. The colonial Mayas, most of them didn’t have any clue about this. The ones who did were the calendar specialists and they made sure to keep their mouths pretty tightly shut because the Spaniards were burning people at the stake for maintaining pagan ideas of which the calendar was a major part. The calendar determined all the ceremonies and rituals, when people were sacrificed, all the nasty things and all the good things.

The transit of Venus in June of 2012? Oh, just ignore that.