Essays in Idleness

We forgot to check the Internet this morning to see if the world had ended, a matter of some consequence to us, for if it had, we would have to reassess our whole position towards New Age Gnosticism. As we understand, the prediction for midnight Thursday, Greenwich Mean Time, was intelligently shifted to the Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice at 6:12 this morning (standard time in the Greater Parkdale Area).  We write now more than six hours after that event, so feel entitled to sound the all clear. We have reached 13.0.0.0.0 through the wheels within wheels of the Mayan calendar, without anything more than the usual unpleasant incidents, worldwide.

Contrary to several reports we have seen in the Mainstream Media, even the ancient Mayans are still with us. It is a small point, we know, but they were not wiped out by the Conquistadors, as graduates of our public universities are apt to believe. There are millions of them left, in Mexico, Guatemala, & so forth. In general, we have found a tendency among the liberal cognoscenti to seriously over-estimate the efficiency of Spanish imperialism.

Other threats remain, however, & while climate scientists in some of the world’s most heavily-funded environmentalist lobbies are beginning to abandon the anthropogenic global warming “theory,” & search for something more remunerative, the Toronto Scar hit us this morning with the very plausible backstop to it. Temperatures on this planet may rise by more than 100 degrees Celsius as the sun expands beyond the orbit of Venus into a Red Giant, a few billion years from now.

And of course there are asteroids. One winged by just the other day — 4179 Toutatis by name — at a distance of only a few million miles. Scary stuff: it has a highly irregular orbit, & though charted in 1934, was then lost sight of for half a century. As worrying, large patches of sky in the Southern Hemisphere are still not being monitored for small-but-wicked cosmic debris. Toutatis will, we are told, buzz closer still in 2069. But fear not: from what we understand it is barely large enough to take out one city, & even that would require a lot of luck in aim & angle. By means of the YORP effect, the Divine Gardener is anyway taking care of these nasty asymmetrical lumps of metal & silica. That is to say, reflected sunlight produces momentum as well as heat, continually tumbling their rotational axes & finally weeding them right out of our solar system.

The dinosaurs are believed by some to have perished by one of these fluky celestial conkers. They had a very long run before this happened, however — far longer than any “higher primate” — & can hardly be condemned for such a deus ex machina. As we argue, the more men behave like dinosaurs, the longer they are likely to stick around, & we will continue to advance our dinosaurian views on this website as an important public service.

But getting back to the Mayan calendar, we noticed polls showing a good 10 percent of the North American electorate (millions of people, & beyond the victory margin in almost any consequential election) actually expected the world to end today, or something big to happen. Frankly this did not surprise us.

More interesting, to our mind: only a few ten thousands of the world’s New Age goofballs congregated at various auspicious sites in France, China, & elsewhere, for their only chance of survival by intercession of mysterious rays. Which means, not only did this significant demographic believe their lives might end today but, in response to that threat, they did nothing. They just went on living their tedious consumerist lives, many perhaps neglecting even to max out their credit cards.

As Virgil explained to Dante, Hell has no place for these people, & Satan himself will reject them as unworthy. (End democracy now!)