Dec 21, 2012

You're not going to die today.

It's 6:43am on Friday December 21st, and as many of you know, today we're all supposed to die.  

Or at least that's what the Mayans would have us believe.


Those wild and crazy Mayans – unsuccessful apparently at predicting the demise of their own society – have enjoyed incredible success post vitam in convincing many that today will be their last.

Some apparently are taking their prediction so far as to take their own life in anticipation of the "inevitable".  Or, as in the case of this complete ding-dong, plan on dying tonight so that he may spare the rest of us from certain planet-destroying death.  How?  That's simple.  He plans on flinging himself off a huge rock in Sedona: http://j.mp/hesprobablynotgoingtojump

Media coverage leading up to this day has been frenetic.  We all know that the news industry can't help themselves but go positively berserk for sticky news stories like this one, fueled by good ol' fashioned coal-fired-fear.  

Print, television, and every media distributor between them count fear-based story lines such as this Mayan prediction among their favorite types of "news"; and why shouldn't they, it's dirt cheap to produce, can hold the public's increasingly finicky attention span for days, weeks, months, or longer.  And best of all, where a product of good journalism typically requires expensive legwork in the field, all a media producers need do now is play a few clips or quotes of convincing fear salesmen, then pan to their proverbial audience, hysterical and wide-eyed with fear...mmm, cheap ratings!  

Yep, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more successful story type than those which scare the daylights out of their own audience.

So, as an exercise in rational thought, I thought it'd be fun to post research showing just how unique these types of large-scale predictions of death and apocalyptic destruction really are, and also shed some light on the types of glue-huffing half-wits that were successful in getting their 15 minutes as it were in the apocalyptic limelight.

Here below is an incomplete (but completely entertaining) list of end-of-days predictions which, for obvious reasons, didn't quite materialize as expected. 

Egg, meet face, face, egg.

Enjoy:


















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