Working in Ottawa today --The 13th B'ak'tun

Good morning folks,

I will be working in Ottawa this today.

Natasha wants December 21st off.  I thought her a wee bit ambitious to make plans for that day in particular since popular myth has it that the world as we know it will cease to be a pleasant place and instead turn into something that only food hoarding, AR-15 armed civilians spewing witty reparté can save humanity from.

But why on that day?  You may recall earlier end of world predictions from me, and why even the Schröd's cat was alive, dead, and also heaving up a fur-ball and how intersected with String Theory there stood an excellent probability that we, at least the readers of my missives, would all survive just fine.  It is true that it is unlikely that non-readers would fare that well, but that is well beyond our control isn't it?  Poor bastards.   (http://pulp.puckett.ca/2011/05/working-in-ottawa-today-end-of-world.html)

But again, why on that day?  It's because of a very selective interpretation of the Mayan calendar.  Selective such as if you looked at this October calendar and screamed in terror, "October ends on the 31st, it's the end of the calendar, the printer must know that the world will end Wednesday the 31st".

Damn.  October isn't even named after a Roman god or Emperor, just octo, eight, what a crappy month to end the world on.. (January and February are new months inserted into the old Roman calendar, in case you ever wondered about the number named month all being an offset of two, bet you didn't know that).  Oh wait, I know, just flip the f..'ing page there Spanky!

And we're back.. now it is just dumb to look at a single data page in a calendar to predict such an important occurrence on so let me give you a very crash course in Mayan calendars.

The smallest calendar component is the day or the k'in, also refers to the Sun.

A Winal is 20 K'in
A Tun is 18 Winal.
A K'atun is 20 Tuns.
A B'ak'tun is 20 K'atuns (144000 days or about 394.25 years).
A Pictun is 20 B'ak'tuns.(2,880,000 days or about 7885 years)

There may have also been C'alab'tun, K'inchil'tun and A'lau'tuns also all 20 fold of the previous.  So rough and dirty an A'lau'tun would be what.. 3,154,000 years?

Yes, it helps to be a nerd.

The current Pictun started on August 11, 3114 BCE which corresponds to around a millennium prior to the start of the Mayan Empire and will end on October 31 4772.  We are just now nearing the end of the 13th Baktun.  So why do we care?

Beats me.  I mean, yeah I know.. keep reading.

The answer lies with Frank Waters.  Author and U.S. gov't propaganda analyst (really).  Frank wrote several books, one particularly is relevant to this email - Mexico Mystique, I think in 1975 (I need to hire a fact checker) within he identified the 13th B'ak'tun as the Mayan Great Cycle, screwed up on the math (see previous missives on end of world calculations and why checking calculations is so damned important  http://pulp.puckett.ca/2011/05/working-in-montreal-today-always-know.html) and pegged the destruction of all time to be some time last year.  Fiz.

Over the last 30 years other cash strapped authors entered the Mayan Calendar Destruction books for cash drive and predicted devastating occurrences for 1987, 1989, 2004, 2010, 2011 and of course this December.  You may recall the 1987 Maya-Galactic "Harmonic Convergence.".  You may also recall that the world was not torn apart by focused gravitational forces, however it is true that exactly 10 years earlier Elvis died at 42.

Have a good day, Natasha won't be in on December 21.