A - Armageddon

What a wonderfully positive and upbeat topic to begin our A-Z month with, the topic of impending doom!  During my admittedly short lifetime (I’m 25), I lived through approximately 5 apocalypses.  I’m not sure what everyone’s worried about, they just seem to pass by like any other normal day if you ask me.  Still, the prospect of inevitable doom is intriguing to me.  The best movies, games and stories all involve a post-apocalyptic wonderland of some description.

This year sees another Armageddon looming over the horizon; the one that the Mayans predicted.  Or not predicted, as the case may be.  The theory that the end of the world is coming is mainly based on the fact that the Mayans didn’t produce any calendar dates past 21^st December 2012.  Personally, I don’t think this is because they thought the world would cease to exist after this point, but more along the lines of them not being arsed to work out more dates.

People seem to struggle when figuring out what they’re going to do a few days in advance, let alone a few millennia.  Will Auntie Maggie really care if you forget her birthday several thousand years after you’ve both retired from life?  Probably, but it doesn’t seem like a pressing matter right now.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN!

Like many people, I like to believe that I’m rather smart.  Or at least, not a great stonking idiot in the slapstick sense of slipping on my own drool.  However, I lack the long term cognitive thinking which is often crucial to human survival.  If I don’t pay my rent, I fail to fully realise that I will be evicted in the future.  In the short term however, it seems like I have more money to spend, which seems like a good thing until the bailiffs arrive.  This is how I imagine the Mayan civilisation to have behaved, which probably explains why they collapsed.  They failed to come up with a long term plan.

When it comes to doomsday, no one seems to have predicted this more often than Nostradamus.  There was a doomsday in 2000, there was a doomsday on 9/11, a random doomsday in 2003, and the list goes on.  Every other day is doomsday day!  It seems to me that Nostradamus should have been a cult leader.  If you can convince enough people that the world is going to end, you can also convince those people to hand over their wallets, the keys to their Porsche, and then convince them to conveniently drink a cup of poison punch. 

It reminds me of the recent case with the cult leader who sold his believers pet care plans for after the rapture, so that people could have their pets cared for after they’d ascended into heaven.  The most striking part is that the police only arrested him for fraud AFTER the aforementioned death day failed to materialise.

With all this pointing and laughing, it’s inevitable that there will be an end of times at some point, and someone will probably predict it.  Baby-faced brainbox Brian Cox has predicted that the sun will die within 5 Billion years and, whilst this catastrophe seems a long way off, I reckon we ought to do the opposite of what the Mayans did and start making our preparations now.  If anyone wants their dogs walking once they’ve been crushed in a freezing gravitational sink hole, I’ll do it for £20 a month.