The world didn’t end on Friday, Dec. 21, 2012 like the Mayan calendar indicated. I wasn’t surprised, were you?

For the weeks preceding the Mayan doomsday date the National Aeronautic and Space Administration calmed fears among those who thought a bunch of Mayans a few millennia ago could predict the end of the world. I’m thinking they didn’t predict anything. I’m thinking they got tired of chopping calendars out of stone and went home for supper. I mean, how many calendars into the future do you really need?

One of many Mayan Calendars.

It would be like printing out on our laser printer calendars for the next 4 thousand years – only printing them with a computer would be a heck of a lot easier than chopping them out of stone with little birds and leaves and snakes and stuff like that.

The Mayan Calendar is a little confusing to me. I’ve seen pictures of it and it looks like a wheel with some strange dude sitting in the middle surrounded by little icons towards the outside of the wheel. The icons look kind of like the first television set we had back in the 1950s.

They say the Mayans were pretty good at astronomy even though they didn’t have powerful telescopes to watch the stars. But think about it, what else was there to do at night? They didn’t have electricity and there was no TV. So what to do? They looked at the stars – it was almost the best nighttime entertainment available.

The smarter Mayans, probably the ones who went to MIT, the distinguished Mayan Institute of Technology, to get their PhD in astronomy, studied carefully the patterns of the stars. Their observations resulted in that cute carved rock with the little circle of symbols called the Mayan calendar.

Here’s an idea: I think I’ll claim Mayan ancestry and pick up where they left off. I could tell folks that my great-great-great great grandfather was a Mayan Indian chief. I think I could pull it off because I do have high cheek bones. Heck it was a good enough story for some goofy college professor to get elected to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, so why wouldn’t it work for me?

Then I could spend a few days figuring out all the signs of the times revealed by the chaos, death, disease and warmongering around the world using Google Search. Next I could create some mystical math equations decipherable only by me because of my superior Mayan heritage intelligence, and then, and this is where the plan comes together, I could predict the next date for the end of the world and describe earth’s final days and its attendant cataclysmic disasters!

This whole gig could be very popular and gain me a tremendous amount of attention because people love disasters. Remember the movie “Poseidon Adventure”, and “The Towering Inferno” with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, then “Earthquake” and “Outbreak” and “The Day After Tomorrow”? Blockbuster movies all!

The public seems to like that kind of stuff and some folks will believe anything. So maybe I should declare myself a Mayan, affirm I have a superior and mystical intellect; then start to hold meetings at midnight somewhere on a mountaintop in Colorado. After gaining a few followers I could then declare the next date for the world to end!

Would you join me? Gee, I hope not.

But what about the very serious notion that someday the world will end? It will end, of that I’m certain, “but no one knows the hour or the day these things will happen.” As far as I’m concerned it can end anytime God decides to push the button or pull the plug or light the fire or sound the trumpet. Whenever he wants to do it, I’m ready.

Are you?