The End is the Beginning is the End
on December 21, 2012 at 11:52 am
Today is the long-awaited “end of the Mayan calendar”… and as we can see, the world has not ended. Well, it hasn’t ended yet, anyway. Nonetheless, in celebration of the Mayan Apocalypse, The Gralien Report will be teaming up with Mysterious Universe tonight at 11 PM ET for a special “end of the world” broadcast, which will be viewable (that’s right, there will be video!) through MU’s YouTube channel. So in the event that the big “End” does arrive (maybe just a little later than expected), we should be able to bring you live coverage, as always.
I believe it was George Harrison that said, “All Things Must Pass,” and we’re sure that probably applies to the end of the world as much as it does kidney stones. Hey, too bad we can’t find a similar end to the tax-and-spending problems going on in Washington… but I digress. Strangely, there is more to this story…
Maybe people weren’t taking the Mayan prophecies quite so seriously, after all. This morning (and rather surprisingly), no stories involving the supposed apocalypse were trending on Google News. Instead, the aforementioned political issue, as well as reviews for Tom Cruise’s new “Jack Reacher” flick, as well as that painfully obnoxious “Gangnam Style” (wait, are we STILL hearing about that???) were among the stories appearing.
NASA Weighs In on the End?
That isn’t to say that a number of news sites weren’t carrying the story… CBS was reporting on the end-of-the-word shenanigans early this morning before most in the West had even had their coffee, commenting on how NASA had literally been posting educational videos online, in an effort to help thwart people’s fears of an oncoming apocalypse:
Donald Yeomans, manager of the NASA Near Object Program, said, “The earth is not coming to an end. There is no evidence whatsoever for that.”
In fact, NASA has taken a lead role in debunking the Mayan myth, posting several YouTube videos in an attempt to soothe a shaken populace. In one of those videos a narrator says, “No known asteroids or comets were on a collision course with Earth. Neither is a rogue planet coming to destroy us.”
One might argue that, so long as these are the sorts of things that Americans continue focusing on, maybe we’d be better off undertaking the return of Quetzalcoatl, the great Mayan serpent bird snake thing (pictured to the right). In this case, the Serpent is the Bird is the Serpent, perhaps.
And I put it thusly, just to be able to reference again the wonderful title of this post, which was borrowed from the title of a famous song composed by The Smashing Pumpkins. The tune, The End is the Beginning is the End, appears in a number of films… oh yes, in addition to that terrible Batman movie with George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger that we all keep trying to forget, it was also featured in Watchmen and a few others, occasionally retitled something like “the Beginning is the End is the Beginning.” We think the first variation fits the mood of the day a bit better, in commemoration of another dying conspiracy theory/paranoia outbreak; hence, we’ve included a link to that original version of the song, along with a snazzy mashup of scenes from director Chris Nolan’s rendition of the Batman series (no, we wouldn’t pain you today by linking videos from that other movie):
Image by Wolfgang Sauber via Wikimedia Commons.
