IS 2012 THE END OF US?

Apparently things are going to hell in a garden basket! As the meltdown nears, a company in Thomson, Illinois will, for $149 (Credit Cards gladly accepted), send you a bag of seeds so that on the eve of Armageddon you can grow your own crisis garden.

According to the "Survival Seed Bank"..."you don't have to be an Old Testament prophet to see what's going on all around us. A desperate lower class demanding handouts. A rapidly diminishing middle class crippled by police state bureaucracy. An aloof, ruling elite that has introduced an emerging totalitarianism which seeks control of every aspect of our lives."

Though; according to my grand-daughter, it didn't live up to the advanced hype: I am waiting for the appropriate dark, morose and inclement day to "gird my loins" and pop into the DVD player the ultimate action-adventure movie: "2012", which - "brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors" - No doubt with a bag of Illinois grown survival seed in hand! - I digress.

Chances are that most everyone spends their day going about the casual business of life never imagining that millions of fellow earthlings are freaking-out that the world will end in a little more than two years. Apparently there is even some disagreement on whether the "End O' Time" is December 21 or 23. Authors of doomsday scenarios plastered all over the Internet say it's December 21, 2012 - The winter solstice. Scholars, historians and anthropologists say the "doomsday" is actually December 23. It's not clear, even to the panicked, what precisely will happen but: IT WILL BE BIG! Or, so we've been warned by the Maya calendar on which it's all based.

I'm not sure of anything anymore: But, apparently scholars claim that fears about 2012 rest on just one of at least three Maya calendar systems, the so-called "Long Count" which began on August 13, 3114 B.C. and which ends on 13.0.0.0.0, what we (non-Maya) call December 23, 2012. God knows! Just hang-on to those "survival seeds" bags, because if 2012 fails to bring about the end of the world, there is an Aztec calendar that ends in 2027.

Anyone remember Y2K?

Worries about 2012 are based from fragments of a Maya inscription at an archaeological site in Tortuguero, Mexico. It's just the kind of boost the Mexican tourist industry can use for the next couple of years - or beyond. Last year's panic over the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic, which was blamed on a Mexican pig farm. - And, the current travel fears over the violence and more than 18.000 murders associated with Mexican drug-lords, really haven't been very kind to the Peso. Obviously there is a tourist "Tee-Shirt" hued rainbow just over that bleak horizon. And if 2012 (like the movie) fails its expectations; the Aztec 2027 Tee-Shirt can probably already be ordered.