Lisa DeJong/The Plain DealerEvangelical broadcaster Harold Camping predicted Judgment Day would come May 21, 2011 — culminating in the end of the world five months later. To those who quit their jobs to prepare for the end . . . whoops.
The end of the world is upon us. All hell is breaking loose.
There’s LeBron James ordering the world not to destruct — at least not until The King gets a ring.
Republicans and Democrats trying to pin the apocalypse on one another — to score political points.
The 99 percent rejoicing because they finally have achieved equality with the 1 percent — in the grave.
Egads, we are all doomed!
Hey, that’s life. And death in 2012 — the year we are all supposed to perish based on pop readings of the Maya calendar, which is to end Dec. 21.
The new year has brought with it enough doomsday visions to fill the Book of Revelation, maybe even a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
When will it all end?
Well, we can assume it might end with the apocalypse. Then again, who can predict?
“People won’t stop asking me if this is the year the world ends,” says The Amazing Kreskin, reached via phone from his home in New Jersey.
Stephen Chernin/Associated PressThe Amazing Kreskin is so sure that the world is not coming to an end that he’s booked a party on Dec. 22, 2012 — one day after the Maya calendar sees the world taking a bow.
The mentalist rose to fame in the 1970s, thanks to countless appearances alongside Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” While he doesn’t claim to be a psychic or a clairvoyant, he has been making New Year’s predictions for years.
This year: He sees rising crime. Political turmoil. A crumbling society.
But — yippee! — NO apocalypse.
“Not going to happen,” Kreskin says. “In fact, every time I hear someone predict the end of the world, I book a party for the following day to celebrate another day on Earth.”
That’s what he did last year, when Christian radio broadcaster Harold Camping predicted Judgment Day would take place May 21. Camping envisioned five months of fire and brimstone, culminating with the end of the world on Oct. 21.
“Some people sold their belongings and quit their jobs because some guy predicts the end of the world,” Kreskin says. “It’s crazy.”
But there is a rational explanation for the end-of-the-world madness — beyond the pop mania about Maya mayhem.
“Interest in superstition and psychic phenomena always increases during times of turmoil,” Kreskin says.
He points to the rise of fortunetelling after the Civil War.
“Predicting the future became a big thing during World Wars I and II and the Great Depression,” he adds. “People see cataclysmic events as the end of an era or the beginning of something new — and they want to know what that is.”
So, what are the cataclysmic events of this era?
“We have so many economic problems, our politicians have no answers, and we’re becoming an isolated society,” he says. “There used to be a time when people would sit on a porch and it would result in such a thing known as a neighborhood. Now, we all just sit on our computers, alone.”
The most accurate predictions come not out of seeing the future, adds Kreskin, but by looking at current conditions and projecting forward.
“The decline of the neighborhood and the rise of crime will lead to more break-ins in homes,” Kreskin says. “And I can confidently predict, based on past performance, that Paris Hilton will never win an Academy Award.”
Cashing in on cataclysm
Ah, but we can safely predict that Hollywood will continue to relish destroying the world — or at least pushing it to the edge, just in time for a hero to show up to save the day.
Hollywood, you see, has cranked out more prophecies than anything Nostradamus could have imagined. The French seer credited with predicting cataclysmic events turned the apocalypse into a pop-cultural fascination in 1555, when he published “The Prophecies.”
The 1950s marked the beginning of the end in the movie era, with a series of films that preyed on Cold War fears — “When Worlds Collide” and “War of the Worlds.” The destroyers didn’t wear red; they came from outer space, in the forms of aliens and meteors.
By the 1960s, the apocalypse got creepier, thanks to a newfound suspicion of science and ecological destruction. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 doomathon “The Birds” inspired a gaggle of animal-revolt films. “Night of the Living Dead” unleashed a pack of zombies onto the screen.
By the end of the 1960s, the caretaker of the world was the architect of its destruction — and subjected to the rule of simians, in “Planet of the Apes.”
Twentieth Century FoxIf the world ends in 2012, is it only a matter of time before the planet is run by APES???
“Few films had that kind of impact on me, especially seeing the Statue of Liberty at the end in this post-apocalyptic world,” says Cleveland TV legend “Big Chuck” Schodowski. “It was part of this growing realization that nothing is forever and that our world and universe will come to an end someday.”
It also made Hollywood realize that humans love to see the world come to an end — at least on-screen.
Popularity of the “Apes” series spawned a genre of doomsday scenarios, from “The Omega Man” to Mel Gibson’s “The Road Warrior.”
One of them, “Silent Running,” would make for great viewing — if you wanted to watch one movie on your last day on Earth, Schodowski says.
“The Earth is dying, and they try to save it by taking it into outer space in a huge domed spaceship,” he says. “There are a lot of end-of-the-world movies, but that’s my favorite.”
The rise of sci-fi doomsday scenarios is part of a larger pop-cultural exploration of the universe.
“When I was a kid, I thought the universe was our Milky Way,” says Schodowski. “You take life a lot less for granted when you realize that someday the Earth or sun could die.”
Roadmap to ruin
The 2009 film “2012″ brought the Maya vision of doomsday into the mainstream. Based on the Maya calendar, it imagined a world destroyed by earthquakes and tsunamis, maybe even a collision with a rogue planet.
But there’s one problem with that scenario. And it’s a big one, says Gerardo Aldana.
The professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been the leading voice in debunking the Maya calendar as a blueprint for destruction.
“To get to 2012, people correlated the Maya calendar to the Gregorian calendar that we use today,” says Aldana, via phone from Southern California. “The problem is the data supporting the correlation is incorrect.”
Even if the Maya calendar is correct in predicting the end of the world, the date could be as far in the future as 4772.
There’s another problem.
“The Mayan king responsible for the calendar also projected into the future beyond the end of the calendar,” he says. “The Mayans had the idea that the world would be destroyed and re-created periodically. The idea has been taken out of context and mistakenly applied to the old calendar.”
The belief in the Maya calendar as a road map to ruin dates to the 1960s, when scholars attempted to convert it to the Gregorian calendar we use today.
It became a pop fascination in the 1980s and ’90s, with books released on the subject, Aldana says.
“This is a phenomenon catalyzed by the Internet,” he adds. “The end of the world has been a longtime fascination, and people are always looking to find some pattern. It’s like finding animals in the clouds or voices in the static.”
A culture of doom
The endeavor might not lead to answers, but it has spawned a culture of doom that informs movies, art and music.
“There’s a romantic idea of being the last generation,” says Cleveland artist Derek Hess. “It’s helped spawn a doomsday culture.”
Hess points to music genres of doom and black metal, offshoots of heavy metal that explore doomsday scenarios for artistic purposes.
“I remember seeing Venom and Slayer and Exodus play, thinking, ‘Wow, that’s some kind of end-of-the-world concert,’ ” he says. “People see an overpopulated world or hear about fracking causing earthquakes in Ohio and they see them as signs of something really bad that’s going to happen in our lifetime.”
Or something good, in the case of Tim Tebow.
Julie Jacobson/Associated PressOK, maybe Tim Tebow isn’t a sign from God. But he answered the prayers of Browns fans when he slew the beast, er, rather, defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, on Jan. 8. The praying quarterback even threw for 316 yards, seen as a feat of biblical proportions by devoted followers.
The Denver Broncos quarterback has become a sensation for extolling Christian beliefs on the gridiron.
The hosannas reached a feverish pitch when Tebow passed for 316 yards en route to defeating the uber-evil Pittsburgh Steelers in a playoff game two weeks ago. He averaged 31.6 yards a completion, a miraculous feat for a quarterback.
He’s also been known to wear eye black with the inscription John 3:16, a reference to the Bible passage that says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Miracle? A sign of the second coming?
Hell is a Browns game
Call it a coincidence, says Dick Goddard, author of “Six Inches of Partly Cloudy: Cleveland’s Legendary TV Meteorologist Takes On Everything — and More.”
“Tim Tebow seems like a decent guy, but he’s one of these ‘sky pointers,’ ” Goddard says. “Athletes who point to the sky every time they do something on the field, thinking there’s a deity looking over them.”
Goddard considers himself an interdenominational skeptic. He discards attempts to divine meaning from athletes and prophecies as “complete [expletive].”
“People make money off this,” he says. “They sell tickets and movies and prophecies because the bottom line is people love calamities.”
Scott Shaw/The Plain DealerDick Goddard would rather put faith in woollybears than prophets. “Their predictions of the end of the world are bigger scams than any Woollybear Festival,” says the meteorologist-author.
Goddard has been making predictions for more than five decades as a weatherman. He’s studied woollybears. He’s worked as a statistician for the Cleveland Browns. And yet he’s loath to issue a prophecy on the end of the world.
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” he says. “And even if the end does come and it’s hell, I’m ready for it: Doing stats for 43 years for the Browns has prepared me.”
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