Yes, indeed: it’s the title of the 2012 Campari calendar featuring Hollywood actress and model Milla Jovovich in various fetching poses. This will make it the thirteenth edition of said calendar. But then if you suffer from triskaidekaphobia you will not want to have been counting to that dread number.
Inspired by ancient Mayans that the world will end on 21st December 2012, Ms. Milla is depicted in various apocalyptic scenarios such as floods and hurricanes to meteor strikes and alien invasions. In short, the whole doom and gloom bit.
So what’s a gardener to do? Ordering vegetable, herb and annual flower seed seems to be a good bet. But perennials, bulbs, shrubs, vines, trees and assorted other horticultural herbage – well, what’s the point? As for fixing the fence, calling in the arborist or assorted other chores, procrastination has nothing to do with it.
After all, mankind hasn’t just left it to the Mayans to predict end of the world. Just last September, the Ignoble Awards ceremony at Harvard University acknowledged some slightly more recent doom mongers:
- Dorothy Martin of the U.S. who predicted the world would end in 1954
- Pat Robertson of the U.S. who predicted the world would end in 1982
- Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the U.S. who predicted the world would end in 1990
- Lee Jang Rim of Korea who predicted the world would end in 1992
- Credonia Mwerinde of Uganda who predicted the world would end in 1999
- Harold Camping of the U.S. who predicted the world would end in 1994 and then again in 2011
Certain segments of the population have always deplored anyone having a better time than them. Judgment Day or The Day of the Lord in Christian theology finds particular appeal – a check on a famous search engine yielded some 13,000,000 results.
The “Weeping Prophet” Jeremiah warned the people repeatedly to repent from their sins, or God, he said, would punish them severely. The disciple Matthew was even more enthusiastic if horticulturally disillusioning:
“Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (3:10-12). Then a little further on (13: 40-43),
“Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and thy will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
So with the monumental jeering at Camping and company, why should a mob of ancient Mayans be any the more believable? Well, it’s their 5,000-year-old calendar, you see. It runs out on next 21 December. Or is it 12 December as some say?
And just like global warming, Russian elections and Quebec separatists, there are some pretty prominent believers. Famed
Star Wars director George Lucas spent 25 minutes telling Seth Rogen the world would end in 2012. In France, the French agency MIVILUDES is directing a Gallic gaze at tiny southern French hamlet of Bugarach near Carcasonne, supposedly the only place in the world that will survive the 2012 Apocalypse. But do they know the difference between astrology and astronomy?
There’s no confusion over this fact at NASA. Its website reassures visitors that nothing cataclysmic is going to happen to Earth on 21 December 2012. Three years ago, even a Mayan elder, Apolinaris Chile Pixtun, debunked the claim. Meanwhile, astrobiologist David Morrison has been kept busy answering queries at NASA’s ‘Ask an Astrobiologist’ web page (
Link).
Morrison told Richard A. Kerr at Science, one of the world’s premier scientific journals, that on investigation, he found a long and convoluted history for the basic storyline stretching back to the Sumerians. They blamed a planet called Nibiru that passes Earth every 3,600 years for calamitous events. This seems to have gradually morphed down through assorted fabulists, doomsters, psychics and their ilk to the present tale, viz: the apocalyptic end at the winter solstice of 2012 coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar. Only it is simply a pack of codswallop.
“There is no danger,” Morrison says. “All the talk about a doomsday is a big hoax perpetuated in the Internet and with people trying to make money . . . Don’t worry about 2012 and enjoy 2013 when it comes.”
Hollywood depicts the Maya calendar’s end as a cataclysmic event, noted the
Los Angeles Times. But top Mexican tourism officials have another take. They are betting on an invitation to see Maya ruins will attract hordes of older, wealthier U.S. visitors.
Closer to home, don’t be surprised if Richter’s herb catalog arrives as usual round about the second week of December 2012. It will be dated 2013. You have it on excellent authority that you can order from it in the confidence that seeds, plants, gardening gadgets and other necessities of horticultural hobbies will be delivered in due course.
According to NASA you can count on another 5 billion years of gardening. Then the sun runs out of fuel and swells into a red dwarf. And no, that is not a vertically challenged Russian politician.
