2017-09-21 – Happy New Year!

There’s a story going around that this will be the last one, however, for on Saturday the world is supposed to end. This is due to a rogue planet called Nibiru that will smash into the Earth, ruining your weekend.

If this were true, of course, you’d already see Nibiru in the sky. I know that we don’t customarily look into the sky, but if Nibiru were visible, Fox would have let us know.

If there were any truth to this story, scientists would have been tracking Nibiru for years and would have calculated the impact date based on celestial mechanics. But that hasn’t happened.

Instead, I’ve heard that this apocalypse was calculated as 33 days after last month’s solar eclipse. I don’t know why last month’s solar eclipse was chosen and not one of the many solar eclipses that happen every couple years somewhere on this planet, or some other celestial event.

I also don’t know why 33 was chosen. . . . Well, I do. 33 was the age that Jesus died. 33 years, 33 days . . . you get the idea. But why Jesus’ age? Why not the number of apostles? Why not 666? Why not the number 2, signifying that Noah brought pairs of animals into the ark? Why not the 7 days of creation—7 days to create it, 7 days to destroy it? There’s lots of “significant” numbers in the Bible.

In fact, there are so many significant numbers and so many celestial events to attach them to, you could probably create a prophecy fingering every day on the calendar as doomsday.

But it’s not Saturday, for most people.

I figure we each have our private doomsday. But global doomsday? It’s not happening Saturday. I got some plans for the coming week. I hope to put a few miles on the bike. I have my guitar class. And it’s my son Cal’s 24th birthday. (The last one was foretold 24 years ago. It keeps coming around every time the Earth completes a circuit around the sun.)

The funny thing about these predictions is that many of the folks who are predicting a sudden end, are in complete denial about more gradual sorts of global catastrophe. You’d think that people who are looking for disasters would be more attuned to the disasters happening all around them.

[Note: This post was edited to correct errors that I wouldn’t have made if I had actually looked at the calendar and to fix the image.]