We're All Going To Die

The end is nigh, dear reader.

If you believe the hype, then the world will end on December 21st, 2012. I will have just turned 50 so at least I will have made it to the half century.

Personally I think it is a load of old codswallop.

Nobody can predict the future, even when there is evidence that may support a claim that the world is about to end in a painfully horrible fashion.

Let’s take the millennium as an example. As we entered 1999, we were about to fall foul of two potential global catastrophes as well as many other miraculous occurrences.

One of the driving forces was the supposed second coming of Jesus, which would signal the end for all of us. Many thought that there would a war of Armageddon, started by the Antichrist, and we all suffer horrible and extremely painful deaths with born again Christians rising to heaven.

What was the evidence for this nonsense? There was none; none whatsoever. It was utter, utter bunkum. The only good thing that came from predictions of Satan rising to claim the Earth was the movie End of Days where Arnie took on the Devil himself and saved the world – a cracking but flawed movie.

Did the world end? Of course it didn’t. I wouldn’t be typing this if it had – and you wouldn’t be reading it.

And the other catastrophe predicted for the millennium was none other than The Millennium Bug.

I’ve worked in IT since 1984 and even then I, like a few other programmers, were aware that perhaps we ought to take account of the turn of the century and we started to do it. What’s more as the millennium approached this awareness spread and most if not all software producers modified their software, a few years in advance. To cap it all, almost everybody involved in IT performed stringent tests, probably from 1998 onwards to make sure that the Millennium Bug was not present.

Yet the media, doom mongers and large numbers of people who know little or nothing about computers, software and technology, decided that the Millennium Bug would wipe out civilisation.

We were warned of aircraft dropping out of the sky, people being eaten alive by their own toasters and washing machines rising up and murdering entire families.

Some idiots were so convinced that Hell would be unleashed on Earth that they actually packed up, left the cities and moved into the wilderness where they dug a big hole and buried themselves underground to avoid the nuclear war that would be unleashed when the Millennium Bug hit the world’s nuclear arsenal.

In their view, the war of Armageddon would be triggered by the Millennium bug and we would all be wiped out. What’s worse is that they were absolutely convinced that they were right.

The Millennium Bug was arguably the biggest anti-climax ever. I laughed so much because I knew it would be several years beforehand.

Now we are approaching another Armageddon moment, with the evidence coming from the fact that the Mayan calendar ends on 21st December 2012. What doom mongers fail to notice is that the Mayan calendar is cyclic – one ends and a new one begins.

The doomsday hoax is the result of pessimism from a bunch of idiots, just like the Millennium Bug and the predicted war of Armageddon in the year 2000. These people see things that just aren’t there. They interpret flimsy evidence as fact and end up in a flap about it, forcing their opinions on people. Even when proved wrong they refuse to accept how ridiculous their arguments were.

Before I stop, I would like to just mention Nostradamus. He apparently has predicted everything from the Great Fire of London to World War 2. And of course, he has predicted the end of the world.

Nonsense – of course he hasn’t.

Nostradamus wrote a bunch of cryptic quatrains, which could be interpreted as anything. Here’s one that is supposed to predict the attack on New York City on September 11th 2001:

Volcanic fire from the center of the earth

will cause trembling around the new city:

Two great rocks will make war for a long time.

Then Arethusa will redden a new river.

Those who chose to believe that Nostradamus had a gift have actually translated the original French line:

au tour de cité neufue

as “around New York” rather than “around the new city”.

All of this means, to me at least, that the quatrains of Nostradamus are open to interpretation by those who believe that he could actually see the future.

I suggest to you, dear reader, that he could not and that he either had a vivid imagination or sold himself as some kind of seer for personal reasons.

I mean I could write some utterly ridiculous cryptic crap and state that I can predict future events and I could state that I know for a fact that such events will occur within the next thousand years because I have seen them in my dreams or somehow interpreted current events and projected their meaning into the future using a combination of my prophetic gift, astrology, my horoscope and imaginative elucidation of the global trends.

In short – it would be a load of old codswallop written with one hundred per cent horseshit.

I could write something like this:

When the colon of Ura meets the turn of Sa

And the line of force penetrates the centre of Terra and Sol

Then the four horses of the Armageddon will rise

And bestow words of fire on the kingdom of unity.

What does that mean? Absolutely nothing!!!

I’ll tell you what Nostradamus means to me, dear reader - this

Enjoy and come to Manchester for a party on 22nd December, 2012.