I prefer Bloomsday *

Or, as Janis Joplin said more indelicately: "It's all the same fucking day, man."

Our gullibility is charming at times, and often funny. Enter, 2012, The Movie. I've been successfully ignoring it but finally succumbed to Burl Burlingame's debunking article Doomsday denied in the Honolulu Star Bulletin.

If you haven't been shopping for crystals lately, the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 (on our calendar). Presumably, so do we.

Was that story really necessary? Well, yes, apparently it was. Google it if you must, but there are as many references to 2012 as, uh, as there are stars you can see from our little planet. According to Burlingame, "the filmmakers have also created Web sites that pretend to be legitimately scientific, something that has real scientists somewhat annoyed."

I'd provide a couple of links, but that would just be driving traffic to those sites. My reasoning was similar when I decided not to write about Ben Stein's loopy Creationism catechisms; I stopped using the Drudge Report to follow news sources when I was reminded that I was enabling his looniness by building his numbers.

In a nice touch, one source refers to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which pretty much sums up my feelings: we're pretty insignificant, emphasize the small 'i'. Our calendars are constructs, like our languages and very much rooted to place. Our 'time' is tied to the earth's rotation period, which isn't fixed.

So I don't buy into specie-ific fixations on our little planet in a universe that is incomprehensible to us. Then again, we're tethered to it. If it goes, well, "so it goes".

Or, gee, maybe 2012 is when we finally enter the Age of Aquarius, though that sounds fishy to me.

* I happened to think of Ulysses, probably my favorite book, about 20 minutes before I found this article. Sigh, haven't read it in a century, though.