Happy New Year 2012.
Middlebury — MMXII, Y2K12. Happy New Year 2012. The new year of 2012 A.D., or C.E. if you prefer, will mark several interesting events.
First, some New Ageers believe 2012 will mark the end of the world. It appears the mathematicians of Mesoamerica ran out of fingers, toes, and human sacrificial bodies to count past 2,012 (or however they reckoned our still-in-the-future Anno Domini calendar) and thus—with no calendars to chisel out of lava rock—the planet Earth was predicted to vanish in an apocalyptic firestorm. Funny since similar predictions have been made by U.S. environmentalists since the 1970s.
Another big event in 2012 to watch: April 15, 2012 will mark the centennial of the tragic sinking of the luxury liner RMS Titanic.
Over 1,500 men, women and children died after the unsinkable jewel of the British maritime crown struck an iceberg off Cape Race, Newfoundland, in the Atlantic Ocean.
The sinking of Titanic has captivated audiences young and old and spun off whole disaster industries. There are Titanic pop culture items from books, comics and television (let’s not forget sci-fi, disaster master Irwin Allen’s “The Time Tunnel” first broadcast in 1966 with a time-travel tale back to the Titanic) to silent and talking motion pictures. Among these unsinkable films are the dumbest—James Cameron’s "Titanic"—and the brightest, the 1958 Roy Ward Baker docudrama "A Night to Remember".
The funniest thing to look forward to in 2012 is the ironic change in the date of the State of the Union Address before the U.S. Congress. Several online sources indicate both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address will occur on the same day next year (but don't take our word). If so, then as the satirical Thunder Mug website put it, “This is an ironic juxtaposition of events. One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication. The other involves a rodent.”
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