The Baktun Has Ended; Welcome the New Baktun

So it's not the alpacalypse after all?

Yup. Well, there were some ancient Mayans who had a cosmology in which at the end of the Baktun the people were judged, found wanting, condemned, and replaced with a new set.

Swampbits and the apocalypsists are off by about a week, though; according to a professor I know, the mapping of the Mayan calendar to ours that has the new Baktun starting today is based out outdated research.

Happy Nothing Happened Day.

Heya Jon,

You might like the haiku I wrote along about midnight yesterday when out for a walk:

Haikopalypse

Bright solstice half moon
Dives into the western clouds
The world is still here.

V.

That is just splendid! It's also a hell of a lot more poetic than mine:

The Baktun is gone.
Now, business as usual.
(It's always like that...)

Ahem.
jon

My favorite cartoon so far is a guy running from his car in screaming hysterics because the odometer had rolled over to all zeroes and it was about to EXPLODE AND KILL ALL OF US!!!

Bob Wilson had a collection of odd calendars, and used to head letters with a miscellany of dates. I tries Googling "Discordian calendar", and learned that there's been one in util-linux for almost twenty years, and that there are both iPhone and Android apps available, but didn't quickly enough find a simultaneous converter to Mayan, Chinese, Roman, and Hebrew.
Come to think of it, I can contribute a useful mnemonic for the Hebrew calendar. As you know, Bob, the lunar calendar accommodates leap year with an occasional extra month. Seven extra months in nineteen years comes out even with boggling, implausible precision. Look at a piano keyboard from C to high E. That's a total of nineteen keys, seven black. And that's the pattern of the leap years.

We likes it! The piano keyboard accordance with the leap months is just wonderful.

One wonders how long the boggling & implausible precision will last, btw — the moon's orbit does change, albeit rather slowly.

"Happy Merry, ...or maybe Merry Happy," as my father would have said.
jon