Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.
Or is it?
Definitely not, the Mayan elder insists."I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."
It can only get worse for him. Next month, Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.
At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.
"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."
Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan, ideas.
If only they've taken a History of Religion in America course, they would have heard dozens of individuals and groups in the 19th century who managed some kind of formula that claimed the end of the world was coming. And when that date had come and passed covered they're mistake up with the excuse of "God is not in error. It must have been a miscalculation of mine in my formula. Oh yeah I see it ... its not Jan. 1, 1880, its Jan. 1, 1888." Etc....
I always wonder -- don't people have anything really annoying in their lives to worry about that they have to find this kind of nonsense to upset them?
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