Dec. 2012 -- the End or another Y2K?

[mgland]

2012: It's only a movie, not doomsday
By Mark Stevenson
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/oct/11/2012-its-only-movie-not-doomsday/?uniontrib

ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:00 a.m. October 11, 2009
MEXICO CITY — 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 Maya Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year, and man, they had me fed up with this stuff,” he said.
It can only get worse for Chile Pixtun. Next month, Hollywood's “2012” opens in theaters, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.
At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the “Curious? 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.
A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments that they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly once every 25,800 years.
But most archaeologists, astronomers and Mayas say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel that mixes “predictions” from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks, “Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?”
A stone tablet named Monument Six, found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, forms the basis for the doomsday theories. The marker almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.
It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that's supposed to occur that year involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.
However, erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.
Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University said that luckily, there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 — including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.
Union-Tribune