Prophecy update

Hard as it is to believe, we're over halfway through 2025.  On the one hand, it seems like it's flown.  On the other, any amount of time spent living through the Trump regime is going to feel like having your feet in the fire, so it's a mixed bag.

Maybe there's something in Einstein's theory to explain this, given that he said "time is relative" and all.

I thought this might be a good point to check in on our psychic predictions for the year and see how the psychics were faring.  We still have a bit over four months left to go, and the final scorecard won't be certain till December 31, so think of this as being a bit of mid-game analysis.

Some of them, however, go right down to the wire.  Like the TikTok clip of a woman running up to a couple on the beach in Saint Augustine, Florida, shrieking, "I know what's coming!", pointing to the waves, and then running away.  The guy who posted it said the video is dated December 30, 2025.  How that's possible, I have no idea.  In any case, he advised us all to "flag this post in case anything weird happens."

Of course, it works the other way, too.  If you pinpoint a date, it's much easier to prove wrong.  Despite an alleged prediction by Alexa that there would be a "strong 8.2 magnitude earthquake in the Philippines, along with an eruption of Mount Pinatubo," April 23 dawned and nothing had happened.  So the take-home message for would-be prophets is "keep it vague so no one can say you're definitively wrong."

That's the approach of Nostradamus, who couched his prophecies in such arcane, weird, and symbolic language that you can interpret them to mean pretty much any damn thing you want.  The 2025 predictions from the mysterious Frenchman are supposedly for "global conflict, natural disasters, and shifts in environmental patterns," which are a pretty good bet in any year, but also supposedly we're in for a "large asteroid falling from the sky, followed by a great fire on Earth."  Which would be hard to miss.  Thus far I haven't seen any sign of it, and NASA has assured us that of the asteroids it knows about, none pose an immediate threat.

None it knows about.  Or is willing to tell us about.  Amirite?  *slow single eyebrow raise*

In any case, so far so good on the giant asteroid front.  Although I have to say if it targeted Mar-a-Lago, I might be in the pro-asteroid camp.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gunnshots (Don), Psychic reading, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Then there's Baba Vanga, the blind Bulgarian mystic who according to some sources left behind enough prophecies at her death in 1996 to last us until the year 5079.  This is also a smart tactic, because not many of us will be around for that long, so saying "In the year 4537, a freak hurricane will flatten Hoboken" falls into the "unverifiable even in theory" department.  But fortunately, we have her predictions for 2025, and they include a few doozies.  Aliens are going to "make contact during a major sporting event," which sure would add some spice to the halftime show.  Medical science will take a huge leap forward when researchers figure out how to grow fully-functional human organs in vitro.  Physicists will discover a new energy source that is "clean, limitless, and unlike anything we've seen before."  And human telepathy will become a reality, meaning that we'll be able to communicate with each other with no intermediate medium necessary.

I don't know about you, but I'm not thrilled about this last one.  Exposing some innocent person to the chaos that goes on inside my skull just seems mean.  I explored the whole "telepathy is not pleasant" idea in my Parsifal Snowe Mysteries series (currently out of print but hopefully back soon), in the character of the tortured psychic Callista Lee -- who describes ordinary existence as being trapped in a crowded, noisy bar 24/7.  Keep in mind, though, that this series is fiction.

In any case, Baba is batting a big fat zero so far.

Then we have John Sommers-Flanagan, whose predictions include Superbowl LIX ending with the Bills beating the Lions 36-30 (the actual outcome was Eagles 40, Chiefs 22).  Otherwise, he chose to play it safe, saying we'd have rising temperatures and food prices, falling economic strength and consumer confidence, and that Trump will continue to be an ignorant, racist, authoritarian fascist-wannabe schmuck.  (Not in those exact words, but that's the gist.)  In any case, those all fall into the "Who Could Have Predicted This Besides Everyone?" department.  

So the predictions thus far have kind of been a bust.  Of course, to be fair to the psychics, we do still have four months for all of it to happen.  Me, I'm hoping Baba Vanga's aliens do show up.  At this point, I don't particularly care if they're hostile:

Alien: Ha ha, puny earthling, we have come here to slaughter your leaders, subjugate your entire planet, and rule you for all eternity!

Me:  Okay, go for it

Alien:  ... wait, what?

Me:  You heard me.  Hop to it, lazy, we don't have all fucking day

But given their track record (the psychics, not the aliens), I'm thinking we're probably going to remain stuck with the "leaders" we have.  On the other hand, if you live in Saint Augustine, Florida, you might want to stay away from the beach on December 30.  You wouldn't want to throw caution to the wind if this turns out to be the one time the psychics nailed it, and get eaten by Cthulhu or something.  As my dad used to say, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

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Thus sayeth the prophecy

I have written daily on this blog for years now, and I still run into crazies that I haven't heard of before.  I guess this isn't that surprising, since humanity seems to produce an unending supply.  But given the amount of time I spend weekly perusing the world of woo-woo, it always comes as a little bit of a shock when I find a new one.

This week it was John Hogue, who a friend of mine asked about, in the context of, "Wait till you see what this loony is saying."  Hogue is a big fan of "Nostradamus," noted sixteenth century wingnut and erstwhile prophet, who achieved fame for writing literally thousands of quatrains of bizarre predictions.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Hogue believes that just about everything you can think of was predicted by Nostradamus.  We'll start with his claim that Nostradamus predicted Saddam Hussein's rise and fall, only (because being a prophet and all, you can't just say things straight out) he called Saddam "Mabus."  How does Hogue know that Saddam is Mabus?  Let's have it in his own words:

Here, for your review are the two core quatrain prophecies about Mabus, the Third Antichrist, indexed 2 Q62 and 8 Q77 in Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece Les Propheties, initially published in serialized form between the years 1555 and 1560: 

2 Q62

Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comète.

Mabus will soon die, then will come,

A horrible unraveling of people and animals,

At once one will see vengeance,

One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

8 Q77

L’antéchrist trois bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept ans sang durera sa guerre:
Les hérétiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre.

The Third Antichrist very soon annihilated,

Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last.

The heretics [are] dead, captives exiled,

Blood-soaked human bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

Let us go through the milestones that [show] Saddam... to be candidate number one...
Being a dead candidate is the first and dubious milestone...  Saddam was hanged at the 30 December 2006...
[Saddam's name] can be found in the code name Mabus.  Saddam backwards spells maddas=mabbas=mabas.  Replace one redundant a and you get Mabus.

Or if you don't like that solution, maybe Mabus is Osama bin Laden, whom Hogue refers to as "Usama" for reasons that become obvious pretty quickly:

Usama mixed around get [sic] us maaus.  Take the b from bin Laden.  Replace the redundant a and you get Mabus.

If you take my first name, Gordon, and rearrange it, you get "drogon."  Replace the "o" with an "a," because after all there are two "o"s anyway, and you clearly don't need both of them.  You can get the "a" from the leftover one Hogue had by removing the redundant "a" in "maaus."  Then you get "dragon."  If you take my middle name (Paul) and my last name, and rearrange the letters, you get "a noble punt."

So this clearly means that a dragon is about to attack the United States, but I'm going to kick its ass.

Basically, if you take passages at random, and mess around with them, and there are no rules about how you do this, you can prove whatever you want.  Plus, all of the "prophecies" that Nostradamus wrote are vague and weird enough already, without any linguistic origami to help you out.  They make obscure historical and mythical allusions that, if you're a little creative, can be interpreted to mean damn near anything.  Here's one I picked at random (Century X, Quatrain 71):

The earth and air will freeze a very great sea,
When they will come to venerate Thursday:
That which will be, never was it so fair,
From the four parts they will come to honor it.

What does that mean?  Beats the shit out of me.  I'm guessing that you could apply it to a variety of situations, as long as you are willing to interpret it loosely and let the images stand for whatever you want them to.  Me, I think it has to do with the biblical End Times.  Oh, and that climate change is a lie, because the sea is going to freeze.  I'm sure that the Planet Nibiru and global conspiracies are involved, too.

They always are, somehow.

What I find amazing is that there are literally thousands of websites, books, and films out there that claim to give the correct interpretation of Nostradamus' wacky poetry.  Some of them take a religious bent, and try to tie them into scripture, especially the Book of Revelation; some try to link them to historical events, an especially popular one being World War II; others, even further off the deep end, try to use them to predict future catastrophes.  These last at least put the writers on safer ground, because you can't accuse someone of being wrong if they're using arcane poetry to make guesses about things that haven't happened yet.

In any case, I'm doubtful that Nostradamus knew anything about Saddam Hussein, any more than he predicted World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of JFK, or any of the hundreds of other things Hogue claims he forecasted.  All we have here is once again, people taking vague language and jamming it into the mold of their own preconceived notions of what it means.  About John Hogue himself, I'm reminded of the words of the Roman writer Cicero, who said, "I don't know how two augurs can look each other in the face while passing in the street without laughing out loud."

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Prediction conviction

I know it's been a tough year.  The pandemic, the final year of King Donald the Demented's reign, the fractious election and its aftermath -- it's a lot to pack into a twelve months.

So it's natural enough that a lot of us are looking forward to saying goodbye to 2020, although rationally speaking, there's no reason that going from December 31 to January 1 should mark any real delineation in world events.  The fact that the most commonly-used calendar in the industrialized world marks the year's end in the middle of winter doesn't mean it's any kind of real phenomenon.  If we went by the Jewish calendar, the Hindu calendar, the Mayan calendar, or any of a variety of other ways humans have gone about marking time, what we call New Year's Day would just be another ordinary day.

That hasn't stopped the prognosticators from doing what they do, of course.  Just in the last couple of weeks, a number of psychic types have revealed to us what 2021 is going to be like.  As you might expect, none of them agree with each other, which you'd think would give people a clue about their veracity.

But as I said earlier, there's not much of this that has to do with rationality.

Let's start with Nicolas Aujula, who warns us against getting too optimistic about any serious improvements in 2021:

I have had a couple of quite horrid visions – one of a male world leader being assassinated.  I couldn’t see who it was, but sensed it sent shockwaves through the world.  Obviously I hope that doesn’t come to fruition.  I’ve also had a vision of a world summit being plagued by a sex scandal and, a rise in far-right politics, particularly in southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and a volcanic eruption leading to major weather changes.  And I’ve had the words ‘pig flu’ come to me and seen images of mass panic.  I don’t think it will be another virus, but I can imagine the reaction will be alarmist, given what’s happened this year.

What stands out to me here is the volcanic eruption, which would seem to be a pretty striking predication if a month and a half ago there hadn't been an announcement from geologists that Grimsvötn, Iceland's most active volcano, is showing signs of another big eruption, and that it has a history of larger eruptions than nearby Eyjafjallajökull -- which had a 2010 eruption spewing so much ash into the air that it led to the cancellation of 100,000 airline flights. 

So that one just shows that Aujula knows how to read the news.  As far as the rest, when hasn't there been a political sex scandal?  And the "rise of far-right politics" isn't exactly a reach, either, since it's been going on for what, four or five years, now?

Then there's Polish psychic Adam A., who has some Poland-specific predictions whose likelihood I can't speak to with any authority, but also had two visions that are a little baffling:

• A large dark triangle soars over a city with low buildings.  There are no skyscrapers or other tall buildings here.  Cloudy water flows outside the city and it spills out.  A strong stream hits a mysterious triangle.

• Eight people are sitting at the table, debating a piece of paper crumpled into a ball.  One of the men has a mustache.  The paper ball starts to burn, and the fire takes the shape of a bird and goes to the sky.

Nope.  I got nothin'.

But when it comes to arcane predictions, no one can beat Michel de Nostredame (better known under his Latinized name of Nostradamus), the sixteenth-century mystic and astrologer who made pronouncements so weird and incomprehensible that you could interpret them to mean damn near anything.  Which, of course, is very helpful after the fact, because no matter what happens you can always go back and find something Nostradamus said that seems to fit if you squint at it in just the right way.  

Portrait of Michel de Nostradame, painted posthumously by his son César de Nostredame (ca. 1590) [Image is in the Public Domain]

He wrote in these little four-line stanzas called quatrains, and of course, there are people who are now trying to apply them to 2021.  Here are a few of their better efforts:

1) A famine

This one is supposedly predicted by this quatrain:

After great trouble for humanity, a greater one is prepared, 

The Great Mover renews the ages: 

Rain, blood, milk, famine, steel, and plague, 

Is the heavens fire seen, a long spark running.

So I think we can all agree that's clear as mud.  But predicting a famine is a good bet anyhow, especially given what we're doing to the climate.

Then we have:

2) A devastating earthquake in California

Once again, that's not a reach to predict.  Although even with stretching your interpretation, I have a hard time making this quatrain about California: 

The sloping park, great calamity, 

Through the Lands of the West and Lombardy 

The fire in the ship, plague, and captivity; 

Mercury in Sagittarius, Saturn fading.

Okay, California is in the west, at least from the perspective of those of us here in the United States, but the only connection it has to Lombardy is that they're on the same planet.  And yeah, an earthquake is a "calamity," but I don't see what it has to do with ship fires, plagues, and captivity.

And don't even get me started about the whole Mercury in Sagittarius thing.

Finally, no cataclysm would be complete without:

3) A zombie apocalypse

You think I'm making this up.  Here's the pair of quatrains that supposedly predicts it:

Few young people: half−dead to give a start.
Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine,
And in an exalted place some great evils to occur:
Sad concepts will come to harm each one,
Temporal dignified, the Mass to succeed.
Fathers and mothers dead of infinite sorrows,
Women in mourning, the pestilent she−monster:
The Great One to be no more, all the world to end.

Right!  Sure!  I only have one question, which is, "What?"

I mean, I guess you could say that predicts zombies as much as it predicts anything, but I'm a little baffled as to why this one is scheduled for 2021.  Other than the fact that we've had pretty much everything else you can think of in 2020, so maybe a zombie apocalypse is the next logical step.

The article I linked has a bunch more of Nostradamus's predictions that supposedly apply to next year, and I encourage you to read it if you're interested in finding out more about what we're in for.  Suffice it to say that it doesn't sound like much fun.  But even with all this, I still can't help but be a little hopeful.  For one thing, it's looking like Donald Trump will finally be relegated to the Little Kids' Table of History, where he can tweet and throw a tantrum and dump his Froot Loops on the floor all he wants without bothering the rest of us.  We'll finally have a president who takes climate change seriously, although I'm under no illusions that the battle is won.

So I'm inclined to agree with the folks who are glad to see 2020 go.  At this point, my general feeling is: bring on the zombies.

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One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Thus sayeth the prophecy

I have written daily on this blog for years now, and I still run into crazies that I haven't heard of before.  I guess this isn't that surprising, given that humanity seems to produce an unending supply.  But given the amount of time I spend weekly perusing the world of woo-woo, it always comes as a little bit of a shock when I find a new one.

This week it was John Hogue, who a student of mine asked about, in the context of, "Wait till you see what this loony is saying."  Hogue is a big fan of "Nostradamus," noted 16th century wingnut and erstwhile prophet, who achieved fame for writing literally thousands of quatrains of bizarre predictions.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Hogue believes that just about everything you can think of was predicted by Nostradamus. Let's start with his claim that Nostradamus predicted Saddam Hussein's rise and fall, only (because being a prophet and all, you can't just say things straight out) he called Saddam "Mabus."  How does Hogue know that Saddam is Mabus?  Let's have it in his own words:

Here, for your review are the two core quatrain prophecies about Mabus, the Third Antichrist, indexed 2 Q62 and 8 Q77 in Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece Les Propheties, initially published in serialized form between the years 1555 and 1560: 

2 Q62

Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete. 

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible unraveling of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

8 Q77

L’antechrist trois bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept ans sang durera sa guerre:
Les heretiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre. 

The Third Antichrist very soon annihilated,
Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last.
The heretics [are] dead, captives exiled,
Blood-soaked human bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

Let us go through the milestones that [show] Saddam... to be candidate number one...
Being a dead candidate is the first and dubious milestone... Saddam was hanged at the 30 December 2006... 

[Saddam's name] can be found in the code name Mabus.  Saddam backwards spells maddas=mabbas=mabas.  Replace one redundant a and you get Mabus. 

Or if you don't like that solution, maybe Mabus is Osama bin Laden, whom Hogue refers to as "Usama" for reasons that become obvious pretty quickly:

Usama mixed around get [sic] us maaus.  Take the b from bin Laden. Replace the redundant a and you get Mabus.

If you take my first name, Gordon, and rearrange it, you get "drogon."  Replace the "o" with an "a," because after all there are two "o"s anyway, and you clearly don't need both of them.  You can get the "a" from the leftover one Hogue had by removing the redundant "a" in "maaus."  Then you get "dragon."  If you take my middle name (Paul) and my last name, and rearrange the letters, you get "a noble punt."

So this clearly means that a dragon is about to attack the United States, but I'm going to kick its ass.

Basically, if you take passages at random, and mess around with them, and there are no rules about how you do this, you can prove whatever you want.  Plus, all of the "prophecies" that Nostradamus wrote are vague and weird enough without any linguistic origami to help you out.  They make obscure historical and mythical allusions that, if you're a little creative, can be interpreted to mean damn near anything. Here's one I picked at random (Century X, Quatrain 71):

The earth and air will freeze a very great sea,
When they will come to venerate Thursday:
That which will be, never was it so fair,
From the four parts they will come to honor it.

What does that mean?  Beats the hell out of me.  I'm guessing that you could apply it to a variety of situations, as long as you were willing to interpret it loosely and let the images stand for whatever you want them to.  Me, I think it has to do with the upcoming apocalypse on October 21.  Oh, and that climate change is a lie, because the sea is going to freeze.  I'm sure that the Planet Nibiru and global conspiracies are somehow involved, too.

What I find amazing is that there are literally thousands of websites, books, and films out there that claim to give the correct interpretation of Nostradamus' wacky poetry.  Some of them take a religious bent, and try to tie them into scripture, especially the Book of Revelation; some try to link them to historical events, an especially popular one being World War II; others, even further off the deep end, try to use them to predict future catastrophes.  These last at least put the writers on safer ground, because you can't accuse someone being wrong if they're using arcane poetry to make guesses about things that haven't happened yet.

In any case, I'm doubtful that Nostradamus knew anything about Saddam Hussein, any more than he predicted World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of JFK, or any of the hundreds of other things he's alleged to have forecast.  All we have here is once again, people taking vague language and jamming it into the mold of their own preconceived notions of what it means.  About John Hogue himself, I'm reminded of the words of the Roman writer Cicero, who said, "I don't know how two augurs can look each other in the face while passing in the street without laughing out loud."

Whole lot o' shakin' going on

To all of my readers in California:  I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you're all gonna die.

I know, I know, I should have told you about this sooner, so you could do something about it, but I didn't even know about it myself until yesterday, and by then it was too late.  I mean, just think if everyone had tried to leave the state yesterday evening.  The traffic would have been worse even than usual, and where would they all have gone?  I mean, it's not like Oregon wants 'em.

If you're wondering what all this is about, I'm referring, of course, to the fact that California is going to be destroyed by an earthquake today.  9.8 on the Richter scale, no less, and caused by the alignment of Mercury and Venus, or something.  Scary shit.

How do I know this?  Well, there's this article in IN5D Esoteric Metaphysical Spiritual Database, which as authoritative sources go, is pretty much unimpeachable.  In it, we learn that Nostradamus predicted this, and since Nostradamus's predictions have proven as accurate as you'd expect given that they're the ravings of an apparently insane man who did most of his writing after a bad acid trip, we should all sit up and pay attention.  Here, according to IN5D, is the quatrain in question:

Le tremblement si fort au mois de may,
Saturne, Caper, Jupiter, Mercure au boeuf:
Vénus aussi, Cancer, Mars, en Nonnay,
Tombera gresle lors plus grosse qu’un oeuf. 

English translation: 

The trembling so hard in the month of may,
Saturn, Capricorn, Jupiter, Mercury in Taurus:
Venus also, Cancer, Mars, in Virgo,
Hail will fall larger than an egg.

The site goes on to clarify:

On May 28, 2015 towards the end of the day UTC time, and continuing on May 29, there will be a series of very critical planetary alignments whereby Venus and Mercury are really being charged up on the North-Amerca [sic] / Pacific side.

Wow.  Pretty scientific.  Bad things happen when Venus and Mercury get "really charged up."  Time to get outta Dodge, apparently, not to mention Los Angeles.

Okay, astronomer Phil Plait says we should all calm down.  In his wonderful column Bad Astronomy in the magazine Slate, he says:

First, there is simply no way an alignment of planets can cause an earthquake on Earth. It’s literally impossible. I’ve done the math on this before; the maximum combined gravity of all the planets under ideal conditions is still far less than the gravitational influence of the Moon on the Earth, and the Moon at very best has an extremely weak influence on earthquakes. 

To put a number on it, because the Moon is so close to us its gravitational pull is 50 times stronger than all the planets in the solar system combined. Remember too that the Moon orbits the Earth on an ellipse, so it gets closer and farther from us every two weeks. The change in its gravity over that time is still more than all the planets combined, yet we don’t see catastrophic earthquakes twice a month, let alone aligning with the Moon’s phases or physical location in its orbit.

He goes on to say that Mercury and Venus aren't aligning anyhow, at least not the way the prediction claims (I mean, they're always aligned with something; two objects always fall on a straight line, as hath been revealed unto us in the prophecies of Euclid, and said line includes an infinite number of other points).  So the whole thing is pretty much a non-starter.

This hasn't stopped it from being shared around on social media, of course.  It'd be nice if articles like Phil Plait's would get shared around as often as the idiotic one in IN5D, but that, apparently, is not how things work.  People still gravitate toward predictions of doom and destruction, even though said predictions have had an exactly zero success rate.

So my guess is that if you live in California, you have nothing to worry about above and beyond the usual concerns over wildfires, mudslides, droughts, earthquakes, and Kylie Jenner spotting 75 chemtrails in the sky and posting a hysterical claim that they're killing honeybees.

The usual stuff, in other words.

Gangnam Style, Nostradamus, and the end of the world

This morning I have a poem for you, Dear Readers.  See what you make of it.

From the calm morning,
the end will come;
when of the dancing horse,
the number of circles will be nine.

Well, what do you think?  Most especially, do you know where it's from, and what it means?

If you think you know the answer to the first half of the question, it's probably because of two things: (1) its characteristic style, laid out in four short phrases, with no obvious rhyme or rhythmic structure; and (2) its wacky, opaque imagery.  This by itself is probably enough for you to conclude that it must be one of the famous "quatrains of Nostradamus," the writings of renowned 16th century wingnut Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), who, depending upon whom you believe, either was a prescient seer who has correctly predicted everything from the assassination of JFK to Hurricane Sandy, or a wacko crank who wrote down predictions that are so vague that they could be interpreted any way you want.

Guess which I believe.

Of course, probably most of you knew about Nostradamus already, and in any case the subject of his overall veracity has been beaten unto death in other venues.  Why, then, did I begin this post with one of his quatrains?

Two reasons, actually.  The first is that there is currently a claim zinging its way around the internet to the effect that this quatrain was referring to Psy's viral hit "Gangnam Style" (the "dancing horse"), which came out of Korea (the "land of the calm morning"), recently topped one billion hits (nine zeroes -- "nine circles"), and that this means that the world will end, undoubtedly a week from Friday, As Spoken In The Prophecy.

Add this to the fact that Nostradamus himself was born (according to his Wikipedia entry) either on December 14 or December 21, 1503, and I think we have here what the lawyers like to call "an airtight case."

Well, except for the second reason I posted all of this, which is: this isn't actually one of Nostradamus' quatrains.

The origin of the claim was someone who posted it on the phenomenally wacky site Godlike Productions (see the original post here), and interestingly, it almost instantly got called out as bullshit by people who (like I did) took the extra two minutes to see if the quote was actually from Nostradamus.  (If you want to spend a few hours turning your brain into cream of mushroom soup, all of Nostradamus' predictions are available here.  You won't, if you're wondering, find any mention of a "dancing horse" in any of them.)  Eventually the original poster admitted that he'd made it all up, but even with all of the screams of "Lies!  It's all lies!" and the original poster's confession, this still made it out into the web as a valid claim.  After that, it spiraled out of control, even making it onto mainstream media (I ran into it on The Examiner). 

So, what we have here is a repeat of the ridiculous "Rebecca Black's 'Friday' is about the JFK assassination" incident, but with the added twist that even the guy who made it up admits that it was a hoax.

And yet, still people believe it.  I have, to date, been asked three times by students if I'd "heard that Nostradamus said that 'Gangnam Style' was going to cause the Mayan apocalypse."

Now, don't get me wrong; it wouldn't surprise me if "Gangnam Style" triggered the End of the World.  In fact, I thought Rebecca Black's "Friday" was going to do the same thing, and for the same reason; both songs are so bad that when people hear them, they suddenly feel an urge to stick objects into their ears, even if those objects happen to be screwdrivers.  So I can see how either song, or (heaven forfend) both of them played one after the other, would cause massive mortality.

But as far as "Gangnam Style" having anything to do with Nostradamus, or the Mayan apocalypse, I'm afraid that the answer is "no."  The only people who believe it are those who don't know how to do a source search.  And the guy who originated the claim made the whole thing up.  Which, now that I come to think of it, is all Nostradamus himself did, so I suppose it's fitting, somehow.