Time marches on

I was observing to a friend a couple of days ago how fast this year is going by.  It seems like only a week or two ago that we were all complaining about adjusting to writing 2024 on our checks, and here it is September, with the Autumnal Equinox less than a week away.

Thus far it's been a wild, and rapid, ride.  We've had the hottest year on record, and that's with some stiff competition from the past twenty years.  War is still raging in Ukraine and Gaza.  Donald Trump is still shrieking about evil immigrants eating pets, which for some unexplained reason does not result in his handlers squirting horse tranquilizers down his throat with a turkey baster.

So pretty much the status quo, weird though it may be.

But if you think time's rushing by as-is, it's nothing compared a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2024, we should be in 12,024.

The reason for this proposal is that marking our calendar based upon the beginning of Christianity is a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the backwards-running "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary.  So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,024 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E."  (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer (Image is in the Public Domain]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,024 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,126, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design every year is the moral equivalent of strafing the Three Wise Men while they're on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable."  Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the entire thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass, and if you count his movie appearances, drop-dead sexy as well.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 C.E., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.E.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-fourth century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C.E. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years.  In fact, when that change was made, it was because in the sixteenth century, the powers-that-be were beginning to notice that the solstices and equinoxes, and more importantly from their point of view the holy days, were coming unglued from the dates they were supposed to occur on.  So this prompted the reformation of the calendar called the Gregorian calendar, which fixed the beginning of the year at January 1 (before, the date that marked the beginning of a new year varied from December 25 to March 25, depending on whom you asked), and added an extra day in February every four years to keep it from happening again.  The adoption of the Gregorian calendar caused the loss of 13 days (February 1 was immediately followed by February 14).  And even it wasn't adopted smoothly and universally -- the Republic of Venice adopted the new calendar in 1582; Great Britain waited until 1750; and Russia and Serbia didn't cave in until 1918.

You can just imagine the hell this played with people's international engagement calendars.  (Actually, the author Umberto Eco used this very idea as one of the many plot twists in his novel Foucault's Pendulum, which might well be the most brilliantly intricate novel ever written.)

So trying to make a major-scale, simultaneous, worldwide change to time-keeping would be too much for us, I think.

Me, I think if we're really going to have a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's a real Zero Year.  And it makes the fact that we've only got three and a half months left in 13,800,002,024 A.B.B. seems like not such a big deal after all.

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Time marches on

Happy New Year 2017 to all of my readers, and I hope this one brings you everything you hope for.  Me, I'm keeping my New Year's wishes fairly modest this year.  I'm currently working on two novels and I'd like to finish them both; I'd like to get my 5 K race time down below 27 minutes; and I'd like it if Donald Trump doesn't open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

Other than that, I'm pretty content with the status quo.

But speaking of calendars, milestones, and benchmarks, apparently there's been a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2017, we should be in 12,017.

The reason for this proposal is that marking our calendar based upon the beginning of Christianity is a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the calendar-running-backwards "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary.  So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,017 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E." (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer (image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,017 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,133, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design was the moral equivalent of strafing the Three Wise Men while they were on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable."  Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the whole thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 A.D., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-4th century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years (and had a "leap second" this year -- hope you used your extra second for something productive).  Trying to make a major-scale change to calendar-keeping would be too much for us, I think.

Me, I think if we're really going to have a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's a real Zero Year.  And with that thought, I'll end here, and pause only to reiterate my wish that your 13,800,002,017 A.B.B. is a special one.

The crazy is strong with this one.

Here I am, waiting for the cataclysm that is supposed to happen in a little less than three weeks (I do so love a good apocalypse!), without realizing that something amazing is supposed to happen next week.  December is going to be so jam-packed, I just don't know if I can handle it.

I refer, of course, to 12/12/12.  At 12:12 (and 12 seconds).  Amazing things will happen.  Amazing things always happen when a human-designed, human-defined chronology hits some set of numbers that forms a pattern.  For example, I'm sure you all remember the chaos that ensued when my odometer hit "77,777" a couple of weeks ago.  I said, "Huh."  And then I kept on driving.  (I was a little upset when my car hit 66,666 miles, however.  I was expecting Satan to show up, and at least give me a certificate, or something, but nothing happened.)

So based upon my experience with the odometer, we should all brace ourselves for transformative events to occur next Wednesday at a little after noon.  (It is unclear which time zone we should be setting our clocks to, in order to be ready for said events, so I plan on being vigilant all day, or at least until I get bored.)

I found out about all of this in an acutely painful half-hour during which I read various posts on the site "Earth Keeper Chronicles."  This website has some of the most concentrated crazy I've ever seen.  Just consider some of the titles of the posts:

"Easter Island - Rapa Nui 144: The umbilical of the new Earth."
"Standing waves of the crystal vortex."
"Parallels of OmniEarth: The Kingdom of Fae"
"The Crystal-Electric-Auric as the manifold of power & auric effects of air travel"
"Arkansas: Quakes, grids, triple-date portals crysto coding the sun disc"
"Metatronic keys: The Mer-Ki-Va crystalline light body polarity clarification"

It's almost like someone took a bunch of woo-woo articles, shredded them, and then pulled out one word at a time at random and wrote them down.

And of course, I had to check out at least one of the actual posts, a move I now heartily regret because I hear that brain damage is irreversible.  The one I chose, for no very good reason, was "The ascension and the 144 - crystal grid."   Here are the opening paragraphs, just so you can get a flavor for what every post on this website is like:

The Crystalline Grid is the energetic lattice that covers our planet. It reflects and amplifies our ascending levels of consciousness. It is a crystalline 'light' matrix that was anchored in 1992, five years after the harmonic convergence. Although in place and functional, its total activation will involve 12 phases, with full resonant vibratory rate achieved on the 12-12-12 ...December 12, 2012.The 'triple' dates ( 01-01-01 thru 12-12-12) that occur uniquely for the next 12 years each carry numeric light codes that open & activate each of the 12 major pentacle facets of this amazing template.

Visualize the grid as a geodesic sphere, of pentagons and triangles, sparkling as a faceted, brilliant diamond. It is a seed crystal of new form, the double penta-dodecahedron. Its time has arrived, merkaba of Earthstar. The double penta dodecahedron has 144 facets, the number of Christ ascension. Each dodecahedron has 12 major pentacles with 60 facets, add the 12 truncated pentagons for 72, and double this for 144 !

The concept of planetary grids is not a new one. Plato theorized the concept as did the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Hopi Indians. In a sense, grids are the template, the window 'program', if you will, that allows all life to accelerate in the graduated light format that is called the ascension.

If you will, the crystalline Ascension Grid, is 'Windows 2012' , and indeed, it is quite necessary for our ascension.

There is not one, but three grid templates surrounding our planet effecting human life. The three are separate, yet intricately related. The three become the one. The grids have separate functions relating individually to: (1) planetary gravitational field, (2) telluric electromagnetics, and (3) crystalline consciousness.

The Gravity grid is both within and on surface of the planet. It is anchored to the spinning crystalline core of the earth. It is in the form of a dodecahedron, a sphere with 12 facets. It is primarily rooted in the first three dimensions. The dodecahedron was the primary consciousness geometric of the planet from the time of the deluge of Atlantis, until the emergence of the icosahedron about 4,000 BC.

And this goes on for pages.  Basically every trope from every woo-woo website you've ever heard, blenderized and poured out, over and over and over.  It's kind of sad when a skeptic finds a website that badly needs debunking, and doesn't know where to start.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the website (and all of its publications) have been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.  Because obviously, we don't just want this nonsense to be available to English speakers only.  We've got to make sure that people in Bulgaria, for example, are as confused as we are.

Anyhow, I don't have much more to say about this one, except that I'm looking forward to next Wednesday, to see what happens when the last of the twelve "numeric light codes" opens up.  Given the amazing transformations we saw on 11/11/11, 10/10/10, and so on, I think we can count on its being a pretty stupendous day.  I'm gonna stock up on beer and potato chips.  I figure that even if nothing happens on the 12th, I can save it for the 21st, when the apocalypse is supposed to happen.  You can never have too much beer and potato chips during an apocalypse.