History Channel

What’s the scariest network on television? Sci-Fi Network? Nope. HBO on a Friday the 13^th? Uh-uh. Fox News? Not even close. By far the scariest TV is being produced by the History Channel. The other networks make up scary stuff; the History Channel tells you about the different ways you’re going to die and how uncomfortable it will be. And they have shows about Hitler.

I’m not a History Channel addict, but over the last couple months I’ve been told all humans will be wiped off the earth by one of several calamities (Now that’s a word that isn’t plural very often. Usually one calamity is plenty). Sometimes they’re very tangible, like global warming, nuclear war, alien viruses (I didn’t make that up), massive volcanoes, etc. Other times, we find out the world is going to end on 12/20/2012. I didn’t make that up either. And if the world doesn’t end on 12/20/2012, it’ll definitely end in 2026 when an asteroid is supposed to be on a collision course with earth.

I know what you’re thinking. The History Channel should be focused on history. But the History Channel has taken it one step farther. They want to do shows about when we’ll become history.

The end of the world coming in 41/2 years makes me nervous. There are a lot of things I’d like to do yet, like see my kids leave the house. The History Chanel didn’t make this day up, it comes from the Mayans. You remember those guys, they spent all their free time making calendars and inventing the month of May*. Think Calendar Club, but with stone and slightly fewer sales. Apparently, the Mayans calendars stopped at 12/20/2012. This led the bright people at the History Channel to determine the world will end on 12/20/2012. Now I’m naturally analytical and skeptical so I think there might be other reasons they stopped the calendar at 12/20/2012. For starters, they were using stone. And it was about a thousand years ago. Can you imagine how long it would take to carve a thousand years of stone calendars? Maybe the calendar carvers got tired. Maybe calendar sales were soft for a couple holiday seasons so they discontinued the calendar lines in favor of those cheesy rippling water pictures with waterfall sounds that make me want to pee. My point is maybe we shouldn’t trust some culture that was conquered by the Spanish a thousand years ago. I mean, when was the last time the Spanish conquered anything?

The asteroid scenario is also a bit unsettling, and not just because Bruce Willis won’t be around to blow it up. Apparently the best idea we have to stop this asteroid is to send a satellite to it and use the gravitational pull between the asteroid and the satellite to “guide” it around the earth. Who the hell came up with this idea, Wil E. Coyote? (Yeah, I know, two Armageddon references are two too many) The “scientists” said blowing it up will make a lot of small asteroids hit the earth instead of one big asteroid. Apparently these scientists have never been in a rock fight. It is much better to get pelted by dozen of pebbles than by a concrete barricade.

So what does this all mean? It means you need to start living a little. Don’t go into work tomorrow. Max out your credit cards. Take a trip to Mexico and visit what’s left of the Mayan civilization that gave us the heads up about our eminent destruction. Go for it, because chances are that cold you think you’re coming down with is really an alien virus.

*probably not.