Seeing Mike Wiener’s post on the Mayan prophecy up above got me thinking:

Of course the Mayan calendar didn’t “run out” in 2012—the Baktun number just changed from 12 to 13. It’s scandalous, but even scholars commonly refer to this as the “13th Baktun”. Of course, unlike the Western calendar, there was a 0th Baktun, so this is really the 14th. So the 13th Baktun ran from (I get) September 27, 1617 to December 21, 2012. Maybe 13 is an unlucky number—a lot of nasty shit happened during the (real) 13th Baktun. Does that mean things will start getting better?

Hey, if you can (mis)use the Mayan calendar to forecast doom, I can use it to forecast improvement.