peter young’s listopia

15) Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas, 2009
Fourteen linked prose stories about the end of the world as we know it, but this is not a polite apocalypse after which there remains some kind of structure to life after the event. No, Butler's vision is to turn everything completely inside out with nothing left to grasp onto: weather, society, bodies, the mind, and especially families which most of the stories are structured around. However life does go on somehow, and Butler pushes the reader through one impossible event after another (eg. 'The Many Forms of Rain') with a variety of narrative voices that never question what is happening to them. It's an extraordinary and often jarring experiment, and as apocalypse fictions go this has to be a benchmark, something that will for a long time be hard to top.

I've seen it as a growing meme/virus on the outer fringes of my Facebook friends list – but thankfully not yet on my LJ FL, you guys are far too intelligent – that we are now in the last days before the Rapture on 21 May 2011. I don't wish to give further currency to this crap, but like many atheists I'm once again rather looking forward to the day after, hopefully when the planet has been harvested, swept clean and entirely divested of its millions of credulous Christian fundamentalists, the day we can all begin to party. But we poor saps who are Left Behind can only enjoy our decadence for five months, as the man who dreamed up this nonsense has further predicted that The End Of The World Itself must happen on 21 October.

If you want to know with whom this meme-ified bollocks originated, it comes from the warped and money-grubbing mind of Harold Camping, a California radio host. The details, via Wikipedia:

According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days.
51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
(5 × 10 × 17)² or (atonement × completeness × heaven)² also equals 722,500.
Thus, Camping concludes that 5 × 10 × 17 is telling us a "story from the time Christ made payment for our sins until we're completely saved."

Top marks if you can follow that. Camping had previously predicted the end of the world would happen on 6 September 1994 in a self-published book. Richard Dawkins (for it is He) has made his own prediction for 22 May 2011: that Camping will give a revised date and appeal for money so he can update his billboards.

For further entertainment, here are a couple more previous fundie TEOTWAWKI/Rapture predictions, the first of which was perhaps not taken as seriously by some as the second:

When Glenn Beck was a news commentator at CNN he predicted 22 August 2006 "is the day that Israel might be wiped off the map, leading to all-out Armageddon... [It] could be the day that agnostics get down on one knee and start to pray, 'Sweet Jesus, are you coming today?'"

He was backed up by Bernard Lewis writing in The Wall Street Journal, who pointed the finger at the possibility of Ahmadinejad chucking a nuke at Israel on that date as a final answer to US concerns about Iranian nuclear development. "What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (cf Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for August 22nd. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind."

Fundamentalist preacher Yisrayl Hawkins predicted a thirteen-day nuclear war would start on 12 September 2006. The day after, he revised it to 12 June 2007. Then it became 12 June 2008. It must have been in 2006 that I watched Hawkins preach to a crowd of thousands in Nairobi's Uhuru Park, and hundreds of his followers throughout Kenya later hid in their basements and donned gas masks on the appointed date. As his website can attest, he's still in business and selling you shit.

But in case we're all wrong, here's how the soon-to-be-Raptured can plan ahead for their bereaved cats and dogs. A steal at only $135! I like the top FAQ: "Is this a joke?" Yes.

2012, 2009, USA   DIRECTED BY ROLAND EMMERICH
There's a rather good customer review of this up at Amazon that points out to other disappointed reviewers that "it's okay to simply be entertained sometimes, honestly, it is." Emmerich likes nothing more than to create over-the-top rollercoaster rides, so really, to watch 2012 with any greater expectations is to know it's gonna be an awful experience even before the opening credits roll, so why watch it at all? I did have problems with Emmerich's previous epic The Day After Tomorrow in that I felt he was wrong to depict his flash-Ice Age affecting only the northern hemisphere with the southern half left unaffected, but this time around he's been more scientifically accurate and has sensibly wrecked the entire planet. In 2012 the term 'groundbreaking special effects' has never been more literal: maybe some people enjoy watching California sink into the Pacific, the Yellowstone Supervolcano finally blowing or the Himalayas being flooded almost to the peak of Everest, if so then they're all here to witness in perfect realism. What I did particularly enjoy was seeing Chiwetel Ejiofor in another lead role (he's familiar with more realistic disaster movies, and his performance in the excellent HBO drama Tsunami: The Aftermath was memorable); Ejiofor is still convincing even if this time around the subject matter is considerably cheesier. I also loved that singular moment where Woody Harrelson's character struggles to say the word 'government' without throwing up. There are quite a few character-as-stereotype issues that people will point to, selfish Russian billionaires included if they could be bothered. Graham Hancock's pseudoscientific book Fingerprints of the Gods is acknowledged as an inspiration for the film as that's where Emmerich learned of the Earth's Crust Displacement Theory. There have been two rather unfortunate developments since its release: North Korea has banned the film because 2012 will be the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the nations founder; people caught in possession of 2012 have reportedly been arrested and charged with "grave provocation against the development of the state." Columbia Pictures is also in deep water itself for the film's destruction of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro – not for the symbolism of the act but for ignoring the copyright to the statue's depiction in films. My biggest problem with it all was that 2012 does drag considerably towards the end. A film to be both endured and enjoyed, then.