The Oxford-based indie/anthemy band INLIGHT have been making an advent calendar for their fans. Videos, interviews, Christmas recipes, scurrilous gossip and impromptu recordings to amuse you day by day. It’s kept me entertained on the few days this month that I’ve actually managed to get near my computer!
Inlight’s frontman Charlie also moonlights for the IT support/networking company that I co-founded back in 1997. We’re having the company Christmas party tomorrow (Monday), a formal affair with tuxedos and fine wines. I’ll be checking in with the guys…
Meanwhile foreign editions of Joshua continue to be posted into my house, *glee*. I have now assigned all my advance copies of ZERO MOMENT, with a extra copy for surprise ONE runner-up in the Christmas 2009 ZERO MOMENT competition.
What an amazing few weeks.
There was the British Museum gig, which will rank as one of the highlights of my authorly life, I’m sure. Then my TV interview with LJ Rich of BBC TV’s Click – I’ll do a dedicated post about that once I’ve edited the little video I made of LJ and I, and LJ bumping into her long-lost pal Barney Harwood (of BBC Radio 4’s late, lamented go4it).
There were also a couple of lovely meetings with Team Joshua to discuss all the fun we can have telling everyone about ZERO MOMENT when it comes out in Feb 2010.
Finally a couple of days ago, members of Scholastic Children’s Book’s Team Joshua (and a few kind extras from SCB) came along to Bookmarque printers to help me sign the entire, limited edition neon-sleeved run of the UK edition of THE JOSHUA FILES: ZERO MOMENT.
That’s 4700 copies ONLY! So be sure to snap one up from Feb 1 2010!
We also had the great excitement of watching the brand new green paperback edition of ZERO MOMENT being bound. My book on the production line! Seriously cool.
Oh yes and…I have a couple of brand new copies of ZM to give away as prizes.
Hmmm. What task shall I set? Comment and suggest!
Those lucky Young Friends of the British Museum get the bonus treat of being allowed to attend up to 4 sleeppvers a year. Last weekend was a special Moctezuma-themed event, featuring storytelling about the Mexican Day of the Dead, warrior head-dress making, Mexican folklore from Mexicolore…and then some Mayan hieroglyph deciphering with me.
Meanwhile publicist Alex from Scholastic and I enjoyed being set free in the British Museum at night. We saw some strange stuff up in the Mesopotamian gallery, near the remains of the Temple of Ninhursag… but I won’t say any more.
What a great wheeze though! Picnic and sleep amongst one of the greatest (perhaps THE greatest) collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts outside of Cairo. All this an education too.
MG and Alex in the Egyptian gallery. At night!
It did bring joy to my nerdly heart to see more than 150 youngsters faithfully copying glyphs from a 6th century Mayan inscription, deciphering them and then standing up to present their translations to their fellow code-crackers. Round midnight, too!
Thanks to Claire Johnstone from the British Museum for inviting me, to Sky and Alex for helping with all four events, and to the very kind Simon Martin of Penn Museum for giving us his translation of the inscription.
If this is how stoked people can get in 2009 about a 2012 movie, what will happen in 2012?
Will we be totally over it? Can it get more hysterical?
Believe me, we’re all quite hot under the collar now. Articles are appearing from NASA, National Geographic, the BBC, the Telegraph, etc etc…and that is in addition to the squillions of twitter comments, articles on blog, Webzines and forums all over the Internetz.
The world is going to end! The world isn’t going to end!
Which could it be?
The 2012 movie crew are getting flak from some quarters for stirring the fear. Well, if they’d taken an Al Gore-style approach to a doom-laden catastrophe-scenario and produced a documentary with Science Data And Evryfin, like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, I’d be angry too. That would be lame and silly at best, dangerous and irresponsible at worst.
But – unlike a few wingnuts who’ve inhaled too much sherbert – they didn’t. They made a daft-as-a-brush-and-twice-as-fun megablockbuster, a disaster movie in which clearly at some point they’ve thought, ‘Screw it. Let’s blow everything up.’
It isn’t Bergman, that’s for sure. But you could probably tell that from the poster.
If you want to see some of these frankly hilarious wingnut films, check out the video section of mayan2012kids.com. Mainly these films are sitting on YouTube not harming anyone. I have to say that if you lose sleep over what you see ranted about on YouTube then you deserve it. Although some of the clips are from the History Channel. Naughty, smack you, History Channel!
The very best article I’ve read so far comes from Rod Liddle, a columnist for The Spectator (The UK’s equivalent of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine with intellectual, political-right leanings.) His column this week discusses 2012 hysteria as part of a general passion of hand-wringers for apocalypse, now. If it isn’t that society is going to hell in a hand-basket, it’s that we’re all doomed because of global warmingglobal cooling climate change, ancient prophecies of catastrophe or even the mysterious disappearance of honeybees. Don’t worry though. It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died.
Well if you’ve ever had to listen to a passionate Warmist over dinner, you may have had the thought ‘they’re having so much fun. What a spoilsport I’d be to ruin it with actual scientific evidence and rational thought.’
You would be a rotten spoilsport. As Rod Liddle writes, “The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe.”
We need to believe in catastrophe, like we need ghost stories, monsters and the paranormal. Doesn’t make it any more real.
Again, I’m with Liddle on the climate change thing. As Rod Liddle puts it, ‘My own view of climate change — or global warming as it used to be called, before the evangelists changed tack when they realised everything wasn’t getting warmer — is absolutely open. I am a little sceptical of man-made climate change because, for me, the raw statistics do not quite add up, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. And I also reckon that most of the stuff urged upon us in order to address climate change makes sense for other environmental reasons anyway.’
All the same, it’s eerie to watch insane notion, like 2012 doom, being taken seriously enough that big news organisations feel the need to refute it.
Hey guys, you are intruding on MY territory – the world of make-believe!
It makes me wonder how seriously anyone should take them on issues like climate change. Or politics.
Because the truth is, some clever publicists have hooked into the irrational fears of the public, into a segment of people who have by now swallowed so much Warmist garbage that choking down a bit more unscientific or New Age daftness will be very easy. They’ve made a viral marketing campaign so successful that it’s tricked all those serious news agencies into publicizing the movie.
It couldn’t have been done though, if people weren’t already primed.
If my turn ever comes to speak to the media about 2012, you know what line I’m taking. And you know what, if you listen to what Emmerich et al are actually saying in interviews, it’s the same thing. 2012 simply represents a generalised fear of the end – a fear that is pretty old.
What seems to be more of an interesting question is that NASA and National Geographic are even bothering to take time time to engage with this as a serious Thing.
As someone who thinks that the 2012 threat is suitable only for fiction, (much like the wicked witch and her gingerbread cottage, Voldemort, his Death-Eaters and the Priory of Sion), it’s quite baffling to me that serious, proper people like NASA and FAMSI etc need to actually dispute this.
What’s next – a sober article in Nature about how vampirism doesn’t exist? (And I mean an article. News and Views doesn’t count, they put any old gossip in that.)
What a credulous bunch we all must be. Not you, reader. If you’re a young person reading this because The Joshua Files made you anxious, be assured that the threat of 2012 is no more real than vampires, werewolves and wicked witches. It’s the stuff of nightmares and stories.
But you knew that already, didn’t you? Whatever thrills you enjoy from a bit of fictional threat, deep down you have Common Sense.
Everyone else, shame on you! How could the ancient Mayans possibly know the date of the end? Unless, like in The Joshua Files, (SPOILER ALERT – highlight the following text!) they had time travel…
I don’t know about you, but I’d need more than the possibility of t(spoiler) -time travel to persuade me to lose a night’s sleep thinking that the world is going to end. I would need cast iron proof of t(spoiler) -time traveland a LOT more.
All the same I’m still going to enjoy seeing 2012 – Emmerich’s apocalyptic vision of mayhem. Some people like movies about virus-infected, flesh-eating zombies taking over a ravaged planet; I enjoy doomy eschatological fantasy.
