The ridiculous notion that the Mayan calendar foretells the end of world in 2012 makes me think of the ridiculous notion that the rollover from 1999 to 2000 would touch off similarly apocalyptic events.

Calendars are flawed. They foretell nothing.

The Gregorian calendar -- the one we use now -- is a wholly human invention. We invented a way of counting time, a decidedly imperfect way, and then proceeded to scare ourselves with it.

In the sixth century A.D., a monk named Dennis the Short came up with our current system of dating years from the birth of Christ. And, most scholars agree, he got it wrong by at least four years. So all the significance we placed on the year 2000 was a literal miscalculation.

Maybe the Mayans were better at math than Dennis the Short, but even then, all they did was arrive at way of marking time. When did time begin? No one knows. So the Mayans jumped in midstream and tried to keep track of it. And now we actually think they had some way of knowing when it would end? Please.

I think this falls into the category of what I term fun fear. Humans love to invent things to be afraid of. Remember the vastly overblown fear that a computer glitch at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999 would cause planes to fall out of the sky and perhaps end civilization as we know it? That was fun fear. A tiny percentage of people headed to the hills with bottled water and ammunition. Everyone else just sort of enjoyed the adrenaline rush of worrying about something they pretty well knew wasn't going to happen.

You can put the 2012 nonsense into that same category.

Meanwhile, we've invented nuclear weapons and thrown the climate off-kilter with carbon emissions. Isn't it just like us to ignore genuine threats in favor of imaginary ones?