austin_tycho | blaaaarrrgh!

As you are all surely aware of, it's gonna hit the fan in 2012 according to the folks who enjoy predicting such things. I've heard that this is because it's when the Mayan calendar resets, and Kirby tells me that in accordance with prophecy at that time jaguars will rain from the sky, which sounds neat at first but when you think about it is a pretty inefficient way to end the world. But that hasn't stopped someone from making a movie about it! I love a good shit-hitting-the-fan movie, and with them computer machines they're even more over-the-top. Check out the trailer:

Now, when Paul Constant (or as I call him, my doughy internet boyfriend) saw the trailer in Seattle a couple of days ago, he reports the following, which made me smile and go "awwww!":

So it's for an awful-looking movie called 2012 based on that hooey about how the world is prophesied to end in 2012. In the middle of some (admittedly impressive) SFX shots of the ocean pouring into the Himalayas and destroying a temple, these words appear on the screen, in title cards:

How would the world’s leaders

(pause)

prepare six billion people

(pause)

for the end of the world?

And there's a huge dramatic movie trailer pause and then the answer comes up:

They wouldn’t

The theater was very, very quiet, but a few rows ahead of me, in a very quiet, earnest voice, a young man said aloud:

"Obama would."

And everybody laughed, probably because most of us were thinking some variation of that thought. Right now, before Obama takes office, it's like we're in a post-apocalyptic-thought world. He'll save us from anything. I hope we'll remember what this feels like a year and a half from now. It's a pretty amazing thing.