Pinback Summer Project wrote:For the love of all mankind, there's only 3 more days till it's sweet glorious release!!
10x more entertaining than watching Yumiko perform a bukkake scene, it's the Pinback Summer Project!
That should have happened three days from the eighth. Last wensday the 11th we got nothing. What is this? I was looking forward to at the very least a link to goatse.cx but I got nothing. Even Ben was waiting for this finely flossed spiked dildo of content. Now, I want to know who started this. I want to know if this should be on Jonsey's to-do list or if this was something that popped out of Lex. I demand retribution.
I am not infallible. For fuck's sake I gave birth to that Battle Raper nonsense by downloading and mentioning the thing. Though, if you can you unnoted author of the PSP lampoon Ben, outline my twelve year old libido, or just do something more entertaining than Molly Muffsweet please BRING THE CONTENT.
Maya is a strange country that contains many secrets. On March 4 1519 Hernan Cortes, with 11 ships, 600 foot soldiers, 16 horses and some artillery landed on the coast near what was to become Vera Cruz. By August 13 1521 he had conquered the Aztec Empire, the most powerful state in all of the Americas. Part of the reason for his success was a case of mistaken identities, the Indians believing that he was a god named Quetzalcoatl whose return had long been prophesied.
The Spanish for their part were both fascinated and appalled by what they found in this 'New World'. To them the indigenous religion, which included human sacrifice on a grand scale, was both barbarous and satanic. Accordingly they set about destroying it without trace. Whole libraries of colourful bark-books were burnt and those natives who did not die from disease, hunger and over-work were forcibly converted to Catholicism.
Fortunately not all the Spanish were as unsympathetic towards the Indians as Cortes. A few, such a friar named Bernadino Sahagun, made friends with the natives and attempted to record for posterity their traditional beliefs and ideas. He discovered that central to Aztec philosophy was a belief in the cyclical nature of time and an awesome fear that one day, possibly sooner rather than later, their world would come to an end. It seems that they believed that the sun, which they nourished with their sacrifices, would one day no longer send its life force, thereby bringing to an end the fifth and last age of man. They counted the days according to two calendars, one a "vague" year of 365 days and the other a shorter cycle of 260 days. Every day had two names, one according to each calendar so that the same combination of names would not recur for 52 years. When one of these 52 year time periods, known as an Aztec century, came to an end they would leave their cities and, going up into the surrounding hills, anxiously watch the stars. The sign they were looking for was the Pleiades star-group, symbolising for them a cosmic snake's rattle, crossing the southern meridian at midnight. This, they believed, meant that the heavens had not stopped turning and the sun would rise again. The Aztecs celebrated the birth of this new 'century' with rejoicing and the lighting of fires, symbolising the rebirth of the world.
Most native Meso-American documents were destroyed in the early years of the Spanish occupation but a few priceless books and relics did survive the destruction, either having been hidden by the Indians or exported back to Europe as presents for the King. The Mayans had rather similar beliefs to the Aztecs though with some major differences of emphasis. Several of their bark-books have been preserved showing their amazing knowledge and fascination with astronomy.The most important of these was what is now called the "Dresden Codex", named after the town in whose library it was lodged. This strange book, inscribed with unknown hieroglyphs, was written by Maya Indians who once ruled over much of Central America, the ruins of their once grand civilization littering the jungle. In 1880 a brilliant, German scholar, who was working as a librarian in Dresden at the time, turned his attention to this codex. By a process of extraordinary detective work he cracked the code of the Mayan calendar making it possible for other scholars and explorers to translate the many dated inscriptions to be found on buildings, stelae and other ancient Mayan artefacts. He discovered that the Dresden Codex itself was concerned with astronomy providing detailed tables of lunar eclipses and other phenomenon. These were so accurate that they put our own calendar to shame. He also found evidence for a curious "magic number"- 1,366,560 days, which could be factorised in a number of ways and which harmonised the cycles of Venus and Mars with two "yearly" cycles also used by the Maya: the sacred tzolkin of 260 days and the Haab of 365 days. However, he also found that they had another system of counting the days relative to a starting date, called the Birth of Venus and now known to be 13 August 3114 BC. This calendar was divided into "months" or uinals of twenty days, "years" or tuns of 360 days and longer periods of 7200 days, (the katun) and 144,000 days, (the baktun). The number 13 was magically important to the Mayans and they believed that, starting from the Birth of Venus, after 13 of these longest periods, or baktuns, the world would come to an end. This means that working from their start date for the present age of 13 August 3114 BC, this Mayan Prophecy points to a date for the end of the age which is in our own time: 22 December 2012.
