As you are no doubt aware, there is a new star sign: Ophiuchus.

My concern, as I’m sure is yours, is not what those born into this sign resemble in terms of character traits, but the various effects this new sign has on our world.

After hacking into JSTOR using a borrowed e-mail account and password (sorry James), I decided that I’d take up my mantle as Aaron Simon, Investigative Faux-Journalist, and have a looksie into what this portends.

The Babylonians

According to an article by an astronomy professor who was ousted from his chair at Oxford in 1965 on dubious charges (according to his autobiography published in We Have Funding For This Quarterly), the discovery of a new astrological sign has, in past cultures, signaled their decline.

For example, or so Dr. Wilhelm Desjackston states in his article, “The Death of Societies – BY STARS!” the Babylonians’ horoscopes only consisted of eleven astrological signs. And then, as time marched inexorably forward, so, too, did the first astrologers, the Astrologiarians, as they called themselves, decreed that there would be another sign added to their horoscope wheel. Soon after, as we all know, HaShem struck down the Tower of Babylon, the empire was destroyed, and the Romans took over their land.

The Mayan Calendar

It is a well known fact that the ancient Mayans–who had not quite mastered ironworking–were even smarter than we could ever hope to be. Their calendar, based on the scientific principles of circles being right about everything, clearly, incontrovertibly, states that the world will come to a fiery end on the 21st of December, 2012.

But why?

In a 1975 article in Scientific Factoids, Dr. Fredina Fulhalfen, chair of Ancient Studies at Brown, wrote a ground-breaking study of the ancients’ cumulative studies. Dr. Fulhalfen wrote:

After walking down the pyramid’s interior ramps–for everyone knows the Mayans were handicapable–I discovered that the wall art that we had long expected to be nothing more than bored doodles of possibly enslaved workers were, in actuality, a detailed discussion about the addition of another star sign to the Mayans’ horoscope.

The discussion went on for most of the ramp, concluding at the bottom with a picture of a disk in the process of breaking apart at the middle. I chipped off this portion of the wall and brought it back to Brown, where I then handed it over to my research assistants in their laboratories. In those dark caverns, they discovered that the disk being torn asunder was nothing but the Earth itself. We may thus conclude that, the Mayans being flawless astronomers and scientists more intelligent than my colleagues shall ever dream of being, our world is doomed the second a horoscope sign is added.

Thus, as you can quite clearly see, the addition of Ophiuchus to our previously 12-sided die of horoscopes – thus making it an unwieldy die – is a portent of destruction.

The Mayans, we must remember, were slaughtered by disease, Aztecs, and Spaniards – all of which are extensions of God Almighty. Since the Spaniards are no longer a threat to anyone, disease has been conquered, and the Aztecs are thankfully dead, we must therefore assume that our demise will come at the hands of aliens.

Ready the Will Smiths and Tom Joneses of the world, lest we lose all we have fought for.

Today

There are plenty more horoscopes out there created by nations that were, themselves, destroyed. I was not able to look at them, however, because my activity had been reported by an interested, and extremely paranoid, party (fuck you, James), I was locked out of JSTOR and thus found myself unable to continue my investigation.

However, that has not stopped me from making brazen assumptions based on nothing but my Fallout-fueled fevered dreaming. As such, I have made the following conclusion:

While it is no doubt certain that the astrological sign is meant to represent a man killing a snake; it is actually a man killing a bird. Look closely at the stars.

See it?

No?

Now do you see it?

The hunter is clearly trying to kill two innocent birds. The Greeks had it all wrong.

Now, think back a week or so before this story broke. What happened? Birds died.

Everywhere.

Bunch of dead damn birds.

Connect the dots. It doesn’t take much in the way of intelligence to do it: Your average Limbaugh listener could figure it out.

With the discovery of Ophiuchus, we can all be assured of one thing: All of the birds in the world will die at the hands of a galaxy-spanning nude Greek guy.

And after the birds, the world.