It's Been Foretold

Prophecies are hard.

Not deciphering them, although I'm sure that isn't a simple thing. I mean making them up. It's a pain, really. I'm making one up for a storyline i'm working on, and I gotta tell you it's frustrating because even though you're making something up, you want it to be believable. You want it to make sense, and not have people question it but accept that it could be true.

I was watching the movie "End of Days" tonight, the flick where Robin Tunney is the chick the devil wants to bear his kid. Ah-nold is the hero who saves her from being raped by lucifer and giving birth to the antichrist.

The plot point here is that the devil needs to impregnate the girl between 11pm and 12am, New Year's Eve, or the whole plan goes to shit. All the Guvinator has to do is keep the girl away from his unholy scepter until the hour passes, and the world is saved for another hundred years.

Now...it's a Schwartzennegar movie. Which means I shouldn't be thinking too hard, right? So why did I?

It's because of that damn prophecy. Let me ask you this: why, specifically, between 11pm and 12am? Why an hour? Why not 3, which is a more magic number? Or 7 hours? How about 7 minutes? Or maybe, 6 minutes past the 6th hour of the 6th day? Or some crap like that?

And when they say between 11pm and 12am...is that EST, since the story takes place in New York? Why not Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which would mean the hour is already 5 hours gone?

Why New Year's Eve? In fact, why the Western version of it? Why not the Jewish New Year, which Christ (and, presumably, Satan and God) would have followed - which would make the prophecied New Year out to be Rosh Hashanna?

When was the prophecy made? Was it based on our current Gregorian calendar, or was it based on the Roman calendar, which was used up to 45 BC? Or was it on the Julian calendar, which was in effect throughout Europe until 1753?

See? Not so easy, is it?