The Outer Sunset

I’m a big fan of the Southwest Airlines Chinese New Year Festival & Parade posters.

They’re always up and down Clement and Irving street every year and they are up there with the Cherry Blossom Festival as one of my all-time favorite posters from a San Francisco block party. Here is my very flawed and faded collection so far.

Year of The Ox.

Year of the Rooster.

Year of The Monkey.

Year of The Ram.

Year of The Horse.

Year of The Serpent.

I love the use of triangles in this one. It’s very tribal and hypnotic.
I designed my entire bathroom around the theme of this poster.

Year of The Dragon.

Anyone else think that’s weird?

There’s only one mythical creature in the Chinese zodiac and it’s a Dragon? A fucking Dragon?

And guess when the next Year of The Dragon is?

That’s right. End of the World. 2012.

The funny thing about 2012 is that it directly ties into several other apocalyptic theories.

2012 ties into Peak Oil. Peak Oil is the theory that oil is a finite resource and that humans have already consumed half of the oil on the planet and that we are about to embark on a downward spiral of diminishing returns. I used to really be into Mike Ruppert so I’m all kinds of familiar with Peak Oil. Planet Earth consumes about a billion barrels of oil every 12 days and oil is more than what you put into your car. Oil is food, oil is the ability to do work, and oil is the crack cocaine that keeps our economy working. The funny thing is that a lot of the Peak Oil people point to 2012 as when we fall of the cliff.

That’s when blackouts start to become permanent. That’s the moment when the Industrial Revolution dies.

Funny thing about Peak Oil is that I later found out that a lot of people think it’s a scam. Peak Oil is funded by the oil industry so that might make them somewhat biased and the person who wrote the most scathing article against Peak Oil died a year later of West Nile virus, so I don’t know if I really want to talk smack about Peak Oil online.

Funny thing is that I’ve also read that 2012 is a giant hoax. The real year of The Singularity is supposed to be 4000-something, 2012 is just a typo but it’s caught on like wildfire. Probably because it’s a year that will happen within our lifetimes and also because 2012 is just a sexier number.

And 2012 ties into the various finical apocalyptic theories. I think these are far more realistic and scary than any Jerry Bruckheimer film. Gerald Celente, the man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union , is now forecasting ghost malls, boss-nappings, food riots and tax rebellions by 2012. The quadrillion (that’s a thousand trillions) dollar derivatives bubble in America is a black hole that some have estimated to be ten times larger than the entire wealth of planet earth.

Ultimately though, if I was a Rothschild or Rockefeller type of guy and I had my H1N1 2.0 manmade virus in the pipeline I would just drop it on December 21 2012 and blame it on the Mayans. It’s the perfect boogieman.

UPDATE – A reader alerted me to the fact that not only did Walt Contreras Sheasby die of West Nile Virus, he has the distinction of being the FIRST person in all of California to have died from West Nile.