Even true believers can recognize that there is nothing special about 2012

Bob Makransky knows better than any of the Daniel Pinchbecks or Gregg Bradens out there how the Mayan calendar works. He certainly knows better than I do. Why? He's an ordained Mayan priest:

I was given a ritual to invoke the Mayan spirits; and after a while they began talking to me. Apparently it had to do with past lives I’ve had as a Mayan priest here in Guatemala in ancient times. It’s not a job you can interview for, or anything like that; it just was my destiny, luckily.

Not only that, he can also upstage any of the charlatans (see Pinchbeck, Braden, above) in the sense that he has a better-than-Internet-rumor understanding of the Mayan calendar:

Nothing is going to happen in 2012. There is no Mayan prophecy about 2012. In addition to the Chol Qij the Mayans have various other calendar counts of lesser mantic importance. One of these is the Long Count, which is a continuous count in days since August 9th, 3114 BCE. The Long Count will reset to zero-zero-zero-zero-zero on December 21, 2012. But this is just a major calendar change – their equivalent of Y2K – with no more spiritual significance than the change of millenium had for us. This 2012 thing is being touted by some non-Mayans as a kind of New Age version of the Rapture: a miraculous transformation of human consciousness which sweeps humanity up into the clouds to escape the coming tribulation. But things don’t happen that way in real life.

That's the most interesting part about this guy- he appears to be a die-hard astrology fundamentalist, he seems also to believe in something like The Secret, and he appears to be a big advocate of a bogus sham "all-natural" cancer cure, but he's still not crazy enough to buy into the garbage being peddled the 2012 apocalypse crowd.

Give the interview a read. It's quite fascinating. And, of course, Mr. Makransky will never be famous because he isn't dishonest enough to deliberately misinterpret reality with the same zeal as the 2012 apocalypticists.