The Ten Labors of Hercules - Labor # 2

Hercules, now stylishly dressed in his new lion's fur coat and cap, is given a new monster to kill.  His second labor is to kill the Hydra, a nine headed monster who lives in the swamp of Lerna.  Not having heard of the Hydra, Hercules just shrugged and took off for it.  It wouldn't have mattered if he knew what kind of danger he was facing anyway.  That's just the kind of guy he is.

Hercules' nephew, Iolaus, came along for the ride.  They did practically everything together.  Athena went too, although nobody knew it.  She developed a fondness for her half brother and decided to help him out some.  She did this time by leading him to the right place to find the monster.  Of course, we are very familiar with this story.  Hercules cuts off a head, two more grow back.  He cuts off another one.  Two more grow back.  he cuts off another one, two more grow back.  This would have happened forever, if Iolaus wasn't with him.  Cleverness isn't Hercules' strength.  Iolaus ran in with a torch and burned the stumps as soon as the neck was chopped in two.  This way, the new necks couldn't grow back.  The center head is immortal, so Hercules just dropped a big rock on that one and called it a day.  He then coated his arrow heads in the hydra's blood since it is poisonous to any living creature.  On his way out of the swamp, he kills Cancer the crab just for kicks (and crab legs).

When he gets back, Eurytheus refuses to count this one as a successful labor since he had help.  Thus, the title of these posts will become "The Eleven Labors of Hercules."

The Hydra has many allusions to it.  Here are a few:

The Hydra - this little animal lives in streams and lakes in temperate and tropical zones.  It has amazing regenerative abilities and never grows old.

Hydra - This is a bad guy group in Marvel comics.  This gang was started by a guy named Baron Wolfgang von Strucker.  They always go around shouting about how you can't stop Hydra, cut off one head and two more grow back.  They usually say this right before they get killed.

THC-Hydra - this is some login hacker program.  I didn't want to search too much for this.  I figured I was making myself a target for being hacked.

Hydra was the name of a multichannel digital ad platform.  I don't really know what that encompasses, but I like the idea that they are playing on the many heads idea and connecting it with their mulitchannels.  However, they ditched the cool name and replaced it with the name Adknowledge.  Oh well.

Hydra - a made for TV movie in 2009 that stars, well, nobody I recognize.  The big tag line for this movie - "Prepare to be consumed."  IMDB doesn't even bother to add a summary for this movie.  Here's the trailer for it!  Scratch that.  I can't seem to get onto YouTube right now. I bet it was that stinking login hacker thing above!  It's probably best that we not see this trailer anyway.







But wait!  There's more!  We have:

The Hydra Project

And about 12,000,000 other results on Google.  Geez!  Everyone loves Hydra.

Next labor - no more killing monsters!  That's not working well anyway.