Don't Fly Like My Brother

I love the radio show Car Talk on NPR.  They are supposed to say before a commercial break, This is NPR."  But since they are constantly making fun of themselves (and anything else they can find to laugh at), they usually say it in a way that shows people can't stand the fact that such an awful show would be on NPR.  For example, the other week they said, "Even though Van Gogh lops off the other ear when he hears us say it, this is NPR."

They had a mythology one recently, "And even though Icarus heads back for the sun when he hears us say it, this is NPR."

I love mythology allusions!

Worse Mythology Allusion - EVER!

Congratulations to Burger King for winning the coveted Bubo's Blog award for WORST MYTHOLOGY ALLUSION EVER!  (applause) (cheers)

I was going to give them an award for a current commercial about the god of hamburgers, which is just a cheesy commercial.  Not cheesy as in Thunder Cats cheesy or old Batman TV show cheesy, but as in OMG(s) that's stupid cheesy.  However, I could not find that commercial on You Tube yet.  No worries, because I found another ad by Burger King that tops the bad cheesy commercial and wins this award hands down.  Here is the ad:

This ad appeared in Spain in 2009.  For those of you who don't read Spanish (like me) the above slogan reads "A SNACK THAT'S SACRED."  The goddess on the sign is Lakshmi, a Hindu goddess.

Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and prosperity.  She is also a goddess of fertility and courage. People look to her to bring good luck and she can keep you from economic woes.  Unless, of course, you use her to sell meat, which is forbidden.  

God Checker says this about her:

She can pop into your feet, thigh or naughty bits, or your bosom, heart neck or face. All these will bring good fortune appropriate to the part involved.

We can hear you muttering 'that's only six', but she will also do your head in if that's where she enters — and that is bad fortune. So the odds are six to one.

So I guess Burger King got it in the head.

Now I might say that using a goddess from a religion that is not only opposed to meat, but look at cows as sacred beings, to sell your hamburger products is clever.  I might would, if people no longer worshiped the Hindu gods.  However, there are approximately 950 million Hindus in the world.  It is an offensive comparison and down right stupid on Burger King's part.  They truly deserve this award.

Just to be fair, Burger King did issue the following statement shortly after the ad was released: "Burger King Corp. values and respects all of its guests as well as the communities we serve. This in-store advertisement was running to support a limited-time only local promotion for three restaurants in Spain and was not intended to offend anyone. Out of respect for the Hindu community, the in-store advertisement has been removed from the restaurants."

I challenge anyone to find me a worse allusion than this.

What's Worse Than Medusa?

Why, Medusa in spider form, of course.  For the record, I HATE spiders with a passion.  Check this little bugger out:

The big one is the female and the little one is the male.  I've actually seen one of these in Hawaii where they are called Garden Spiders.  In Guam, somebody brought in a brown snake of some sort which had no predators.  It practically ate all the birds so now there are pretty much no predators for this spider and they overrun the place.  Scratch Guam off my "To Visit" list.

Now why would this spider make my mythology blog?  Well, in Lost, which I am currently mid way through season 3 (catching up via Netflix), they show this spider in an episode ("Expose").  However, in the show, it is not the harmless little garden spider, it is revealed to be the dreaded Latrodectus Regina, a type of widow spider that is nick named the Medusa Spider.  It appears that one bite from this monster will paralyze you for about 8 hours.  To make matters worse, when we see the spider to begin with, the science middle school teacher, who is one of the island cast aways, is catching one in a jar.  He tells a girl on the island named Nikki about the paralysis poison and that the female (the one he has in the jar) emits pheromones that will attract every male in the area to her.  Pretty nasty stuff.

(*Spoiler Alert* if you are also catching up on Lost and haven't gotten this far)

Now, as the episode goes on we find out that Nikki and her boyfriend Paulo (also stuck on the island) are really thieves who killed this older man and took 8 million dollars worth of diamonds.   The diamonds seem to be lost in the plane crash and eventually Nikki gives up the search.  Paulo, however, has found said diamonds and is not telling her because he loves her and is afraid that if she has the diamonds, she might leave him when they get rescued.  Due to his stupidity, she finds out and thinks he was trying to keep them all for himself.  She meets him out in the jungle where she opens the Medusa spider jar that the science teacher had.  Then she throws the spider on him, which bites him and he falls paralyzed.  She then retrieves the diamonds and sets off, but not before those pheromones kick in and she gets bit by a male spider.  In classic Twilight Zone fashion, the other castaways find them, mistake them for dead and do a quick burial. 

I love the connection to Medusa here.  However, the Lostpeida website has this to say: "'Medusa' could also reference a creature of Greek mythology."  Come on!  Could be?  Could be?  What's an English teacher to do...

The Good Year Wingfoot

Almost everyone is familiar with the Good Year blimp and the simple logo that represents that company.  You may have even paid attention to the fact that there is a winged foot in between the words.  I wondered how closely was it to mythology and how much was it just a need to have a symbol for speed and someone chose that one. 

Goodyear has a history page on their website that explains all that.  It seems that the founder of the company, Frank Seiberling, grew up with a statue of Hermes/Mercury in his house.  It made an impact on him and when the time came, he wanted to somehow use this god as part of the company logo.

In 1900, a meeting was held to figure out how to make this work.  Out of several sketches, this one was the one that stuck:

This works great because of the speed symbol that a Hermes allusion brings, but also because of the fact that he is the god of commerce.  However, it was the messenger status that really led to using Hermes as a symbol.  Seiberling loved the idea of the good news that the messenger god brought and wanted people to feel that by using Goodyear products that they too were getting good news.

Can you think of any other logos with mythology allusions?

Swallowing Eyeballs For Your Parents or Frankenstein Mythology Part V

What does swallowing eyeballs have to do with Frankenstein?  Well, to figure this out, we need to take a look at Quan Yin, Queen of Heaven.

In an Indian legend, Quan Yin started life named Miao Shan.  She was beautiful, but not vain.  In fact, she led a life of self sacrifice and followed Buddha.  Eventually she attained Buddha-hood and took the cool name of Quan Yin.  Ever the self sacrificer, she denied herself heaven and decided to stay on earth to help where she could.  She wanted to help her father (a noble task, I say) and since he was blind, she wanted to fix it for him.  She took a different form so that he would not recognize her (the whole be kind to strangers for they may be a god theme).  She looked at him and said, "If you were to swallow one eyeball from one of your children, you would regain your sight."  Now, I don't know about you, but I think I would rather stay blind than to take the eyeball of one of my kids.  Maybe you feel differently, I don't know.  Anyway, her father asks each of his children (minus Miao Shan since she is dead) for one of their eyeballs.  Hey, they have one to spare, right?

I know that each of you out there would quickly gouge out an eye to help out your father.  Believe it or not, none of his stingy, worthless, suck-egg-mule kids would do this simple little task to help out dear old dad.  I know I'm shocked.  Quan Yin is disappointed that times had gotten so bad that children would not do anything for their parents.  She created an eyeball and gave it to her father, who swallowed it and could see once more. 

In Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, there is a Chinese restaurant that Victor Helios goes to to get exotic food.  It seems that when you live for hundreds of years, even Taco Bell gets a little old, so he seeks out the oddest delicacies possible.  The dish he is given doesn't have a name in the book.  I have since found the name for it as Three Screams.  It was live hairless newborn rats served fondue style.  I know what you are saying, how does this relate to swallowing eyeballs?  The name of the restaurant - Quan Yin.


~

Frankenstein Mythology Part I

There is actually a bit of mythological allusion we can pull from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  Many of know the story of the creation of this novel.  It was a dark and stormy night.  Mary (who is still Mary Wollstonecraft since she is just sleeping around with Percy at the time), Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, some other dude (a doctor friend of Byron named Polidori) are sitting in a cabin by the lake when someone has the idea to have a story writing contest.  The doctor wrote a vampire story ("The Vampyre" which is the first modern vampire story), Mary wrote Frankenstein,  Bryon started, but never finished a ghost story, and Percy just never got around to writing his.  Some people think that Mary may have been influenced by Bryon's poem "Prometheus."  This seems the case since she has as a secondary title to the book A Modern Prometheus.  Prometheus, of course, being the titan that gave man fire and was punished by Zeus by having an eagle (or vulture) rip his liver out every day while being chained to a rock.  Here is his poem:

Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;

What was thy pity's recompense?

A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,

All that the proud can feel of pain,

The agony they do not show,

The suffocating sense of woe,

Which speaks but in its loneliness,

And then is jealous lest the sky

Should have a listener, nor will sigh

Until its voice is echoless.

 

Titan! to thee the strife was given

Between the suffering and the will,

Which torture where they cannot kill;

And the inexorable Heaven,

And the deaf tyranny of Fate,

The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create

The things it may annihilate,

Refus'd thee even the boon to die:

The wretched gift Eternity

Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.

All that the Thunderer wrung from thee

Was but the menace which flung back

On him the torments of thy rack;

The fate thou didst so well foresee,

But would not to appease him tell;

And in thy Silence was his Sentence,

And in his Soul a vain repentance,

And evil dread so ill dissembled,

That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,

To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,

And strengthen Man with his own mind;

But baffled as thou wert from high,

Still in thy patient energy,

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit:

Thou art a symbol and a sign

To Mortals of their fate and force;

Like thee, Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;

And Man in portions can foresee

His own funereal destiny;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,

And his sad unallied existence:

To which his Spirit may oppose

Itself--and equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense,

Which even in torture can descry

Its own concenter'd recompense,

Triumphant where it dares defy,

And making Death a Victory.

You got to admit, the man has a way with words.  Of course, if poetry isn't you thing, you may be more inspired by The Miserable World of Prometheus. 

Next time: either more Frankenstein or else... do I smell popcorn???

Egyptian Deities

I am reading a book titled Nick of Time at the moment.  It was a book donated to my classroom and for the most part a pretty good boy's adventure story.  It has all the right materials - pirates, Nazis, and spies, not to mention time travel too.  In this book I ran across something that doubtlessly you guys know about.  I didn't, so I'm going to post about it here.

One of the heroes was offered a cigarette by one of the Nazis.  The Nazi said, "You'll like them, their Egyptian Deities."  So I did a little  research and sure enough there were some Egyptian Deities cigarettes back in the day.  I don't know if they still make them or not, but here are some ads for them.  I just think it funny to think of Egyptian gods and goddesses sitting around smoking.

This one is from 1906 -

And this one from 1916 -

1919 - (the price goes up I notice)

And from 1920 -

This one is my favorite.  I'm going to have to search for that tambourine playing goddess.  I don't remember her.


So, if you are a person of culture and refinement (obviously that leaves me out (and Peyton too, by the way)), then you are obviously going to want to get right on this and find ouot if they still make them.  You don't want to be considered uncouth by the other cultured types.

Obscure Myth Allusion Award - Yggdrasil

Let's play a game - tell me what you think of when you hear the words "finger puppets"?

Was it Yggdrasil?  You too? 

Evidentally the good people at Purciful's Magical Toys thinks along those lines.  You can see the tree puppet to the left.  Here is there sales copy for it:

In Norse Mythology, Ygdrassil, the World Tree, shelters the planet between roots and branches. Folkmanis has its own great tree, this 17" Sequoia, safely holding the forest animals--finger puppets ready to be an entire puppet show or combine with other Folkmanis creations.



Go Purciful!  I hope that the puppets sold like hotcakes and the copy guy got a raise.

Dionis

Swim team season is almost over (tomorrow!) and then I can get back to posting on a somewhat regular basis. These last few weeks have been crazy.

I was a Cracker Barrel restaurant and for those of you who are not familiar with them, they have a store of country related goods that you must go through to get to the restaurant.  My oldest son is 10 and has decided that he wanted to get him mom something really nice for Valentine's day.  So he gets me (since I have the money, I guess) to walk over with him toward the scented candles.  While there, I see some goat milk soap products made by a company called Dionis.

You know by now that I am a bit of a nerd and wondered between having to smell various Yankee Candle scents (kind of liked the Strawberry Buttercream) if this was something related to Greek mythology.  The name just had a ring to it, but I couldn't place it. 

So here I am, looking on the internet and I find that it is an obscure alternate spelling for Dionysus (Mr. D to you Percy Jackson fans).  Even alphadictionary.com which searches 1065 different online dictionaries only had it as a girl's name from a baby name dictionary.

I was a bit afraid of looking at the connection between Dionysus and goats.  I mean, this is Greek mythology and all.  I've never been a big fan of Dionysus.  My students, however, think that he is the greatest.

Turns out that the connection is not one to worry about and I am ashamed that I had not remembered this myth.  The goat connection comes from his birth.  Hera, constantly jealous (with good reason) finds out that Semele is carrying Zeus' child.  She disguises herself and goes down to convince her to ask Zeus to see him in all his glory to prove he really is who he says he is.  After making a stupid promise to give her anything she wished for, Zeus ends up shining brightly and completely destroying her in the process.  He saves the baby (Dionysus) by sticking him into his thigh. 

When the baby is born, Hera comes after him.  At first Zeus hides him by dressing him as a girl.  That didn't work.  Then he changed Dionysus into a goat.  This worked like a charm and Dionysus grew up as a goat.  When he got old enough, Zeus turned him back at which Hera literally drives him crazy.

I think that naming the goat milk products after this is worthy of an Obscure Myth Allusion Award.  Looking at his picture, I guess it is lucky for him that most women around him were a bit intoxicated.

Good Advertisement

This is an little poster that shows that when the ad is this good, who cares about facts? It mentions that the first time anyone showed a viking with a helmet with horns was for an opera. However, I can imagine Frigga looking at Odin in a big horned helmet before going out to eat and saying, "Are you wearing that?"

You can see it bigger at:
http://bionicteaching.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/vikings.jpg

FFBP

Not exactly an obscure allusion, but this news article will have to do:

3.5 percent tax hike still won’t cut it 

EAST PROVIDENCE - “In Greek Mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill and then watching it roll back down again. This, it seems, is a fitting metaphor for budget and financial management in Rhode Island as we developed this budget.”

The rest of the article was sadly enough not about Sisyphus.  It is about some boring budget that I'm sure I would care about if I lived in Rhode Island.  But since I don't... (no offense at all meant toward Rhode Islanders, I'm sure it is a great place to live)

While we're here, let's discuss Sisyphus.  Most of us know the name and are familiar with the rock pushing guy.  But why is he doing this?

Well, this Sisyphus was a king.  Not just a king, mind you, but the king and founder of the city of Corinth (the same Corinth that has a book of the Bible written to it).  He was well known for being clever and tricky.  He was also the grandfather of Bellerophon.

When he died, he was so important that Hades himself came to collect him.  Now, Sisyphus was not quite ready (who is, right?) and must have been on good terms with the gods because he began to talk to Hades.  The conversation went a little like this:

Sis "Hey!  Good to see you, I've been meaning to call and all, but you know how things get."

Hades "Let's go." (Hades has never been one for small talk)

Sis "You know, I've always been interested in how you make people come with you.  Let's say that I don't want to go and wish to put up a fight, I wouldn't, you know, but let's just pretend for argument's sake.  What would you do about it?"

Hades (reaching into his back pocket) "Well, that's why I have these handy dandy handcuffs."

Sis "Man those sure are nice, but what would you use against a big guy?"

Hades "These things are stronger than they look.  They could hold Hercules himself."

Sis "Strong?  Those things?  No way."

Hades "I'm serious.  Why I bet they could even hold me they're so strong."

Sis "Now you're just teasing me.  I bet ten (whatever would be an ancient Greek dollar) that they couldn't hold someone as big and strong as you are.  Why I bet you couldn't even get them over your wrists."

Hades "You're on!"

Well, after Hades locked himself up, Sisyphus pushed him into a conveniently located closet and went on with his life.  While Hades was gone, nobody could die (which reminds me of a Piers Anthony book I read a long time ago called A Pale Horse which was about Death.  Not a bad book if I remember, but I read it in high school or jr. high, so it has been a while).  That might sound col and all, but think about the poor sap that gets trapped underwater and can't drown - lungs still scream for air and all, or the poor sap that drives his chariot over a cliff and lies in a mangled mess at the bottom, still alive.

Eventually Hades gets free and immediately sends for Sisyphus.  Sisyphus, however, was having great fun and decided that Hades was a push over.  He told his wife not to bury him when he died.  So, here he stands before Hades, ready to receive his punishment for making Hades look like a fool in front all of his god buddies and he complains to Persephone that he wasn't properly buried.  Plus, he had no coin to pay for his spot in the underworld.  Persephone, feeling sorry for him, lets him go back up to tell his wife to bury him properly.  Letting him go back up for a few moments is akin to me letting some of my students leave to go use the bathroom.  They may or may not come back.

Finally, (after another good several days) they get him back.  He is charged with various crimes (one being that he snitched on Zeus for having an affair with Aegina and another for using magic) and receives one of the most famous punishments in the world - pushing the rock up a hill for all eternity.  I bet when he gets near the top he can even see Tantalus, one of the other FFBP (Famous For Being Punished).  You know, he may even be able to see Rhode Island.

This picture below is titled, "Sisyphus Resigns!"

Bubo Bling

I found this news article on the web about mythology and jewelry.  There is this guy named Robert Coin who is evidently a world renown jeweler (I didn't recognize his name, but then again, I don't know any jeweler by name).  He designed a line of jewelry called the Nemo line (after Captain Nemo or Finding Nemo?).  In it, he draws from the mythology of the Greeks and Phoenicians for inspiration.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

Interestingly, these endearing marine creatures are often found depicted in mythological Greek tales where Poseidon, the sea god is said to drive a chariot pulled by sea horses. They are also called ‘Hippocamp’ and often decorated mosaics and Roman baths and can be seen on the 18th century Trevi fountain in Rome.

The whole article can be read here:

http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/fashion-news/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=75903

Another mythology inspired bit of jewelry is the Pandora bracelet.  This, however, has little more to do with mythology than the name, but deep on their website, you can find a reference to the curiosity of Pandora being the inspiration for this line.  Well, I found it once on a web site.  I can't find it on their current web site.  My wife has one of these bracelets.  It is essentially a charm bracelet, but instead of the charms hanging, they slide around the bracelet.  It is pretty neat looking.  

http://www.pandora-jewelry.com/

Poseidon's Gate

If you are not familiar with Kindle, it is a new way to read books.  Think of it as an iPod for books.  The whole thing is pretty neat and nifty and is probably going to stick around and continue to change the way we think of books.  I remember back in the early 90s having a conversation about the electronic book in my college class.  I had to read a book called The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts where the author predicted it would come to this.  My professor scoffed at the idea and moved on.  

I haven't thought much about that book until now.  I ran across an article about the horrors of the future of advertisements on eBooks.  It's a great read and I hope you'll go here to read it (after you finish reading my post and commenting, of course).

What kind of gets me is the title of the article. It is "Kindle at Poseidon's Gate."  I've never heard this term used before.  All I could really find on Google about Poseidon's Gate is several links to this article and some song by Cybertribe with that title.  I can only assume that this allusion means to open Poseidon's gate is to invite a flood of things that you may not particularly care for.  

I feel stupid for not having heard it before and am sure that it is a common saying with all of you.  Let me know if you've heard it before.  

$Mother Nature$

Mother Nature has to do a lot. Make flowers grow, control the tides, send in storms, gentle showers, sunshine, take care of forests, wild life, combat pollution, make rainbows, the list goes on and on. Over the years and thorough out the multitudes of cultures, mankind (excuse me, I was being sexist there) peoplekind have given her many names from Gaia (Greek) to Tonantzin Tlalli (ancient Mexico) to Phra Mae Thorani (Thailand). In fact, only the Egyptians screwed it up thinking that earth was male (Geb).

Seeing how important she is to us, we can forgive her for seeking out a few ways to make an extra buck or two. Even if she chooses to make a cheesy commercial now and then. If you are as old as I am, you grew up knowing that Mother Nature does NOT like to be fooled by margarine:

O.K., How much money do you think she earned from those commercials? Well, it was enough to keep her busy for two and a half decades. In the meantime, she has been making a nice living hawking environmental products on her online store.

And by keeping people informed on her own cable news channel (although times are tough for her there as she has been reduced to showing reruns of Captain Planet).

She also made a few bucks guest appearances in a few kids' shows every now and then, like her cameo onThe Year without a Santa Claus:

In fact, she is in quite a lot of Christmas specials (as I remembered after plugging in Santa Claus and Mother Nature into Google images a minute ago).

But now, she's back in the commercial biz again and I have to say, 1. I miss the old maragarine days and 2. Mother Nature isn't looking too good lately.

In today's time, everyone going green and all, you would think that Mother Nature would pick an ad for a hot news environmentally sound sports car or something like that. But no. Check out her newest ad line:

I guess the true lesson here is that money really does make the world go 'round.

Back to ya!

I'm reading Troy:Fall of Kings and ran across what is possibly the best mythological expression I have even encountered.

The scene: Paris and his brother Dios are wrestling each other when King Priam walks in on them.

The remark: Priam immediately yells out, "By the balls of Ares, are you morons?"


Well, it beats, "By Jove!" any day.

The Bourne Mythology

Well, not a new Bourne movie.  I went to the library to pick up a book to read and didn't see one I wanted.  So I decided to give the Bourne books a try, but they were out of the first two, so I picked up another book by the same author.  I picked it over the others purely by the title: The Prometheus Deception.  Since then I've found another book I want to read, so I am going to probably return it, but before I do that, I thought I'd share with you the opening page (I thought it pretty intriguing)

Prometheus swept down from the heavens bringing the gift of fire.

Wrong move.

Kali

The English teacher nerd in me saw a book with seven Jules Verne novels and said, "Hey, Mark, buy this and read some great Victorian literature over the summer."  Since the cool part of me was somewhere else at the time, I went ahead and did.  I read the titles to my 5 year old and asked him which one should I read first and his response was Around the World in 80 Days.  Since I was sure that the movie version with Jackie Chan was probably not very true to the book, I started.  Let me tell you, the English teacher nerd in me is very happy with that choice.

Once Phileas Fogg got to India, the mythology nerd in me got interested.  While crossing India on elephant, Fogg runs across a procession about to make a human sacrifice, or suttee.  Seems that a rajah had died and they were about to burn his corpse and, of course, his wife.  The wife, still being alive and all, was not all that happy about it.  The idea is to appease Kali, the goddess of love and death (as described in the book).

This was interesting to me since the only thing I really know about Kali is from The Temple of Doom, and I am sure that the suttees that took place in history didn't really have people getting their hearts removed and still living while the rajah held the still beating heart.  So, I did a little searching.

Now, as a little disclaimer, I usually do not talk about religions still being practiced as mythology, but I am making another exception here (as I have done on numerous occasions).  Anyone viewing this that can shed better light on the worship of Kali because they actually worship Kali or know people who do are free to correct me in the comments section.  

Kali is known as the Dark Mother and sports four arms on each side.  Most pictures I saw of her had her wearing human heads and a belt of human arms.  

Kali was born from the eyebrow of Durga, another goddess, while Durga was fighting evil.  Kali immediately joined in the fray and got so carried away that she pretty much destroyed everything.   Shiva stopped her by laying down in front of her feet.

As fearsome as she looks, her image is highly symbolic.  She wears fifty heads as symbol of her infinite wisdom (there are fifty letters in the Sanskrit alphabet).  She wears no clothes to symbolize nature.  Her white teeth show her inner purity and her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness and the bonds that bind her followers.  She has three eyes that represent the past, present, and future.

The suttee was associated with Parvati, which by some sources I found, is an incarnation of Kali, which is why my book makes the association.  These dark sides of Kali and other deities are not worshipped as much today.  The most recent suttee was performed in 1987.  Personally, I feel that a woman should rather be burned alive than to live without her husband.  Makes sense to me.  Think I'll mention that to my wife tonight.  I'm positive she'll agree.

Lord of the Cu Sith?

Darth Vader is by far my favorite anti-hero.  Everything about him always seemed so mysterious.  Now that the first three movies have been made, we know all about him, but when I was growing up, there was always that wonder of what happened to this guy to make him so evil?  Even now I'll watch Revenge of the Sith and sort of hope that he won't actually kill those little kids, even though I know he must in order to turn so evil.  And that title:  Lord of the Sith!  When I was a kid, no one knew what a Sith was, but man, wouldn't it be cool to be one?  I even remember a Marvel comic that had a Sith as an alien being and Darth Vader, as evil as he was, had done something super nice and saved their whole world, which is why they worshipped him.

Now, Sith just means jedi of the dark side, and while it is nice to have some clarity, the magic just seems to be gone.

But since I am bored today, I'll push it a little farther.  Sith, in Gaelic, evidently means fairy.  Now, while I usually think all mythology allusions to be super cool, Darth Vader - the guy named Skywalker after the Norse trickster Loki, the guy whose name is a twist on Dark Father (a little foreshadowing back then), is now the Lord of the Faeries???  Just doesn't seem right.  I wondered if it was an accident or intentional on Lucas's part.  We have talked about faeries here, some, but not enough for me to know this.  I couldn't find out, although I did find a large history of the Sith (Star Wars-style, not Gaelic) at How Stuff Works, of all places (and they do mention the faerie thing.

Pushing on along, I found a website called Cu Sith.  It seems to be a start to a collection of mythological articles.  I was not very impressed by it yet, as there are more links to buying things, progressive newsletters, and other stuff than actual myths, but it might be interesting to check back there every once and a while to check it out to see how/if it evolves.

The interesting thing about Cu Sith is the name.  A cu sith is a faerie dog.  It is huge, so huge that its paw is as big as your hand and bigger than a bull.  It foretells death, like so many other of the black dog ilk, but in this case, what separated the cu sith from those other dime-a-dozen dogs is that he's green.  Yep.  

You really got to feel sorry for the cu sith.  While he is environmentally friendly and all, from what I've learned from Kermit growing up, it's not easy being green.

The Dog Star, uh Planet, uh Whatever...

O.K., back to our journey through space.  I got a bit distracted in the process, we are finally at Pluto.  Only two more stops to go!

Now, Pluto was a planet, but is now no longer a planet for reasons we will discuss when we get to the next stop in space.  Let's just say that I am not very happy about this and my nerdy self has not yet gotten over it.  I understand why, I just like Pluto.

Pluto is almost impossible to see, which is why it took so long to find it and why it earned the moniker of the formidable god of the dead*.  Pluto (Greek - Hades) has a helmet of invisibility, so the astronomer was being rather clever when he he chose Pluto as the name.

One of Pluto's problems is that it is very small.  In fact it is less than 3/4 the size of our own moon.  It has three moons itself, despite the small size.  The first to be found was named Charon, after the ferryman of souls on the river Styx.  For a while astronomers did not know if Charon should be a moon or classify Pluto and Charon as a binary planet system since Charon is almost the same size as Pluto.  There are two other moons, both very small that are not yet officially named.  Unofficially they are Hydra (after the monster from Hercules fame - I think Cerberus would be a better name) and Nix (night - a divine being that is so powerful that even Zeus is afraid to challenge).  

* There is some argument about Pluto being the god of the dead.  Technically, Pluto is the Roman god of wealth.  Dis is the Roman god of the dead, counterpart to Hades.  Over the years, the two basically have gotten merged in our minds as one.

Disney created their famous dog character the same year that Pluto was discovered.  When the news was released that Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet, Disney issued their own press release:

 BURBANK, CALIF (Thursday, August 24, 2006) – In reaction to news today that Pluto was demoted to the status of “dwarf planet,” the Seven Dwarfs issued their own short statement:

    “Although we think it's DOPEY that Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet, which has made  some people GRUMPY and others just SLEEPY, we are not BASHFUL in saying we would be HAPPY if Disney's Pluto would join us as an 8th dwarf. We think this is just what the DOC ordered and is nothing to SNEEZE at.”

    As Mickey Mouse’s faithful companion, Pluto made his debut in 1930 – the same year that scientists discovered what they believed was a ninth planet.

    Said a white-gloved, yellow-shoed source close to Disney’s top dog, “I think the whole thing is goofy. Pluto has never been interested in astronomy before, other than maybe an occasional howl at the moon.”

And now, to top things off..

Introducing the Medusa hat, by Oakley.

I don't know what disturbs me most about this hat.  Is it the fact that they didn't include little snake heads?  Is it the mannequin's face?  Or is it the fact that this item is OUT OF STOCK, meaning that whatever the number they made, they sold them all! (no offense to those of you sporting one right now, I'm sure it looks great in person.)