Twitterpated

• 00:10 Photo: For everyone who didn’t get one, here’s a New Year’s Kiss. (No, my New Year’s resolution was not to... tumblr.com/xpy550nv2 #
• 00:14 twitgoo.com/at9qh Reagan's first meal of the year #
• 02:08 Video: samuraifrog: tumblr.com/xpy553kmn #
• 04:18 Stupid Comics - Eggbert - One of the most disturbing comics I’ve ever seen, this one actually involves unborn... tumblr.com/xpy556kko #
• 09:58 @JaredofMo I thought the rabbit h
  ole led to Neverland! #
• 09:59 As soon as @NowIsStrange is ready, we're off to New York to see @eehouls. #
• 13:15 Okay, who decided it was a good idea to close Books of Wonder? #
• 13:17 Not that I would have bought anything there anyway, most likely. Their Oz section has declined. #
• 13:18 Still bigger than at any other bookstore, though. #
• 13:19 @jdrose86 Could be interesting, although most of my Oz dreams have been rather boring. #
• 13:23 The twist ending is that @pftompkins was twee
  ting the whole time! #
• 13:25 Seriously, I can't understand why people are unfollowing @pftompkins. It's not like there's a Twilight Zone marathon every day, is there? #
• 13:28 The Jersey City streets were abandoned. Did the apocalypse happen, and nobody told me? #
• 17:18 twitgoo.com/attgw Children's menu @ Kellogg's Diner in Brooklyn #
• 17:23 @TheRealTavie We're in Brooklyn now, but my car is in Jersey City. #
• 19:47 Video: samuraifrog: tumblr.com/xpy55qd90 #
• 20:51 Video: samuraifrog: Has Ronald cut back on the lipstick a bit in recent years? I can’t quite tell. tumblr.com/xpy55s5vg #

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Walking in the New Year

Well, this is my first actual post of the year (not counting Twitter updates), so happy new year, losers my dear readers! New Year's Eve was quite uneventful, with the main thing I did at midnight being feeding the cat. New Year's Day was a lot more fun, though, as bethje and I went to New York City to see not_glimmer, who is visiting from Oregon. The crappy thing about being in New York on New Year's is that nothing is open. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but several places we wanted to go turned out to be closed. We decided to meet at Books of Wonder, and...well, we did, but we weren't able to go inside. Oddly enough, the cupcake place that shares the building WAS open, even though I think they might have the same owners. So we're allowed to fill our stomachs, but not our heads? Anyway, we had an early dinner at an Italian place called Focacceria, where Erin had actually eaten last New Year's. I'd been wanting pasta for a few days now, so it was cool that I finally had some. After that, we walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, and had milkshakes (well, I had a smoothie, actually) at a diner called Kellogg's. Then we returned to Manhattan, and had a third dessert at a cafe there. All in all, it was a lot of walking. I enjoyed seeing Erin again, and should probably be grateful for the exercise, but I'm hoping our next visit to the New York metropolitan area will be more relaxing.

I think there were some other things that I wanted to address, but I can't remember what they were. I'm going to guess they weren't that important, though.

Glory of the Hades

While the actual personification of death in Greek mythology was Thanatos, the twin brother of the sleep god Hypnos, the more famous Greek figure associated with death is Hades. While Hades' rule over the world of the dead leads to some modern association with Satan (in Disney's Hercules, for instance, Hades was portrayed as a duplicitous schemer), he's actually quite different. While widely hated and feared, and certainly one of the most dour and unpleasant of the Olympians, his attitude seems to derive more from his bleak surroundings than from an evil personality. And while he often takes on an antagonistic role, this isn't always the case. In some versions of the Perseus myth, for instance, he loans his famous cyclops-made Helm of Darkness to the hero for use in killing Medusa. The Greek myth-makers often seemed to think of him as someone who, while fair and skilled at his job, really didn't like it. The story has it that Hades and his brothers Zeus and Poseidon, after winning control of the world from the Titans, drew lots to divide up the place. Zeus took the sky, Poseidon the seas (he was second to choose, but got his first choice anyway), and Hades was stuck with the underworld. The upside to this dreary position was that Hades technically owned all the wealth to be found underground, hence his alternate name Plouton, which became the Latin Pluto. I remember when the Disney movie came out, and someone asked why Hercules had his Latin name while the gods all went by their Greek ones, and someone joked that calling them by their Latin names would have meant Hades being Pluto, who of course is someone else quite different in the Disney universe. Actually, the Romans also referred to the god as Dis Pater and Orcus, but would your average movie-goer have known this?


The most famous legend of Hades is probably that of his abduction of Persephone, the daughter of his sister Demeter. (The gods never seemed to have a problem with incest; Rick Riordan's explanation for this in the Percy Jackson series is that they lack DNA.) Demeter enlisted the help of Zeus and Hermes in getting her daughter back, but since Persephone had eaten six pomegranate seeds, she was required to stay in the underworld for six months of the year. This is apparently why the seasons change, although the tilting axis might have a thing or two to say about that.