1. The obligatory Disney-buys-Marvel joke: “High School Musical: Xavier Institute Edition”. Let’s face it: it couldn’t suck worse than X-Men 3.
2. My son is back and better than ever. His cat Lewis, however, has developed some weird attachment issues from the separation. For instance, Lewis kept running around to block me as I was trying to leave the house this morning–and I’m not even his tertiary Comfort Person. But it seems that nowadays no one is allowed to leave the house without his written permission, and he doesn’t know how to write.
3. My friend Howard Jones got a big splash in the Wall Street Journal for his collections of Harold Lamb’s adventure fiction. A belated “Yay!” for that–they really are great books and Howard has done incredible work bringing the stories back to light.
4. I was reading Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds last night and I saw that Iambilichus claimed the mys- in mystery comes from Greek μῦς (“mouse”). So every mys-tery is really a mouse-tery. This strikes me both as a pretty unlikely etymology and as totally awesome. This fourth item might seem to violate the “Three-Thing Day” rule–unless it is really the first item over again, eternally recurring, like a mouse swallowing his own tail.
The obligatory Disney-buys-Marvel joke: “High School Musical: Xavier Institute Edition”. Let’s face it: it couldn’t suck worse than X-Men 3.
Oh, no….oh, please, no…
Something Sort of Like This?
“Your mind bends me like a chiropractor;
your burning eyes really have the X-Factor…”
Re: Something Sort of Like This?
Oh, you are a sick man…
I suspect that Disney buying Marvel is a sign that the comic book movie craze has peaked and is already headed toward creative obsolescence. I think you’ll also see a massive exodus of best & brightest artists & writers from Marvel over the next year or two. In three or four years, when Disney sells Marvel for about $3.5 billion less than they paid, you’ll probably see a merger of Marvel & DC.
You may be right–though creative obsolescence still might be able to make some serious coin; Disney has made a lot of money on those direct-to-video sequels.
That is a lovely splash. Harold Lamb is totally new to me. I may have to pick those up. We should all be so lucky as to be posthumously rediscovered by our own Howard Joneses.
The Amazon listing for the Ogden looks even more delicious.
Mouse-tery? I’m still not quite recovered from the claim that the etymology of “tragedy” is “goat song.”
The Lamb books are indeed great. I read a bunch of Lamb’s popular histories as a kid, but had never heard of his fiction until Howard started his reprint series a few years ago. It’s amazing how good some of it is–the cream of pulp adventure fiction. A little light on female characters, maybe, but when they appear they’re great–totally non-cliché.
Ogden has another book out from Princeton which is also good, but is narrower in scope (Greek and Roman Necromancy). It’s also a monograph–not that there’s anything wrong with that–whereas Magic, Witchcraft etc. is a sourcebook, full of interesting bits of evidence that doesn’t have to be hammered into the context of an argument.
There is _something_ about mouses and magic. Apollo Smintheus’ totemic animal was apparently a mouse.
As a mystery cultist in good standing, I’m perplexed by the mouse connection. Admittedly, many component parts of my mystery cult are (arguably) of 1940s vintage, but our founders lifted bits of lore out of so many likely and unlikely contexts, I’m always surprised when I find something they haven’t stolen and patched in. Ah, well. Maybe the rodent connection is an oathbound secret of one of the higher degrees of initiation.
If there’s a real connection, I suspect that both “mouse” and “mystery” derive from a common root (maybe meaning “hidden” or “earthy” since mice live in hiding places in or on the ground) rather than “mystery” being derived directly from “mouse.” But that’s just a guess; I don’t have any Greek etymological dictionaries nearby to chew on.
Yeah it could. Everything Disney sucks way more than X-Men 3.
As in, crap made by Disney, not the ‘we bought ESPN’ bit.
Well, they used to do some good stuff sometimes through their “Touchstone Pictures” arm. Though “used to” is the operative phrase, I guess.
Very much so.