Carol Danvers, Marvel’s first female superhero, is also the most powerful. Article from Mashable.
Someone reading this noted that Carol Danvers is hardly Marvel’s first superhero. The article itself doesn’t make that claim, and I can only think whoever wrote the headline hadn’t read the article through, or misunderstood it.
`You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?’
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky – its modern name comes from the Ancient Greek Seirios (“glowing” or “scorcher”). It is actually another one of those binary stars, a white star and a white dwarf. Like Procyon, its nearness to Earth makes it much brighter in the night sky than many other stars. It is brighter than our sun, but dimmer than Rigel and Canopus.
Procyon suffers from an inferiority complex – even its name points to a more important star. Procyon means “before the dog”, meaning Sirius, the dog-star. (Fun fact: the racoon genus is called Procyon, because it used to be thought that raccoons evolved before dogs.)
Nemetona, Goddess of the Sacred Grove, had her cult in those dense Germanic forests that the Romans feared so much. Especially after the disaster in 9 CE, when three Roman legions and their auxillaries were ambushed and cut down in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, they preferred open spaces to the forests in which the druids and others worshipped.
Ancamna was a protector goddess of the Treveri, a Celtic tribe from the Moselle River area in Germany. Her cult centered on the area around Trier, known to the Romans as Treveri Augustorum (French Trèves).
The North Star is not a particularly bright star; it doesn’t make the top 20. It’s no. 45, actually. What’s even more disturbing is that it hasn’t always been the pole star, and it will eventually move out of position again. The Earth’s orbit has a wobble in it, and thus the north pole rolls around a little over the course of the millennia.
Imagine the poles as the ends of the dowel sticking out of a round top, and you can imagine the north end wobbling around as the top rolls. This is a bit of a blow to myths about the north star, because they tend to stress the constancy and centrality of Polaris. Continue reading
I suspect that the last thing the Amazon princess has ever worried about is wardrobe failure. Some of us mortals, however, have questioned whether a beauty-pageant style outfit is really suited to crimefighting. Batgirl and Spider-Woman, among others, have switched to more sensible, modern uniforms. (Although in Batgirl’s case she just had to lose the kitten heels.)
I assume, like everyone else, that WW is being rejigged for the movie, which is good news, because she’d look pretty silly standing next to Batman and Superman wearing a swimsuit.
The only problem I have with her new outfit is that her bracelets have these blades that shoot out to make her look like the guy in 300. I mean, this is a woman mighty enough to pair comfortably with Superman. She doesn’t need weapons. I keep imagining a weird variation on the old ads for Ginzu knives: buy now and we’ll throw in these arm blades. They slice, dice, and eviscerate! Order now and we’ll add a second set free!
Still, it’s about time she got a costume you can imagine fighting in. The artist Jim Lee came up with the look, but J. Michael Straczynski, the writer, also had input. He famously wanted the clothing on Babylon 5 to be comfortable and have pockets, because in the future people will still want to carry stuff around. We are assured that he gave Wonder Woman a place to stash her stuff, too.
When I wrote this post nine months ago, I was responding to the new Supergirl comic series, now sadly cancelled. The TV show, however, seems to be going strong. Perhaps now DC will try again.
Anyone who’s studied Supergirl’s history can’t blame her for being angry. When she first came to Earth, back in the 1950s, Superman did not always treat his cousin kindly. You would think he would be delighted to finally have another Kryptonian around, but no. He parked her in an orphange, where she had to wear a dowdy disguise and fend off potential adopters. (Mike Madrid’s The Supergirls compares her to a Victorian heroine, whose fate rests in the hands of an adult guardian.)
Despite this, she finally does manage to find a family to take her in, and enjoys the sort of stable, loving family that Clark Kent had. (When you look at Superman’s treatment of Lois and Kara through the 1950s, you have to assume he was mainlining Red Kryptonite the whole decade.)
In Norse myth we have two stories involving the theft of a substance that confers a magical benefit to the user. Both involve the thief taking the form of an eagle. Both involve a pursuit with a god and a giant. Of course, the two myths have very different results, although in both cases the final score is Aesir 1, Jotunar 0.
One is the myth of the giant Þiazi kidnapping Iðunn to get the apples of immortality, the other is the story of how Oðin stole the mead of poetry from the giant Suttungr.
We Are Star Stuff 