perfidy

At least, I sure hope they do.

Growing up I always enjoyed Scandinavian mythology. To be sure I read alot of Greek tales as well and I found them no less exciting, what with the crazy monsters and the brave heroes and the beastiality. But the Norse tales were, I dunno, edgier somehow. That world was battle, broadsword, and blood on the ice, a far cry from the Mediterranean climes, vineyards, and olive groves of the Greeks. I knew what deep snow and arctic chills were about; I don't think I could have picked an olive branch out of a lineup. While the Norse tales were more challenging, due perhaps to their obscurity relative to the domination of Greco/Roman sources on subsequent publication, their telling always resonated with me in a way the Greek stuff never did. They were both fantastical, but the Norse tales will always seem more...real.

Which brings me to the Ragnarok, the final war of Gods and Men.

As best I understand the Norse cosmology, when men die they go to one of three places: Hel, a horrible place of shadow and icy mist reserved for that sorry lot who die in their sleep of old age, and from which none return; Volkvangr, Freya's hall, for folks who died in violence but not neccessarily in glorious battle, not sure what becomes of these folks in the end; and of course Valhalla, Odin's hall.

Valhalla was reserved for the bravest warriors who fell in battle. Odin's servants, valkyrie, would choose the greatest of the slain (and indeed may have caused their deaths in the first place, by "fettering" or otherwise crippling the hero at the critical moment- there is seemingly some overlap between conceptions of Norse valkyrie and the Celtic Morrigan here), and wing them to Valhalla. There, the spirits of the Earth's mightiest warriors fight by day and feast by night, training to serve under Odin's command at the Ragnarok. And even though Fate has foretold the result and the ramifications of the final battle and the end of the universe, no party- Men, the dread Jotun (giants), or even the Gods themselves- can alter it.

So where does that leave me?

I don't have a battle, even a metaphorical one, that would hope to qualify me for Valhalla. And I'm not going to be the guy who tries to get in, you know, by default. I'm not going to tell thousands of burly vikings that I should be included because, yeah, I didn't fight an actual battle but I *DID* improve the database interface between IT, Advancement, and Admissions and got 5's across the board at my last annual review because of it, which was kinda like a battle because Jean in IT is so prickly and it's almost impossible to get a meeting with Janet in the Business Office to finalize the budget.

No sir.

My only hope is that Asgard's army will need administrators. Maybe on some fateful day the valkyrie will come, desperately in need of a chubby douchebag administrator to help do some import and config work so Valhalla's database can talk to Volkvangr's, and thereby contribute to the final battle.

Because unless that's the case, I'm probably going straight to Hel.

The email read:

Many of you may have used the derogatory term "dickhead" to refer to someone who may deservedly have earned such a title. Others of you may have earned the title for yourselves.

However, it should be noted that though they are seldom sighted, real "dickheads" do exist in the wild, as evidenced by this undercover shot taken at a pool in your neighborhood.

Speaking of lessons, also from an email this morning entitled "Why you shouldn't show off", this YouTube link which, inexplicably, had embedding disabled, elsewise I'd have just embedded it to save you the extra click.

Because I'm a giver.

I was the first human explorer to set foot on Mars.

The dream began with me stepping onto the planet, so don't ask me anything about the trip, the balance of the team, the mission objectives, or even the mode of conveyance- wasn't there.

The surface had much more terrain excitement than is seen in actual imagery. My dream-Mars was all crushed stone, almost like a carpet of gravel with bits of bigger rock here and there. It looked like the remnants of a long-extinct glacier, or huge flood- possibly two sides of the same coin, I thought. I walked around a bit, quite satisified with my spacesuit, which was very lightweight and not at all uncomfortable; in fact, I may not have been wearing a helmet at all. In short order I found that the landing site was on a shelf, really a titanic mesa, and from the edge I looked down into a huge canyon. I could see the bottom- the ambient light was pretty good, and not nearly as red as prior missions would have you believe-and one edge, but the rest of it went off to obscurity.

That's when I saw the hut.

Further down the mesa's rim I saw a small structure, unmistakably an Earth-type dwelling space. I walked over, perhaps a half-mile (hard to gauge Earth distances on foreign planets, dontchaknow), and walked inside. I don't remember there being a door. The hut enclosed a single space that mimicked my own bedroom, at least in size and the layout of the bed. Yes, the bed- there was a king-sized sleigh bed in the middle of this hut.

Then things got weird.

On the bed, just kind of hanging out, was my stepfather, who has been dead for over three years now. Or so we all thought. He explained that he had faked his death and moved to Mars to just kind of get away. You know, leave it all behind for awhile, and he wasn't particularly excited to see me. I was trying to make sense of that when I realized there were two other people in the room. I think it was one of his brothers and his sister-in-law, neither of whom at this writing is either dead or pretending to be. They knew he had been faking, and had gone back and forth to Mars a couple times to visit.

The whole scene was making me a little uncomfortable, so I went back outside to the mesa's edge. I looked again down into the canyon, and was thinking it would make a pretty good lake if someone filled it. After some moments of indecision, I figured I'd go back inside and try to get some more details. As I turned away from the canyon I saw movement farther down the rim. I could make out two, maybe more, figures slowly walking toward the hut opposite the place I had started, but at about the same distance. In short order I found them to be tourists from Earth, startled to see not just one but several people already there. They had paid a premium for the exclusivity of the destination, and were kinda pissed that it wasn't quite so exclusive.

My stepfather, meanwhile, was getting kinda pissed that all of a sudden all these people had showed up uninvited at his place.

Posted without further comment.

I ran across this video the other day, and in the interest of furthering Dark Knight Hysteria, I present it here for your edification and amusement, and to make you extremely depressed. Why? Because it's a fake. It's not a real movie, and it never will be. Still, though...wow!

[wik] from Buckethead: if you go here, you can read the entire screenplay for the nonexistent movie this is a trailer for.