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I was thinking about a discussion on last month’s Flash #226 and got to thinking about the way religion figures into mainstream comic books. Not the way religious characters are portrayed, but the way the fictional world works. I’m not familiar enough with Marvel (though I can make some guesses based on the presence of Thor), but DC seems to have an “anything goes” cosmology: current scientific theory coexists with the Christian God, Heaven and Hell, with gods and other supernatural beings from various mythologies—some of them made up, like the Lords of Order and Chaos—occupying their own corners of the universe.

That’s probably what you want for a long-term, open-ended shared universe, because it gives you the most opportunities for stories. Want to write about an alien race that lived billions of years ago, or evolved from cats? Check. Have a fallen angel join the Justice League? Check. Tie Wonder Woman’s origin directly to the Greek gods? Check. Use made-up alien gods to explain the Greco-Roman split? Check. Power up half your villains and a handful of heroes as they sell their souls to a devil? Check. Pit the spirit of God’s wrath against a 50,000-year-old immortal ex-caveman? Check. Send some characters to Heaven or Hell, but have others destined to be reincarnated over and over again? Check. Observe the hand of God at the moment of the big bang? Check.

There are a couple of limits. DC seems to avoid ascribing a particular religion or denomination to any of their A-list characters, probably so that readers can just assume it’s their own (kind of like setting a story in “Anytown, USA”). And they avoid direct portrayals of God or Jesus, probably for the same reason. Continue reading →

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So who’s next? Well, Opera 9 beta 1 is very close—there’s a pair of red squares that should be black, but that’s it. Neither IE7 nor Firefox 1.5 will have much in the way of Acid2-related fixes, though the trunk builds of Firefox show improvement, so 2.0 has a chance 3.0 might make it will pass (since 2.0 will use the same engine as 1.5).

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According to Marketplace, critics of President Bush’s flu pandemic preparedness proposal contend that it’s too focused on vaccines and antiviral drugs, and that the money would be more effectively used by monitoring outbreaks and trying to stamp out bird flu in the third world.

In other words, they say we should take the fight to the flu abroad so we don’t have to fight it at home. Why does that sound familiar? 😉

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WWW, while convenient to type, is rather unwieldy when spoken (at least in English). “Double-U double-U double-U dot some site dot com” takes a while to say. It’s not like, say, AAA, which can be easily spoken as “Triple-A.” Fortunately, these days most major sites have their servers configured to return the same web with or without the www. prefix, so you sometimes hear a website described with just its domain name.

This morning I caught the end of an interview on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, and the announcer explained that the full version of the interview was available on their website, “dub dub dub dot marketplace dot org.”

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The Wine Cube

Saw this at Target today. I suppose I shouldn’t be much of a wine purist, since I don’t drink much myself (I think we have one bottle in the apartment, and we haven’t opened it in the year+ we’ve had it)—but somehow I can’t bring myself to buy wine-in-a-box.

I mean, think about it. “You, me and a box of wine.” How appealing does that sound?

Then of course there’s the fact that the boxes are roughly the size of the Macintosh G4 Cube. And of course, that brings up thoughts of the WINE project (which allows many Windows applications to run on Linux), but of course that won’t run on a PowerPC chip…

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Christmas aisle

I dropped into Sav-on briefly today. Among other things I wanted to top off the supply of Halloween candy for Monday. Imagine my surprise to find that Halloween was crammed into half an aisle, and there were two aisles of Christmas already. (You may notice that the sign above this one doesn’t say “Seasonal” or even just “Christmas.” “Christmas” was the next aisle over. This was labeled “Christmas Lights,” presumably to avoid duplicate signs.)

Yes, the Christmas stuff is already up, and it’s still October. It’s annoying enough when malls put up decorations and start playing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving! Soon, buying holiday decorations is going to be like buying seasonal clothing. You’ll have to finish your Christmas shopping in July, or you’ll have to rely on the remaindered stuff that the stores couldn’t get rid of. And you’ll have to pre-order Independence Day fireworks in December, and hope they’re still legal to set off by the time summer rolls around.