I am happy to announce that I have launched a new web site, an online myth magazine called “Journey to the Sea”. I published the first issue today, which contains two articles I have written and one by a good friend of mine.

• Myth: A Defintion — Journey to the Sea is a new online magazine devoted to the study of myth. The English word myth has many connotations, and Randy describes what we mean by myth throughout this site. Full article »
• God and Man: Two Western Themes — Many Western traditions teach that mankind is separate from the divine. They typically reflect one of two contrary themes concerning man’s proper response to the divine. Full article »
• Magic in the World of Alvin Maker: Seventh Son (by Laura Gibbs) — Laura begins her series on the “ecology of magic” that storytellers create for their imagined worlds, looking first at the alternate America imagined by Orson Scott Card in his Alvin Maker series. Full article »

The current plan is to publish one issue of this same size (three articles, a thousand words each) once a month. I realized some time ago that writing about something really helps me learn the material, and I had been planning since the beginning of the year to start writing about myth. This has definitely been the case writing these first two articles, and I think this online magazine will be a great format for me to continue to explore myth.

I have spend quite a bit of time lately looking for fonts. I saw a fun video about building a web start-up earlier this year, around the time I started building my Amesbury Web site. The creator of this video recommended that small companies avoid paying design fees for a logo early on and instead just buy a good font and work from that (see 3:20-4:00 of the video). I have been scouring the web for typefaces, and last week I made my first font purchase and created logos that I really like for both Journey to the Sea and Amesbury Web.

(I also added these logos to the home page of this site, one under the “Myth” column and one under the “Web” column.)

Along with this version of Firefox, Mozilla launched a new version of their web site. The new web site looks very nice! I love how they evolved the existing design to incorporate some of the current trends in web design: instead of a complete redesign, they have wisely chosen to take a sophisticated step forward. The images rotate each time you visit the home page, between birds, hot-air balloons, and UFOs; I love how these prominent images  fade nicely into the background as you enter the more content-heavy pages.

With this release, they also moved the old Mozilla dinosaur from the header to the footer — a choice which I think has been long overdue.

I went to see The Incredible Hulk this weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Edward Norton does an excellent job as Bruce Banner. One of the things I enjoyed most about the movie is that they relegate his “origin story” to the opening credits. It can be a little disorienting if you know nothing about the general story, but I think they made the right choice in concluding that most everyone knows the essentials and in moving on to the more interesting parts of the specific story they wanted to tell.

It had a different feel to it than Iron Man, which I saw a few weeks ago. I think this stems from the different way they each acquired their powers. Iron Man underwent a psychological transformation during his captivity that led him to pour his money and genius into a new social cause, while the Hulk is a victim of a scientific experiment gone wrong and would like nothing more (at least at the beginning of the movie) to be free from it and return to normal life. I liked Iron Man a little more, but I definitely thought they were both well done.

I also saw a trailer for another comic book movie coming out this summer: Hellboy 2 (July 11). I didn’t see the first Hellboy movie, but I’m now thinking I might have been remiss in overlooking it. This new one looks very good — very mythic — and the director Guillermo del Toro proved that he understands the relevance of myth for us today with Pan’s Labyrinth. (Others apparently were convinced of this also: he has been chosen to direct The Hobbit.)

To sum up: the summer has had two really good comic-book movies so far, and there’s a good chance there will be three more good ones before it’s all over:

• Iron Man (May 2)
  
• The Incredible Hulk (June 13)
  
• Hancock (July 2)
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army (July 11)
• Batman: The Dark Knight (July 18)
  

• The Sky Is Falling: It appears that there is a serious threat that an object (asteroid or something similar) could strike the earth or even just explode in our atmosphere and cause serious damage. This article looks at the danger and what NASA is doing about it (hint: nothing).
• Two articles look at Barak Obama and the internet. The internet is changing the way we do pretty much everything, “raising campaign funds” and “running a country” included.
  • The Amazing Money Machine: “How Silicon Valley made Barack Obama this year’s hottest start-up.”
  • HisSpace: “How would Obama’s success in online campaigning translate into governing?”
• In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: College education is increasing as a requirement for jobs, promotions, etc. An adjunct English instructor at a community college discusses why a university education should not be for everyone and why making it so is destructive. He offers an interesting perspective on this issue.

The next sporting event that will interrupt my regular routine will be the Summer Olympics, which start in just two months.

• Iron Man (May 2)
  
• The Incredible Hulk (June 13)
  
• Hancock (July 2)
• Batman: The Dark Knight (July 18)
  

(Even though Hancock is not technically a comic-book adaptation, he is definitely a comic-book style superhero.)

I wasn’t even sure I was going to see Iron Man until I started hearing really good things about it — even from “serious” movie critics. Someone even speculated that the acting was Oscar-worthy. I went to see it this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Iron Man is an excellent start to a summer that will hopefully be filled with more good comic-book movies.

I did not read comic books much growing up, but I would include the stories they contain within my definition of myth. This type of story can be adapted reasonably well into a movie, especially with the advances of special-effects technology in the last few years. (Novels, on the other hand, do not seem to me to be as easy to adapt to film. There are lots of reason for this, and I hope to consider this in more detail in the future.) I still think it takes a lot of work to do it right: there are just so many ways these movies can go wrong! There’s always the danger that they will be ridiculously cheesy (like Batman 4, my vote for worst comic-book movie ever) or simply mindless action flicks (like X-Men 3). But all comic-book movies, because they deal with subjects beyond our everyday experiences, have the potential to instruct or inspire us in the same way as the great myths.

Here’s how they work:

1. Mount the bracket on the wall.
2. Place on the bracket a book that can permanently act as the base, leaving the back cover hanging down.
3. Tuck the back cover underneath the bracket; it has an indentation at the back that holds the book cover in place.
4. Stack a few books on top to cover the full height of the bracket.

I chose as my base a hardback copy of The Odyssey. I have multiple copies of this classic, and I’ll never need this particular copy because I prefer a different version — the poetry translation by Richmond Lattimore.

I have just about finished C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. It is a parallel novel, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. Lewis explores many of the ideas from his non-fiction works — man’s proper response to God, the nature of myth and of history, the dynamics within human relationships — in the context of a fictitious barbarian kingdom on the fringes of ancient Greece.

I also just started Joseph Campbell’s book Primitive Mythology that examines the archaeological evidence for the earliest myths and rituals of primitive man. He looks at the two primary mythological perspectives that arose, the shamanism of hunting societies and the fertility rites of planting societies. (I have never looked at mythology from this angle and in this much depth before, and it is incredibly fascinating. This is the first book of a four-volume series, and I’m really looking forward to see how mythology developed through the centuries.) You can always find out what books I have finished and what’s next on the list by visiting the Books I’m Reading page.

I have been a little behind, and I just now finished the March 2008 issue (which I think I received early February; does the date refer to when it’s available at the newsstands?). Two articles I found worth mentioning:

• The Next Slum? — After describing the well-known migration of people from living in cities to living in suburbs that started in the 1950s, this article examines the implications of the rising demand for urban living. I think I would love living in a walking city or a town center like those described in this article.
• Marry Him! — This article encourages women for whom motherhood is important not to wait for the perfect guy and the perfect romance but to find a husband who is good enough to get the infrastructure in place for a family. (The author did not settle and later wished she had.) It is definitely thought-provoking.

Those who work in advertising are masters of persuasion. They subtly weave their images and slogans into our daily lives, knowing that we will register so much unconsciously. Then we walk into a supermarket and feel a sense of familiarity with a product we think we’ve never heard of.

• Video: Derren Brown - Subliminal Advertising

I watched this video after finishing the science-fiction novel Shikasta that harshly critizes the materialism of Western society, with its insatiable drives to consume and accumulate. This video made that criticism all the more real to me.

The last two games of the tournament were absolutely thrilling.

1. After Memphis easily beat UCLA in the first of semifinal games on Saturday night, Kansas jumped out to 40-12 (!) lead over North Carolina in the second. Then North Carolina rallied to cut their deficit to only 6 points (!!!) halfway through the second half. Kansas held off the comeback and finished the game with a comfortable lead, moving to the championship game. I know I should have been rooting for Kansas, a fellow Big XII school, but I admit I wanted North Carolina — I am a huge fan of the coach Roy Williams and their long tradition.
2. The championship game on Monday night was one of the best championship games of all-time. The teams traded the lead back and forth, never more than seven points, until Memphis appeared to have the game won when they pulled ahead by nine points with two minutes to go. Against all hope, Kansas hit some big three-point shots — with Memphis missing some important free throws — to tie the game and then easily win it in overtime.

Congratulations to the Kansas Jayhawks.

CBS compiles a montage of clips from throughout the tournament called “One Shining Moment”, which they play every year at the end of the championship game. This montage provides, and I look forward to it every year. (I only missed it once: in 2003, I got so upset that Roy Williams and Kansas lost to Syracuse that I forgot all about it that night.) If you missed it, be sure to check out this year’s montage online.

Last year during March Madness, our son Garrett was born. This year, we celebrated his first birthday with a basketball-themed party on the night of the Final Four. He opened presents and ate his first bite of cake.

I wanted to direct other geeky web developers to something cool I discovered this year while following March Madness. ESPN has created a web-based tournament bracket with HTML and CSS. The design is elegant, the markup is very clean, and it is filled with hypertext goodness. (If you are not a geeky web developer, you can pretend that you never read this.)