Monday, May 9, 2011

Mortal Cat, Immortal Tricksters

A “Week of Cats” within my “Month of Animals” is clearly necessary, and we begin with a link tweeted on April Fool’s Day by Nathan Fillion.

Speaking of tricksters – in myth, Odin was an even worse one than Loki, according to this assistant prof who, I will have you know, is an expert on folklore and ancient mythology (here contrasting the movie Thor with the mythological one – and with the drunken liars who surrounded Thor in those myths, no formula for a healthy parent-child relationship and not a reliable way to forge a hero).

And to compensate for the fact that this is largely a month of stupid video clips of animal doing silly things, here’s a relatively noble and serious item: a cat who needs your help to afford his rabies quarantine (who was tweeted about by Mary Katharine Ham, a.k.a. the funny political reporter who first posted a clip of my C-SPAN2 appearance last year).  The fundraising drive ends Saturday!

Tomorrow on this blog, though: quite simply the greatest cat video of all time, in my opinion.  Don’t miss it.

2 comments:

Gerard said...

"...in myth, Odin was an even worse one than Loki."

Might this have something to do with the popularity of the latter, at least in terms of online pseudonyms used for non-comic message boards?

Just an observation.

Todd Seavey said...

Despite Odin's bad behavior, Loki's still the trickster god, which I suppose makes him a natural as a pseudonym for the trouble-prone, whereas when you map these characters onto Judaeo-Christian thinking, All-Father Odin inevitably gets thought of as a Yahweh-analogue, I suppose (a topic we should discuss when I host a debate on paganism and Christianity in a few months, if all goes according to plan).

Or it might just be that Loki was the bad guy in all those comics.