Super Sugarplum Pre-Apocalyptic Holiday Mega Crunchy Post!

Merry holiday-times everyone!

     Chances are, you've heard we've yet another end of the world on our hands. Just in case something does happen later, let's talk about writers' fixation on the apocalypse - now!
     It's fairly common for sci-fi writers to mention the end of the world; either as a setting for the tale or a potential stake if the hero loses. The apocalypse offers a great deal of freedom for an author to craft (or un-craft) his world. It also goes along way towards sparking public interest in how our little blue marble may one day meet its maker. In recent year it's been all about the zombies; zombies with guns, zombie plagues, fat zombies, short zombies, zombies that climb on rocks, the list goes on. No one is sure how the cultural movement began (though the word has roots in voodoo and Night of the Living Dead seems to be their first successful mainstream outing), but the walkers are now inundating mass media, from Call of Duty games  to The Walking Dead comics to The View.
     Going further back we see definitive streaks of alien invasions/annihilations. Meteor strikes and other natural phenomena are safe bets too in the right setting (Roland Emerich's made a career of it, with Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow, among others).
     The 2012 Mayan Apocalypse has sparked its own number of responses, from the big budget (2012) to Walmart bin Schlock I can't even remember. This past weekend I saw 4 different trailers for end-of-the-world movies, including the deftly titled After Earth (by the incomparable M. Knight Shaymalan), a romantic comedy with - you guessed it- zombies, and the requisite "Giant Robots fight Giant Monsters" flick.
     The point is, even when we aren't supposed to die later in the week, pop culture has a fascination with the End. Have we exhausted all possible scenarios? Will we ever have a new fate to fear? WE may never know.
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Now that that's out of the way...

If you are reading this, it means the world may not have ended yet, which means it's time for the Super Secret Holiday Message! In every blog post I've made thus far (starting with #2) I have left a fragment to a coded message of the utmost yuletide importance. Can you decode it? Here's a hint:

9=I

20=T

Good Luck, Happy Holidays, and listen to the Little Orphan Annie radio show!

The Lost Sequel to the Odyssey

     The Iliad and Odyssey are some of Homer's most famous works, detailing the Trojan War. But according to a scholar named Proclus, they are but two in a series of eight epic poems. None were written by Homer, but when stitched together they fill in his missing pieces of the war.

     Now, we don't actually have any way of proving Proclus' story, but other writers have quoted the six alledged tales, and tiny scraps of them have survived in paper. Asside from that, it's difficult to question him. We know the Trojan War happened, so it's logical that someone wrote about it, and we know it was common to write epic poetry back then. If the only existing evidence of Julius Caesar was that some dude from the Elizabethian Period claimed there was a drama about the assassination of Caesar, could we refute it? We know that the assasination did take place, and we know that there were many famous playwrites in Elizabethian England - including Shakepeare.                                  14

     The last book in the lost collection, the Telegony, details the end of Odysseus' life. According to Proclus, Odysseus returns home to Ithaca from his latest adventure (which sees him marry the queen of a faraway land and remain there long enough to see his illegitimate child reach adulthood) just in time for the invasion of Telegonus, the bastard child of Odysseus and - gasp! Circe! It seems Telegonus went to visit his long-lost father, but didn't appreciate his absence when he got there.

The Death of Ophelia

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When King Hamlet died, it made his son vengeful and crazed. The same thing happened when Hamlet slew (slayed?) Polonius, only Polonius had two kids. Laertes got the vengeful, and Ophelia got the crazed.

Only whereas Hamlet could have been faking his insanity, Ophelia definitely isn't faking hers.

It may seem odd for someone to be so stricken with grief that they develop an unaimed loss of composure, but for Ophelia, it's a blade that cuts on both ends. Obviously on one hand comes the sudden death of her father, but on the other hand comes the man responsible; Hamlet. The man she loves just killed her father, and she doesn't know how to cope with this.

So we come to one of the most famous scenes in Hamlet that you've never seen. After an outburst of creepy singing in the courtyard, Ophelia drowns hanging Laurels by the river. But what exactly happened? Shakepeare leaves it ambiguous, but there are a few options. She could have simply slipped, or she could have committed suicide. Her mental condition muddles the water even further. Perhaps she even went for a swim, not realizing in her state that she was wearing a flowing, heavy dress. Each option is equally likely, which was probably Will's intention.