Silver Surfer as Christ Figure June 17, 2007
Posted by Steve in : The City, Movies, The Cultural Conversation , add a comment
Just got home from seeing the latest summer blockbuster, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer that has been brought to the big screen by Stan Lee and 20th Century Fox. It was an excellent movie with incredible special effects and a strong Christ figure in the Silver Surfer. The good story line comes from the comic books (although no face for Galactus?). The cinemaphotography was superb. This blockbuster is supposed to have done nearly $60 million this opening weekend. It will be interesting to see how it does. As of Sunday night, it had more than 4, 700 ratings and an average fan rating of “B” at Yahoo Movies. What do you think?
Wikipedia tells us that “the Silver Surfer is a fictional Marvel Comics superhero created in 1966 by writer Stan Lee and artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby. They created a character, Norrin Radd, who was a young astronomer of the planet Zenn-La. In order to save his homeworld from destruction by a fearsome cosmic entity known as Galactus, Norrin made a bargain with the being, pledging himself to serve as its herald. Imbued in return with a small portion of Galactus’ Power Cosmic,[1] Norrin acquired great powers, a silvery appearance, and a surfboard-like vehicle — all modeled after a childhood fantasy of his. Known from then on as the Silver Surfer, Norrin began to roam the cosmos searching for new planets for Galactus to consume. When his travels finally took him to Earth, the Surfer came face to face with the Fantastic Four, a team of powerful superheroes that helped him to rediscover his nobility of spirit. Betraying Galactus, the Surfer saved Earth but was punished in return with everlasting exile there.[2]
Writer/editor Stan Lee, Kirby’s “Fantastic Four” collaborator, loved the character. “I felt that he had to represent more than the typical comic-book hero,” he wrote later. Lee gave the Surfer his own book (without Kirby) and made the character a noble philosopher and Christ figure, trapped on Earth, suffering for mankind’s sins, even doing battle with a Satan stand-in called Mephisto.
Check it out!
Ministry Travel: Ensure the Lowest Fares May 29, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Technology, Methods & Strategies, Tech Tips , add a comment(Yahoo) Have you ever bought an airline ticket from ministry travel only to see the price fall in the enusing weeks and your frustration rise as you try to manage costs? Now there is something you can do about it.
Few customers realize it, but many airlines will give refunds if they cut the price after you have bought a ticket. Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest, United and US Airways all offer vouchers for the full price difference — if the price drops $200, you can get a $200 coupon towards a future trip. Others offer vouchers, or cash, after deducting change fees (which can run up to $100). In industry jargon, it is called a “rollover,” and in most cases it only works if you bought the ticket directly from the airline. (It generally won’t work if you bought them via a Web site such as Expedia.com or Orbitz.com, unless the price drops in the first 24 hours.)
The rollover policies have been in place for decades, but, until recently, it has been tough for consumers to figure out when their flight’s price has changed. The catch is you have to call while the lower price is in effect to get your rollover. That is where a new Web site, Yapta.com, has come up with a clever way to take some of the anxiety out of buying airline tickets.
Yapta, a company run by a former Alaska Airgroup Inc. pricing vice president, was launched May 22. It tracks fares on specific flights you select before or after you buy a ticket. That is an improvement over Web sites that just track markets, but don’t allow you to specify which flights you really want. You can use Yapta before you buy to alert you by email to pricing changes on a particular trip, or let you know if the price drops after you’ve bought a ticket and you’re eligible for a refund. In order to obtain the voucher, you need to phone the airline directly. (You usually can’t snare one online.) So as you are planning on attending that future multi-site conference, input your preferred flights and when they get to your budgeted level, it will notify you and you can then purchase the tickets.
One woman, who signed up with Yapta to test the site before its launch, paid $800 each for four tickets from San Francisco to Kona, Hawaii. A few days later, she got notification from Yapta that the price had dropped to about $400 per ticket. She called United Airlines and got tickets reissued at the lower price plus four $400 vouchers. “There’s no way I would have been checking sites to see if the price went down,” she said.
Check it out now here.
