NorsePlay.

We're using this sweet Lego animated video to point out that the diss (short for disrespecting) in hip-hop is a modern-day parallel of Flyting, the poetic trading of insults , which is present in Norse Mythology's Lokasenna & Hárbarðsljóð , so the idea of Thor successfully rekking Zeus with his mad thunder rhymes is pretty on the mark. Go Thor, go Thor, go, go! And though the word "rap" itself is Scandinavian in origin, the African roots of The Dozens, an insult contest played in the evening that eventually led to rap battles, is not directly related to flyting, but just happens to be an incidental cultural match that also celebrates verbal deftness and one-upsmanship. [From ERB, directed by Forrest Whaley.] #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful poten...

So I secretly hate Cards Against Humanity. It gives people a sense of falsely achieved creativity when really they've done nothing but use some mild associative thinking to score the utmost inappropriate shock value with a hand of canned answers, which is entertaining in results but really, really shallow. But I play it because my friends love it, and I love my friends. Oddly such a game might remind one of the Lokasenna , where Loki publicly says all the inappropriate truths at a gathering of the Aesir to ruffle their feathers and falsely attempt to illustrate that they're just as malicious as he is . It took drawing this card (which I'd never drawn before) to draw that parallel, wyrdly enough. [My actual hand taken with my BlackBerryPassport Silver Edition.] #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t h...