EnglishisEasy/Elinglésesfácil

"When in Ecuador, I use Mjolnir to crush and then eat mighty crabs!" Why is Thor important to the English language? He is really important because it is with his name that they made up one of the days of the week and that is none other than Thursday which literally means Thor's Day (el Día de Thor). Thor is not an invention of Marvel, the company that publishes Spiderman and also The X-Men. What they did is to take a figure of Norse mythology and made it more accessible to the minds of the audiences of the present time.  In Norse mythology, Thor is indeed a god, the God of Thunder, a deity that the Vikings held in great esteem. When the Vikings invaded the North of Europe they also spread their culture and their beliefs and a reflection of that event is the names of some days in English. Thursday is Jueves in Spanish and thus here is another difference between English and Spanish since Jueves literally means the Day of  Jove (one of the many names the Greek god ...

Were fairy tales created to entertain children or to frighten them? Perhaps it depends on which fairy tales we are referring to. Some are “harmless”, so to speak, such as Pinocchio written by Carlo Collodi. But there are others like those written by the Grimm brothers by Andersen the intention of which is a bit suspicious. The Red Shoes by Andersen for example tell the story of a vain stepdaughter who is so proud of her red shoes she even wears them to church gaining apparently divine disapproval. At a party she begins dancing and cannot stop. An angel then appears to her revealing her shoes are now cursed and  won´t ever stop not even after she dies (creepy!) to serve as an example to other children.  She keeps dancing for days until she finds an executioner who taking pity on her chops her feet off, and the shoes still with her feet inside kept dancing around. The executioner replaces her feet with wooden part. Repented the girl attempts to go back to church, bu...

     Last night the sky over our city was so clear you could see Mars as a point that whimsically showed its redish color and then not. Mars is the Roman name for the Greek god of war, Ares. Romans pretty much adopted a great part of the Greek culture including the religion and just changing the names with some of their own making (the exception is perhaps Janus, the two-faced god). In Roman culture Mars was an important god, more even than Jupiter himself; understandable, considering how tightly they embraced warfare. The presence of Mars in the sky was not regarded by all cultures the same way. Some saw it as a herald of ominous things to come. the Egyptians knew about its retrograde motion, the indians tried to calculate their diameter,the Babylonians recorded its position and movements, the Italians calculated its distance to the Sun, andin 1610,  Galilei´s eyes were the first to observe its surface through a telescope.          ...

Seen it already. I must admit I was expecting yet another disappointment since the translation from comics to film is always difficult, especially when you have several characters to deal with and this was a movie about a team of superheroe s. Now that I've seen it the only thing I can say is... THAT MOVIE IS AWESOME! The highest point is the dialogues which showed the great dedication of the writers in order to understand these characters and project to the public who they really are. Character development is usually a flaw in this type of movies but not a problem here because this is actually part six (or seven) of a series that began with Iron Man 1, so if you have seen the previous films you already know where they stand.  As I said I was afraid it wouldn't turn out so well but the fact it didn't proves that if you choose people who really care and actually know the characters, the translation to the big screen will be a successful one. Here the merit has a name and...

A forgotten villain, and also the inspiration of Skynet, the self-aware computer of the Terminator series. HAL9000 is older than the sentient machines of Matrix and perhaps the coldest killer depicted in any science fiction film. It kills the entire crew of the spaceship that is being used to investigate a mystery in space and it does it saying they could jeopardize their mission (to locate a strange black monolith in the solar system, a piece that could be of alien procedence). One man survives and manages to overcome the machine's attempts to murder him and resets its memory. He then finds the monolith and discovers the object has the power to somehow boost evolution. This all happens in 2001: A Space Odyssey , a film directed by the legendary Stanley Kubrick and based on the work of Arthur C. Clarke. The movie ends with the protagonist, whose name is David Bowman, being transformed by the monolith into a new, apparently superior being.

 Gabriel, Raphael, Michael are all said to be the names of archangels. Their rol in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs is always to act as messengers of God (it was Gabriel who revealed the Qu´ran to Muhammad) or as enforcers of his law. The suffix El (deity) in their names reveals their divine origin (Michael for example means "Who is like God") though it is not exclusive to only them since some prophets´names such as Daniel or Samuel also have it. In the Old Testament the Saviour's name is revealed to be Emmanuel (God with us).     It is interesting that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster,the creators of the archetype of all superheroes (Superman) chose El to create their character´s real name: Kal-El and his father´s, Jor-El. The explanation behind this fact was that in Krypton (Superman´s homeworld) everyone belonged to a "house" (family) so in their case El was actually a family name. But this explanation was devised later on, and not by Shuster or Siegel. ...

Hard to say. It's really two different stories. The "first" Thundercats were visitors from another planet called Thundera actually seeking haven in a planet they called Third planet that was, for all the evidence provided, an alternate version of our Earth (Excalibur for example exists there) sometime in a distant future where mankind doesn´t exist or has departed to other worlds. Thundera has been destroyed by some malign intervention later revealed to be the action of a powerful and evil sword that had been kept inside the planet. A neighboring planet called Plundarr is home to a race that hates all Thunderians for no apparent reason whatsoever and they are called the Mutants that are actually alien antropomorphs that for some reason none of them resembles cats (you see, the Thundercats were created by a cat person). The only survivors from the destruction of this tragedy is a group of catlike humanoid warriors called the Thundercats who are led by their brave leader, L...

Otra historia ambientada en un futuro apocalíptico, donde los humanos existen en mega ciudades que son regidas por la iglesia católica, mientras que fuera de ellas moran los vampiros, los que quedan luego de la última guerra entre ellos y los humanos, un conflicto que el hombre pudo ganar creando un cuerpo de guerreros infalibles al que se llamó simplemente sacerdotes. Un pariente del más temible de los sacerdotes es secuestrado por vampiros y aquel va en su búsqueda aunque para ello tenga que enfrentar la desaprobación de la misma iglesia que lo creó y que ahora se niega a creer que los vampiros hayan regresado deseando venganza. Hasta ahí suena interesante en realidad, sin embargo hay puntos débiles en esta historia como los vampiros mismos que aquí son presentados como criaturas que más bien parecen salidas de Resident Evil o las escenas de pelea que tanto recuerdan al estilo impuesto por Matrix a más de esa inveterada obsesión  de Hollywood por presentar a la iglesia católica c...