Why Am I In This Handbasket?

http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/comic_book_religion.html

If you are a comic geek then you probably already know that Night Crawler is Catholic and Kitty Pryde is Jewish but what about The Hulk? Or over at the competition you can't miss that Azrael is Catholic but what about the new Green Arrow?

 

 

http://www.japaneselifestyle.com.au/

I can almost guarantee that if you haven't read the rest of this post your first reaction upon clicking that link will be to think I've lost my mind. The big ads for hot Japanese girls and hotels give it a particularly tabloid trashy look. What could be of interest here?

Quite a lot actually once your eyes adjust and you can focus on the text. Here you will find links to dozens of articles on just about everything Japanese, many of which are illustrated. Some are better than others, and most are drawn from other sources, but there is a lot of good information here.

Do you want to know how the Japanese celebrate Christmas? What a wedding kimono looks like? What is the climate like? Need a map of the country or of a particular city?

Here you go.
.
.
.

http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/buddhism.shtml

Mark Schumacher has degrees in Japanese and Chinese studies and has lived in Japan since 1992. His focus is on Japanese Buddhist art and this site is the sister site to his online store. The entries are primarily his notes on the art and the stories behind it and under each heading you will find much repetition of the same information as he copies in things he has learned from new sources. However, the organization of the site with an alphabetical index in the sidebar allows the visitor to quickly find what she is looking for and the information is presented in a way that is understandable to the layman. It is presented in a dry textbook style that can cause a bit of eyelid drooping in longer entries but the huge number of illustrations keep it interesting.  Many of the pictures have been taken by Schumacher or are of things that he has personally viewed.

It's not rare for historians or archaeologists to differ on the interpretation of the known facts about something and I particularly like that when sources differ Schumacher will present both theories and the reasoning behind them. He is also open to input from his readers and updates the site regularly.
.
.
.
.