i know next to nothing about the comic book character thor. in fact, i had to search the web to confirm he was indeed a comic book hero and not in some 1970s movie or tv show instead. what i do know, i learned from a bag that raleigh had when we were little. it was yellow, plastic coated, and if my memory serves me correctly, had some thor comic strips printed on its side.
somehow, long before raleigh could read, we latched onto thor as our superhero of choice, and we used what i guess was a modification of a phrase from the side of that yellow bag when we were playing. we couldn't remember the whole thing, so we made up a word in the middle. although i've never seen it written, the word was something like "emp-a-size" and our phrase was this: "if you touch this hammer, you will be emp-a-sized" into thor."
as an adult i've often wanted to find that yellow bad and find out whether that phrase was even on it, and if so, what that missing word was. now of course if you search the web for "if you touch this hammer" you get back a dozen links to the lyrics of mc hammer's "can't touch this," which is of course a different thing all together.
[written 1 october; published 2 october]