And now, in honor of the passing of the inventor of instant noodles, I rhapsodize about ramen.

I loved ramen before ever I tasted it.

I remember the first commercial for Top Ramen that I ever saw, in the 1970s, when it was a new product. (Note: Nissin Foods introduced Top Ramen in 1972, but I don't know if the first commercial I remember was from as early as that, or from a couple of years later.) It featured a young Asian girl giving ramen to her little brother. There was probably some vague plot, but I'm not sure what -- in my memory it keeps getting mixed up with the "he likes it -- hey Mikey!" Life Cereal commercials.

What I remember most distinctly was the final product shot: a wide-mouthed Asian-style bowl full of squiggly ramen noodles in chicken broth, with a few green vegetables (bok choy? chives?) and sliced boiled egg strewn across.

Man, I wanted some of that.

Professional atheist provacateur Richard Dawkins has been making the rounds with his new book, "The God Delusion."

I find Dawkins troubling, because for every five intelligent things he says, he comes out with two really annoying things. He's a proselytic atheist, which is sort of hard to wrap one's head around. And he is the patron saint of atheists who think they are, axiomatically, intellectually superior to non-atheists. Typical conversation:

A: "Religious faith is for the weak-minded."

B: "What? That's an insulting thing to say."

A: "I'm sorry if you thought I was being insulting. Really, what I meant to say was that only a childish idiot could believe in something as obviously ridiculous as an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do."

B: "What? You can't be serious. I guarantee you, people who are much more brilliant than you or I have been sincere religious believers."

A: "I'm sorry if you feel I'm insulting your religious faith."

B: "I don't have any religious faith! I just think it's incredibly arrogant of you to claim that you are intellectually superior to everyone who has ever had religious faith!"

A: "I never claimed to be intellectually superior. It's just that religious beliefs are so obviously insane, how could a sane, intelligent person believe them?"

This is it, the final episode of Terra goes to Hell. In another essay, I unload a lot of things that have been on my mind about religion. In this essay, I'm going to talk about being gay.

I'm not gay.

But I could have been.

I realized this when I was around 14. I was in junior high. Some girls in one of my classes were bugging me to tell them "who do you like?" meaning, what boy did I like. I kept saying "nobody," which was the truth, and they kept accusing me of lying. Eventually I picked a guy I barely knew, pretended a crush, and they left me alone.

But, in the privacy of my own head, I wondered about it. I wondered why they were so unwilling to accept the "nobody" answer -- did they know something I didn't know? I thought about my mother, who talked about how I couldn't go on a "car date" until I was sixteen, as if she just assumed I would want to do such a thing. I thought about other girls I knew, many of whom had been annoyingly boy-crazy since they were ten or eleven.

And I wondered --

Was I normal?

Was I -- could I -- possibly be gay?

I convinced myself that I wasn't, because I didn't have any crushes on any girls either. But on some level I knew that I hadn't resolved the question yet, I had merely put it aside. Until I actually had a crush on somebody, and that somebody was male, I didn't know I wasn't gay.

So, I didn't turn out to be gay. But what if I had?

That's pretty much the origin of Terra's story.

Terra Goes to Hell

In this episode, Terra finally goes to hell. (The text is based on Paradise Lost.) Note the reappearance of the sexy demon babe from the cover, although here she appears to have horse or goat legs, and on the cover she appears to have human legs, but if a demon babe from hell can't change her legs, I don't know who can.

Of course, I don't believe in hell.

Here we are, almost at the end of Terra Goes to Hell. Two more segments and it's over. I intended to end it at the end of 2006, but it didn't quite work out that way. Oh, well. I'm probably the only person who even notices, let alone cares.

This entry is nominally dated January 05. TGtH continues on Jan 12, then concludes on Jan 19.

After that, starting on Feb 9 we do a special seasonal story called The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.