Midas

  Today I was looking at how mythology is common in our everyday world even if we don't know it. Something interesting that I found was that many companies today use mythology in their names and logos. For example is the car repair company Midas. In Greek mythology, Midas was a king of Phrygia who had the power to turn everything he touched into gold. This was called the "Midas Touch". But soon, Midas realized that the golden touch was not always a good things. He couldn't touch anything without it turning into gold, and that was a problem for eating or using any object. So overall, Midas realized that having the golden touch was tougher than he thought.

    The Slogan of the Midas car company is "Trust the Midas touch", which now that I think about it might not always be a good thing. I guess in terms of cars, having a magical touch is a good thing. However, overall in the story of Midas, the touch led to many disadvantages for him.

   Something else that could relate to the Midas story is something I saw in the t.v. mini-series The 10th Kingdom. This series basically is about two people in a journey through a magical kingdom and throughout their journey they encounter many fairytale characters. At one point in the movie, one of the main characters Tony sticks his pinky in a magical fish and the fish bites him, and his pinky turns gold and everything he touched turns to gold. At first he is super excited about it, but his daughter feels differently. He tells her, "look, I could touch this boat and it would all turn to gold and we would be rich!". Then his daughter puts things in perspective and says "yes, but then the boat would sink and we would all drown." I think this shows the two sides of the Midas touch very well. On one hand, the idea of turning things into gold seems marvelous at first, but when you think about things in a realistic way its not that great.