Rise of the Apes, Maybe

Last night we watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I rather liked it for lots of reasons. Pretty cool to see a pre-apocalyptic movie. I kinda dug that.

Part of it prompted an exchange I found humorous.

After an episode where Caesar (a highly intelligent ape) pummels a human neighbor, he gets put into custody. He's not happy and feels abandoned. As the screen shows his distraught face as his humans leave him, my son, Sage has a question for me...


Sage looks at me, all seriousness, and asks, "You wouldn't do that to me, would you?"


"What, leave you in a facility with a bunch of troublesome apes?"


He says, "Yeah."


My daughter, Maya, says, "Sage, you wouldn't chase a man down the street, beat him and bite his finger, would you?"


Sage hesitates a moment, thinks it over, and finally says, "Maybe."

Sage was definitely relating to the apes in this one.

Radio Scotland Weather

And I quote, from today's forecast:

"The showers will die out before the bands of rain move in."

Americans and Climate Change?

My wife and I both looked at each other, mystified looks on our faces, as we listened to this Morning Edition piece on how fewer Americans believe in Climate Change now than five years ago. Really?



Really?

Something to Believe In

In preparation for our move back east this summer, we've started to pack up a few boxes. Light work, just this and that every day or so. It's hard not to come across things of interest, nostalgia-making, etc. I won't punish you with too much of this, but there was this...

Gudrun just found a journal that she kept, all too briefly, when Maya was little and we were still living in Scotland. It recounts how she was out walking with Maya one day. Maya asked who made the sky. Gudrun gave a rather long, detailed lecture on the various possibilities. She moved into religious territory and - as Gudrun is not particularly comfortable in this region - she said that Maya could choose to believe what felt right to her when she is older.

Maya had a ready answer for this. She said: "I want to believe in cookies."

Got any similar child-related stories? Or favorite things to believe in?

Campbell & Things Overheard While Living

Apart from being happy and answering lots of emails, I haven't progressed a lot with my thinking on the Campbell Award and/or the Hugos. I'd like to think I'll have thoughts on both in the weeks to come, and I'll share them here.

One thing I didn't say with the last post is congratulations to all the other Campbell Nominees. You guys are standouts, and I'm glad to be in the mix with you. Let's hang out in Montreal, if not before, and let's be friends moving forward with our writing lives. Sound good? I hope so, because the part of me that wants to win this thing is a close relative to the part that's just glad to be included, that wants to be a part of something and to make friends and allies for the future.

Last year Jon Armstrong, another Campbell Nominee, did a series of interviews with the other nominees for his series If You're Just Joining Us. He did them as audio interviews. Very cool. I'm not quite that tech savvy, but I'd love to post features on each of the other Campbell contenders. We might as well use the occasion to spread the love. Hopefully, I'll soon be able to offer you some quality time with these authors.

So that's that. On another note...

The young lady to the left here is my daughter, Maya Calypso. This evening I watched a rather interesting exchange between her and her mother. I was sitting to the side, so I heard things with a bit more clarity than my wife. I should mention to preface that we rather like nice sweets here in the Durham household. Not generic chocolate bars, but confections with... well, real chocolate and such in them. It's those delicacies, frugally dispensed, that this is about.

It went like this...

Maya (from the other side of the room): "Anviano lafl aoml aif nibubuv caramel?"

Gudrun: "What?"

Maya steps closer, says: "Anviano lafl aoml aif nibubuv two caramels?"

This went on for awhile, until...

Gudrun: "What? Speak clearly. I can't hear you."

Maya (after exhaling with exasperation, and then vocalizing with a speech-therapist's pronunciation): "Can I have three caramels?"

Gudrun (relieved to have finally made sense of her daughter's mumblings): "Yes."

I sat there impressed. One caramel became three, all by the process of limited - and selective - communication. As has happened many times before, I just learned something from my daughter. Not sure how to use this new knowledge, but I'm filing it away for future reference.