The Other Son

The Other Son is an intense, emotional film set in Israel and Palestine (there's a great deal of coming and going across the border between the two areas, and many views of the wall), and it's quite a tear-jerker, though in best sense.

It has a slightly improbable story, perhaps (although the starting point of the story is as old as the hills): two babies are literally swapped at birth because of fears of a Scud attack.One baby is Jewish but is given back to the Palestinian mother, and the other baby, of course, is Palestinian, and given back to the Jewish mother.This only comes to light when the 'Jewish' boy is about to turn eighteen and a blood test reveals that he couldn't possibly be the son of his parents. The other parents are informed, and there's a great deal of struggling to come to grips with the issue, both on the part of the two young men, but even more so on the part of the fathers. The mothers manage to begin to work through the problem much quicker than their husbands, of course, but even for them it's a major upheaval.

There are four languages spoken in the film: Hebrew, Arabic, English and French - the Jewish father is French by birth, and it appears that the family has spent some time there, but the 'Arab' boy has also been studying there.

The director is Lorraine Lévy, who also co-wrote the screenplay. She makes a fine job of bringing out the emotional aspects of the story (there's little 'action' in it), and is supported by a wonderful cast, all of whom are unknown to me, though plainly very experienced. When you see foreign movies you realise again and again what a vast world of actors, directors, writers there is out there whom we barely know about. We're so inundated with Hollywood and British movies and TV that we remain quite insular. 

This is a great story, and well worth catching up with. There's an interesting interview with the director here.

Human rights in the abortion debate

Today is the 16th October, here in NZ, and it's Blog Action Day again...or BAD, which always strikes me as a kind of ironic acronym to be using. Anyway, the focus this year is on Human Rights, a subject that covers an extraordinary number of areas.

One that concerns me greatly is that of abortion. Yes, I know all the old arguments as to why women should have abortion on demand and so on, and that men shouldn't have any say on the matter because they don't have to carry babies in their wombs (even though the babies wouldn't have got there in the first place if it hadn't been for the men), and that it's a woman's right to choose and all the rest of it. The arguments for abortion on demand have been running around like headless chickens for decades now, and are sound very tired and very hollow.

Too often those arguing for abortion on demand come up with straw men arguments. One such is claiming that those who are pro-life are all religious people, people who want to impose their religious views on everyone else. This isn't the case at all. Yes, there are plenty of people of faith involved in the abortion debate, but the reason they're there is because it's a matter of ethics, and ethics are very close to the hearts of people of faith.

Pro-life arguments are also about human rights, and the rights of the little human beings who are being carried in the wombs of their mothers are never given any credence by those in favour of abortion. Somewhere along the line, these evolving babies were turned into 'foetuses', blobs of jelly, or growths. Anything but what they actually are: potential human beings.  If we were to take a new-born baby and kill it, we would be charged with infanticide; this has been the case for many centuries. But somehow a baby - a human being - inside the womb is regarded by the pro-abortion movement as not a human being, and certainly not one with any human rights. According to the long-held myth - "it's a woman's right to choose" - the potential human being has no rights. (Many women who argue "it's a woman's right to choose" don't realise that this myth was propagated by a man originally, not by a woman.)

I know most of this will be pooh-poohed by women (and men) who favour abortion.  However, I'd like to suggest you read further on these straw-men arguments.  Even more I'd like you to stop and think about the human rights implications of abortion.  Where else in the world do we allow thousands of people to be killed day after day, hour after hour, without a major outcry?  Nowhere. If a tribe or a nation kills hundreds of members of another tribe or nation there is an international tribunal set up to investigate, even if it takes a decade or more to do so.  But because the abortion movement has so successfully redefined human rights when it comes to humans inside the womb, there is no outcry, except from those who fight against this evil year in and year out.

It's truly time for the ethical, human rights issues in the abortion debate to be honestly defined.  For several decades people have believed lies about the benefits of abortion, or the rights of women and so on. Lies eventually lead to nations being destroyed from the inside out. Don't let that happen to your nation.

Items of Interest

Two articles on the same page of yesterday's Otago Daily Times caught my attention.  One from the regular column giving some history on people buried in local cemeteries.   This week it featured Otago Harbour's first pilot, the aptly named Richard Driver.  He was one of the area's earliest European residents, although when he was a young man he almost didn't survive an attack by local Maori when he and several of his fellow crew-members stepped onto what is now known as Murdering Beach.  Fortunately he was saved by Motoitoi, the daughter of Kahutia: she threw her father's cloak over Driver and soon after married him.
This is where my interest in the story rose: he had three daughters by Motoitoi, and, after she died, a son by his Maori housekeeper.  That's four children.  In 1849 he married a 17-year-old called Elizabeth Robertson.  She bore him three more children, and then seven more who were all born dead.  That's fourteen children in effect, with Elizabeth being pregnant ten times up to that point.  Once they shifted from the area they lived in, she bore him eight more children.  Thus she was pregnant eighteen times.  He was the father, to all intents and purposes, of 22 children, beating J S Bach by one.  (Though far more of Bach's children actually survived.)

He produced 15 living children - it's not surprising that the writer notes: their descendants today number many hundreds. 


The second article begins: A baby's cries are tuned to trigger a uniquely fast response from adults, research has shown.  Scientists compared volunteers' reaction times while listening to babies crying, the sounds of adults in distress, and birdsong.   Right.  We all respond quickly to birdsong.   The study's leader noted that it is almost impossible to ignore crying babies on planes and the discomfort it arouses.   Well, well, there's a finding for you.

So far this would have been all right - it's basically yet another study that tells us what we already know, but that's hardly uncommon.   Innumerable studies are done to show us that what we know is what we know.  However, the sentence that niggled me (because of the sheer lack of any scientific basis) was this: Evolution has decided that it is a good thing for us to look after our young, and there is something in the acoustic properties of babies' cries that evokes a very basic response that appears to be hardwired in ancient parts of our brains. 


I don't think 'evolution' (which is a person or thing) has ever decided to do anything.  Nor, from my understanding, do we have 'more ancient parts' in our brains.  This is literary science, the kind that tells stories about research but doesn't actually base these stories on anything factual.   It's metaphor, not science. Science is based on experiments that can be replicated not just once, but over and over.   There is no experiment that can show evolution ever 'deciding' to do something.   This is typical of the idea that pervades science: that evolution can be regarded as being responsible for anything and everything, without anyone actually showing this to be the case.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Family history

Just posted a couple of items on the Hannagan family blog. Photos of my great grandfather on my grandmother's side; my grandfather (her husband); my father - or possibly my uncle - there seems to be a bit of dispute; and my father amidst a bunch of colleagues at the Australian Chess Championships in Adelaide, in 1960.

The photo of the chess players is probably historic, and would be more so if I could read my father's writing on the back successfully. It doesn't help that he uses lots of abbreviations, and many of the names aren't familiar to me. Nevertheless, I'm made an attempt to 'translate' it.

The blog doesn't get used a great deal - it relies on me to keep my relatives providing material for it, which they're mostly only keen to do when some new baby arrives on the scene, or when someone changes the pond filters on their pond - which happens fairly irregularly too. Actually I was in England when my brother-in-law changed the pond filters. Not a pleasant job. And his older brother has a complex system of pipes and drainage and filters and who knows what around his pond. He's the sort of person who'd invent something just for the sake of it.

Anyway, the reason I've posted those photos on the other site is that after all our renovations, we have several piles of papers waiting to be sorted - papers meaning anything from stuff that's really valuable, like the pack of photos I'm talking about, to newspaper clippings that no longer tell me why I kept them; from dot matrix print-outs of emails from the first year I was on the Net to reviews of books I've done.

Tricicle

We went to see Tricicle tonight. This is part of the Otago Festival of the Arts, and consists of three Spanish mimes (who occasionally speak or make noises): Eduard Méndez, Antonio Del Valle, Fedor De Pablos. These aren’t the original three guys, apparently, but members of a sister company that tours internationally. I’m not entirely sure that I understand how it all works, even after reading the info on the website, but the original three members are still working together after thirty years, and still producing new shows on a fairly regular basis.
What we saw tonight, I think, is some of the best sketches the original company produced. If these three guys are the originals, they’re certainly well up to scratch, and their performances are top notch. They had the audience in fits from the very beginning, and there was little respite at any point afterwards.
There’s lots of interaction with the audience, so it was worth being downstairs. Apparently the people upstairs missed a lot of went on in the stalls, where newspapers were tossed back and forth between the performers and the audience, or people were picked out for a boxing match, or a pretty girl was invited to blow kisses, or some people supposedly upset one of the performers and was given dirty looks for ages afterwards.
The highlight is the skit with the three dressed as babies, in nothing but floppy and possibly poo-filled nappies. They totter around the stage threatening to fall over constantly, and their arms flap around in a fairly useless fashion. They play with a giant size ball, knocking each other over, or themselves, and in general create chaos with the minimum of material.
In other scenes all three are boxers in the same ring, or two are tennis players trying to hit a ball that’s actually connected to a long rod held by the umpire, or their three hoons trying to work out how many things they can do with three toilet seats, or a couple of them are airhostesses on a rather dodgy plane (that was when the newspapers got thrown everywhere, the audience joining in with delight). There’s a long sequence in a dentist’s waiting room that builds up more as each one of the cast comes in. There are some props in this: a metal lamp that each of the cast gets their head caught in at some point, and is later used for a variety of other less lamplike purposes; a couch that insists on making rude noises when sat on, and an armchair that apparently has no seat, so that whoever sits in it almost vanishes. There’s a very supple coat rack as well.
But often there’s hardly a prop in sight. The three have utterly flexible bodies, and faces, and do most of what they make us laugh with, with these alone.