Hand-me-downs

[ciroccoj]

It's so neat, sharing stuff you loved as a child with your own kids. A few months ago I showed them Chariots of Fire, one of my favourite movies when I was a kid (I know; I was weird) and not only did they tolerate it; they asked to see it two more times. Who knew. We've also been watching Star Trek (old series) every few days; they've gotten to where they recognize the Fight music, the Suspense music, and the Kirk Puttin' The Moves on a Gauze-clad Green Lady music. That last, BTW, utterly grosses them out every time. They recently watched an episode where at one point Spock says something like, "Captain, if you could perhaps concentrate on our situation instead of the young lady-" and they cheered him quite loudly. Ah, prepubescence... please for to stick around for a while, 'k?

I'm currently partway through Little House's These Happy Golden Years with Justin, who says, "Can you read to me, Mama?" several times a day. I must have read these books a hundred times as a kid; we're reading my editions, which are slowly falling apart on us. He's thrilled at descriptions of pioneer food, cried at some of the sad parts, laughed at Laura getting even with Nellie Oleson, had deep thinky thoughts at Ma hating Indians, groaned at the constant blizzards of The Long Winter, and is now eager to see how Laura does as a schoolteacher at age fifteen - and snickering at how clueless she is as to why Almanzo Wilder keeps driving her to her school and back home every weekend.

I also recently finished reading Ishmael to them both. One of my very favourite Star Trek novels ever - and a book that I recently discovered was not just Star Trek fanfic, but a crossover to a show I'd never even heard of before, called Here Come The Brides. (It apparently also has cameos from "Have Gun Will Travel", Dr. Who, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Bonanza, Maverick, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Rawhide, and the Man With No Name, though I didn't catch most of them, as I've never seen most of those shows/movies). As half the book was set in Seattle in 1867, the boys learned a lot about that era. Which fit in nicely both with Justin and his Little House books and with the trip we took this year to Vancouver - same flora & fauna, similar history to what we learned about while there, and there were neat little echoes, like the Godey's Ladies' Book mentioned in both Ishmael and Little Town on the Prairie within a day of each other. They really got into it. It was so incredibly cool, to have them eagerly request just one more chapter, and to listen to them playing Ishmael a couple of times on their own.

Chris is currently showing them Cosmos, which convinced me that I wanted to be an astronomer until I hit high school physics. I'm watching along. It strikes me, every single time I watch, how much what Sagan said stuck with me to this day. There's so many quotes that evoke such thinky thoughts.

• Eight hundred kilometers times 50 is 40,000: so that must be the circumference of the Earth.
  
  That's the right answer. Erathostenes' only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, brains, plus a taste for experiment. With them he deduced the circumference of the Eart with an error of only a few percent, a remarkable achievement for 2,200 years ago.
  
  
• When [Kepler] found that his long cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts, he preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions. That is the heart of science.
  
  
• There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly all right; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts; rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system, and the history of our study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.
  
  
• The argument - if it can be dignified with such a word - went something like this:
  
  "I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus."
  
  "Why not?"
  
  "Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds."
  
  "Well, what are clouds made of?"
  
  "Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore the surface must be wet."
  
  "If the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp. If there’s a swamp, there are ferns, if there are ferns maybe there are even dinosaurs."
  
  Observation: You couldn’t see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

That last bit has been in regular use at our house, actually, and has been ever since Chris first watched Cosmos with me. We told the kids the story and often cut them off (and by "them" I mean Daniel) when they're going a bit too far. Observation: you can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.


One thing that doesn't always travel so well? When your kids are at an age to really understand lyrics, Guns'N'Roses Sweet Child O' Mine, Paradise City, and November are A-OK. I Used To Love Her (But I Had To Kill Her) and Back Off Bitch? Notsomuch :(