Museums, Galleries and lots of culture oh my

When we went to the powerhouse museum, we discovered the premier's adventure passport for kids which gives free entry to school age kids for the next 6 months to cultural institutions on weekends and holidays- and 4 years old counts apparently.

This was great! what with that, Scout being free and having a voucher from the Entertainment Book, it only cost us 10 bucks for the 4 of us.

The Powerhouse was wonderful for this age - 5 play areas, including a play building site that our boys loved.

But now Sparky wants to take advantage of this scheme to the full - where to next? Maybe the Australian Museum? Anyone got a suggestion?

Museum over movie

Well you know Sparky and I love movies. And we had decided to go to one every holidays. But there are no G movies this holidays except Hannah Montana, which he declares is too girly. He also reckons that the PG rating for Ice Age 3 Dawn of the dinosaurs is probably warranted - "because even the title scares me mum" so we are thinking we won't go to that.

So our movie substitute is the Powerhouse Museum, which has a special school holidays exhibition for children called the Odditoreum which looks interesting, showcasing curiousities from their collection with stories written for each by the children's writer Shaun Tan. I hadn't realised the museum is so reasonably priced ($5 for over 4, $10 for adults, and we have a voucher). Scout can come too, unlike a movie.

Olympic games revealing

picture by Ricardo Stuckert/PR from http://www.agenciabrasil.gov.br under creative commons licence

I got up early this morning to watch the Opening ceremony replay with Sparky, who is very excited about his first Olympics (last time he was in the womb). I had a wonderful time sharing this with him - I got a bit teary! He and his 18 month old brother watched a lot more than I thought they would - I guess spectacle is a genre that goes across age.

Sparky thought the 2008 drummers were a camera trick and was amazed when I explained in this case it wasn't so.

The ceremony was beautiful, lavish, stylish and dignified. I have to confess I still think Sydney's were better. This is probably because my taste is Australian! I liked the combination of cheekiness and transcendence in Sydney. It is a very Australian mix - we don't take things too seriously - and yet, deep down - at times, we do want to. It seemed to me that in fact Sydney while less dignified reached for the heavens more (the whole Eternity thing for instance). Is this the difference between a country whose government is based on a materialist doctrine and one that while secular still has some more overt Christian influence? The ceremony did however have a great message of care for the environment, as well as the usual messages of peace among the peoples of the earth.

The ceremony also celebrated the major inventions first invented by the Chinese. I knew some of this before, and it doesn't surprise me, as working for a chinese australian church, I am well aware of how smart Chinese people are! - I think the only reason they didn't conquer the world is that at a crucial point they became, politically, internally rather than externally focussed.

Language and women

"I can go on to tell you that I saw two major problems -- for women -- with
English and its close linguistic relatives. (1) Those languages lacked
vocabulary for many things that are extremely important to women, making it
cumbersome and inconvenient to talk about them. (2) They lacked ways to express
emotional information conveniently, so that -- especially in English -- much of
that information had to be carried by body language and was almost entirely
missing from written language. This characteristic (which makes English so well
suited for business) left women vulnerable to hostile language followed by the
ancient "But all I said was...." excuse; and it restricted women to the largely
useless "It wasn't what you said, it was the way you said it!" defense against
such hostility. In constructing Láadan, I focused on giving it features intended
to repair those two deficiencies."
Suzette Haden Elgin, linguist and author
(see her website here)

I have long been intrigued by the native tongue series of books by this author – I have read the first 2 books of the trilogy. They are based around the conviction that language helps construct reality , and that the lack of feminine input into language historically has therefore impoverished (or even damaged) culture. I certainly believe that language and culture interact with each other, that language is very powerful, and I wonder what changes to culture would occur with a female oriented language, though unlike the author’s perspective in the first 2 books – which I gather changed somewhat by the third - I am not sure it would accomplish redemption, for I think divine intervention is necessary!

I came across the quote above recently, and felt sympathy to the vulnerability of women to hostile language she speaks about – many many times I have known someone was using language in an aggressive or manipulative fashion, yet when asked to explain why, found it very difficult to form my perceptions into words that could be readily understood by the other – particularly when that other was male. Women were much more likely to immediately understand the hostile intent in language without needing an explanation. Though these gender distinctions do not always hold. So I was intrigued by the possibility that this comes about because of a language that isn’t geared towards female perception. I’ve had a look at the language she constructed and it does have words for things that you think ahhh yes, a word for that is good. For instance, it is a language rich in emotion words, for different types of love, anger, loneliness and so on. It is almost commonplace these days to see English as lacking in terms for love – that said, it does help you see the common thread between different love experiences – romantic love and love for your children have differences, and yet the intensity of feeling has a lot in common too.

If you look at the biblical world view, language is seen as of incredible importance. For instance , one title for Jesus is the Word. God creates by word. The Tower of Babel punishes human arrogance by the multiplication of languages so that they could not understand each other. I wonder whether one thing that makes us in the image of God (in distinction from animals) is that we have language. In a sinful world, language can be both illuminating and deceptive – it has power for good and evil.

Well, here you can see my first degree intersecting with my second (first honours in literature, then I did honours in theology).