More bad timing for Labor

Huge export earnings rise tipped for resources sector | The Australian

Of course, if the Coalition gets in, it's goodbye any form of mineral tax to help run the country.

New baby

Our fertile possum visitor and her new, squashed, offspring:

Hard to disagree

Poor planning has doomed Labor's media reform - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I find Bruce Hawker a dull analyst on TV, but I find it hard to disagree with his general take on how Labor seems to approach policy.

For the first time, I feel that Gillard will soon lose the leadership.  She presumably gave the go ahead to Conroy to run with the "it's all or nothing with these media reform proposals and we will not negotiate" tactic.  Conroy doesn't have a good head for politics - literally, with that haircut of his - but this is just the latest in a series of poorly judged approaches by him.

Whoever gets the leadership needs, I think, to make it clear that Labor needs to look at how it deals with processes.  No more announcing policies that have yet to be finalised (Gillard and using Timor for asylum seekers, for example).  

If Rudd does rise from the grave (groan) he at least needs not to be triumphalist.  In fact, he probably can't afford that due to the lack of people who would then work for him in the ministry.  But he should acknowledge that the haphazard approach to policy began with him, and say that he will work hard to make sure that the party's policy formulation appears, and in fact is, a result of careful and considered process, and not the results of running around at the last minute to get a policy seemingly just for the sake of having a policy.  He could also promise to slow down personally and let his staff get some sleep.  

It seems to me that Rudd is so puzzlingly popular with the public that the Coalition could not actually run for long with all of the deep personal criticism that Labor politicians came out with last year, because people would soon think the Coalition was being unfair. 

I find Crean harmless and reasonable but he doesn't have much charisma with the public.

As much as I think Rudd is not a man to be admired or liked, if it is between him and Crean I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the party would do better under Rudd. 

If Gillard retains leadership, I would still wish her well, and maintain my belief that she is the most unreasonably despised politician this country has ever seen.

Today's history lesson

BBC News - The African chief converted to Christianity by Dr Livingstone

Here's a short account of the missionary work in Africa by the famous Dr Livingstone.  Just one convert, but an important one.  The story has many interesting parts, including this:

This was how things stood when Sechele first met Livingstone - he ruled a half-tribe. Livingstone persuaded him to make peace with his other uncle by sending him a gift of gunpowder for his rifle.

The uncle was suspicious that the gunpowder was bewitched, tried to neutralise it with fire, and in the resulting explosion was killed. Sechele thus ruled over a reunited Bakwena.

And here's bit of bad luck:

As Sechele grew increasingly interested in Christianity, he found two huge barriers in his way. One was rain.

Tswana tribes had rainmakers, whose job was to use magic to make the rain come. Livingstone, like all missionaries, vehemently opposed rainmaking, on both religious and scientific grounds. 

Sechele happened to be his tribe's rainmaker as well as kgosi, and Livingstone's stay coincided with the worst drought ever known, so Sechele's decision to stop making rain was predictably unpopular.

Experiments best not done

CultureLab: The radioactive legacy of the search for plutopia

New Scientist talks about a new book (from Oxford University Press, so I assume it is credible) about some surprising Cold War experiments about radiation:

MAKING plutonium for nuclear bombs takes balls, but not in the way you might think. In 1965, scientists at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in Washington state wanted to investigate the impact of radiation on fertility - and they weren't hidebound by ethics.

In a specially fortified room in the basement of Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, volunteer prisoners were asked to lie face down on a trapezoid-shaped bed. They put their legs into stirrups, and let their testicles drop into a plastic box of water where they were zapped by X-rays.

The experiments, which lasted for a decade and involved 131 prisoners, came up with some unsurprising results. Even at the lowest dose - 0.1 gray - sperm was damaged, and at twice that dose the prisoners became sterile. They were paid $5 a month for their trouble, plus $25 per biopsy and $100 for a compulsory vasectomy at the end so they didn't father children with mutations.

Another idea re black holes and the LHC

It seems there is now a suggestion that the LHC could make stable quantum black hole remnants without their ever first having been black holes which radiate down to a remnant.

At least I think that's what this paper is saying.   It talks about how they may be detected.

Bugs in sinks

'Nightmare' superbug alarm

I didn't know that "superbugs"actually lived in sinks happily; even hospital ones, where they are presumably getting a rinse regularly with antibacterial soap off users' hands.  I suppose seeing mould growing up the insides of the drain of the bathroom sink where I shave daily (until I hit it with bleach every few weeks) should have given me a clue.   Anyway, I was still surprised:

An infectious disease physician at the hospital, Rhonda Stuart, said doctors had been concerned about a string of cases in the intensive care unit between 2009 and last year, but only acquired the technology last August to test surfaces for the bacteria known as CRE. Associate Professor Stuart said the tests revealed the bacteria were in the sinks where healthcare workers washed their hands. While it could not be proved, she said, this might have spread the infection to patients because the sinks' poor design caused water to splash back off the drain.

Despite this being discovered seven months ago, Associate Professor Stuart said the hospital was only now preparing to replace the sinks. When asked if cost had delayed this, she said ''there were always difficulties with trying to do things in budget-restrained times''. However, she said doctors were satisfied the intensive care unit was safe.

The sinks were being cleaned regularly with 170-degree pressurised steam, which removes the bacteria for about three days before they grow back. Staff were also being careful with infection control procedures to prevent further patient infections, she said.

''No patients have tested positive for the bacteria since we've undertaken this process, so we're happy things have been controlled with the new steam technology … There is no risk to anybody,'' said Associate Professor Stuart, who is also medical director of infection control for Monash Health. CRE (Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae) is a new class of multi-resistant bacteria alarming doctors worldwide because of their ability to spread drug resistance to other bacteria.

Reason to use the bleach at home more often, I guess...

Douthat on a change needed

What the Church Needs Now - NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat is pretty conservative on a all things Catholic, but he at least does not take the approach that I have seen often taken by Right wing Catholics in one prominent Australian blog:  denying the harm caused by the sex abuse scandals of the last few decades.  He writes:

But in a sense all of these challenges have one solution, or at least one place where any solution has to start. Francis’s reign will be a success if it begins to restore the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy and clergy, and it will be a failure if it does not. 

Catholics believe that their church is designed to survive the lapses of its leaders. The Mass is the Mass even if the priest is a sinner. Bishops do not need to be holy to preserve the teachings of the faith. The litany of the saints includes countless figures — from Joan of Arc to the newly canonized Mary MacKillop, an Australian nun involved in the reporting of child abuse by a priest — who suffered injustices from church authorities in their lifetimes. 

But it’s one thing for Catholics in a Catholic culture, possessed of shared premises and shared moral ideals, to accept a certain amount of “do as I say, not as I do” from their pastors and preachers.

It’s quite another to ask a culture that doesn’t accept Catholic moral ideals to respect an institution whose leaders can’t seem to live out the virtues that they urge on others. 

In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.

Not a good advertisement for the Witnesses

Slamming the door on Jehovah

This article paints a bleak picture of what it is like to be a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses.  It is a religion with a bad enough retention problem already:

The religion's proper name is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. It was founded by American draper Charles Russell in 1872. They believe in the end of the world and also the paradise beyond and have predicted five times that Christ would come again to signal it. The last time this happened was 1975. More than 1 million devotees abandoned them in the following six years. In America the Jehovah's Witness have the lowest retention rate of all religions.

They also believe Satan has ruled the earth since 1914. The only way to make things better is by creating a heavenly kingdom on earth of a small number of believers. The Jehovah's Witness' trait of being aloof and "separate" comes from this idea that Satan runs things, so the best way to survive is to avoid society.

Membership has flatlined against population growth in most developed countries. The reach of the internet has had a big impact as whistleblower groups, ex-Witness forums, websites, "leaks" sites and negative publicity abounds.

It's hard to see the appeal of the religion for a newbie:

Kingdom Halls are plainly decorated, like school classrooms, with no iconography or adornment. Congregations meet twice a week to listen to Biblical passages. The structure for disciples to live by is uniform and rigid. Moral conservatism (anti-gay, anti-abortion, no sex before marriage) is strictly enforced.

The British sociologist Andrew Holden says the church has a "quasi-totalitarian" approach in which converts "defer unquestioningly to the authority of those who are appointed to enforce its doctrine". The individual, he says, "becomes the property of the whole community"....

 Aron says new recruits are often unaware they will go without birthdays and Christmas. "It's a religion without a soul."

Even as far as cults go, it sounds like a particularly joyless one.

Drink up

Green tea, coffee may help lower stroke risk

A study from Japan has some cheering results for those of us who have just a cup or two of coffee per day:

*  People who drank at least one cup of coffee daily had about a 20 percent lower risk of stroke compared to those who rarely drank it. 

* People who drank two to three cups of green tea daily had a 14 percent lower risk of stroke and those who had at least four cups had a 20 percent lower risk, compared to those who rarely drank it. 

* People who drank at least one cup of coffee or two cups of green tea daily had a 32 percent lower risk of intracerebral hemorrhage, compared to those who rarely drank either beverage. (Intracerebral hemorrhage happens when a blood vessel bursts and bleeds inside the brain. About 13 percent of strokes are hemorrhagic.) 

Participants in the study were 45 to 74 years old, almost evenly divided in gender, and were free from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Update on black holes from LHC

Researchers find it would require 2.4 times less energy to create a black hole than thought

It's been quite a while since I've gone looking for this topic, but here's an article that says it may be easier to make one (based on your standard old physics) than previously thought, but it's still hard:

Researchers know that it is theoretically possible to create black holes because of Einstein's Theory of Relativity—particularly the part describing the relationship between energy and mass—increasing the speed of a particle causes its mass to increase as well. The computer model in this effort, which is based on Einstein's theories, provides a virtual window for viewing what happens when two particles collide—they focus their energies on each other and together create a combined mass that pushes gravity to its limit and as a result spawns a very tiny black hole. That result was expected—what was surprising was that the team found that their model showed that such a collision and result would require 2.4 times less energy than has been previously calculated to produce such a tiny black hole.

The team also notes that despite fears of researchers building a collider to replicate in real life what their model depicts—and in the process creating a black hole that would swallow the Earth—the science just isn't there yet. It would take billions of times more energy than even the LHC is able to generate and use. Also, even if they could create such a black hole, it would disappear just as quickly as it appeared, due to Hawking radiation.

The concern about black holes, though, used to be about the relatively low energies they could be created at if there were "extra dimensions" such as string theory predicts.  I don't think this present article is about that at all...

A Jesuit for Pope? Takes the name "Francis"?

Well, well.  These two factors alone make the new Pope potentially interesting.

There is little commentary on this at the moment, but I see Stephen Hough has picked up on it:

S.J. Those two letters indicating that their holder is a member of the Society of Jesus might, in earlier times, have been the cause for fear or dismay at this time. But since the 2nd Vatican Council the Jesuits have been at the forefront of reform in the Catholic Church. They have forged new theological paths; they have explored new ways of mission as cooperation and friendship rather than coercion; they have embraced a clear option for the poor. In fact, they have recovered something of the charism of their founder Ignatius Loyola whilst leaving behind the baggage of many Jesuit generations in between.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio has chosen a brand new name, Francis I. Francis Xavier certainly would have been in his mind, but also the Poverello of Assisi whose plan to rebuild the Church consisted of giving everything away. I have a feeling it's a name which that other Jesuit, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, might have chosen had he lived, had he been elected. It's a complete break with the Papal past at the same time as being a link of charity with all that has made Christianity of value over the centuries. Pope means 'father'. Let's hope that Francis I will be one in the fullest, warmest sense of the word, to Christians and those of every and no faith.

 Time wrote about the Jesuits in 2008 (when they elected a new Superior General):

 Though more recently established, more traditionalist movements and religious orders such as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ have gotten more attention of late, the Jesuits are still far and away the largest clerical order in the Church. They too, however, have suffered from declining ordinations, down to fewer than 20,000 members from a peak of 36,000 in the 1960s.....

Indeed, the order was founded with a special mission to directly serve the Pontiff, and has been dubbed the "Pope's cavalry," engendering suspicion in the past of conspiracies and secret powers. Even Popes, including John Paul II, have criticized them for their apparent autonomy. "Yes, we are in the vanguard of the Church," says Jose de Vera, head spokesman for the order. "It is not our job to just repeat the catechism, but to do research. Sometimes looking for real truth, you can step over the line." Just last year, the Vatican's doctrinal office issued a "Notification" to Spanish Jesuit scholar Jon Sobrino, a proponent of Marxist-inspired liberation theology, for what they called "erroneous ... and even dangerous" writings. 

Most Jesuits steer clear of offending the Vatican hierarchy, focusing on frontline missionary work amongst the poor and oppressed. Noted in particular for their vast network of schools and universities, the Jesuits are widely considered the day-to-day educational and intellectual motor for Roman Catholicism. Pecklers, who teaches liturgy at the Gregorian University in Rome, has lately been working on an education project in the hinterlands of Mongolia. "Whereas a Benedictine is centered around his monastery, the Jesuit's life is the road. The way we've achieved our credibility is getting our hands dirty, getting involved in issues of countries." Still, the order is facing many of the same challenges that face the entire Church, including declining numbers of clergy, especially in Western Europe and North America, and the tricky balancing act between faith and politics.

Since the Second Vatican Council, many Jesuits have favored progressive reform in the Church, seeking to adapt Catholic traditions to modern life. Kolvenbach's request to Benedict to step down as he approached the age of 80, Vatican sources say, could have implications for the "white" papacy as well if a Pope were to consider retiring because of old age or ill health.

I also bet some nutty conspiracy sites will go into overdrive about this.  Just give them a day or two to get their deranged thoughts in order.

Pick-a-Pope

The Guardian has come up with the Pontifficator - a handy table of every Cardinal which lets me bring you my picks for the most unlikely outcomes:

Pope most likely to convert Jamaicans:

(Yes, OK, so he's Indian, but still it would be a bit like Samuel L Jackson making the cut.)

Pope most wanted by the International Association of Dentists:

(He's Cardinal Wako, from Khartoum.  Which makes me realise that I don't know enough geography. Someone also tried to kill him a couple of years ago, which makes my picking on his teeth very unfair.   Good luck, Cardinal Wako.)

Pope most likely to have had early career on a cruise ship:


 OK, so is stereotyping Filipinos a sin?

But seriously, Cardinal Tagle is apparently really in the running, and he's the smiliest, most photogenic candidate by far.  Who could stay mad at him while being condemned to Hell for going on the Pill after 6 kids and a serious case of prolapse when he has such a nice smile?

However, let's face it, his hair is only partially grey and he probably has 20 years of good health ahead of him yet.  That almost certainly puts him out of the running.


Instead, we'll probably end up with Pope who Looks Most Likely to Use the Mafia to Clean up the Curia:

(Actually, he's Spanish, but Martin Scorsese sprang to mind when I saw him.)

Anyway, soon we'll know...

Smart dogs

The genius of dogs: Brian Hare on friendliness, intelligence, and inference in dogs. - Slate Magazine

A good interview talking about the way in which dogs are smart. For example:

 Dogs are the only species that have been identified to date that learn words in the same way as human children—by using inferences. Show a child a red block and a green block, for example. If you then ask for "the chromium block, not the red block," most children will give you the green block, despite not knowing that "chromium" can refer to a shade of green. The child infers the name of the object. Dogs have been found to learn in the same way.

The second thing is that they make use of human gestures at a similar level of flexibility to young infants. Obviously older infants quickly outstrip what dogs can do, but the fact that there is any overlap at all is remarkable.

And this:

There are lots of flavors of intelligence. Researchers have looked at different animals and the contexts in which they are able to make inferences. Corvids, the family of birds that includes crows and ravens, make incredibly complicated inferences when it comes to using tools or outcompeting group members in hiding food, for example. What's special about dogs is that they have the ability to figure out what we want, to use humans as a tool in a way that other animals cannot.

The way that I would love for people to think about intelligence is to think of a tool box. If somebody asks you what's the smartest species or who's the smartest person, it's the equivalent of asking, what's the best tool, a hammer or a screwdriver? Well, what's the problem you're trying to solve? What is it that dogs need to solve to survive? They need to figure out how to use humans effectively.

Clive on climate

Nature v technology: climate 'belief' is politics, not science

I quite like this piece by Clive Hamilton, drawing similarities between how Einstein's theory of relativity was initially rejected by many on political ground, in the same way that much of the Right does with respect to climate change.

Yay, science fiction comedy

Douglas Adams is still the king of comic science fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian notes that Google is today celebrating the 61st birthday of the late Douglas Adams.

I am very keen on the genre of science fiction comedy, and have been enjoying watching a re-run of the entire set of Red Dwarf series on ABC2.  It's now nearing the end, though, I think.

If we are very lucky, I wonder if the ABC could follow this up with  a repeat of Hitchhiker's Guide?   It's been decades since I have seen it, and the movie did nothing for me.

11,000 years ago and now

Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling - NYTimes.com

The Andy Revkin post on last week's science study seems to me to have given too much prevalence to the assessment of Robert Rhode, who suggested that the paper did not have fine enough time scale resolution to rule out past rapid temperature rises of similar magnitude to that of the 20th century that may have come and gone within the space of a few centuries.

Co-author Shukan gets to make a rebuttal in the comments thread that there is pretty good reason to not believe such changes happened, and he also makes the point in the video that, with the known effects of increased CO2, there is no reason to think the present rise is going to go down.  However, these responses are something you have to dig up in the thread, and (as others have claimed) Revkin's desire for balance sometimes ends up giving a false impression.

The Science article in question was pretty well summarised here.  The thing that surprised me was that warming periods over the past 11,000 years did match pretty well with orbital changes that would have increased sun in the north:

Marcott said that one of the natural factors affecting global temperatures over the past 11,300 years is gradual change in the distribution of solar insolation associated with Earth's position relative to the sun.

"During the warmest period of the Holocene, the Earth was positioned such that Northern Hemisphere summers warmed more," Marcott said. "As the Earth's orientation changed, Northern Hemisphere summers became cooler, and we should now be near the bottom of this long-term cooling trend -- but obviously, we are not."

 That's the biggest significance of the paper, it seems to me.

But I should note that Revkin's post on the matter does redeem itself by including this response by Richard Alley, which makes some very important points which climate change fake skeptics do not usually appreciate:

I think it is worth remembering a few things for how this fits into the bigger picture. Whether the past was naturally warmer or cooler than recently, and whether the changes were faster or slower than recently, are of great interest to climate scientists in learning how the climate system works, including the strength of feedbacks. But existence of a warmer climate in the past doesn’t mean that the current warming is natural, any more than the existence of natural fires rules out arson in some recent warehouse blaze. And, existence of a warmer climate in the past also doesn’t mean that we’ll like a warmer climate in the future. Nature has made places and times colder, and warmer, than most people like. Our high assessed confidence that the recent warming is mostly human-driven, and that the costs will become large if the warming becomes large, do not primarily rest on how much warmer or colder today is than some particular time in the past, or even on how fast the recent changes are relative to those in the past.

Furthermore, because the feedbacks in the climate system often respond similarly to warming with different causes (warmer air will tend to melt more snow and ice, and to pick up more greenhouse-gas water vapor from the vast ocean, whether the warmth came from rising CO2 or increasing solar output or alien ray guns or a giant hair dryer), data showing larger climate changes in the past in response to some estimated forcing actually increase the concerns about future warming. If, for example, scientists had somehow underestimated the climate change between Medieval times and the Little Ice Age, or other natural climate changes, without corresponding errors in the estimated size of the causes of the changes, that would suggest stronger amplifying feedbacks and larger future warming from rising greenhouse gases than originally estimated. Any increase in our estimate of the natural climate responses to past forcings points to a more variable future path with larger average changes.

A similar point was made about the Schmitter paper last year - the paper suggested a lower range for climate sensitivity, but another result was that it meant that relatively small temperature changes can have huge impact on large parts of the Earth.

Wetter and drier

Increase in the range between wet and dry season precipitation : Nature Geoscience 

The abstract I'll reproduce in full, because this topic is something that climate change "skeptics" just continually can't seem to get their head around :

Global temperatures have risen over the past few decades. The water vapour content of the atmosphere has increased as a result, strengthening the global hydrological cycle^{1, 2, 3, 4}. This, in turn, has led to wet regions getting wetter, and dry regions drier^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. Climate model simulations suggest that a similar intensification of existing patterns may also apply to the seasonal cycle of rainfall⁷. Here, we analyse regional and global trends in seasonal precipitation extremes over the past three decades, using a number of global and land-alone observational data sets. We show that globally the annual range of precipitation has increased, largely because wet seasons have become wetter. Although the magnitude of the shift is uncertain, largely owing to limitations inherent in the data sets used, the sign of the tendency is robust. On a regional scale, the tendency for wet seasons to get wetter occurs over climatologically rainier regions. Similarly, the tendency for dry season to get drier is seen in drier regions. Even if the total amount of annual rainfall does not change significantly, the enhancement in the seasonal precipitation cycle could have marked consequences for the frequency of droughts and floods.

A journalist explanation of the study adds some more detail:

...the gap between wet and dry seasons was widening at a rate of 1.47 millimeters per day per century. All three trends, they report, “are significant at the 99 percent confidence level.”

In the real world most of us experience, it’s hard to be sure that rainy spells are rainier, and dry seasons are drier: that is because, as the authors concede, global rainfall patterns are “spatially complex.”

But there is general agreement that such changes are taking place, with good physical reasons for doing so: a warmer world means more evaporation, and more precipitation. Furthermore, the authors say, simulations predict such a pattern and observations confirm it.
 

Tony Abbott and the friends of Dorothy*

So, Tony did a 60 Minutes bit last night which seems to have been a lot about his attitude towards gays and lesbians.    And his sister, who now lives with a woman after a lengthy heterosexual marriage, was there to lend support.

But doesn't she contradict Tony's attempted explanation of why he said 3 years ago that he felt "a bit threatened" by homosexuality?:

Supported by his lesbian sister, her partner, his wife Margie and his daughters, Mr Abbott said that when he claimed three years ago during a television interview that he felt ''a bit threatened'' by homosexuals, he had been trying to guard a family secret.

He had only just been told by his sister she was a lesbian.

 

''Now I couldn't talk about that then because it was deeply personal and deeply private,'' he said. ''But certainly they were very tough times for our family, hence my comment, because the cohesion of our family was threatened at that time. But I'm pleased to say we're all in a better space now than we were then.''

Interviewed at a family barbecue at his Sydney home, Mr Abbott's sister, Christine Forster, said he was ''completely unfazed'' when she told him she was in a lesbian relationship after 19 years of being married to a man. Her partner, Virginia Edwards, said Mr Abbott and his family had been ''fantastic''.

I think Tony is just clumsily trying to be all things to all people again. 

I don't really see much wrong with a man indicating that he's not always sure how to react to gay men or women, particularly when you're talking about certain versions of how homosexuality is expressed these days.     I mean, I suspect no one thinks having dinner with Stephen Fry would be awkward in any way, but lunch with this woman might be somewhat different.   I think this is all Abbott meant when he, clumsily,  referred to "being threatened".  He had, after all, long been friends with Christopher Pearson when he made that statement.



*  Well, it seems an appropriate title in light of my previous post

Oz-ing about

Let's start with a photo.  Do you know who this is?:

If you're like me, you would not have recognized him as Sam Raimi, a director with a bit of a cultish following for his (very successful) work, but who seems to keep his personal profile so low I had no idea what he looked like.

And here's another photo:

It's L Frank Baum.  I can't remember seeing him before, either.  The Wikipedia entry about him is pretty interesting.  As a young man, he got into breeding fancy poultry, which apparently was "a national craze at the time."  (TV not having been invented yet, I suppose.)  He wrote a book about it:  The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.  Hamburg chickens, that is. Here's a photo, because I haven't seen one of them before either:

Sort of the dalmatian of the chicken world.  But I digress.

All of this is by way of background to talking about yesterday's viewing of Oz The Great and Powerful.  But there's more backgrounding to be done yet.


I was pretty young when I was given an abridged picture book version of The Wizard of Oz, and I thought it a peculiar story, but I liked the imagery of a glowing emerald city.  I don't think I saw the movie until my  older teenage years, and remember being pleasantly surprised at the humour and charm of the portrayal of the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow.

It also struck me that the story could easily be read as being very humanistic, and anti-religion, if not anti-theism.  The feared Wizard, who can be taken as a stand in for the fearful God of the Old Testament in particular, turns out to be a "humbug", and each of  the characters already has the worthy attribute which he seeks; they just need to be given the confidence that it is indeed within them.  

This aspect of the book and movie still, it seems to me, gets little attention.  Sure, Googling the topic now brings up some (usually fundamentalist Christian) sites which attack the story on these grounds; but not many, really.  (OK, if you really want to, you can see here a rather rotund American evangelical preacher ripping into it as a "God hating" movie.)

In any event, what were the religious views of Frank Baum?   Wikipedia says that he and his wife (who was prominent in the women's suffrage movement) were into Theosophy, 8 years before the book was published.  It summarises his views:

The Baums believed in God, but felt that religious decisions should be made by mature minds and not religious authorities. As a result, they sent their older sons to "Ethical Culture Sunday School" in Chicago, which taught morality, not religion.

Well, it would seem that he would be against the old school Christianity that emphasises fear of God, in that case. I suppose you could say it is a fairy tale that Pelagius would have enjoyed, much more so than St Augustine.

And so, we can finally come to the question - did I like the new movie? 

But before we get there - is it based on anything Baum wrote?  No, it's not.  I was aware from Martin Gardener, who was an Oz fan, that Baum had written many sequels to the original Wizard book, and I was guessing that maybe one of those books were a prequel. But no, this does not appear to be the case at all.

Nor is the movie story in any way related to the successful stage musical Wicked.  I knew nothing of that show until my kids' school choir last year did a version of "For Good", which I thought was very pleasing.  But then I found the song as it appears in the stage show, and it seems rather awful in its orginal form.  Compare, if you want to, an American high school version:

 

with the cheesy sounding stage version:



I think that's a valuable lesson in how many voices arranged well can improve a song a lot.

Anyway, the story is an elaboration on the Wizard's explanation as to how he arrived in Oz in Chapter 15 of the original book, but there was very little information there to go on.   I think that making it about a selfish loser who redeems himself in another world was basically a good idea that fits thematically with the original story.

But - and I think I'm really ready now - did I like the movie overall?

Yes I did.

The biggest surprise is the unusual decision to make the adult theme of romantic/sexual jealousy a key part of the story.   Well, as I have said, the original Oz story is a bit more serious than is normally credited, too.   But I just did not expect that the deeply flawed man who is destined to become the Wizard would be shown to be bad by way of being a chronic womaniser, even though it appears he once had a true love to whom he has been incapable of being faithful.

I am not at all sure how kids will take this, but it seems to me that it really pitches the movie more towards a teen and adult audience.  (My 10 year daughter said "he liked one woman, then another, and another.  I just don't get it."  She enjoyed the movie anyway.)   It is similar, I suppose, to the way the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland started with a bit of a mini Pride and Prejudice theme. (I saw that movie on TV recently, and thought it was pretty bad.)

The movie is visually impressive; unlike many reviewers, I don't criticise James Franco for being annoyingly self absorbed when he is playing a character who is meant to be self absorbed; it made me realise again what a funny character voice Zach Braff has; and it has a pleasing sort of, I don't know, depth? to it.  It is my guess that its best features are a result of Raimi's sensibilities.  Even though I am no fan of the superhero genre, generally speaking, he did do a very good job with the Spiderman franchise.  It's funny how a man who started with zombies handles romantic themes well, isn't it?  

It's not perfect, and don't get me wrong, I still consider the whole world of Oz to be rather peculiar; but I was pleased to have seen it.