Margo Lanagan will be hosting a writers’ walking tour of the Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania. The tour will stretch over the week of 5-11 January 2009. Fitness levels do not need to be extreme. All the walks are “easy grade” and the emphasis is on observation and reflection rather than on burning up the miles, and every day there will be time for writing and workshopping.

The Tarkine is one of the great temperate rainforests on Earth. It is every bit as majestic as the traditional European forests that so dominate fantasy settings, but is also distinctly alien to anything in the northern hemisphere. As Margo promises, “the giants are not northern ogres but Tarkiner giants: myrtle, gum, sassafras and Huon pine. The birds, reptiles, mammals and insects that thrive in and among them; the fungi, ferns and smaller flora at their feet and in their branches; and the humans who have shared this part of the planet with them for about 30 millennia, will stretch your usual definition of ‘forest’ and ‘coast’, of ‘life’ and ’society’, in utterly new ways.”

The tour can only accommodate 10 people so book early. Information and bookings here.

The Tarkine wilderness (from Ken’s public Picasa gallery):

In the never-ending circus of lies, misattributions, and ethical lapses surrounding the current so-called Culture War, especially as it relates to evolutionary science versus religious fundamentalism, biological anthropologist Pat Shipman has contributed yet another outright lie to the debate. (more…)

Yet another terrestrial creature demonstrating wheeled locomotion - though this one may be proof of intelligent design rather than natural selection.

Thanks to boingboing.net for the link.

Michael Mihalev’s Rusty has served Talking Squid well, but I think it is time for a change. And I need help choosing a new theme. Follow the break and comment to tell me what you think…

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Seen while browsing through New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions; a link to video of a salamander that coils up and rolls downhill a la the mythical hoop snake or M. C. Escher’s Curl-Up.

Norm Geras, whom I usually rely on to write thoughtful exercises in clear thinking, has let me down by praising a review by Marilynne Robinson. It’s not that I disagree with the point that attracted Geras to the review in the first place. Robinson was reviewing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Harper’s, and she made the fair point that,

[I]n comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison.

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The Spiderwick Chronicles is a superb fantasy movie that towers over its Narnian and Dark Materialed rivals despite, and possibly because of its non-epic, almost domestic scale. Although ostensibly for children, the filmmakers made a laudable decision to allow the threats to be very, very real, to be genuinely scary, and to avoid easy, mawkish endings. As one would expect, the heroes win and the villains lose, but winning does not make all the heroes’ problems go away. In fact, it is my great pleasure to report that the classic fairytale ending of “they all lived happily ever after” is not even remotely applicable.

The performances throughout are spot-on. The script is tight with just the right amount of flourish to spark up the necessary slower, building scenes. It speaks volumes that the producers invited John Sayles to the screenwriting team. Sayles, for those who don’t know, is widely regarded as one of the great American filmmakers of the 1970s. He specialises in small-scale, low-budget independent movies (if I could recommend one of his films, check out Lone Star) and his skill in drawing big character out of small dialogue is second to none. Probably Sayles joined Spiderwick on the recommendation of his frequent collaborator David Strathairn (who plays Arthur Spiderwick), but the fact that the producers took him on shows that they were serious about making a good film with solid characterisation and were not willing to fob off the audience just because they are children and watching a fantasy film. And Spiderwick has a line that is destined to be quoted everywhere.

Vengeance or death! … Hopefully vengeance.

Quibbles: my only major reservation is the disservice the script does to the older sister in the movie. She starts as an intelligent young woman with moxie, but as her younger brother becomes more and more self-assured, she becomes less and less. It’s almost as if her brother’s rise is counterweighted by her own diminution. By the end of the film she is looking to her brother with big puppy eyes for her next instruction.

I am aware that the film has considerable divergences from its source books. For instance, the children in the book are shifted five or six years older than in the books. But not having read the books I can’t comment on the overall effect of these changes for good or bad.

I have a bigger quibble–although not with the movie itself but rather with the fantasy genre as a whole. The tropes of Spiderwick are drawn straight from the folklore of Europe and yet it is set in New England, USA. It seems myopically ahistorical to me to assume that brownies and sylphs and ogres have lived in America the whole time. Perhaps they stowed away on the westward ships–in which case there is a great idea to be had in the clash between the invading European mythology and the Native American. Who wouldn’t want to read about Puck hunting Coyote in the Columbia River Plateau after Chief Joseph’s surrender to take Coyote’s place as the trickster of the New World?

From boingboing.net (where else?): ‘Giant, hippie-hating, cannibalistic squids attack SF Bay Area’

Granted, it is dated April 1st, and writer Xeni Jardin immediately admits that “Oh, alright, I made up the hippie-hating part”, but the rest is apparently true and rather scary.

When I win the lottery, I shall build myself a house with a fossil wall. I’ll put a sandstone wall behind and mount museum-grade fossils as a patchwork facade. There will be one or two window boxes to let in light and to support those fossils that need to be put on stands rather than wall mounted. It can’t be planned too much in advance as it depends on what high-grade fossils are available at the time of building, but it will look something like this:

I really should have put a person there for scale; the large fan-like plant fossil on the bottom row would come up to an average man’s shoulder.

The fossils are (L to R, top to bottom): a large trilobite, theropod tracks, some flying thing (a real Archeopteryx that size would need more than a lottery win!), a Jurassic fern, Paleohyrax reprobae, a leaf, a group of fish (probably Knightia from the Green River fossil fields), a large skull (I’d go for a sabre-tooth cat myself), a frond of river plant such as a Seirocrinus with an accompanying Knightia, a mammoth tusk, an ichthyosaur, a stromatolite section (the polished yellow rings), a pair of large eurypterids, a cluster of Vendian soft-bodied echinoderms, brittle starfish, a field of large ammonites, and lastly, on a mount, the hugest insect in amber.

See how many clues it takes you to guess the identity of this historical figure.

12. Although not a Lutheran by denomination, he was a great admirer of Martin Luther.

A few days ago I was in Eisenach and stood on top of the Wartburg, where a great German once translated the Bible.

…and from another setting,

And we know that were the great German reformer with us to-day he would rejoice to be freed from the necessity of his own time…

11. Although not a Lutheran, he was commemorated in this carving of a baptismal font inside the Martin Luther Memorial Church (image pixelated to maintain the quiz; click here to see the original image).

10. He argued that Christians should unite by rising above denominational conflicts.

We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls…. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.

9. He urged people to live as one under the guidance of Jesus Christ.

So we have come together on this day to prove symbolically that we are more than a collection of individuals striving one against another, that none of us is too proud, none of us too high, none is too rich, and none too poor, to stand together before the face of the Lord and of the world in this indissoluble, sworn community.

8. He felt that religious faith was a necessary condition for a good life.

I say that they can be solved; there is no problem that cannot be, but faith is necessary. Think of the faith I had to have eighteen years ago, a single man on a lonely path… Life is hard for many, but it is hardest if you are unhappy and have no faith. Have faith.

7. Correspondingly, he rejected atheism in the strongest terms.

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

6. He railed against blasphemy, especially when used to support political agendas.

But he who dares to use the word “God” for such devilish activity blasphemes against Providence and, according to our belief, he cannot end except in destruction.

5. He warned against the dangers of occultism and paganism and even used the “some things mankind was not meant to know” argument.

We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement.

4. Although never inclined to promote unity of purpose with non-Christian churches, as a young man he was struck by the prevalence of anti-Semitism.

Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word ‘Jew,’ with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions…. For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.

3. He believed in fair distribution of wealth.

We must, therefore, coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another.

2. He was reasonably talented as an artist and painted this glowing portrait of the Madonna and child in “naïve art” style. (There’s a really big clue in this painting, if you know what to look for!)

1. His most widespread motto (stamped on literally millions of belt buckles) was “God With Us.”

Answer after the break…

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