Messing about with empathy
Blue, the velociraptor in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, shed a tear. My hubby said that dinosaurs don’t cry. I disagreed, and then he asked if birds cried. I didn’t know but wanted to find out. As with all answers, it is complicated. Birds do have tear ducts, and they make tears to protect their eyes.…
Did you hear that a mummy talked? No, this isn’t from one of the great Brendan Fraser Mummy* movies. Thanks to science, a 3,000-year-old mummy spoke for the first time since his death (one assumes.) It’s not easy to get a mummy to talk. Vocal cords are made up of soft tissue and don’t preserve…
First of all, I’m not into anti-hero stories. There are a few exceptions, but if I can’t root for the main character, then I probably won’t like the book or movie. An easy way to gain my sympathy is a story technique called “Save the Cat.” Have the main character, no matter how evil they…
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.” That is the opening paragraph of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s…