The unthinkable - a blog about one of my kids.

Depending on your levels of literacy and powers of observation, you might know that I have some children. "Some" may be three (it was at last count) but it just sounds better to number them as some rather than three. And let's face it - it's all about the champagne comedy here.

Anyway, I felt compelled to mention my middle son after reading this post of the lovely ms. mac. You see, this particular son o' mine is cursed with an exceptionally high intellect. This manifests itself as an eccentricity bordering on tortured genius. You know, the kind of general malaise that curses chestnuts for their indolence, that kind of thing.*

James has a tendency to display casual indifference to most things in his life, indeed he is most happy when he's playing games or with toys by himself in his room, when his brothers are out destroying corn fields. But occasionally, there will be something which piques his interest and then he absorbs every bit of information about it that he can find. This time his obsession is the dramatic effects of Hurricane Katrina and this new one, Rita. He was quite disturbed by the footage from New Orleans, but not in a childish way. Rather he was thinking about what would happen to the people in the aftermath and how will they get backto normality - a quite mature and adult perspective.

A few weeks back, we let him watch The Day After Tomorrow (a stinker IMHO, but the kids seem less fussy) and he really enjoyed the "science" parts about the meteorology etc. You remember the bit where the three storms were all converging across the northern hemisphere? He certainly did, because when he saw the weather reports of Katrina on CNN, he immediately drew a reference back to the movie.

Today he watched CNN before heading off to catch the bus for school and saw similar footage of Hurricane Rita. I can just see his mind processing the info and out popped the question " Mum, are you ABSOLUTELY sure we don't need to be preparing for a snap Ice Age?"

I think it is dead cool that even with his powerful intellect, he still trusts his mother and I to sort things out for him. If we say no, he can accept that the Ice Age isn't coming just yet. You'd think that for someone so smart, he would have realised by now that we're relying on him, and the sooner he turns things around for us all, the better.

Mind you, I did catch him looking up directions on the internet for making a tinfoil hat, so who knows how he's going to turn out.

*I bloody love Dr. Evil. Possibly one of my favourite characters of all time.