Hollywood good guys and bad guys.

Hollywood is a world of good guys and bad guys, of lines between good and evil carefully drawn. It is world in which there can be no mistaking who is good and who is evil, unlike in the real world, in which spin, media control and other measures can obscure what is truly evil and make it seem to be better than it is.

Children, however, have a way of seeing through to the core of things. Fintan, five, likes his Hollywood films and cartoons as much as any other child, but he doesn't just watch them, he considers them, too.

The other day, he turned to his mother, suddenly, with a question on his lips, as is his way:

"Mummy: why do the bad guys always lose, when they are bigger?". His eyes puzzled up at hers, sure that something wasn't quite right in this picture.

Now, I don't, at this moment, know Syahidah's reply...but the question alone is revealing enough. He had spotted an inconsistency between film and reality. In the real world, the big guys tend to win. In film, this is not necessarily so: if they are big and EVIL, they will lose against the heroic good guy. Fintan wasn't happy with this picture since it conflicted with his understanding of likelihoods.

The funny thing about it is that many adults may have overlooked the truth that Fintan had spotted: the EVIL guy does tend to be more powerful, more dangerous, larger, more difficult to defeat - yet, he (it is usually a man) is always defeated by our daring Hollywood hero.

It is sweet to watch Fintan try to reconcile the world of the TV/Film/Cartoon to the real world, sketching out where they meet and where they do not. I find that he sees things that often we tend to overlook - perhaps because he is actually thinking about what he sees, instead of just receiving it passively.

I hope this habit of thought endures and that he is always someone to question what he sees and what he learns.

Regarding the winning of the good guy...if only it were always so in the real world, too.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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