My work schedule is such that “the weekend” is Wednesday and Thursday. Many of you already know this, because you can see a marked improvement in my ability to compose a blog entry on those days. One of the benefits of a mid-week weekend is that I can go places people ordinarily go on the weekends and they will be much less crowded. Normal people, I suppose, don’t have Wednesdays off to travel around Southern California visiting pet cemeteries, aquariums, or even science museums. I find this to be most unfortunate, because we have so much to learn about science, and I’d hate to try and learn it standing in line waiting to see the next stupid exhibit in a museum filled with stupid exhibits. That’s exactly what happens if you try going — and this is a total random example, of course — to the California Science Center on a Saturday or Sunday. Which is where Louise (check out her photography blog to see a picture of me eating a potato!), Nicci and I went yesterday. I learned so much about the mind, the body, and the universe that I couldn’t possibly explain it in words. Instead, I’ll explain it in pictures, and I’ll use less words to describe the pictures so that you know what you’re looking at. The combination of words and pictures, I imagine, will afford you great insight. Insight into what exactly…I don’t know. Insight into how it feels to be me? No, that can’t possibly be understood intuitively by scrolling through a series of photographs and reading captions. My anguish has to be experienced fo’ reals — in the flesh — in order to truly comprehend its horrifying size and scope.
Anyway, here are some pictures from yesterday’s trip! Click on them to make them bigger! That’s what she said! Whee!
Here Nicci plays with a rope attached to a lever attached to a pickup truck. Even before you walk into the museum, you can take part in “science” by lifting a truck six or twelve inches off the ground — just by pulling a rope! You can tell how interested I am by the number of steps I’ve taken away from the exhibit in the other direction.
This photograph is funny because I thought I was leaning out of the photograph, but Louise was standing far enough away that there was a good two or three feet between me and the edge of the frame. The illusion of me not being “off camera”, in effect, makes me look like a mentally disabled child trying desperately to stand upright.
The 3D IMAX films that were playing yesterday were, as you might have guessed, Sea Monsters 3D or Wild Ocean 3D. We went to see the latter.
This structure separated the Science Center from the IMAX theater. When the weather is nice, I bet they throw killer parties under that thing. You should see what it looks like in there.
Way heavy, right?
Upon entering the museum, we raced up an escalator and saw this thing. I guess one person stands at one end and whispers something into the hole, and then someone else stands at the other end and they can hear it. This works much better at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey because their pipes go all the way across the ceiling and wind up on another side of the room. Here you can actually see the person whispering to you so it totally kills the mood.
For all you stoners and stoner-esses out there, the following photographs of nebulae and sonic clouds and moons and stars and shit will blow your minds. Of course, so too will a trip to your local planetarium, which is something I highly recommend if you have not been there since grade school. You catch my drift, Panama Red?
Far out, man.
If Louise stares at that any more intensely it’s going to transform into a rifle-wielding goat riding a unicorn through the Suez Canal in a blizzard, or something.
I had to Photoshop my left thumb out of this picture because a quick glance made it appear that my penis was creeping out from my jeans. I couldn’t have you people noticing that and mocking me for it, so I removed it. Also, if you’re wondering why my hands are in my pockets during every picture, it’s because Nicci stole my hoodie and it was cold inside the museum.
So you see, big purple satellite dishes bounce signals off each other, thus creating an invisible form of “science” that nobody except for super-smart melvins can understand.
In this exhibit, something called an “instructional video” teaches you how something called a “computer” can make “music”. For example, I could pluck a guitar string, and through “science” the sound of a dog barking is recorded! It’s magic, I tell you! Pure magic in its purest purity!
If you’re looking at me again and wondering why I seem to be channeling the spirit of yet another developmentally disabled child, take a closer look at the video screen and you can see that I was simply panning for a camera. You see, this exhibit taught me how a “computer” can process a photograph and, by using “science,” can turn it into something that looks really silly! And the “computer” was only half the size of an 18-wheeler! Gosh, I wish my home computer could take funny-looking photographs of me and make them look even funnier! Oh, wait…
This machine shows a list of recent earthquakes that have been measured in Southern California.
You can clearly see that on a given day, there might be more than a dozen earthquakes in the state.
In fact, if you look at the bottom of the screen, you can see a 2.2 magnitude quake occurred ten minutes before we entered the earthquake exhibit. I guess we didn’t feel it because at that time we were inside another exhibit that simulated being in an earthquake! Ugh, all this irony is giving me an aneurysm.
Well, after long last, we’ve found “science.” Somehow I pictured it looking different.
Just kidding! I don’t know what that is, but it sure looks stupid!
There’s an obvious joke here about “looking for a brain,” but I’m not going to make it because I’d never get laid again. Instead I’ll make a much-less-obvious joke which is equally as funny, and ask you to kindly notice the dark-skinned fellow in the back there who is not-so-subtly eying my girlfriend. Sorry, my chocolate friend, she’s spoken for.
Something about cocaine. Those buttons are identical to those of my old Ms. Pacman machine, so you know I was standing there mashing them like crazy trying to figure out the difference between “Normal” and “Cocaine User”.
The gray mouse runs circles around the black mouse because it is high on cocaine.
This video was as zippy-a-dee-doo fast as it was boring!
Remember when Marilyn Manson wrote an autobiography and included a list of rules to help determine if you’re a drug addict, and one of the rules was, “thinking of drugs makes you want to take a shit?” Staring at this wall made me feel like I had to take a shit.
Your guess is as good as mine.
(hint: my guess is “science”).
Here we are in the IMAX theater waiting for the movie to start. Stevie Wonder, eat your heart out! The movie was good and very much “science”. I especially liked the sharks and the dolphins, but not the native African rituals and fisherman.
And that, my friends, concludes this week’s trip to the Science Center. Next week, we’ll go to the sewage treatment plant and pioneer town, and then the week after that we’ll get a behind-the-scenes tour of a local playhouse! Oh, joy!
