And the shore of your face will turn to bone

I am returned to New Haven. Driven by a dearth of science in my life lately, I spent much of yesterday afternoon with hans_the_bold at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. I'd been only once before, to look at the traveling exhibit on giant squid last year, and we'd had only about half an hour before the museum closed. (I will also admit that greygirlbeast had tweaked my curiosity about the Zallinger murals.) So we arrived around two o'clock, which was a little late for properly sunlit photography of the Torosaurus, but entirely appropriate for wandering around a small three-story museum, and stayed until they kicked us out. It was lovely.

In particular, I loved the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, the Hall of Mammalian Evolution, Fossil Fragments: The Riddle of Human Origins, and the Hall of Native American Cultures, which tells you how I feel about natural history museums: the beauty of bones and masks. Rudolph Zallinger's murals were as incredible as I had been promised, especially The Age of Reptiles—it might have come out of a vanished age of paleontology, but not of art.* There was also a very nice traveling exhibit on Machu Picchu and Inca culture, a rather impressive hanging model of a giant squid, and their permanent collection Daily Life in Ancient Egypt made me wish once again that I knew how to read hieroglyphs.** We took all sorts of photographs, none of which have yet been developed (because I still do not own a digital camera), but which I will undoubtably post when I have them. I am now the proud possessor of a poster of Zallinger's The Age of Reptiles. The real problem with museums is that they always leave me wanting degrees in about three other fields.

We wound up the day with High Plains Drifter, which was a beautifully apocalyptic and eerie ghost story disguised as a Western; with a little morality play and surrealism thrown in for good measure. I'd never seen any Clint Eastwood films before, unless Space Cowboys counts—which I'm sort of hoping it doesn't—so even though I've been warned that I'll be depressed for days afterward, I'm now very curious to see Unforgiven.

But first, Lucan.

*The murals are also still under copyright, so I had to figure out some way to photograph dinosaur bones without picking up the mural in the background; as I have no interest in getting my camera confiscated. We'll see if it worked when the photographs come back . . .

**Admittedly, this is a skill I could pick up once I have the time: it's not as though Yale doesn't have top-notch Egyptology. But couldn't they have had something in cuneiform or Greek, too?