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In love with Downtown Crossing
This afternoon, my father took me to the Boston Museum of Science. Many of my childhood memories involve the Museum of Science; we would usually wander around the exhibit halls, eat lunch in the sixth-floor cafeteria where the Skyline Room is now, read in the library on the third floor, and see either an IMAX film or a planetarium show. I used to be terrified of the two-story Van de Graaff generator where they put on lightning shows. I never did get around to seeing a laser show, probably because at the age of ten I was very uninterested in Pink Floyd. My favorite places in the museum were always Mathematica, with its optical illusions and projections and push-button Möbius strip; the exhibit about conception and childbirth, that had the statue of a mother with her newborn child; the habitats of New England, in taxidermied diorama; and I was very fond of the gigantic, tail-dragging, eventually outmoded Tyrannosaurus rex statue.* I would climb into the Apollo space capsule at the drop of a hat. I hadn't been there in years.
We skipped the traveling exhibit on Star Wars and went right for the old favorites. No one has updated Mathematica in God knows how many years, at least since the 1970's, and I like it that way. The childbirth exhibit likewise contains a short video of a woman giving natural birth in water, but that's the only change in years. The old T. rex has long since been moved outside (where it was still wearing its holiday Santa hat) and replaced by a leaner, meaner, more accurate predator; this is okay.** There's still an exhibit on the in-progress Big Dig, that I suspect will be there for the rest of the century; and on the second floor there is a new Butterfly Garden, which was lovely. The Common Morpho (Morpho peleides) and the Owl Butterfly (Caligo memnon) were two of my favorites, *** although we also watched a new-metamorphosed Julia (Dryas iulia) pull itself free of its chrysalis, and that was beautiful. (The humidity didn't hurt my head cold, either.) And the Apollo space capsule was there, too: currently inhabitated by small children loudly counting down to lift-off. We didn't have time for the planetarium, but just wandering around the museum was still worth it. I don't ever want to live in a country where parents cannot bring their children to learn about the ways the universe works.
The sun setting in gold haze and firelight over the Charles River, as seen from the first-floor cafeteria at the Museum of Science, was a beautiful sight. I like Boston.
On our way back, we stopped into Pandemonium in Harvard Square, where I had a very pleasant conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sokmunky and spent some of my hard-earned money (otherwise known as, I got paid for writing, therefore I recycle it right back into reading: it's like the water cycle, only with books) on Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I am greatly looking forward to this. I return to New Haven tomorrow; I'll need some fortification.
But on Monday, I get to teach the Odyssey.
*There was also a brief period of infatuation with the replica of a skull from the Neanderthal burial at Shanidar, after I read The Clan of the Cave Bear in seventh grade, but we won't talk about that . . .
**Scientific progress is our friend. (It also goes "boink.") I'd have been upset only if they'd thrown out the old statue.
***Yes, I would still like these butterflies if they didn't have Iliadic names . . .
We skipped the traveling exhibit on Star Wars and went right for the old favorites. No one has updated Mathematica in God knows how many years, at least since the 1970's, and I like it that way. The childbirth exhibit likewise contains a short video of a woman giving natural birth in water, but that's the only change in years. The old T. rex has long since been moved outside (where it was still wearing its holiday Santa hat) and replaced by a leaner, meaner, more accurate predator; this is okay.** There's still an exhibit on the in-progress Big Dig, that I suspect will be there for the rest of the century; and on the second floor there is a new Butterfly Garden, which was lovely. The Common Morpho (Morpho peleides) and the Owl Butterfly (Caligo memnon) were two of my favorites, *** although we also watched a new-metamorphosed Julia (Dryas iulia) pull itself free of its chrysalis, and that was beautiful. (The humidity didn't hurt my head cold, either.) And the Apollo space capsule was there, too: currently inhabitated by small children loudly counting down to lift-off. We didn't have time for the planetarium, but just wandering around the museum was still worth it. I don't ever want to live in a country where parents cannot bring their children to learn about the ways the universe works.
The sun setting in gold haze and firelight over the Charles River, as seen from the first-floor cafeteria at the Museum of Science, was a beautiful sight. I like Boston.
On our way back, we stopped into Pandemonium in Harvard Square, where I had a very pleasant conversation with
sokmunky and spent some of my hard-earned money (otherwise known as, I got paid for writing, therefore I recycle it right back into reading: it's like the water cycle, only with books) on Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I am greatly looking forward to this. I return to New Haven tomorrow; I'll need some fortification. But on Monday, I get to teach the Odyssey.
*There was also a brief period of infatuation with the replica of a skull from the Neanderthal burial at Shanidar, after I read The Clan of the Cave Bear in seventh grade, but we won't talk about that . . .
**Scientific progress is our friend. (It also goes "boink.") I'd have been upset only if they'd thrown out the old statue.
***Yes, I would still like these butterflies if they didn't have Iliadic names . . .
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I was able to stop in when I went up for the Revels; I'm still warm from that. and I've been so behind - I'd no idea they were moving over to Central Square! well, bigger and better they tell me, but my heart will ache, as it's been many a year I've gone to the garage as a horse makes it's way back to the barn.
I never did get around to seeing a laser show, probably because at the age of ten I was very uninterested in Pink Floyd.
*chuckle* I'd do them at the smaller science museums, but not the Boston Museum of Science. waste my time on 80s music and cherry scented mist when I could be avidly hanging out in the exhibit rooms? like fun.
ack, however many years it has been since I last went, well that's one too many, that's what. *nods*
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I must be even more behind: I've heard nothing of this. Damn.
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time slips us by - I hadn't been in in oh three months or so, and what do you know? :-/
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*checks watch anxiously* yes, we've time.
would this be Not One of Us you refer to? (I just poked about your journal, but if so I do indeed remember it at Pandemonium. ^_^ )
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ach, all this talk of sneaking over has me quite crochety; I've been down in CT for a year and the old "I'll just stop in to glance at the new release shelf honest" routine is a lot harder to pull. ^_^
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Ah. That's at the heart of what matters. May you have good students.
I had far too few museums in my childhood. My art classes had a fine Victorian cast gallery, with fig leaves. And Mystic Seaport had ships' figureheads.
Nine
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I never got to see the Boston Museum of Science as a child, like one is supposed to (though the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry was an acceptable substitute). I did, however, get to see a laser light show there. Not Pink Floyd, but Beatles. "Jai guru deva om, nothin's gonna change my world" with psychedelic laser blossoms painted across a planetarium-accurate representation of the Milky Way. It worked.
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It does when written by Bill Watterson.
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travelling Star Wars exhibits come and go, but musical stairs should last lifetimes, that's what. *nods*
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Waitaminute.... a walk through of the Millennium Falcon? How long is this here for?
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---L.
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I'd have thought that Orpheus' descent-and-return would have to precede Odysseus' necromancy—I'm not even sure I would qualify it as a descent to Hades, because he is sailing out of the mortal world, past the White Rock and the Gates of the Sun, but he's also calling up the dead: not going down to meet them—because didn't Orpheus sail on the Argo, along with Achilles' father Peleus? That's long before the Trojan War, never mind the heroes' homecomings. I have no idea where Theseus fits in temporally, however.
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Either way, all three returns from Hades were a generation before Troy: Nestor is the last man alive from that generation, and he was a young man at the war of the Lapiths and Centaurs, which started at Piritheus's wedding.
---L.
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---L.
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