Saturday, January 03, 2004
85 hours, 47 minutes, and counting. The vacation is holding, for now.
Yesterday, we went to The Fernbank to see the Etruscan exhibit. We wandered through the maze of ancient pottery and brass relics, copper and gold, past tiny animal statues sculpted 2,600 years ago as offerings, past skillful images of griffons and satyrs and maenads, past rings and spear tips, all the refuse of a long-forgotten people. At some point, I said to Spooky that trying to get an accurate image of what the Etruscans were like by looking over the assembled artefacts was not unlike trying, a couple millennia from now, to form a coherent image of "Americans" by examining the jumbled refuse of our cemeteries, from Colonial Times down to the Present. Archaeologists and anthropologists know this, of course, but my own experience as a paleontologist has taught me that the museum-going public has precious little comprehension of either time or cultural evolution. After the Etruscans, we saw an Imax film about lions in the Kalihari, then spent a while with the Gigonotosaurus and Argentinosaurus (see Low Red Moon, pp. 34-41), who are starting to feel like old friends I haven't known for very long. But really, my very favorite thing about The Fernbank is that the floors and much of the outside walkways are paved with Solnhofen Limestone.
The Solnhofen is an amazing German lagerstätte (a word that means "lode place," used by palentologists to denote geological formations especially rich in well-preserved fossils), deposited in a sub-tropical lagoon near the end of the Jurassic Period. These beds are most famous for yielding remains of the proto-bird Archaeopteryx. Anyway, one can spend hours scanning the floors of the museum of fossils, sliced and polished neatly in vertical or horizontal cross-section. The pens (internal skeletons) of squid-like cephalopods known as belemnites (Hibolites hastatus), alongside the beautifully spiraled shells of nautiloids and ammonites (Glochiceras, Hybonoticeras, etc.). Remains of sponges (Tremadictyon and Ammonella) are especially easy to spot, along with bryozoans, bivalves, and other invertebrates. Yesterday, Spooky noticed a very small shrimp (probably Aeger).
After the museum, we had spinich and mushroom pizza at Fellini's, then stopped by the market before heading home. The evening was spent on rented DVDs, catching up on a couple of films we'd missed at the theatre. First, The Order, which, I thought, was thoroughly charming, in a Buffy, The Vampire Slayer does The Vatican kind of way. I especially liked Benno Fürmann's performance as the sineater William Eden. Gary Oldman could have done it better, but that's true of a lot things. Rosalinda Celentano's Faraway Eyes Girl added something nice to the scenery and the two demon-spawn children were particularly creepy. I was amazed to learn that sin looks a lot like a jellyfish. Next, we watched Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth, which has to be one of the most underrated films of the year. Colin Farrell is grand as one the sleaziest protagonists you love despite himself since Ralph Fiennes' Lenny Nero in Strange Days (another very underrated film). Kiefer Sutherland is adequate as the caller, though Michael Wincott could have done it better (but that's true of a lot of things). But the three hookers really steal the show. Afterwards, I put in The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms, because it's pleasant to sleep to, and because I'd been thinking of Ray Bradbury's "The Fog Horn" earlier in the day.
All in all, a pleasant enough day that it's difficult for even me to complain. We'll see how today goes...
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