a little vacation...and PRX, Public Radio Exchange

While listening to NPR, I learned that there had been 32 hundred and 68 dollars contributed to the anti-gun (not the correct name, but you know what I mean) lobby and something like 13 million, it could have been billion for all I know, contributed to the NRA lobbyist.      It's hard to say anything, in the face of that, about the 20 children and six teachers... sad, sad, sad...


 I can't say that I've been accomplishing much, but I've been working hard...

and wanted a little vacation at the Museum of Science. I'd joined because of the Pompeii show, to see it twice, and because the museum is so expensive for one visit, it's worth getting a membership... I was so involved with the project on Thoroughbred breeding this summer, that I did basically nothing else but fuss over that.,,forgetting all about museums and movies and other such entertainment that humans enjoy.

And now I'm doing bits and pieces of whatever, so a vacation is imaginable. However, the mammoth show just didn't help me feel any better physically or mentally. I liked seeing the mock image of Lyuba, the baby mammoth found in Siberia, I think, by a herder, the frozen creature, named for his wife... National Geographic had an issue about her, but I hadn't remember, or perhaps hadn't known that detail of the naming...         So, there was a bit about her, a reproduction of nomadic herder coming across body that wasn't a deer, that had a trunk, a frozen creature which had been petrified by the bacteria of the swamp into which it had fallen,  inspected sufficiently to discover that she wasn't old enough to eat grass, but had lived on pollen and mother's milk...

I can't name the ages, paleolithic, etc., and being confronted with more information that I know nothing about didn't sit well with my mood. Usually I'm cheered by a realizing all that I've missed learning, but I was too tired to enjoy that at all. And it hardly mattered to me, given the mood I was in, that pygmy elephants had come into existence on islands because there was so little food.

I was going to give up and go home to lie down, but then I looked down a different stairway and saw the sculpture

that this little boy is looking at. It's quite huge, a perpetual motion of balls rolling across and down and banging into this or that which got them moving again. Fascinating. The upper section has larger black balls which make more noise, but I got a stiff neck trying to make sense of that, so I settled for looking at the two brothers, one of which appeared quite a while after this fellow had stood transfixed at all the pool-table-size-balls that were conveyed up, slowly, one at a time, to the point where they could start sliding down the wire pathways....and finally end up in that metal bowl shape object  that he's peering into.  

After this I found a volunteer with a skink clutching onto his leather glove...   He was explaining the tongue of a snake, forked so that it can receive smells from different directions, compared to the fleshy tongue of the skink...      

In back of him was a fine room with a hodgepodge of skulls, shells and taxidermied animals...very interesting. It would be wonderful to sit there and draw...

It would be wonderful to sit anywhere and draw...

My favorite new thing is to wake up in the middle of the night and listen to the radio, this strange program that features a mix of story-telling styles. I have yet to look up blank on blank and the other organizations featured on WGBH at that strange hour. Fabulous.

P.S. And to my amazement, I learned about musk oxen on the Seward Peninsula in Alaska, relatively small animals, maybe 600 pounds, with eight inches (could this be possible?) of  heavy, thick interior fur warmer than lambs wool and long silky outer coat that drags on the ground which is shed every year. This was told as if the fellow was actually watching a small herd, but obviously he wasn't and broadcast on Northern Encounters from KCAW in Sitka. Before that I heard Mountain Voices, the last bit of a woman talking about her job checking hunting licenses in a reservations. Her voice woke me up, so I had the pleasure of hearing about musk oxen and learning about a psychiatrist, Albert Bendura, who helps people overcome phobias to snakes, guided master! and learned that the basis of good story telling is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. I hate rules, but I didn't mind at least hearing that one...on PRX, Public Radio Exchange.   Hurry toward this station.