This is a Special Edition Two-Day Blog Entry, since I won't finish it until tomorrow (Friday) evening. That's just because it's already after dinner and we have to start catching up with Lost (bad timing with the power failures last week).
Rachel was here for a few days, this week; she took herself off to Tahoe to drop her stuff off over there, and tomorrow we're meeting up in Sacto (on her way back to SF) to do Something Interesting. For the most part, we just hung out, each of us working on our own tasks, but we also got some snowboarding/skiing in yesterday up at Sugar Bowl. Here's Rachel, obviously amused by an item in "Intelligent Life". And here we are, having just burned up the slopes at SB. By "burned up", of course, I would be describing Rachel's zooming to the bottom, and my, more leisurely pace, catching up with her at the lift, usually by one Song Unit.
One "Song Unit", you say? Rachel carries her life's sound track with her most places, even on her snowboard, and the new safety equipment, these days accommodates that style by wiring up the helmet so that she just plugs her iPod into it and takes off. It even has a "mute" button on the outside of the ear flap. Hm. So, now, I guess I have to be wondering if, when I'm chatting away on the chairlift, she scratches her ear...
Today (Friday), Rachel and I planned to meet in Sacramento to view an exhibit called "Bodies Revealed". If you are not familiar with this kind of exhibit, here's the website for this one: http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/
I have seen two versions of another, similar exhibit called "Body Worlds" with my good friend, Kyle. Here's the url for that one: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/exhibitions/questions_answers.html
I hope to catch up with the new, third edition of Body Worlds sometime soon. Basically, they are all exhibits which display real human bodies which have been "plastinated". Plastination is a complex process by which the tissues are preserved exactly as they are by turning them into plastic. No formaldehyde or whatever has been used thus far. So, the bodies, or the parts thereof, can be "posed" and viewed in 3D, up close and in great detail.
When the first of these exhibits popped up a few years ago, there was Great Consternation about the ethics/ghoulish nature of such a phenomenon. Now, it seems to have died down quite a bit. The Body Worlds guy (Gunther von Hagens) vows that all his "subjects" volunteered their bodies to be used in exactly this way after death (he says he has quite the waiting list, even). There has been a bit of extra controversy about the Bodies Revealed exhibit, even given the same claims by the promoters, because the subjects are all from China, and, well, it might or might not be more difficult to verify such claims. I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I can't seem to get enough of looking at the heart valves, vocal chords, sciatic nerves, gall bladders, etc. Such complexity! SO interesting! A knee, a dissected ear, an ovary. It's just a marvel! We gawked at an entire disembodied circulatory system. The capillaries are so tiny and numerous, they look like fluffy cotton fibers. We found ourselves trying to feel our own deltoids, elbow joints and metacarpels as we looked at those parts of the exhibit subjects. And these are just the structures of the body. Doesn't even touch the biochemistry! I won't go on ad nauseum (like I already haven't!), but here's a bit of a review. Of the three that I've seen, this one, Bodies Revealed, was the weakest. So, while was still pretty amazing to see Bodies Revealed, Body Worlds is a much classier production, if you have a choice.
A fun week! Sunday, we'll mosey down to SF to visit Dylan to see what he's up to.
