A Few More From The Museum. February 21, 2010
Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature, Love and Death, Politics and Society.Tags: Amherst College, creation, fossils, god, Judgement Day, museum of natural history
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The lower floor of the Amherst College Museum of Natural History is festooned with slabs of stone, historical records of How Things Were a hundred million years ago:
The odd lighting is designed to emphasize the subtle undulations of stone surfaces shaped by their environment eons ago, including interference ripples from a clay lake bed:
…and the imprints of those who came here long before us, and preceeded us into the historical record:
Our legacy, as observed from a hundred million years in the future, will likely be that we’re viewed less as a benign phase of existence and more as a cause of the massive extinctions and upheaval which are, on a geological time line, just around the bend.
And so it goes.
If our judges are of a species and mind to forgive us our trespasses on the grounds that we were too stupid to know better, we’ll go down in history as bumbling idiots.
But if there is a God, and if He really expected us to be shepherds of His creation, we’re totally fucked.
A Valentine’s Day Date. February 20, 2010
Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature, Love and Death.Tags: Amherst College, bones, fossils, Susan, Valentine's Day
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This comes late, I know. But I’ve just recently returned to work, and hitting the road at 5:30AM is a shock to the system, and some of the want-to’s need to wait ’till I get a chance to do them justice.
Anyway, this past weekend I took Susan to the Amherst College Museum of Natural History.
Talk about a cheap date. She opted to skip lunch in favor of a chance to see stones and bones.
And of each, there were plenty. Some bones:
A moose takes advantage of our subjugate perspective to lord it over a present-day elephant’s ass and a much grander mastadon’s curving tusks.
And here’s a wall of prehistoric mammals of various sizes:
That bottom one is a Big Boy, think “rhinoceros on steroids.”
Susan stood in the facing stairs, transfixed, for quite a while:
I’m guessing she was imagining their musculature, she being an Equine Massage Therapist, lost in their thick, coarse fur, waist deep in the grasses of a long lost veldt.
We marveled at the fossil record of a feathered Archeopteryx:
…Some long-gone fishies:
…and the rapacious maw of a Tyranosaurus Rex:
Susan was pleased:
Tomorrow we’re off to the Amherst Orchid Show, inexplicably staged in Northampton.
Film at 11.
Little Bang Theory 