Friday, December 19, 2008

Review of Bodyworlds

First off, to anyone who suffered through yesterday's post, I apologize for the length. I sat down to eat my lunch (a snickers bar and diet coke, if you're wondering) and started writing and just kept going. It probably should have been three posts rather than one, but oh well.

Incidentally, I'm kicking around the idea of going back up canyon to check on Joshua. You know, just to make sure he has enough food and so forth. I got thinking that he was probably following us because he was hungry and hoped we might have something we could share. Sadly, we didn't.


Yesterday, along with three of my siblings, four of my in-laws, a niece, a nephew, and my mom, I went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Leonardo in Salt Lake City. Here's a quick rundown:
  • Perhaps the most interesting thing that I learned was before I even entered the exhibit--a sign on the wall indicated that there are more living organisms on each human being's skin than there are human beings in the entire world. I promptly licked my own hand and said "that was like dropping an atomic bomb."
  • The focus of the exhibit was the human heart, so of course they had a display citing Lance Armstrong's statistics for resting heart rate, wattage, and so forth and compared them to an "average" man. I was glad to know I was about 80% of the way between average and Lance, at least as far as the cardio stats are concerned. I just wish I could close that last 20%.
  • Don't go see the exhibit unless you are comfortable looking at skinless genitalia. Or at least mostly skinless genitalia. The female specimens usually had the skin left on, and all of the specimens are "intact." All of the specimens are also depicted in action poses in order to accentuate a certain aspect of the anatomy. The "hurdler" was even erect, although in that case, much of the tissue had been removed.
  • The most disturbing moment was when I made a joke to my mother about the preponderance of genitalia, to which she responded "the ones going like this [points downward] don't do anything for me." I will now go rinse my mouth out with rubbing alcohol.
  • I had a bacon cheeseburger and onion rings at crown burger before going to the exhibit. I was sick to my stomach for the rest of the evening. Not sure which was the causal factor, but I'm going to lay off the cheeseburgers and fried food a little more from now on.
  • My 14-year-old niece had seen the exhibit once before with her 9th grade classmates. You get one guess as to which group acted more mature.

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