Dinosaurs? Yes, Dinosaurs!!

This is a testament to how profound the Summer Laziness runs in my veins: the events in this entry occured one week ago. A whole week, and I've got nothing to cover my shame with except for the fact that the internet was repeatedly and without warning giving out. I'm glad that's over, at least it seems to be.

So. Dinosaurs.

I guess I should start at the beginning. The events which occured one week ago were my first foray into the District of Columbia since our move here. OH MAN. I LOVE IT.

First of all, you should stop thinking of Washington DC as just Washington DC and instead think of it as Modern-Day Rome. Rome, folks. What other city in America has stuff like this. No city. Not even Nashville. DC is Rome. In 500 years, long after America has been sacked by Visigoths or Canadians, people are going to fantasize about walking the streets of DC and visiting the Lincoln Memorial or the Capitol building when they were still standing. I don't have to fantasize, though. I can just go. Anyway as we drove to Rome (we should have taken the metro, probably) we of course passed that one huge monument, and after some difficulty and frustration in finding a place to park (there also aren't too many cities in the US which are so obviously biased against cars), we stopped in a small parking lot in view of a riverside temple. Sorry. I mean the Jefferson Memorial.

It wasn't too far of a walk to our destination of choice for the day, the Smithsonian, but it's very hot in Virginia so it felt long. Along the way we passed by a huge seafood market underneath a highway overpass. We ended up on a wide stone street leading straight to the Smithsonian, a street designed by the city planner Pierre Charles L'Enfant. I had been to the Smithsonian before, but hadn't really remembered what it was like. This is why I was surprised to see before me...



...a genuine Castle. If I was in, say, Britain, this wouldn't be too surprising. Mundane, even. But this is America. We don't have castles. Nevertheless, here is the original Smithsonian Institute building, which even goes as far as to call itself "The Castle." Which is pretty accurate, since the only other Castle I can think of in America is that fake one in Orlando. Here are some more pictures of the gorgeous Castle and the surrounding gardens:



While The Castle is the original building in the Smithsonian complex, now it isn't much more than a Visitor Center for tourists to check out cool 3D maps of DC or just enjoy the air conditioning. The adjacent building is also castlelike, I think it was the museum of science and technology, but it was closed for renovations. We continued past the Castle, out onto the National Mall.

If you don't know, the National Mall is a very looong strip of (theoretically) green grass, which is heavily used by picnickers and whatever else, and looks it. When we crossed the Mall, to the left we could see the Washington Monument to the left, and the Capitol to the right. Straight ahead was this, which a helpful map told us was the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. This imposing Temple of Knowledge is quite a big deal huger than The Castle, and is definitely a No Fooling Around Museum. Reason You Should Visit Modern Rome #8: Smithsonian museums are all totally absolutely 100% free. Paid for by the Government. At least our tax money is going somewhere useful.



The Museum of Natural History lets you know it's not fooling around by flagrantly displaying an elephant, profoundly raised several feet above everyone's heads, in the main atrium. Dead and stuffed he may be, but that elephant is there to tell you that here there be monsters, baby, and I'm not talking about boring latin-named monsters that somebody named Poindexter probably writes about.

I'm talking about real monsters.

They aren't alive, of course, but they are nevertheless here. Knowing this fact, and knowing that I wasn't ready to encounter these monsters just yet, I steered us towards the Mammal Area first. I love to see real animals, even if they are filled with plaster-of-paris, which is what the museum's Mammal section has to offer. A LOT of stuffed animals. Taxidermied animals are in a way actually less depressing than animals in a zoo, because we don't have to imagine how miserable they are, living in captivity, or be sad because we missed their daily performance. Anyway, there are a ton more animals on display than I took pictures of, but along the way we definitely saw a walrus, a
maned wolf (I've seen one of these in real life, they're very graceful), a giraffe, a pangolin, another pangolin (I love pangolins) and a deadly man-eating hippo.

After passing through India and the Lewis and Clark expidition (my dad loved that one), we started to hit some fossils.



Mammoths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats are those animals which really, really want to be part of the dinosaur scene. They're even huge and crazy enough to almost be there. But they aren't quite dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the long, long corridor of post-dinosaur-huge/weird animals is almost as exciting as the terrible lizards themselves. I didn't take too many pictures of it, but I guarantee that there were no shortages of giant sloths, giant ostriches, shovel-tusked elephants, tiny horses and neanderthals.

By the way, did you know that those giant sloths, they are seriously giant. I mean, like just a little bit smaller than a modern elephant. That's why those old saber-toothed cats needed their sword teeth, just so they could stab far enough through the neck fat of a giant sloth to do any kind of damage whatsoever.

Oh, and in prehistoric times, chocobos existed.




This sofa-sized dimetrodon (one of my favorites) invited us warmly into the dinosaur area. I wasn't ready yet, so we made a short stop at the nearby Fossil Cafe, a too-expensive little deal which sold $4 cookies in the shape of dinosaurs, among other things. We got some drinks, sat down at the little tables with paleontology data inside them, and I mentally prepared myself for THE MONSTERS.

It didn't take Godzilla, Stephen Spielberg, or Ray Harryhausen to make me love dinosaurs. As far as I know, by the time two cells came together and decided they were going to grow into a human being named Luke Jones, they had already decided they would love dinosaurs. Some kids are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, I was born with one of those little fossil-duster brush things. I wish I could say I can name every species and subspecies of dinosaur and post-dinosaur exctinct animals, but unfortunately even reading all kinds of dinosaur literature as a child (gotta pick that back up again) hasn't kept me well-informed. Even so, I know a diploducus from a brachiosaur, and I can definitely tell a T-Rex from a lowly allosaurus. I was ready to see some Dinos. This boneyard delivered on those accounts. To save you from my gushing on each individual monster, I'll just go forward with the gallery thing:



From left to right: T-Rex, view from the back leg; big Rex's face; triceratops' huge head; diploducus' superb neck; a wire frame from where a small dinosaur was displayed (THEY LIVE!); another small dinosaur of the same species; T-Rex's pencil-length teeth; the dinosaur boneyard view from the balcony; a HUGE pterosaur flying overhead; some squid in an ancient reef display; what seems to be an ancestor of the dolphin; an enormous and downright diabolical prehistoric whale (take a look at those teeth!). You can bet I was pretty happy with all this. It had been far too long since I'd seen a dinosaur, let alone this kind of banquet. I didn't show you all of them in there, either. You know, I think my one big wish when I get to heaven is just to see some of these prehistoric monsters in action. Not even fighting or running or chasing or whatever they do in movies, I mean just being. Standing there. Breathing. Sigh.



Yeah. Death by T-Rex. Seems a likely way for me to go, huh.



I'll close out here by mentioning another thing that I noticed sets Japan way apart from America: lack of statues. If someone somewhere did something moderately important in America's history, they probably have a statue, or at least a bust, or at the very least a tree or street dedicated to them somewhere in DC. Japan, not so much. The way I see it, their culture is so much more group-based, that someone standing out like that is more frowned upon. Personally, I like statues. John Paul Jones wasn't nearly that tall, though.

I went to DC again today (remember, the stuff you just read happened a week ago), not so much to report this time but it'll be showing up soon.