Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

June 15, 2007

My Day at the Museum

The fact that I managed to sleep for most of the ride home on a bus filled with hyper 11-year-olds shows how tiring it can be to make sure your group of kiddies doesn't get lost in a very large museum.

The entire fifth grade of my younger daughter's school went to the Museum of Natural History in New York today. It had been close to twenty years since I've been there, and I'll have to go again, because the kids just whizzed by everything. Since I was a kid, I have been the kind of person who actually likes to read the small signs next to every exhibit, but that certainly didn't happen today.

It was amusing, however, to see the reactions to the lifelike wax figures of American Indians, etc., in the buff as they lived all those years ago.

The best part was the planetarium show, about how collisions in space likely formed the Earth, moon, and so on. Planetarium shows have certainly changed since I was a kid, where the host would sit in the middle of the room with the big projector and point to the large pictures of the constellations and planets. Today's shows are amazing! Too bad they also have to be narrated by big stars like commie Robert Redford. It annoys me that big movie stars have mooched in on doing narrations and other voice work, something that actors specializing in voice work used to do.

Anyway, something else that has changed is the fact that you no longer have to go on bumpy old school buses, but comfy coach buses with bathrooms and a DVD player with screens throughout. Unfortunately, the movie we watched on the way to the museum was Happy Feet, which was supposedly about a penguin who danced instead of singing, but was ultimately about the evils of humans who overfished and were starving the penguins.

Of course, we had to make a stop at the gift shop, and I saw a wonderful item called a "Global Warming" mug. " I found one online here. The box screams, "See our coastlines disappear!" All for $14.95 plus tax.

What a great day...