A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months. The locals liked it so much, they elected to rebuild it in a more permanent manner. It now also hosts the city of Nashville’s art museum.
After that, we hit the Frist Center for the Visual Arts to catch their exhibit featuring Monet to Dali (on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art). The other exhibit featured some of the work of Angelo Filomeno, who does really interesting (if a bit disturbing) embroidery work on large silk panels. From the Frist website, his works feature “embroidered images of fanged skulls, exploded peacocks, and hovering insects.” Strangely enough, that was about all they had. I have to admit we were a bit disappointed overall. We figured there’d be a more substantial art museum in a city the size of Nashville, but we arguably had a better time at the Huntsville art museum (especially given the difference in the price of admission).
Finally, we hit the Lane Motor Museum before heading home. By far the best stop of the day, especially since admission’s only $5 for an adult. I don’t know what Mr. Lane does for a living, but apparently he must do pretty well for him to have accumulated such an impressive selection of unusual autos predominantly from Europe and Japan. The collection includes everything from cars to trikes to motorcycles to a massive US Army LARC and other oddities like the Helicron. All sorts of cool stuff. Go check it out!
My masters have hauled me down to this strange new land they keep referring to as The South. It seems like I’ve been hear for ages, which is apparently just long enough for them to inflict me with a bladder infection. I felt so uncomfortable I showed them who’s boss by peeing in things to anger them, and figured they’d break them any moment. Since they hadn’t made me better, I figured I had to be more blunt with these simpletons and started going to the litter box every fifteen minutes and I even stooped so low as to drag my ass on the carpet like a filthy dog.
Little did I know they would try and fight back by taking me to the evil man with his pointy stick that he’d use to poke me. As if that weren’t bad enough they started cramming nasty pills down my throat twice a day after taking me home. To ensure my cooperation, they even had the nerve to withhold food until I submitted to this abuse.
After suffering two weeks of this, they took me back to the evil man and he made noises about growing crystals in my pee or something like that. His solution, switch me over to even crappier kibbles than the diet ones I’d had before and start drinking more distilled water every day. Oh, and he wanted to extend my pill punishment for another week beyond the week I had left!
A few more days of that and I was about at the end of my rope. So I started off by peeing in the masters’ suitcase twice in one night! They escalated past that by giving me a bath! The next day they tried to lock me up in a bathroom after that with nothing but lousy prescription kibbles, but I broke out and got into their bedroom. I figured I’d show them good by peeing in their comforter. No, that’s not enough of a statement. So then I crapped on their papers and then smeared it on the wall. Top that silly humans.
Medical researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered a new use for scorpion venom — cancer medication. Each year, some 9,000 Americans are diagnosed with malignant glioma, a form of brain cancer that kills about half its victims within a year of diagnosis.
Glioma cells work a lot like cockroach muscle cells. And while that fact is pretty disgusting, it also got UAB researchers thinking about the giant Israeli scorpion, whose venom is harmless to humans but deadly to its cockroach prey.
Doctors found that when they injected a drug derived from the venom of giant Israeli scorpions into cancer-infected human brains, the poison destroyed the glioma cells and left surrounding, healthy cells alone. The treatment is still in the early stages of development, but researchers remain optimistic.
See the rest of the article on deadly animals that might save your life at Mental Floss.
Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.
The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…
