All your carefully laid life plans are worthless. The universe is driving, you’re just in the backseat. Sometimes you’re screaming, other times you’re back there giggling. It’s all good. As long as somebody decent like Santa Claus is driving, and not some type of coked-out-Aztec-death-god, you’re probably doing okay.
Last year I got it in my head to travel to Chicago for the first time in some sort of joyful ride to stave of mental insanity. It was a highly successful journey. And I wondered when I’d be back in Chicago. I figured many, many years.
No, one year. For work decided my new travel location would shift from Texas to Chicago. So whereas a trip to Chicago was so very, very unique, now I’ll be there all the time.
This is of course a very good thing, I hope. Hopefully work doesn’t detonate my view of the cooler things in life I experienced there. But I did try and start things off on the right foot.
I got to Chicago a day early, before work, to avoid any difficulties in getting there on time for the first day. So I took that early day and went back downtown. I visited some of the restaurants I went to the last time, because I’m a big loser and wasn’t willing to risk a new place just yet.
But the one difference was I went to the Field Museum. They have a ton of stuff there, most of it great, and I might write about some of the exhibits later. They also have a t-rex. They named it Sue after the lady who found it.
It’s the largest, best preserved t-rex bone pile on the planet. The Field Museum paid nearly $8M to take it off the hands of the dude who’s land Sue found it on. When you read about the legal drama that unfolded to bring this skeleton to Chicago, it’s enough to make you yearn for the scene in Jurassic Park where the lawyer gets eaten whilst he was seated upon the can.
This was the only photo I took at Field, but the shot doesn’t do it justice. It’s a huge creature, but yet at the time I still remarked to my lunatic brain, “Wow, I thought it’d be bigger.” I truly did. So this of course does further confirm that I’m an idiot, as this is a seven-ton monster.
An interesting note is that’s not Sue’s actual skull. The real skull is on the second floor in a glass box. It’s simply too heavy to put on the actual skeleton without running a pole to the chin, which was probably a wise aesthetic choice. They figure Sue was about 28 years old when he or she checked out to Dino Valhalla in a dry stream bed, bound for history.
It would have been quite the view if you could actually see one of these dino dudes for real. So I have this idea, to bring the dinosaurs to life. We’d probably need to clone them or something. So I figure we can get their DNA from some Dominican amber. We grab the dino DNA from the blood inside the mosquito inside the amber. Then we get some geneticists to do their thing. And when I have their results, I use their complex data to build a big robot dinosaur. What am I supposed to do, breed a live one? Do you have any idea how high that food bill would be? Sue would eat, like, four or five cows a day, probably? And think of how much beer Sue would drink, and I’d have to buy it, because I can’t say no to a seven ton monster. Who’s got the cash for all that? Not me.
The Arcturus Project 