joel's pub

sorry for the lack of posts lately. di and i travelled down to nashville to visit her family over the holidays. it was very nice to be down there... we brought adrienne and gatsby (our cat) with us for the 15 hour drive down to middle tennessee. anton and his girlfriend camille, plus keisha and simone were there. we played much scrabble (which included a heated argument over whether "chored" is a word... according to the dictionary, it is), ate much good food, especially di's mum's lamb curry. we also saw the grand ole opry.... which wasn't impressive at all from the outside... and a little of downtown nashville, which reminded me of a country/western version of south street in philly. later in the week we drove up to philly to visit my mom. keagan is off visiting saudi arabia for his pilgrimage, so it was just the three of us and gatsby. we checked out "Body Works," an exhibit at the franklin institute. a bunch of scientists took donated human corpses and used chemicals to "plastinate" the bodies... basicallly preserving them with chemicals. then they took the bodies and turned them into anatomical textbook manuals....



my favorite part was where they injected the entire ciruculatory system, from the arteries downt to the tiniest capillaries, with some kind of bright red chemical. then used other chemicals to completely dissolve away everything but the blood vessels... leaving a stange netting of bright red vessels and capillaries. just bizarre.
overall, i wasn't blown away by the exhibit, though. a lot of the organs and full human bodies just didn't look "real" due to the plastics they used... so it just didn't have a very high creepiness factor. not nearly as high as the mutter museum in philadephia... which displays all kinds of medical oddities in formaldehyde.
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