"that guy is hot!"

my first day back, and friends rich, sara, and claire had luckily pre-purchased one of the hottest tickets in town for me. body worlds is on display at the museum of science and industry in hyde park until labor day, and is currently sold out even though it's remaining open 24 hours.

for those of you not here or who haven't heard of it, inside this exhibit you learn about the body by viewing real human bodies that have been plasticened. yep, it can be pretty gross-out - there's a muscle-exposed man carrying a suit of his own skin [pause for "she puts the lotion in the basket" jokes] - but the likelihood that you'll ever be able to conceptualize it being real is pretty low. mostly, it's just cool. how's that for a heady description?

there were two funny elements:
a., often the reproductive cavity/organs were left on, which i applaude, because it's part of the body. why is everyone so dong-phobic? we did well with this at first, but as we went through, became more and more judgemental. one woman on second dong-display actually said the words in the title of this post to her friend, completely seriously. around that point, sara and i lost it, and were not able to get it back. it wasn't our fault, though! the woman said that a dissected running dude was a dreamboat! low standards? well, at any rate - play on, playa'.

b., there was a guest book at the end where people could write comments about what they thought. overwhelmingly positive for the most part, some were just insane. one nice sentiment read "if i were a dead guy, i'd wanna look like that"; another dreamt big by lamenting "i wish there were alien bodies". we read said book for quite a while. an interesting part? one person wrote, in shaky cursive "what a wonder our bodies are! who can deny the existence of god?". directly below it was written "what a wonder our bodies are! who can deny the existence of evolution?". turf war!

i smell a remount of inherit the wind.