"Birds flew off with a fallout shelter..."

That one verse from Don McClean's "American Pie" never seemed more appropriate..

Here's a great sign from The Bell Museum, only visible in the colder seasons (note the vines). It's so kitsch! The Bell Museum is a campy Natural History museum from the 60's--loaded with dioramas of taxidermy wildlife. I chuckle each time I pass it. It's hard to believe that people actually had confidence in fallout shelters.


Or that people even believed in this for example: duck and cover, even a newspaper can save you from the atomic bomb!



Ah, ignorance is bliss...

But the Bell Museum is absolutely fantastic. I'm a nut for animals; if I could make money, I would totally be a Zoologist (not to mention you get the really cool perk of saying you're a Zoologist). Something about stuffed grouse and raccoons put into "natural positions" is such a gas to me. My grandpa hunts, and his house is full of his trophies (and, no, they're not trashy). He's got this really sweet lynx that's been stuffed into an alert/pouncing position. Scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid.

I've got Literature in the Bell Museum Auditorium--hence why I'm there so often. Probably wouldn't be creepin' around there so much otherwise, who knows. But damn! As of today, that Lit class is my favorite. I don't think I've ever taken a literature class that didn't ruin the material, until this one. My AP English class in high school murdered Gatsby for me through a violent and unecessary use of MLA formatting and Harold Bloom, coupled with insipid class discussions with my so called "peers." Bah! How I loathed working on that novel. I love the prose, love F. Scott... but Gatsby will forever stand in my memory as an assault upon my patience.

Regardless, this Lit class is as different from the torture of high school as The Guess Who's original "American Woman" is infinitely better than Lenny Kravitz's pathetic cover. Reading material under the tutelage of my university teach Dr. Conley enhances my experience for once, rather than hindering it. The work we read for this past unit has been the kind that electrifies my soul (see my treatise on the beauty of Squalor) and the defragmenting analysis through defamiliarization of the text blows my mind like a shot of heroin. Jesus, take any one paragraph, and let's sit down together and take it a part piece by piece. What is the significance of using "it" instead of "he" in this phrase? Why does this specific use of alliteration strike us so potently? How come the author decided to repeat this motif right here? That's how lecture/discussion in Literature 1101 goes. Oooh it burn burn burns me in the deepest throes of intrigue! I love this class. I cannot stop my hand from raising with some half-crazed idea to babble about to share this beautiful text w/ people my classmates. And to impress my teacher, but that, children, is a story for another time...