| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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We had breakfast at the motel (included in the motel price).
Our first destination of the morning was the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. As we approached, the population of saguaro (pronounced sa-WAR-o) cactus seemed to increase. We'd seen cactus all over, but not much saguaro. When most people picture cactus, saguaro is what they are picturing. It is the only breed of cactus I know of that is more than a foot or so tall. The tall cactus that is often in human-like shapes or pitchfork shapes--that's saguaro. And it does grow in lots of really weird shapes and postures, although it is the older saguaro that is in weird shapes. Saguaro less than a hundred years old generally is just the single column. Saguaro is in a sense a parasite. It will grow only in the shade; it really needs for its seeds to fall in the shade of a tree. Eventually its roots will squeeze out the roots of the tree that shaded it and it will kill it. In a sense, both its shape and its behavior are human.
The Desert Museum is really a collection of small buildings and open areas that make up a natural history museum and zoo of the flora, fauna, and minerals of the desert.
As we came in a woman was giving a talk on tarantula spiders and showing one to her audience. Toward the end she was trying to show that the spider would crawl onto her hand. However, the spider had other ideas. Evelyn suggested her hand might be warmer and stuck her hand into the spider's box. 'I'd rather you didn't do that,' said the woman. 'I'll second that,' I thought.
Well, what sort of thing is at the Desert Museum? Pretty much everything you would expect. There are exhibits of arthropods. There is a mineral exhibit--the most spectacular aspect of which most people missed, incidentally. That is a microscopic look at the minerals, many of which were in brilliant colors. You see gila monsters and snakes.
As part of the earth sciences exhibit, they have seventy-five feet of fiberglass cave to show you the experience of going through virgin cave. That is one thing that Carlsbad with its elaborate walkways cannot provide. As fake caves go, this is one of the best, far better than Tiger Balm Garden in Hong Kong.
The zoo aspect of the museum I tried to be mellow about. I have a real love/hate relationship going with zoos. I love them and would gladly vote to outlaw them. They are, for the most part, cruel usage of animals. The animals you most want to see, in this case the black bear and the cats (like mountain lions and bobcats), tend to be animals who range over many miles a day. Containing them to even the largest of feasible enclosures is just not giving them enough room. I am not currently an animal rights advocate, but it sure wouldn't take much to push me over the line.
I said earlier that I didn't trust the Bird Cage Theater to have the highest of honesty in its presentation. The Desert Museum you would think would have higher standards. We passed an employee painting fake green lichen on rocks. Elsewhere we saw a camera crew trying to film an uncooperative tortoise. The tortoise didn't seem very happy about all the intruders and equipment in his pen.
Perhaps the most interesting exhibit is that of convergent evolution. They are pairs of plants that look very nearly identical but in fact are from very different families. Faced with similar conditions, they solved the same problems the same way. Typically one plant will be from Arizona, and one from South Africa.
Other features included an aviary, a cactus garden, an obnoxious family with two kids fighting over a camera, a stone garden where kids and Evelyn could look for minerals (special salting upped the odds of a successful hunt).
The last things we saw were the aviary, the cactus garden, the aquarium, and the inevitable book and souvenir shop.
Nearby is Saguaro National Monument. It is just a big natural area with a concentration of everything else we have been seeing, particularly saguaro cacti. Since the shapes of saguaro are weird and random, they are interesting to see. It is very unusual to see healthy saguaro. Most have either holes from birds pecking or other blights. Maybe it is the natural condition of something 200 years old to be constantly riddled with diseases and infirmity. In a sense it seems just since you know each saguaro killed its benefactor--the tree that shaded it when it was small--and now the little guys are licking the saguaro. You have the whole plot of a melodramatic gangster movie like SCARFACE in the life of the saguaro cactus.
We took a nature walk of a half mile but were disappointed. We saw two small lizards and a few birds, and the only other animals we saw were insects.
From there we went back to Tucson. I was starting to look a bit shaggy and we did want to make a social call this trip, so I wanted to get a haircut. While I was doing that, Evelyn was scanning the newspaper and noticed that GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS was playing and she wanted to see it before it disappeared.
Of course there was little point for me to write a film review since it could never be posted in reasonable time. What incredible luxury! To see a major first-run film without having to write a review! And the film turned out to be right down my alley. I love an intense, angry drama. This one was riveting. While covering the same territory, this is a better play than DEATH OF A SALESMAN. In DEATH OF A SALESMAN the system is just mildly uncaring for the salesmen. Here it is viciously intent on squeezing the salesmen for what they are worth and then throwing them aside. Miller's management are stones, Mamet's are pimps. Actually, I have been surprised at how many good films have come out this year. It is still a small percentage, but there are many more unusual and risky films coming out. Even with the vast majority being pap, there are still more good films being made. One summer had FAR AND AWAY, UNFORGIVEN, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, and a few more that are as good but don't come to mind. That's pretty good.
Dinner was at Po' Folks, a pretty good chain. Relatively cheaply you can get an all-you-can-eat vegetable side dishes dinner. Good idea. We hit a grocery and headed back to the hotel.
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Free breakfast at the motel restaurant. Then into Tucson to see the University museum. We got to the area early and walked around the town and the campus. It certainly is a nice-looking campus.
We went into the Arizona State Museum on the University of Arizona campus. Here I am expecting a stodgy institution for the serious study of Indian anthropology. I get in and a panel explains that humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. Who would be coming to a museum like this and still think that dinosaurs and humans were ever contemporaries? Another panel asks why we bother studying anthropology. The explanation they give is: '1) It is interesting. 2) It is curious [whatever that means]. 3) [And here is the explanation of why we really study cultures.]'
I am not sure what it means to say that the study of other cultures is 'interesting' and 'curious.' It seems to me a defense, not an explanation.
Anyway, the museum is mostly about Stone Age man up through contemporary Indians.
You see pottery and Stone Age tools and weapons. There is a nice diorama showing Neolithic peoples bringing down mammoths. They then segue into prehistoric culture in the Americas. The earliest people in this area were Indians called the Hohokam. Nobody knows what they called themselves. 'Hohokam' is Pima Indian language for 'The Vanished Ones.'
In the Indian culture they have woven bowls in a 'Man in the Maze' pattern. The Man in the Maze is Iitoi. He was the only human to survive the Great Flood in Pima myth. This was the flood that ended the last age and brought the modern age. I don't have the full myth, so I don't know why Iitoi is portrayed as being in a maze.
The collection includes terra cotta statues of animals. Perhaps one of the most interesting pieces is one whose explanation is not given. It is a piece of stone carved into an 'H' with one stem about half the length of the others. I think it is given a religious interpretation. That is the explanation given to anything incomprehensible found in archaeology. Since religion is the one area in our society where rationality is not required and where logic supposedly need not apply, it becomes easy when we find the unexplainable in other cultures to assume it is the result of religious irrationality there.
One thing worth seeing is a mammoth with a spearhead. It proved that Native Americans were in this continent at the time of the mammoths 11,000 years ago. That settled a long-standing controversy.
The museum also shows crafts of modern Indian peoples, including a step-by-step explanation of how pottery is made. There is a mezzanine with more Indian artifacts and some wildlife displays.
When we left we stopped at a bookstore in town and while we didn't find anything to buy, I did find a fairly interesting booklet, 120 pages long, called 'Voters: Check This Out.' It is a voter's guide to propositions s/he will be voting for on November 3. Now they are none of my business, but they are really interesting to read anyway. You always find two or three that are pure common sense. On the face of them they cannot possibly fail. But somebody will be richer if they do fail. These are the ones that spur the most controversy and in the end they haven't a hope of passing.
Suppose, to take an example, it has never been made illegal to turn stray cats into meat pies. Now somebody wants to do that in a state I will call Fritz. All of a sudden you discover there is an organization you have never heard of before called Fritzians for the Preservation of Cats, and ironically it wants to defeat the initiative to change the law in Fritz. They will claim that there are already too many cats around and it is making life miserable for all the cats. Stray cats are turning mean and turning on other cats. Also, they carry diseases that are infecting other cats. To protect cat rights it is desperately important that we continue to turn stray cats into meat pies. Further, the bill would be an absolute disaster for the state of Fritz. The wording is so loose that it will mean the veterinarians will no longer be able to treat cats.
Then there is the spectre that this really is just the thin edge of the wedge of cats' rights radicals. Their real agenda is to make it illegal for farmers to protect their sheep from bigger cats of prey. The proposition will end up costing Fritzians billions of dollars.
A huge multi-million dollar campaign will go on television telling people about the nasty future in store if the proposition passes. Billboards on highways threaten that the state of Fritz will be totally bankrupt hiring the extra law enforcement necessary for this totally unneeded bill, a bill that goes far beyond what any other state has done about the problem. Veteran congressmen will make statements that passing the bill will be playing right into the hands of the Japanese. Not only that, it will send half a million jobs to other states.
In the end, the citizens of Fritz vote overwhelmingly that they want stray cats turned into meat pies. It's the American way.
I have seen this exact campaign waged time and again over no smoking areas in restaurants, over deposits on soda bottles, over banning steel-jawed traps, over banning dangerous insecticides, over protecting forests. They always work on the assumption that we are totally powerless to control side-effects of laws. Occasionally this campaign fails and the proposition passes. |
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