We’ve done a bunch of touristy things this week, and it’s been fun to get out and see some of the things in LA and Pasadena. On Sunday we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, where they found a huge number of ice age animal bones from mammoths and saber-toothed cats and early horses who got stuck in the asphalt traps. It was a little bit morbid, but really neat. Did you know that camels used to be native to California? I didn’t.
We also went back to the Huntington to see the old books, since the first time I went there with my parents the library exhibition hall was closed for the one day for air conditioning repair. Yay old books!  And that same day we went to the Norton Simon art museum in Old Town – I had no idea how many famous things were there…lots of impressionist and modern paintings – Renoir, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rodin, Picasso…just lots. That was cool =)
And last night we went to see The Color Purple downtown, and that was really good. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a musical, and the last one was Mamma Mia, which can’t really compare in substance to The Color Purple (catchy songs…but yeah..). Someday I’ll have to read the book.
And that’s it really. My parents are here until early tomorrow morning, and then it’s back to work and packing for Phoenix. We went to the Planetary Science seminar yesterday, and unfortunately it wasn’t on a really engaging topic for outsiders this week. It was on extrasolar protoplanetary disks, which is neat but it was a pretty technical talk and the speaker wasn’t that great. Too bad they couldn’t have come last week, when the Cornell guy gave an overview of the Mars rovers stuff. Oh well.
Ugh, it’s Wednesday already?
I actually wound up going to the La Brea Tar Pits the day after you did with some of my friends from Cooper Union. I particularly liked their fishbowl lab, even though no one was working there at the time. It reminded me of the phase I went through when I wanted to be a paleontologist.
Cool, that’s a coincidence =)
We went on Sunday, so there actually were people working in the fishbowl when we were there, but they weren’t doing very interesting things, sadly. One woman was sorting tiny tiny fossils (~1mm) into piles of ‘plant,’ ‘teeth,’ ‘shell’, etc, and one guy was cleaning a fossil with something that looked pretty noxious. The other lady was filing things…not that exciting. It would be cooler to go in the summer when they operate the excavations in pit 91…I bet the temperature makes it pretty miserable though. mmm tar..