Monday, July 26, 2004

Even Mexico's sold out

Today I saw a visitor to the museum that was wearing a t-shirt that said "Hard Rock Cafe - Tijuana. What happened to the good old TJ of yore. When you could go there to buy weapons, drugs, alcohol all before your 21st birthday. The appeal of TJ was that you could go to some sleazy hole in the wall bar, pic up a cute chicana, promise to take her back to the USA then dump her and go back to your homeland after you were done with her. Or even better yet, pick up an american girl and giver her some disease or get her pregnant so that it'd be really funny when her family asks here what souvenirs she got south of the border. I tell you, the whole world's gradually selling out.

Friday, July 23, 2004

Natural Law

Gelnaw's Law: Nature tends towards maximum irony.

 

Monday, July 19, 2004

Digging with the BHI

   This weekend I went to Wyoming to participate in a Dino dig with the Black Hills Institute.  There were three dinosaur horizons within only a couple of meters of each other.  The first had some sauropod and some stegosaur bits, but the material was really badly weathered from being at the surface.  The next horizon, the one that I worked at contained a nearly complete "Camarasaur."  I put that in quotes because they really aren't sure yet.  Alot of the features look like a mix of camarasaur and diplodocoid characters.  An hour before I left they started to find the skull so that ought to provide some insite.  The next horizon below that contained some more stegosaur bits but that site hadn't been opened yet.  What I found while there included a number of rib fragments, what might be part of the maxilla of the sauropod we're looking and a coelurus tooth.  While walking around a found a couple of large (25+  lbs) bone fragments that everybody else had passed over as rocks.  I guess they weren't expecting to find eroded material that big.  Too bad I didn't get to keep one of them, but it probably would have cost about $30 to send it home to the collection anyway.
   Over the weekend I also read Fight Club.  It's a good book and the movie parted from it a bit, but having seen both I'd have to say that the movie was a really good adaptation.  What was changed was probably done so to cut down on the number of characters and to keep it from getting an NC17 rating.  I liked it so much that I just ordered that author's other books Lulaby and Choke.  But since I found a good deal on Marsh's Dinosaurs, I ordered that at the same time too. 

Bush

I don't know much about politics, but I know what I dislike, and I dislike president Bush.  This November I'll be voting for Kerry.  There are many reasons why (http://drivingvotes.org/bushfacts.shtml) but my biggest reason is that when I started University in Canada, the Canadian dollar traded for roughly 66 cents American.  Now it trades for 76.5 cents.  I've lost money without spending it, and I hate losing money.  I think of the value of things in terms of their permanence or lack of mutability.  I hope that Bush doesn't have much permanence.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Much new stuff

    Well, none of the plans that I had for this last week panned out.  I thought that they might not, hense the "of mice and men" title on the post.  I really wanted to go to the rex dig site, but the van left without me that morning.  I was a little late but they must have left early because if they had left right on time, I would have at least seen them pulling away.  I'm making up for that loss though.  Tomarrow, whether I like it or not, I'm going to a Jurassic Dig site with the Black Hills institute.  My boss felt sorry for me missing the van last time so she arranged me to work with them Friday, Saturday and Sunday. 
    The plan to go cave exploring kind of fell out too.  I wanted to get the most out of my day off so I decided to see Mt Rushmore and go cave exploring in the same day.  And since I don't own a car (and the people who I could borrow one from are still a bit angry with me) I decided to hitch hike.  In the proud tradition of my father Gypsy Gelnaw, I hit the road and stuck out my thumb.  I left at 8:00 in the morning an had made it the 50 miles by 2:00 in the afternoon.  I was supposed to be at the cave by 5:00 pm.  It takes about two hours to see the monument and do everything that there is to do there (I might have been a bit slower because I was tired and my feet hurt).  As luck would have it, one of the people who gave me a ride (specifically the one who gave me the lift to the monument) was actually the daughter of Bob Farrar, one of the co-owners of the black hills institute.  So at 4:30, rather than try to make it 40 miles back to the cave in two hours, I decided to accept her invitation to visit the institute.  I don't know if my positive impression helped me get the weekend spot on the dig, but it couldn't have hurt. 
    On the way to Mt. Rushmore, I stopped in Custer and checked out the rock shops there.  For under $30 I picked up 4 cranial endocasts, two half skulls, one 3/4 complete skull and 3 very incomplete skulls of oreodons (oligocene sheep sized horse).  And to think, my parents got me a 5/6 complete skull for me for x-mas when I was  about 12 for $200.  Boy they charge alot for importing a fossil to California.

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Of Mice and Men

Well, this week promises to be a bit more interesting than usual. Tomarrow I'm going to Wyoming with Earthwatch to check out one of Peter Larson's Tyrannosaur sites. It's either where they found Sue or where they found Stan. Either way, their's more Tyrannosaur material there which supports the hypothesis that gregarious behavior is a conservative trait across the tyrannosauria.
Saturday Evening I might be going spelunking in Wind Cave. The park manager is going to try to map some unexplored parts of the cave and said I could join him. It aught to be a very memorable experience if my mild claustrophobia doesn't turn into crippling claustrophobia. Then again, even if it does, it will still be quite memorable, but for the entirely wrong reasons.
On top of this, I'm finally getting some bigger projects in the lab. We're getting in Pygmy Mammoth material from the channel islands of California (The Santa Barbara Museum which sould be handling it doesn't have a preparator right now so we're handling it) but so far I haven't been able to work on any of it. Right now I've got a first thorasic vertebra, two phalangies and a mid thoracic vertebra to work on. I aught to be done with three of them by the end of Saturday.

Friday, July 02, 2004

Bone Bed

I got to work in the bonebed today. This is only the second time that they've let me work in there but this time I was at least closer to bone, though I didn't personally find any. Bonebed work is quite possibly the most satisfying work that I've done here: considerably more enjoyable than giving tours and working in the gift shop and more physically exerting than time in the lab.