Dinosaurs. Mesozoic maneaters are big
June 05, 2002
Dinosaurs. Mesozoic maneaters are big with the younger set. Drove into the badlands today and spent hours at the Royal Tyrell Museum. I find both the climate and subject matter dry at times. Paleontologists have to lie there with a hanky on their head for hours wisking away millimeters of soil in an attempt to uncover these fragments. Crank up the sun to its maximum damage (Pokemon term) and suck all moisture out of the air and you've got me moving quickly past that folding table on career day. They try to cover up the tedium with terms like "dinosaur hunters" and by using pun laced humour in "hip","interactive" games. I remember what it was like to go to museums as a kid. I know the biggest thrill was sometimes the cafeteria. I mark time by how they fascinate me now. Still the stale institutional smell and information overkill remain. Despite all this I think the day was a huge success and the place really proves such otherworldly creatures existed. I'm a bigger fan of the ice age than the dinosaur age. When I was a kid I worried that it would come again and I would be struggling to survive and simultaneously consumed by boredom. I later lived this condition as an assembly line worker. I should have embraced the idea what with being such a big hockey fan and made a silk purse of a sow's ear. Loved the dinosaurs as a kid but mainly imagined myself being batted around like a catnip ball and then seethed from nave to chaps with the deft stroke of a massive talon or tooth.
Went east to see the "hoodoos" as well. Tiny versions of the towers of monument valley. Strange pillars and knobs of colourfully striped, eroded earth against a stay-puffed marshmallow sky. It was the first time I've ever stopped to take a photo of just the sky. A Rembrandt reality. My middle guy rightly pointed out that he thought those skies were only in the paintings. Too fanciful to exist. He also pointed out that it was a great shame that there was no city in Saskatchewan called Renis. Why Regina and no Renis?