Package Deal

Today's Groupon offer (Groupon is an e-mail coupon system) in Lubbock features both tattoo removal and concealed handgun classes. This is a great combination if you're thinking about a career change.

Cryptozoology

This weekend I make the substantial journey to Maine for a friend's wedding. She was getting married in Farmington, a little town two miles from Portland. Flying from Lubbock to Portland is not a simple process, so in order to make it for the Saturday wedding, I had to leave on the Thursday and return on the Monday. This meant I had a fair bit of time to explore Portland, so naturally, I took the opportunity to visit the International Cryptozoology Museum.

As a kid I always enjoyed books about monsters, and was a huge fan of the TV shows like In Search Of... and Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by Leonard Nimoy and Robert Stack, respectively. That's where I learned to scrutinize Bigfoot footage, and observe the rhetorical trends in UFO narratives. My favorite science magazine, Equinox, once had a feature on Mokele-mbembe, a brontosaurus-type creature that apparently lurks in the jungles of the Congo. On more than a few occasions, I have been able to use my knowledge from this article to start conversations with a certain kind of person, i.e. the sort of person who runs a cryptozoology museum. More on that later.

After you enter and pony up your seven dollars for admission, your first priority should be to get a photo with Bigfoot. While Bigfoot is tall, I should note that he was also standing on a pedestal, which I think is cheating.

The displays were, in many senses, even stranger than I would have imagined, in that most of them consisted of well-known animals, like foxes, squirrels, and in this case, beavers. The sign asks the enduring question "Do Giant Beavers Still Exist?" After looking at this display, I feel confident in saying "No." And yes, those are action figures of Indiana Jones and Steve Irwin, one of whom was a real person. I am tempted to read this arrangement of real and fictional people with a real beaver who only looks giant because of the scale of the plastic people as a clever commentary on the ambiguities of cryptozoology as a field of study, but I'm probably giving it too much credit.

Yetis are not white, you racist fools! I should note that this sign was placed in front of a collection of white Yeti dolls, which doesn't really clarify anything.

 This sign, which as you can see, was not well secured to the display case, seems to make a claim for the rationality of the field. However, the contents of the case consisted of stuffed animals with extra parts glued on to them, so I don't think their authenticity was ever in question:

The Bigfoot footage I remember so well from my youth is here presented on a TV, but with a picture frame around the screen, and old-timey flourishes on the sides to make you take it seriously. Are you convinced?

After making the rounds, I approached the curator to ask if he had anything on my old friend, Mokele-mbembe. He admitted that he didn't have much, but that it was one of the most likely candidates to be a real animal, almost as much as the "Giant Panda." I was tempted to inform him that the Giant Panda is a real animal and I've seen them at zoos, in youtube videos, on greeting cards, and just about everywhere else, but I didn't want to seem disrespectful. He lead me over to a display case to show me this:

This, my friends, is a plastic dinosaur toy that was autographed by a guy who wrote a book on Mokele-mbembe. On one level, this is a wonderful object and I would like to have one myself, but I also felt like in this case, they weren't even really trying.  

Rolling Roadshow

Texas is made for road trips, so last summer I took advantage of the state's abundance of weird small towns. I have been encouraged by the Alamo Drafthouse, a cinema in Austin that shows cool stuff and serves drinks, and their "Rolling Roadshow" - a scheme where they put on open-air screenings of Texas movies, in the towns where they were filmed.

One of their features was the Paul Newman 1963 movie Hud in Claude, which is just a few miles from Amarillo. I packed up my lawn chair and headed north. Now, when it comes to landscape in West Texas, I hear a lot of complaints about its flatness. Yes, it is flat, but I choose to perceive it as living in a Mark Rothko painting. For example:

Except, of course, when you come across a canyon. The transition is so rapid it is actually startling, to go from flatness to deep, red and rocky. I pulled over in the bottom of a canyon just to contemplate things for a moment.

Of course, the Grand Canyon gets more press, but the mini-versions thereof in West Texas are pretty impressive. I drove through the canyons, enjoying the novelty of their verticality, and I was pleased to notice a sign for a lookout up ahead. I pulled in, and noticed a big rig stopped there, with the driver leaning against it. I have seen enough movies to know that this is not a great place for a single woman to stop, so I pulled a U-turn and continued on to Claude. I didn't want to miss the big show, of course.

Claude is an archetypal dying town. It's close enough to Amarillo to get a bit of traffic, but the downtown was quite depressed. I stopped at the Dairy Queen, as that is a staple of the West Texas diet, and explored the main street before the movie. Attractions included the Gem Theatre, which plays itself in the film.

The old schoolhouse:

And an assortment of abandoned shop windows full of mysterious objects, such as this old car:

Or this, a bathtub with sides covered in carpet. This strikes me as a bad idea, or at least something you can only get away with in a desert climate. I'm not sure if the yoke and lantern were included in the original package.:

Finally, no small western town is complete without a cigar store Indian. This one is adorned with a sacred white buffalo. I'll tell that story another time.:

As the sun started to set, the Alamo Drafthouse crew got their projection booth truck into position and inflated their portable screen in front of the town hall. You can see the projector lenses peeking out.:

One of the delightful things about the process is we got to see things that are normally hidden at a movie theatre, like the process of calibrating the projector for the screen.

The local Legion was selling hot dogs, and some kids had been recruited to distribute free popcorn. We all staked out our spots in the parking lot with our lawn chairs, and the show began with some vintage movie trailers that might have shown before Hud back in the day. An unexpected thrill in watching the movie in the middle of town is that since it was shot there, one could perform shot-by-shot comparisons with the surrounding space. There'd be a shot of the courthouse, and then you would look to your right, and there's the courthouse. Not much has changed, except none of Claude's residents resemble Paul Newman in the slightest. 

As the sky grew darker, the light of the screen started to attract moths, which in turn attracted the local bat population. I've written before about the ways nature often competes with outdoor screenings (lightning at the drive-in, etc.), but this was quite spectacular to watch the cloud of bats swirling above us, and occasionally cruising in front of the screen. 

When the show wrapped, I drove home, but took the big highway through Amarillo, since the canyon is not such a good option in the dark. 

I think this guy winked at me on Match.com

Click here for an explanation of the Lubbock problem: Well said, Jimmy Kimmel.

Kennedy Space Center

While in Orlando, I took a day and drove out to Cape Canaveral. I sprung for the "behind the scenes" tour at the Kennedy Space Center, and was delighted to hear that this would include a visit to the Vehicle Assembly Building - a structure I've seen in many IMAX space movies. They don't normally let visitors into this area, since vehicle assembly involves enormous quantities of rocket fuel, and it would be bad PR if a bus tour was incinerated because someone ignored the No Smoking signs. Fortunately, the only spacecraft in the building was the now-retired Shuttle Atlantis, who is being prepared for permanent museum display.

I felt a bit sad to see her there, looking tired, with her nose cut open. I remember my excitement at watching launches on tv as a kid, assembling a Shuttle model kit and playing with it, and poring over the satellite images Dad would bring home from work. I was one of those who felt sentimental when the Shuttle program ended last year - much the way I feel about the decline in celluloid film projection. Dream machines being laid to rest.
We got back on the bus and went out to the shuttle launch pad. The tour guide noted the railroad tracks, which were used back in the early days of the space program, before the equipment got too heavy for trains to handle. I was so pleased that these examples of frontier-exploring-infrastructure were good enough to pose together in perfect composition.

Orlando

Last summer, my friend Elizabeth called me and asked if I'd like to do a half-marathon with her at Disney World. I figured, why not? So, this morning Ginger and Norman picked me up before dawn to take me to the airport, and now I'm sitting by a pool in Orlando. I was most impressed with the Orlando Airport's level of preparedness for Ash Wednesday. As soon as I got off the terminal monorail, there were two airport chaplains with a table, a modest sign, and ashes. As you can see, they fixed me up:

Tomorrow I'm going to the Kennedy Space Center to look at stuff at the Kennedy Space Center. Sunday is marathon day, so to prepare and scope out the scene, we're going to do Disney theme parks on Friday and Saturday. Fortunately, Elizabeth is a Disney World veteran, and I emailed her a list of my points of interest in advance so she would have time to develop a strategic plan. Of course, I have a research agenda, which is to see lots of historically-significant 3D film installations at Disney World, such as the Michael Jackson science-fiction music video Captain EO. This film hadn't been screened for years, but I gather that with Mr. Jackson's demise, the film was resurrected.

What Elizabeth doesn't know is that I've brought a special present for her. We used to be roommates in Chicago, where she developed a taste for my macaroni and cheese. Over the years, she has periodically phoned me from her kitchen to guide her through making it herself. Last weekend I made a big vat of it for the vegetarian co-op, so I froze some of it and managed to get it past the TSA. This is my contribution to our pre-race carbo-loading. Not that it's hard to find carbohydrates in Orlando.