bloodyrosemccoy | This Weekend's Fun Theme: Cadavers

You might not realize this, but there are some perks to being a neurosurgeon.* You get to sit next to rocket scientists in the bracket of Smartest Dudes Ever, and you get the opportunity to closeup observe many great moments in brain damaged behavior. If things go well you also get to fix that damage!

Also, you may get an invitation to go to a special gala opening viewing of the Body Worlds 3 exhibit!

Yes. Dad got invited to go check out the Famous Dead Body Exhibit,** for free. Even neurosurgeons like Free Stuff!

However, there are also some drawbacks to being a neurosurgeon. One of them, for example, is that on the weekend you are invited to a special viewing of a cool exhibit, you may be already scheduled to fly to Tennessee to … well, to get some hands-on experience with dead bodies. He’s got a conference on some nifty advance in back surgery, which he gets to practice on cadavers.

Which meant that there was this ticket for two to Body Worlds just sitting around.

Gee.

So! Body Worlds is a pretty damn nifty exhibit. I didn’t exactly wander through filled with wonder, though I was fascinated by it all. The bodies were extremely interesting, but I admit the exhibit’s a little redundant on that point—they could have cut a few of the poses. Some of the smaller things were more interesting: my absolute favorite piece was the blood vessels for the entire head, without any of the rest of the head—seeing the way it layered was cool. There was a dense part for the scalp and face, then a sort of sparse area, then a really dense layer for the brain.

The brains were amazing, too. The best was the entire nervous system, with the brain, splayed out, in Dad’s words, “like a butterfly on a corkboard.”*** The way it branched was aesthetically lovely, like a cascade. No wonder he loves this stuff.

They did, of course, have a Kids: Don’t Smoke! section with a smoker’s lung in various stages of falling apart. It was a lot better than the one we got to look at back in school in the heyday of D.A.R.E., when they were showing us slices of emphysema.

AMELIA: Look! I found Uncle Paul’s lungs!

MOM: *cries*

Kids: Don’t Smoke.

Mom also accused me of being autistic because I talked in my normal voice and made my weird observations and apparently horrified the weirdly quiet people around us. Well, most of them.

BODY: *is balanced on a hurdle as though leaping over it, with one leg extended past it. He is not high enough to clear it*

AMELIA: In about half a second that guy would be wincing pretty bad.

NEARBY 11-YEAR-OLD-BOY: HAHAHAHAHA!

BOY’S DAD: Come away from the wicked woman, Jaden!

AMELIA: *observing a body with back snapped open like a trapdoor, who is balanced on three wooden balls and holding up all his internal organs in one lump over his head* So, how exactly does this guy come up with these poses? Does he tell people when they’re still alive, “You will be almost doing the splits holding up your organs!”? Or does he wait until they die and let the muse take him? Or what?

WOMAN NEXT TO AMELIA: *backs away*

But my favorite part was the Chamber o’ Fetuses. My favorite book when I was very small was A Child Is Born, because those big photos of the stages of development were so cool. It was even cooler to see the little things in various stages of turning from a squudge of cells into a human. Those tiny little hand-paddles were amazing, and those eyespots ... so cool

I know y’all may not be neurosurgeons, but I recommend you check this out when it comes to your town anyway. It’s great to see how your insides work, and it’s one of the few times you get to go check out dead bodies and call it art!

It beats what Dad had to do with dead bodies this weekend, anyway. Life is full of these ups and downs.

(You know, they should totally decorate that exhibit for Halloween, too. How awesome a haunted house would that be? And how insensitive and plebeian am I for suggesting it?)

*Not always, weirdly enough, including piles of cash you can swim around in, which is what many people do expect.

**For those of you unfamiliar: this crazy German guy plastickizes dead bodies and poses them in ways that show the layers of organs and muscles and whatnot. He also does that with individual organs and animals like—for some reason—camels.

***This was when I described it to him last night.

This Weekend's Fun Theme: Cadavers

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