A couple of Saturdays ago, D and I spent a good portion of the day at the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry with friends. The museum has come a long way since 1992, when I visited last, and it should go on your list of 100 Places To See Before You Die. The exhibits are cleaner, better-lit, well-organized, more relevant and Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince is playing on the Omnimax, as opposed to The Fires Of Kuwait* which I was forced to endure 17 years ago.
We didn’t see the whole museum, but spent large chunks of time in the following exhibits: Toymaker 3000, Petroleum Planet, Circus, the captured U-505 submarine (schwing!), Internet World, the Transportation Gallery (with the Wright Flyer!) and Harry Potter: The Exhibition. Friend Annie and I got great pictures everywhere except at the Potter exhibit because Warner Bros. are a bunch of wankers who want to own all rights to everything they touch and you to spend hard cashola in the store at the end. It’s what the market chooses to bear, as D likes to point out, and he’s not entirely wrong as witnessed in the sheer number of (little and big) kids who threw obscene amounts of money at cheap replicas of Harry’s wand and Nimbus 2000s built to seat toddlers. Me? Contemptuous? No!
Back to the point of this post. D, the two young ‘uns in our group and I decided we were going to watch the ToyMaker 3000 automated assembly line in action by having it make each of us a little plastic gravitron. Ever the chivalrous one, D et me go ahead of him in line. Smiling, I stuck my little barcode in the reader and BOINK** – the machine jammed, renewing my interest in the theory that I am indeed an earthly agent of Chaos. Sirens wailed, children screamed, the SWAT team dropped in on ropes, allegations bounced against the walls. All was discord and sweating parents, until we saw the coolest thing: a real-live museum engineer apparating to fix the robotic assembly line (oh, the irony) with wires, screws and tools. That was pretty neat, educational and worth the hour wait.
Of course, my gravitron is chartreuse in color and has not yet been removed from its packaging. What sort of a nerd do you think I am?
More pictures and stories to come from Chicago.
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*Yeah, it did wonders for the PTSD, thanks for asking.
** The sound of scientific progress, as everyone knows.
This is why we can’t have nice things!