Camel Crossing

A few months ago Afshin and I accompanied some friends to the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco. I wanted to see the Vivienne Westwood exhibit (which was excellent, by the by), and we figured the boys could run around on their own while the ladies checked out the insane fashion. Afterward, we'd all have tea in the Hagiwara Japanese Tea Garden. I hadn't realized it until I was there, but I'd been to the tea garden before, as part of a tour I took while vacationing in San Francisco in 2001. I remembered this one bridge immediately—it's kinda hard to forget a bridge with such tiny, vertical little steps. Not steps, really. More like ridges. It's like climbing an inverted U–shaped ladder, as you can see from the picture below. But Afshin had never crossed the bridge before, so we got in line.

While we're standing in line, we pass a plaque bearing some sort of description of the bridge. Afshin glances at it and then tells me, "You know, this bridge was built specifically for camels."

I looked at him, agape. "What?"

"Yeah, they're particularly suited to this type of bridge."

"But how...?"

He burst out laughing. "You seriously believed that this was built for camels?"

"Well, I saw you look at the plaque, and then you said it all authoritatively...but I was going to ask you how that was possible that camels could get a foothold on this. And why they'd have camels in Japan to begin with."

Camels are the new jackalopes.

Fred and Dino Go to the Museum

There's a right way and a wrong way to do things, I've noticed. Case in point: the new $27 million Creation Museum in Kentucky. This shining monument to scientific knowledge boasts features such as dioramas depicting humans and dinosaurs intermingling, a life-size reproduction of Noah's Ark (which apparently accommodated dinosaurs in its menagerie), and a "giant wrecking ball, labeled 'Millions of Years' [as in the age of the Earth, according to adherents of evolution], that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography." But of course.

On the other hand, the Skirball Cultural Center (note that's cultural center, not sham science museum) has opened an interactive Noah's Ark exhibit that looks really cool (especially for kids). It's creative, it's artistic (just check out the little kiwis made from boxing gloves, shuttlecocks, and oil cans!), and offers visitors the chance to immerse themselves in "a favorite childhood tale," according to the website. That's right—a tale, not a bona fide historical account of our past.

Now do you want to hazard a guess as to which of these institutions I'd be more likely to take my (hypothetical) children to?