Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was a day for playing tourist right here in Los Angeles.

We started out at the MPAA gallery in Beverly Hills for the “It’s Alive!” exhibit. This showed animatronic animals and monsters from movies. For some reason though, T-Rex from “Jurassic Park” just isn’t all that fearsome when he’s only 10 inches tall. We saw Aslan the lion, from “Narnia”, who apparently has no legs. And I got a picture of Cathy with Mighty Joe Young’s hand and head. It was interesting to see. The actual models were not animated, but they had TVs set up around the room showing clips from the movies that the models had been used in.

After lunch, we went to the Marvel Super Heroes exhibit at the Science Museum. This was really intended to be just a basic science exhibit for kids, and the super heroes were just there to try and get the kids interested. Still, Lucinda had some fun there, lifting the car with Iron Man’s mechanical arms and such.

The last part of the exhibit was about the history of comic-book super heroes and how they have evolved with our culture. There was a large poster of Peter Parker hanging up his Spider-suit while declaring, “and every boy… sooner or later… must put away his toys and become a man”. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought this was very sad.

Outside the museum, Lucinda did some climbing on the rock scupltures, and then she and Cathy both were swinging on the ropes attached to the ‘Big Lever’ exhibit.

By the time we were ready to leave, it was close to 5:00, so we thought we should just go to dinner, rather than brave the Los Angeles traffic to get home. Since we were close to Downtown, we went to Union Station so that Cathy could have her official Birthday Dinner at Traxx. We’ve been there a few times before, and it’s always been good. And this time was no exception. We had a very nice dinner outside in the courtyard.

It was a fun day.