One more dinosaur

I don't remember what kind of dinosaur this is, but I still like the image.

T. Rex

There's a parade of mammal skeletons, including bison, elephants, and giraffes, in the main hall, and also some dinosaur skeleton replicas. I like the way the black and white photo makes the bones feel like part of the building design.

Ceiling details

I really love the design here—the plant ornamentation and the decorations on the wrought iron. It's not remotely minimalist, and not my usual taste, but with the patterns of shadow on the iron, it's really lovely.

Museum of Natural History

I know I've been jumping from state to state and country to country without any apparent plan recently, but it's a pleasant evening in Oxford and I'm sitting on the deck behind my hotel and I'd rather finish up one Oxford topic before jumping back to, say, North Dakota.

The museum building, completed in 1860, consists of a large exhibition hall, with decorated wrought iron pillars supporting a glass ceiling. (I may have mentioned how hot it was in there yesterday!) I took this picture from the gallery.

Sunday bird blogging

OK, this wandering albatross is most definitely, as Monty Python might point out, pining for the fjords, but as I have actually seen many albatrosses in the past year, at least one of them a wandering, I think it counts as bird blogging.

It was certainly the one thing that really surprised me in the natural history museum yesterday. It's one thing to know that these birds can have an eleven foot wingspan; it's quite another to actually see how fricking huge they are. (The woman standing behind the display is very useful for scale!)

Saturday reflections

At the Natural History museum in Oxford today.

The museum isn't air-conditioned, and the ceiling is glass, so it was very hot inside. But the adjoining Pitt Rivers museum is air-conditioned, and the kind woman in the cafe gave me a huge cup of ice with my lemonade just because she thought I looked like I could use it.

More closeups

I love that hand, with the Lilliputian cranes and trucks. Crazy Horse's face is almost 50% taller than the heads on Mount Rushmore.

Crazy Horse Memorial

This monument, 15 miles from Mount Rushmore, but on private land, has been under construction for more than 70 years.

Henry Standing Bear (Mato Naji), an Oglala Lakota chief, had petitioned Gutzon Borglum to add Crazy Horse to Mount Rushmore, but Borglum never responded. Standing Bear then made a deal with the government, trading some of his own land for a permit to build on the mountain, and commissioned Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Mount Rushmore, to create the memorial. The Ziolkowski family (now children and grandchildren) is still overseeing the project. Although all of the funding is private, and no state or federal funds are used, there have been questions about how the money is being used, especially among some of the Lakota people.

I don't know enough about it to comment, but it's not just a giant sculpture. There is a college campus onsite that offers summer programs for students of Native American descent, and a really interesting art gallery in the visitor's center.

Avenue of Flags

Yes, that's the official name—accurate if unimaginative. As you approach the monument, you walk through this array of the flags of all of the US states and territories.

But what interests me more in this picture is what you don't see. I expected Mount Rushmore—and really, all of the national parks we visited—to be a lot more crowded than they were on a holiday week in July. Which isn't to say that there weren't a lot of people; there just weren't as many as we expected. And I am wondering if the falloff in international travel to the US is the reason.

I know just how they feel

The faces on Mount Rushmore seen through a zoom lens. Geology moves slowly, but the cracks are starting to show. Or maybe the South Dakota weather is drying out the Presidential complexions the way it did mine.

It was slightly cooler in Oxford today—quite pleasant when walking or sitting in the shade, less so almost anywhere indoors where the lack of air conditioning was obvious. My hotel room isn't as awful as it was yesterday after a few hours of running the fans with the door propped open, but I spent most of the evening sitting on the very pleasant deck instead.

I'd rather pretend I'm here

 

Badlands redux

I'm a long way from South Dakota, but Oxford is having a heat wave and I'm sitting in a stifling hotel room with a huge fan blasting hot air at me, and remembering the insane winds in hundred-degree temperatures in eastern South Dakota that I described as being in a “full-body blow dryer.”

I took the all-day flight instead of the all-night flight, which means I don't lose a night's sleep and walk around like a zombie for two days. Instead I'm sitting in a hot hotel room when it's after midnight local time and my body insists it's hours until bedtime.