04.08.02 - 2:39 p.m.

There were 976 messages in my inbox this morning. 976! And all but five were from the same damn "lose weight while you fuck me in the ass electronically" company. It took me a half hour to get rid of them, slowly and methodically clicking that little checkbox over and over and over while simultaneously trying to do all my other real life jobs. Grrrr. Those fuckers. This has NEVER happened to me before, I've never even had to deal with junk mail filters, really. I live a nice and mainly anonymous internet existence. I'm a good internet citizen. What the fuck did I do to deserve this???

I just wish they would have done it AFTER my ex-roommate emailed me with pleas for money.

Dan and I finally made it to the Museum of Natural History yesterday, after losing an hour of sleep and taking two hours to look for it, like he said. Even if we got there when the museum opened at 10, I still don't think it would have been enough time to see everything. It seemed way more overwhelming than the Field, but maybe that's because I was unfamiliar with the layout. Not like at the Carnegie, either, where I have my set path. And everything was lit so dimly that by the time I got to the Hall of Minerals I was ready to curl up on the carpet and fall asleep. It was so round and brown and denlike!

I went to the special exhibit on pearls while Dan went to the one on baseball. Because we are defining ourselves by our gender these days, eh? Hee. I'm kind of on the fence about pearls; they're so pretty, but it's a fine line between elegance and dowdiness with them. For instance, the necklace I have from Key West? SO nice with the little cornrow pearls, but then it takes the instant plunge into matronliness with the big teardrop pearl in the middle. Sigh.

The exhibit had a lot of things I wouldn't mind owning, though - quelle surprise - like conch pearls, but the best and most unexpected thing was the original necklace Givenchy designed for Audrey for the opening scene of Breakfast. The one in the film was a revised version, but this one was hers. The real deal.

Then I saw reproductions of paintings from Lascaux and the caves of Altamira, which made the Steely Dan song run through my head, and the hominid mannequins - "Ross people," I called them - from Ross and Rachel's trip to the museum where they finally get down to business and are caught by a group of schoolkids.

And poor Lucy, the "missing link" skeleton discovered in 1974. It was kind of a shock for me to see her there, although I couldn't understand why. She was just so unassumingly tucked into a corner amongst the Ross people and the descriptions of DNA, whereas other major finds like Sue get major fanfare. Stil, she's kind of old and Dan made the point that they've pretty much learned everything they could from her.

But there she was, anyway...or at least a copy of her was. See? This is why I'm a nerd! I actually took the time to look up stuff on Lucy this morning and found out that the REAL Lucy is in Ethiopia, where she was discovered. There are 19 casts, copies of her in museums all over the world. New York has one, San Diego has one, Tempe (the link above) has one. So it's not so surprising about where she'd be or why people wouldn't be paying as much attention to her presence in the museum. After all, many museums have casts of dino bones in their collection, but only really amazing finds like Miss Sue get the full PR treatment.

And just so everyone knows, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh has one of the best collections of original dino fossils in the world. And that shot in Silence of the Lambs where Clarice is walking to the bug experts' office? That's the Carnegie's Hall of Dinosaurs right there.