I'm Cleopatra!

This has been my birthday weekend.  
In fact, today is actually my birthday. 

If you've been paying attention,  you know my birthdays are kind of hit or miss.  You can read about some of them here. 

Today is family time and dinner with a possible pumpkin pie.  

Yesterday wound up more exciting than I thought it was going to be.  

My friend and I had been trying and failing to see this particular exhibit at one of the bazillion museums around where we live.  

An Egyptian exhibit, I was assuming a cover price meant the museum would be... bigger.  It was still a nice place.  
...And I still prefer the giant one I volunteered with for a while.  It's free and there is a carousel.

But this one was neat and a bunch of friends joined! 

...I was trying to take a picture of the Christian Science window because I was entertained by the knowledge that they can apparently create zombies by waking the dead.  

Instead, I got a nice shot of bird shit.  This poor man's car was attacked by birds.  Some of the poop is speckled with blood.  Obviously a dying bird. 

Hey, maybe they brought the bird back and it's a zombie, shitting bird?  

I took notes throughout the visit via sketchbook, so I'm going to post them here and do my best to decipher them for you.

I love these.  The imagery, the meaning, the use even when they are "dummy" jars...  

I told my knight that when I die, I want this to occur.  
He misheard and seemed to assume I was going to kill him sometime soon and steal his organs.  

Next up was a mummified dog:

I wondered if it had been left to die before mummification, or if the dog was killed just to be buried with the master.  

Because my brain had already concocted a story involving a mummy coming back via curse and just wanting to find a better replacement limb for an old fake one, I added that perhaps he was also looking to raise his dog from the dead.  

...
I want this table.  
It looks better than I drew it (which goes for everything, really) but it's awesome and I shall make a replica and it shall be mine.  ...Yes.

My knight and I wandered into a little room with a television just as lights went on beyond a glass wall.  I felt as though we were seeing what was meant to be unseen, as it seemed to be a window into the storage area of the museum.  

...Just...  Walls and shelves of chairs, couches and pianos, as far as the eye can see. 

Eventually we wandered to other areas of the museum.  

They aren't even sure who made it. 
...
Chickens. 


*ahem* 

Well done marble sculptures are amazing with how an artist can capture fabric, hair, and even flesh in ways that aren't even easy enough to paint.  

I was particularly intrigued by a few set into little alcoves in the walls going up the stairs.  

Of course, every now and then, you catch something that isn't quite right.  

For example, if you look at certain pieces by Michelangelo, you'll start to see that he knew how to capture incredible amounts of detail, and he understood the male form to a degree which still astounds, but he actually wasn't so great at painting the ladies.  

Part of this is because of the times, and part is just that they seem to be dudes with effeminate faces and little boobies tacked on in ways that just don't happen in human lady bodies.  

Even female body builders don't look like whatever the Hell he was doing. 

In this image by Nehemiah Partridge in 1721, we see that either he ran out of room having planned the composition poorly, or he forgot around the middle that he was painting a three year old girl.
Her face is haggard and her arms are incredibly long.  
...And her body is... wrong.  Just wrong.  



I mean, maybe she was a three year old who looked like an adult and had been cut off at the knees and forced to wear shoes on her stubs?  Maybe?  

Or perhaps the poor girl was somewhat orangutang in shape?

Actually, one of the first paintings we came across involved a double rainbow:  

  
I felt the need to point it out.  

Later on, my companions happened upon a sort of hidden image within an image.  

You see, from far away, it was a highly detailed landscape.  

On closer inspection, there are two men discussing something on the road. 

...Then you notice their dogs.  

Maybe the dogs were just poorly placed, but holy crap.

Some of the modern art was neat.  
The modern stuff tends to be hit or miss for me, as a lot of things are items I would consider an intelligent practice or for fun, not so much something to hang in a museum for others to contemplate.

One of my favorites looked like an ocean from far away, and when close up...  

As you can tell, even right up to it, I had trouble figuring out what the white lines were.  At first, I thought they were white paint strokes in little ribbons, but they were too uniform, so I thought perhaps it was actually string... 
Nope.  Fucking claw marks, man.  Gouged paint in this thing.  Really neat effect.  

The other one I liked a lot was a wall thing involving birds and guns.  

Yep. 

We went to the gift shop (of course) where Rob and I found a little scarab to put in our collection of stuff from things we've done together.  

The plan is to look through said box on our anniversary.  
That'll be fun to figure out what the Hell some of that crap is from.  
Not everything is labeled.  

Then, from the suggestion of a friend, we went to an arcade/bar/food place.  
...Restaurant.  The word is restaurant.  

Said friend handed me a card and a few tickets and I went to town on the skeeball machine.  (Sometimes "Ski-ball" or other names.  Depends where you go.)  

I was rocking it until I was being watched.  BUT tickets were achieved.  Of course they were still only enough for random crap...  

So we got some glorious random crap.  

Ol' Benjamin there is on a pack of cards.  We didn't win money.  

Good times.  

Goooood times.