"Dude, it's cool!" Susan Toone, Part 5: Mad Museum Mash

Editor's Note: MOD Voices guest blogger Susan Toone continues with a look at "other cool stuff" in the Museum of Discovery

Fascinating though Kind of Creepy:

An eyeball is filled with fluid called vitreous humour, which gives it its shape. So are people who lack senses of humor short on this stuff?

The average brain weighs three pounds and is 80% water. I don’t know what to make of that, except I’m wondering if I can improve my IQ by drinking lots of water like I’m supposed to.

Old-fashioned dentists thought that tobacco rubbed on teeth prevented toothache. And you don’t EVEN want to see their tools. But you do want to see the giant set of teeth, although to my great disappointment, they don’t clatter. I never tire of clattering teeth, just as I never tire of hearing someone ask “Will you call me a cab?” and I say, “Okay, you’re a cab!”

We saw a reproduction of Spanish armor – a chain mail poncho-type things that some poor guy drowned in. He was apparently trying to climb out of his canoe and fell back into the water. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get back up!” This is a preventable tragedy happening too often at medieval fairs when the actors try to “keep it real.”

Thanks to a camera that senses heat, I know what I look like to a snake – my whole head looks tasty except for my glasses. Worse, I know what my children look like. This might explain why a mother cobra sometimes builds a nest for their young, only to leave them to prevent her from eating them. Because they look pretty creepy. As Warren Zevon sings, “it ain’t that pretty at all."

A skull with a big hole drilled in the top was part of a display on how mental illness was treated in the past, the thought being that drilling such a hole would let demons escape. What kind of clowns at a medical convention, upon being presented with this idea by Dr. Harold “Mad Sadist” Malevolent, would say “Yeah, I like that idea. I think my mother-in-law has some demons in her head.” And trust me on this, the screenwriter who wrote Silence of the Lambs obviously visited the exhibit – remember Hannibal’s Lector’s mask? Not made up.

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 Just Plain Cool

 You can:

 • Put on a show in a small TV studio! My youngest daughter, bossy by nature, looked right at home there as a producer, barking directions at her friend who announced the weather. Then they changed the settings, and she announced the news underwater. Without holding her breath or her eyeballs bursting.

 • Build a working circuit! I could not do this, due to my limited scientific ability, but I know you can. Electricity scares me. For example, my husband and I received an espresso maker as a wedding present 23 years ago, and I got tired of hiding after I turned it on for fear of it exploding. I gave it away.



 • Watch forces of nature without being scared out of your wits. You can watch a tornado gather force into the dreaded funnel shape and skip lightly over the surface. I never really understood how it gathered force, or how the hurricane worked either. For the hurricane to work, you press on a big, circular wet thing and steam shoots out in the shape of a mushroom cloud – it is very cool. For the best example of both seeing a mushroom cloud up close and personal and how crazy our world leaders can be, see Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

My youngest daughter remarked that after the hurricane ran out of steam, “it “kind of looked like the smoke the Hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland blew out as he spoke to you.”

Susan Toone lives with her husband, two teenagers and two dogs in Little Rock. The husband and dogs are great; the teenagers are driving her crazy. She works at Acxiom and has a blog.


Editor's Note: This concludes our mini-blog series by Susan Toone. Thanks Susan!