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Mandarin Buffet

Overheard:

Brad …so I have to leave early today. My seventeen year old is taking out the entire family for dinner.

Peter That’s huge!

Brad Well, to be honest with you, I think it happened because he was hungry. We were driving by the Mandarin Buffet and he asked if we could eat there, and I said no, we were in a hurry. He asked if we could go there if he paid. I said later, sure, and I thought it would pass. But yesterday he reminded me that today he’s taking us all out, and that I should be home in time.

Peter Still, that’s such a step – I mean, taking everyone out. Wow.

Brad I know. So I don’t want to screw it up by getting home late.

Todd cooks, I clean the kitchen. One late night as Todd was preparing dinner…

Todd You missed that spot there on the pot.

Sage Hey, you’re lucky I’m awake at all, much less cleaning.

Todd, grinning Don’t talk with your mouth full.

Friday Paul and I went to see the Body Worlds exhibit at the Science Centre.

Dr. Gunther von Hagens figured out how to preserve human bodies on a cellular level using a technique called plastination. So the exhibit is a bizarre combination of hard science (real blood vessels surrounding a real heart) and art (sculptures made of people instead of stone or metal) and images I wish I’d never seen (the insides of a pregnant woman).

Though it was kind of like when we watched David Attenborough wax rhapsodic over the Superb Lyrebird, a bird that can perfectly imitate a camera shutter and a chainsaw. While I believe that ol’ David was telling the truth, it didn’t seem quite real. Thirty two years of movie special effects can spoil the real thing.

And yet, despite the (false) fakey-ness of the experience, I don’t want to see it again. I’ve never understood cemetaries or funerals. When I die, I expect Todd to promptly cremate me and tell the crematorium to keep the ashes. But I have to admit that using dead bodies as sculpture was a little too much. I doubt that the horse and the baby camel died of natural causes. And I doubt that’s what these people were expecting when they donated their bodies to science.