Bodies

Attended the Bodies exhibit over the weekend. J. has been wanting to see it for some time. I was mildly curious but didn't have any specific expectations. It proved to be very disappointing. First of all, the admission price is a complete highway robbery -- $26/person. I know everything is getting expensive, and major art museums are charging upwards of $20, but this is, in essence, a traveling exhibit on the subject of medicine, and not a very large one at that. But that wasn't the biggest problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was bored to tears. There are very few things that I have no interest in, but medicine and biology in general are right at the top of that short list, and the entire exhibit was basically one long anatomy lesson. The most controversial aspect of the show -- the fact that all specimens were real human tissue, preserved using novel techniques -- had no impact on me one way or the other. To me, they looked plastic. More than once I had to stop and remind myself that I was looking at what used to be a real human being. The exhibit was not without its redeeming qualities, however, the best of which was a display that showed a healthy lung next to that of a smoker. If everyone saw that display, local governments wouldn't have to ban smoking in bars by fiat. At least J. enjoyed the show quite a bit, being the moderate medical geek that she is.

The show was followed by another disappointment -- lunch at Pizzeria Paradiso in Georgetown (the exhibit is housed in the old Newseum building in Rosslyn). I've eaten at both locations numerous times, and the pizza has always been excellent, except yesterday. For something different, we ordered a basic Margarita and added eggplant and pine nuts to it. Well, as usual the eggplant was the problem -- precisely the unfortunate sort of thing that creates eggplant haters in this world. Evidently, they sliced up some eggplant and just threw in on the pizza raw. It was bland, undercooked and tasted like cardboard. The cheese on the pizza was another problem -- there was too much of it, and it was already rubbery by the time the pizza showed up at our table. I hope that it was just an off day that can be attributed to a large Sunday afternoon crowds, rather than permanently slipping standards at one of my favorite restaurants.

On the positive side -- finally installed and tried out the new clipless (SPD) pedals on my bike on Saturday. Fantastic. My big fear initially was being unable to unclip quickly when I needed to stop, but that fear proved unfounded -- it actually took me longer to learn how to clip in than to unclip, but even that was not a problem after a few laps around the parking lot of my building. And the pedals came perfectly adjusted right out of the box, I didn't have to tweak the tension at all. I rode to Bethesda and back, a hair under 20 miles round-trip, and now I'm craving more.