12:46 p.m. - 2003-02-09
Confederama
Now here's something scientific I can get into:
The most recent issue of Science has a little article on plants and animals which have creative scientific names. For exammple: did you know that cartoonist Gary Larson has a louse named after him? Yup, Strigiphilus garylarsoni! My favorites, though, are the trilobites that are named after the Ramones: Mackenziurus johnnyi, M. joeyi, M. deedeei, and M. ceejayi. If you want to check out more funny names, the website is here and click on Entymology.
I've always desperately wanted Bruce to discover a couple of new species of fish so that we could be similarly immortalised. Can you imagine Fundulus brucei and Fundulus ruthi? Ooooh, it would be just fabulous!!
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Yesterday I just had to get out of Dodge. Sometimes Huntspatch is just too small a town, especially when it's just a tad too cold to be mucking around in the yard.
In the end we headed to Chattanooga. After an hour or two of driving around aimlessly and reading historic markers (did you know that the Spiritualists had a big camp on Lookout Mountain in the 1880's?) we wound up at a goofy little museum called "The Battle of The Confederacy".
"Confess!" I demanded of Bruce. "You really want to go, don't you?!!"
He looked sheepish, but confessed that, yes, he did want to go. Bruce is a sucker for Confederate tourist traps. This is because he has Confederate ancestors. I, on the other hand, have Union ancestors. In fact, I have Union ancestors who, it turns out, were actually shooting at Bruce's Confederate ancestors in various battles. We find this sort of goofy, and so do my parents.
Bruce's father, however, would not find this goofy. He would probably find it infuriating, so we've never told him.
Anyway, we allowed ourselves to get sucked in to The Battle of The Confederacy. This particular tourist trap actually used to be called Confederama but recently underwent a face lift and a name change, probably in an effort to sucker the Yankee tourists as well as the rebel ones. It consists of a humongous gift shop with a tiny little museum in the back. The museum has display cases full of artifacts found on various battlefields around Lookout Mountain - things like bullets and buttons and a broken porcelain doll head and a really blown out canteen.
But the real "attraction" is a little theatre at the back of the building which has a big diarama, sort of model railroad style, of the battle of Lookout Mountain, complete with little tiny Civil War soldiers handmade in South Africa just for the show. The soldiers aren't as little and tiny as the houses though, which are about the size of matchboxes and give the impression that this particular Civil War battle was fought by legions of mutant giants.
We took seats in the front, since we were the only ones there. The lights dimmed. I was immediately disoriented. "Bruce, the sign says that part of the diorama is East? Isn't that West?"
"No, because we're looking South."
"Huh? Then isn't that East?"
An authoritarian male voice booms and fairie lights set into the diorama start blinking to show various points in the seige and battle. As the story continues the voice gets more overwrought, describing "The sulphurous fumes that call up visions of Hell!" and "The Yankees, crazed with joy, overun the former rebel stronghold!" More and more lights blink on and off. Finally, a pitched battle occurs, and the fairy lights go off like a bunch of fireflies on speed! The Yankees have won!
"Hooray!" I shout. Bruce looks grumpy.
I resisted the urge to run back into the museum shouting "We won! Go Union!!" which I could tell from all the rebel paraphenalia would not have made a good impression.
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