This little piggy…
Wed Oct 25, 2006 20:09 (UTC -5)What a busy week it has been. To recap:
I don’t remember anything interesting that happened on Monday.
Yesterday was Tuesday. Apparently I’m not as far into the week as I thought. But since we get out for the weekend tomorrow, apparently I am as far into the week as I thought. The big thing to happen yesterday was in my Anatomy and Physiology class, where we dissected fetal pigs. Actual unborn pigs, they were. They were apparently close to being born, because they looked pretty much like piglets, except that they still had the umbilical cords and everything.
I was hesitant at first, as you might imagine, but I partnered with TJ, who was very eager to get to work. The teacher said that anyone wishing to study the health sciences in later years should get a big pig. So TJ asked for one, and this porker was, for being a fetus, pretty big. We got to cutting it right away, and though I was kind of irked at first, I decided that I could handle it. TJ was a bit encumbered by his gloves at first, so he decided that he could handle taking them off. So we cut the pig open and checked out all the internal organs.
The biggest thing I had dissected up to that time was a frog, which was fairly easy because it was small and they had color-coded the organs somehow. Doing a fetal pig wasn’t that much worse, except you had to pay attention to what organ you were poking because they were all pretty much the same dull pinkish-red color. The gallbladder was green, though.
After finding the important organs, we decided to cut out the heart and lungs to have a look. But that wasn’t enough for TJ. He wanted to check out the brain. So we cut off the pig’s head and he basically made his way to the brain while I poked around at the heart, unsure of how best to cut it (I had forgotten how the parts of the heart were situated). While I was thinking about that, I saw TJ working with his hands on the pig’s head and then I heard a cracking sound, and he had gotten to the brain. It wasn’t in good condition by that time, but TJ then set his sights to taking out one of the eyes, so he did that with a considerable amount of difficulty. (People who are afraid of having their eyes scooped out with a knife can be reassured that they are very well connected to their sockets in the first place.)
And that was dissecting a pig. Pretty fun, actually, if you can cancel out the gross factor in your mind. The teacher’s aide in the class took pictures of us doing the dirty work, and today we watched a slideshow of ourselves butchering unborn piglets. It was pretty neat.
My old friend Reid has always been into acting, and in this blog I’ve chronicled his progress on the stage. When I last saw him in July, I had heard that he had been to L.A. — Hollywood, I would assume, to try to establish himself in the biz. Then I got word that he was going to go there for a few more months. I hadn’t heard anything about what he was doing there, but yesterday I heard some good news. He’s landed a role in a movie with Mary J. Blige. Apparently this Untitled Nina Simone Project will be released by MTV Films, making it a Paramount Picture. He has three scenes, which may or may not make the final cut (though they’d probably end up on the DVD). The shoot is in New Orleans next month. In a few weeks he’ll be coming home briefly, probably for his birthday. I’ll have to wish him a happy 18th and best wishes on the movie.
Here’s a gallery of Photochroms, which were pretty much colorized photographs that appeared on postcards around the turn of the century.
It must have been hard to narrow down the list of America’s Dumbest Congressmen to only ten.
Two years ago: “Of course, nothing is guaranteed, so don’t take that statement as guaranteed.”
