Study Break (i.e. I should take a break and go study)
Saturday, Ethan, Jeff, Rachel and I went to the Asheboro Zoo.
Of course, to get there, we had to be awake, and so Jeff left a message on my machine (I was out of the room already) that consisted of his train of thought culminating in an alarm-clock-like boop!-boop!-boop!-ing. This wouldn't have been a problem if my roommate and his twin brother hadn't been asleep in the room...or trying to be asleep anyway.
In any case, we met up and drove for Two Hours (capitals to give the respect that this time deserves), stopping only once at McDonald's for a quick breakfast. The zoo "soon" stood open before us, and we headed into the mysteries of North America.
NOTE: The Asheboro Zoo is divided into two halves, which are arranged as if they were North and South America and called: 1) North America and 2) Africa.
In an amazing display of foresight, we had forgotten to bring a camera, but the gift shop was right next to the entrance, and Jeff bought an overpriced Kodak Disposable Camera to tide our need for memories over (and so he could, ever so often, take a break from pointing out biology).
We headed into the marshlands section, and the first exhibit was a truly amazing display...of plants. Carnivorous plants, yes, but plants. In a zoo. In fact, that actually was an overarching theme; exhibits frequently listed two species of animals and nine or ten species of plants. I just count myself lucky that they haven't found cage materials interesting enough to tell us about yet.
Once finished there, we headed into the first of many snake pavilions and were greeted by a sign reading, "LOOK UP!" Fortunately, it wasn't talking about the rafters, but we checked to make sure anyway. Next to the pavilion was an alligator pit. Here is one of the two confirmed gators we saw:
How could anyone confuse that with a log, I wondered. We inspected a log on shore and decided that the gators in the water were just not very good at camoflauge. "LOOK UP!" and we did, only then realizing our peril, as the entired pavilion was made of "logs." We hurried on.
Nearby, there was a cougar that yawned as Jeff snapped its photo.
It was then decided that Jeff's dispose-a-click photo-montage needed to be of nothing but animals with their mouths open.
While near the cougar still, I stopped for a mid-morning rest atop a rock alongside one of the zoo's many statues made of melted-together/welded strips of pig iron.
Then it was on to the seal exhibit, where Jeff spent almost five minutes trying to take a picture of the things while they were zipping past. He'd figured out that you have to take the picture at an angle so the flash wouldn't explode back at the lens, but he kept fogetting this and trying to foollow the animals as they moved, negating his careful initial measurements. Meanwhile, an adorable (meaning "cute" here) little girl was so enthused by the underwater window that Rachel tried to make Jeff take a picture of her. They both chickened out on that proposed action, but Kodak knows a Moment when it sees one, and so Jeff accidentally took a reflected shot of the kid anyway.
Up the ramps and stairs we went, passing the river otter exhibit, where Ethan reiterated his desire to be reincarnated as a sea otter (ETHAN: "They just play all day long!" KIT: "Yeah, they play all day long...in between getting eaten by orcas!"). Jeff paused to ogle at the arctic fox, and he tried to get me to pose in front of it (as he obsesses over my affinity for them), but as usual, he'd forgotten how I oonly really have an affinity for red foxes. Grey foxes and arctic foxes and all other types (yes, including kit foxes) just get on my nerves; for some reason, they feel like wannabes. In any case, Jeff, not to be refused, took a picture of the aloof white puffball anyway.
Also along the way, Rachel and Ethan oohed and aahed over the bobcat, and Ethan mentioned how he'd love to own one. The bobcat, however, expressed its views on the matter by turning tail and pissing from two feet away in Ethan's specific direction. Que sera, right?
The next exhibit in North America was Australia.
CHRIS GRIFFIN: HwwwwwhhhHHHAAATTT???
Yeah, well, fine. We'll go with it. Jeff wanted a photo of a wallaby and didn't notice until afterwards that it was sitting proudly next to its own excrement.
Now might be a good time to mention the lesson of the day: Disposable cameras are not like regular cameras. There is a frame in the view of most cameras, and that tells what will actually be in the shot. Not so with disposables. You have to take the picture with just a little of the edges of your subjects lying outside the view in order to not get enormous amounts of blank space around them. Above, you can see lots of white bars; the view didn't see them, but the lens did.
Anyway, we moved on to watch kangaroos through more bars. Actually, at certain points in the day, the exhibit was a walk-through, but we didn't partake. Of course, since the entire kangaroo area was heavily fenced, and since the bars had been slightly bent outward at one point, Ethan and I likened them to the velociraptors as presented in "Jurassic Park" mixed with how kangaroos are presented in Sylvester Q. Pussycat cartoons.
Into the woods we went. The path led us past bears...
and red wolves...
At the red wolf pen, a little boy kept asking his father, "Is that a rabbit?", referring to the big chunk o' fat that the red wolf was so busy pulling at. The father replied that yes, it was a rabbit, yes, it was a real rabbit, but "It's still going to be alive." Either that man's got a strange view of what the afterlife is, or else that poor bunny should have been screaming its cottontail-picking head off. Enh. The red wolf was sure hungry, though, so it's all good.
Continuing on, we came to the first large clearing in the woods, where a sign informed us: "DANGER! Male elk in mating season. They may be violent. Stay well away from the railing." Well, of course, there were only two things we could do, and we did them both:
snarling at the male elk and making hand-antlers...
and making kissy-faces/smooth-talking the female elk...
While we were there, Rachel noticed just how anatomically correct the buffalo statue was, and I was unfortunate enough to be in range of its secondary weaponry.
After that kind of shock, Rachel and I ran deeper into the woods...hilariously.
We might have run forever, if we hadn't realized the danger. After all, we were in the woods...
WE FOUR: "Oh no! We're surrounded on all sides by vertical alligators!"
It was true. With that many toothy "logs" just waiting for us to make a misstep, we slowed down and caught our breath. That's when we found the giant metal spheres sitting on plinths. Nobody was around--unless you count vertical alligators--so we put on a little balancing act. Jeff backed all the way off the path, and I had to severely crop this so I wouldn't have to title it "Where's Waldethan" or something similar.
I think Rachel might be posing like a Charlie's Angel (or possibly a shameless Vaudevillain), but I can't tell for sure.
On we went, until we finally emerged from the woods and were able to take a look at another bear, this one eating a hunk o' fat not completely dissimilar from a rabbit, but more likely something bigger...a hare, perhaps. Jeff kept trying to get a good angle, and Rachel finally sighed, took the camera from him and ducked under the outer rail to get closer, disobeying the rules...just not, as Jeff discovered, the rules posted at the railing (which said not to feed the bear).
And we were off to the desert, the Sonoran Desert. On our way in, we passed a little girl, who was pulling her father toward the desert dome. He asked her what she wanted to see in there, and she replied, "The monkeys! There are monkeys in there!" For the less well-read out there, there are no monkeys in the desert. The father didn't correct her though, and I wondered if he was 1) appeasing her and tired of explaining habitat issues to her or 2) ignorant of the fact that monkeys don't live in the desert.
However, ocelots do.
And Rachel quickly came up with an ingenius plan to steal this one.
The plan mostly consisted of us asking one of the keepers if it would be legal to take the big cat home with us and her replying, "No," but there was also a glasscutter involved, which you can see here if you look really closely:
(Hint: Look at how her thumbs are bent; especially if you're Jeff.)
We finished up at the desert and headed into Africa, only pausing at Junction Plaza long enough to grab a bag of albino animals, AKA animal crackers (credit for joke goes to Ryan Lafitte). Once in Africa, Jeff realized that he was running dangerously low on pictures (I was reminded of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"), and we told him to cut back on taking them. So we do not have a picture of flamingos, a staple of any zoo photo-montage. Instead, I offer this still from Fantasia 2000:
Imagine them without the yoyo, and you're good to go.
We sat for a while by the gorilla pen. Actually, I sat for a while, and everybody else sighed happily at how cute it was that I'd sat down against the window next to the dominant male and how we were looking at one another and understanding where the other was coming from...sort of a "Yeah, but I'm in a cage too; you see that, right?" sort of thing.
My favorite part (which Jeff started to stress over when he saw them, actually) is how you can see my reflection. Because now it looks like I'm part of that gorilla. Duuuuuuuude, that's deep.
Finally, Ethan got us moving again, and we headed into the jungle-bird dome. Jeff spent a good long while setting up the perfect scarlet ibis shot, but disposable cameras don't zoom. Luckily, my scanner does.
We wandered through another dome, where we saw a fennec fox (JEFF: "Kit, stand in front of it! Now!" KIT: "No.")...
...and some kind of ducks (not pictured) that appeared to be beat-boxing (sort of like the sound a refrigerator makes if you push it across a linoleum floor). While Jeff and Ethan watched them, Rachel played a giant board game in which I spun a color-dial and she moved forward Candyland-style up the side of a floor-painting volcano.
We were reaching the end of our journey, and since Rachel and I scared the wrestling lion cubs away with our singing, Jeff 1) didn't get his shot, and 2) will never forgive us (refer here to the word "wrestling"). Thus, he took one photo of Rachel, me, and Ethan in front of the giraffe pen (they all moved away as we got in position)...
and we rode the shuttle back to the top of North America, where we'd apparently parked in Canada (specifically in the F:Fern Lot; why not F:Frog or F:Fiddler Crab, you wonder? Well, obviously (Obviously.) plants are what we were supposed to be there to see.). However, before we got in the car, I reminded Jeff that he wasn't in any of the shots (thumbs and sleeves non-withstanding) and so Ethan managed to get him to smile in front of an alligator block...
...and all it took was Ethan shoving the fake-smiling Jeff backwards hard enough for Jeff to make his "Why are you being mean to me" smile, which looks a lot more natural than his "I keep telling you I'm not photogenic" smile.
We headed home with souvenirs, but not the sketchy otter "statuette" Ethan and I had found on the Clearance shelf in the gift shop. What use did it have? We agreed only one: "otter-shaped butt-plug." That's right, and even it wasn't as bad as the enormous gourd in the playground; that thing was just nasty.
Of course, to get there, we had to be awake, and so Jeff left a message on my machine (I was out of the room already) that consisted of his train of thought culminating in an alarm-clock-like boop!-boop!-boop!-ing. This wouldn't have been a problem if my roommate and his twin brother hadn't been asleep in the room...or trying to be asleep anyway.
In any case, we met up and drove for Two Hours (capitals to give the respect that this time deserves), stopping only once at McDonald's for a quick breakfast. The zoo "soon" stood open before us, and we headed into the mysteries of North America.
NOTE: The Asheboro Zoo is divided into two halves, which are arranged as if they were North and South America and called: 1) North America and 2) Africa.
In an amazing display of foresight, we had forgotten to bring a camera, but the gift shop was right next to the entrance, and Jeff bought an overpriced Kodak Disposable Camera to tide our need for memories over (and so he could, ever so often, take a break from pointing out biology).
We headed into the marshlands section, and the first exhibit was a truly amazing display...of plants. Carnivorous plants, yes, but plants. In a zoo. In fact, that actually was an overarching theme; exhibits frequently listed two species of animals and nine or ten species of plants. I just count myself lucky that they haven't found cage materials interesting enough to tell us about yet.
Once finished there, we headed into the first of many snake pavilions and were greeted by a sign reading, "LOOK UP!" Fortunately, it wasn't talking about the rafters, but we checked to make sure anyway. Next to the pavilion was an alligator pit. Here is one of the two confirmed gators we saw:
How could anyone confuse that with a log, I wondered. We inspected a log on shore and decided that the gators in the water were just not very good at camoflauge. "LOOK UP!" and we did, only then realizing our peril, as the entired pavilion was made of "logs." We hurried on.
Nearby, there was a cougar that yawned as Jeff snapped its photo.
It was then decided that Jeff's dispose-a-click photo-montage needed to be of nothing but animals with their mouths open.
While near the cougar still, I stopped for a mid-morning rest atop a rock alongside one of the zoo's many statues made of melted-together/welded strips of pig iron.
Then it was on to the seal exhibit, where Jeff spent almost five minutes trying to take a picture of the things while they were zipping past. He'd figured out that you have to take the picture at an angle so the flash wouldn't explode back at the lens, but he kept fogetting this and trying to foollow the animals as they moved, negating his careful initial measurements. Meanwhile, an adorable (meaning "cute" here) little girl was so enthused by the underwater window that Rachel tried to make Jeff take a picture of her. They both chickened out on that proposed action, but Kodak knows a Moment when it sees one, and so Jeff accidentally took a reflected shot of the kid anyway.
Up the ramps and stairs we went, passing the river otter exhibit, where Ethan reiterated his desire to be reincarnated as a sea otter (ETHAN: "They just play all day long!" KIT: "Yeah, they play all day long...in between getting eaten by orcas!"). Jeff paused to ogle at the arctic fox, and he tried to get me to pose in front of it (as he obsesses over my affinity for them), but as usual, he'd forgotten how I oonly really have an affinity for red foxes. Grey foxes and arctic foxes and all other types (yes, including kit foxes) just get on my nerves; for some reason, they feel like wannabes. In any case, Jeff, not to be refused, took a picture of the aloof white puffball anyway.
Also along the way, Rachel and Ethan oohed and aahed over the bobcat, and Ethan mentioned how he'd love to own one. The bobcat, however, expressed its views on the matter by turning tail and pissing from two feet away in Ethan's specific direction. Que sera, right?
The next exhibit in North America was Australia.
CHRIS GRIFFIN: HwwwwwhhhHHHAAATTT???
Yeah, well, fine. We'll go with it. Jeff wanted a photo of a wallaby and didn't notice until afterwards that it was sitting proudly next to its own excrement.
Now might be a good time to mention the lesson of the day: Disposable cameras are not like regular cameras. There is a frame in the view of most cameras, and that tells what will actually be in the shot. Not so with disposables. You have to take the picture with just a little of the edges of your subjects lying outside the view in order to not get enormous amounts of blank space around them. Above, you can see lots of white bars; the view didn't see them, but the lens did.
Anyway, we moved on to watch kangaroos through more bars. Actually, at certain points in the day, the exhibit was a walk-through, but we didn't partake. Of course, since the entire kangaroo area was heavily fenced, and since the bars had been slightly bent outward at one point, Ethan and I likened them to the velociraptors as presented in "Jurassic Park" mixed with how kangaroos are presented in Sylvester Q. Pussycat cartoons.
Into the woods we went. The path led us past bears...
and red wolves...
At the red wolf pen, a little boy kept asking his father, "Is that a rabbit?", referring to the big chunk o' fat that the red wolf was so busy pulling at. The father replied that yes, it was a rabbit, yes, it was a real rabbit, but "It's still going to be alive." Either that man's got a strange view of what the afterlife is, or else that poor bunny should have been screaming its cottontail-picking head off. Enh. The red wolf was sure hungry, though, so it's all good.
Continuing on, we came to the first large clearing in the woods, where a sign informed us: "DANGER! Male elk in mating season. They may be violent. Stay well away from the railing." Well, of course, there were only two things we could do, and we did them both:
snarling at the male elk and making hand-antlers...
and making kissy-faces/smooth-talking the female elk...
While we were there, Rachel noticed just how anatomically correct the buffalo statue was, and I was unfortunate enough to be in range of its secondary weaponry.
After that kind of shock, Rachel and I ran deeper into the woods...hilariously.
We might have run forever, if we hadn't realized the danger. After all, we were in the woods...
WE FOUR: "Oh no! We're surrounded on all sides by vertical alligators!"
It was true. With that many toothy "logs" just waiting for us to make a misstep, we slowed down and caught our breath. That's when we found the giant metal spheres sitting on plinths. Nobody was around--unless you count vertical alligators--so we put on a little balancing act. Jeff backed all the way off the path, and I had to severely crop this so I wouldn't have to title it "Where's Waldethan" or something similar.
I think Rachel might be posing like a Charlie's Angel (or possibly a shameless Vaudevillain), but I can't tell for sure.
On we went, until we finally emerged from the woods and were able to take a look at another bear, this one eating a hunk o' fat not completely dissimilar from a rabbit, but more likely something bigger...a hare, perhaps. Jeff kept trying to get a good angle, and Rachel finally sighed, took the camera from him and ducked under the outer rail to get closer, disobeying the rules...just not, as Jeff discovered, the rules posted at the railing (which said not to feed the bear).
And we were off to the desert, the Sonoran Desert. On our way in, we passed a little girl, who was pulling her father toward the desert dome. He asked her what she wanted to see in there, and she replied, "The monkeys! There are monkeys in there!" For the less well-read out there, there are no monkeys in the desert. The father didn't correct her though, and I wondered if he was 1) appeasing her and tired of explaining habitat issues to her or 2) ignorant of the fact that monkeys don't live in the desert.
However, ocelots do.
And Rachel quickly came up with an ingenius plan to steal this one.
The plan mostly consisted of us asking one of the keepers if it would be legal to take the big cat home with us and her replying, "No," but there was also a glasscutter involved, which you can see here if you look really closely:
(Hint: Look at how her thumbs are bent; especially if you're Jeff.)
We finished up at the desert and headed into Africa, only pausing at Junction Plaza long enough to grab a bag of albino animals, AKA animal crackers (credit for joke goes to Ryan Lafitte). Once in Africa, Jeff realized that he was running dangerously low on pictures (I was reminded of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"), and we told him to cut back on taking them. So we do not have a picture of flamingos, a staple of any zoo photo-montage. Instead, I offer this still from Fantasia 2000:
Imagine them without the yoyo, and you're good to go.
We sat for a while by the gorilla pen. Actually, I sat for a while, and everybody else sighed happily at how cute it was that I'd sat down against the window next to the dominant male and how we were looking at one another and understanding where the other was coming from...sort of a "Yeah, but I'm in a cage too; you see that, right?" sort of thing.
My favorite part (which Jeff started to stress over when he saw them, actually) is how you can see my reflection. Because now it looks like I'm part of that gorilla. Duuuuuuuude, that's deep.
Finally, Ethan got us moving again, and we headed into the jungle-bird dome. Jeff spent a good long while setting up the perfect scarlet ibis shot, but disposable cameras don't zoom. Luckily, my scanner does.
We wandered through another dome, where we saw a fennec fox (JEFF: "Kit, stand in front of it! Now!" KIT: "No.")...
...and some kind of ducks (not pictured) that appeared to be beat-boxing (sort of like the sound a refrigerator makes if you push it across a linoleum floor). While Jeff and Ethan watched them, Rachel played a giant board game in which I spun a color-dial and she moved forward Candyland-style up the side of a floor-painting volcano.
We were reaching the end of our journey, and since Rachel and I scared the wrestling lion cubs away with our singing, Jeff 1) didn't get his shot, and 2) will never forgive us (refer here to the word "wrestling"). Thus, he took one photo of Rachel, me, and Ethan in front of the giraffe pen (they all moved away as we got in position)...
and we rode the shuttle back to the top of North America, where we'd apparently parked in Canada (specifically in the F:Fern Lot; why not F:Frog or F:Fiddler Crab, you wonder? Well, obviously (Obviously.) plants are what we were supposed to be there to see.). However, before we got in the car, I reminded Jeff that he wasn't in any of the shots (thumbs and sleeves non-withstanding) and so Ethan managed to get him to smile in front of an alligator block...
...and all it took was Ethan shoving the fake-smiling Jeff backwards hard enough for Jeff to make his "Why are you being mean to me" smile, which looks a lot more natural than his "I keep telling you I'm not photogenic" smile.
We headed home with souvenirs, but not the sketchy otter "statuette" Ethan and I had found on the Clearance shelf in the gift shop. What use did it have? We agreed only one: "otter-shaped butt-plug." That's right, and even it wasn't as bad as the enormous gourd in the playground; that thing was just nasty.