night at the smithsonian

They're filming the sequel to "Night at the Museum" in D.C. this week, and for some reason this makes me inexplicably happy. I never saw the first movie, but I'm always excited about seeing something filmed in a place where we spend so much of our time. (When we lived in Cambridge, Mass., my husband and I rented every movie about Harvard that we could find, including "How High," which didn't even attempt to make it look as if it were taking place in the Northeast.)

Anyway, we spent Sunday buzzing in and out of museums with our friends Tom and Cece and I passed a display at Natural History that could be a horror movie unto itself. This particular display has fascinated me ever since my kids and I first ran into it a couple of years ago during a mad race to the bathroom. My son stopped dead in his tracks, his bodily needs temporarily frozen.
"What's THAT?
"What are they DOING?
"What is WRONG WITH THAT MAN?"
The exhibit was a little dusty when we first saw it, and I seem to remember red lights, but maybe I made that part up. Anyway, I was glad to be able to share it with Tom and Cece, if not our children, whose eyes were covered. And I snapped a couple of pictures so I could share it with you. At the very least, this helped me grasp why the theory of evolution is a little scary for some people...