LOL!

Oh My God. You have no idea how much I love this.

That's just fucking awesome. Reminds me of trips to the local Museum of Science and Industry w/ my grandad when I was about 5 or 6.

Except those first times I was there I was absofuckinglutely terrified of the place - but not because of all the science.

It's because all of the buttons to activate the hundreds of animated or audio exhibits were brass and the carpet was incredibly well suited to generating static electricity. And my grandad kept making me push buttons. Every time I touched a button an inch long spark would zot out and electrocute the fuck out of me, scare the living shit out of me and set me bawling and crying.

I went back years later and all of the buttons were non-conductive plastic. Unthinking bastards.

Heh. My dad was telling me about the last time they took him to the Air and Space Museum, they went to his favorite -- the aircraft carrier flight control exhibit -- with all its switches and dials and wheels, and he was the only kid in there (Lucky!). After he directed air traffic for awhile, my dad pointed out that they had a lunch date with his grandma and it was time to go. My nephew said, "Just a minute," and carefully went around the exhibit, turning off all the switches and returning all the dials to twelve o'clock, before declaring that he'd parked the aircraft carrier and they could go meet my mom now.

I grew up in the DC area, and for most of my childhood thought it was the Erin Space Museum, and didn't connect it with the big airplane museum I had been to on schooltrips.

YOU CANNOT LEARN SCIENCE WITHOUT PAIN.



Little kids are miracles.


Today as I got off the subway this kid, maybe 12, rode his bike off the car in front of me, hopped off, picked it up and ran it up the stairs. Then he tried to take it through the rotating floor to ceiling gate/turnstyle. These things have barely enough room to hold the very fat, and no person with any sense of space or geometry would try to take a bicycle through one (a pink/purple girls bike, no less).

I was firing up my brain to yell at him not to do it, but he was working on kid sugar cereal time and his little monkey reflexes were no match for my sluggard nerves, no match at all. So the little dude got his bike and himself well and truely jammed into this metal cage.

It was like the thing was designed to catch a twelve year old boy and a purplish girls bike, like a German man spent six years thinking about it and crumpling up pieces of paper with failed drawings on it. "Mein Gott, it works!"

So I schlepped over to him and said "Brother, you seem to be in a bit of a jam here. Will I call for the jaws of life?"

He said "What?"

"You're stuck."

"How am I going to get out?"

He kind of made the cage into his own little monkey pen and climbed back and fourth and up and down, at one point trying to pull the bike by the handlebars somehow through himself and out of the cage... no dice.

I was mentally preparing the story I would tell at work about why I was going to be even later and also how I would explain to the weary token booth clerk that a child I did not know was stuck in the turnstyle/exit gate and yes that was incredibly stupid and no I had no idea how he did it and yes and no and yes but we should try to get him out because that is what you do, you know? We're all in this together as it were and maybe someday this kid will grow up and get some other stupid idiot of a boy out of some self imposed snare.

Then he reversed himself and wedged himself out of the gap sideways, like a goddamned flounder. It was impressive. A nice yuppie and his 5 year old daughter showed up and I guess the daughter was in some accelerated engineering program at the Little Red Schoolhouse because she instantly had 17 different suggestions about how to get the bike out, as did the dad. None of them worked. The dad assumed the kid was mine and he told me to go get the booth dude and they could maybe have a key that would collapse the bars. I was a little annoyed that the guy thought I would let any kid of mine try to pass something longer than the 45 degree arc of the revolving gate through a gate, but I said yeah, I'll do that. Then the dad and his Buckminster Fuller daughter left and I asked the kid did he want to get the MTA involved in this project?

He just kept pulling on the bike. So I leaned my considerable weight on one of the bars and the kid heaved and the bike came out.

I said "You have to go back that way and go out the buzzer gate ok?"

He left and didn't say thank you, I called after him, "Please try not to do that again."

That kicks ass, D_W. If I were you, I might have pointed out that he was riding a girl's bike after he didn't thank me for my help, though.

Then again, it probly woudna bothered him at all; he'd a said, "Fuck you, mister!" and hightailed it outta there before I could shake an apoplectic fist.

My first thought was not that he was stuck, but that he was stuck with a girl's bike.

OKAY. THAT'S IT. IF I CAN'T PULL MY SCRAWNY ASS OUT TO NYC THIS FALL TO SEE YOU GODDAMN MOOKS IN PERSON, I AM NO MAN AND SHOULD BE WOOD-CHIPPED FOR FUEL.

Hugh Janus, Divine Wino, et al. You rock my fucking world. No one tells better stories on Metachat.

Wino, you are indeed Divine.

Shucks, I just like to sleep late sometimes.

and that kid...was none other than...the 42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton, who would later ensnare himself in another cage of sorts - this time, in turn, with a huffy ladyfriend.

Paul Harvey...Gooday.

So... Can someone please enlighten me about boys' bikes versus girls' bikes right here, right now? Because this is something I never knowed: why are they different? Why do boys' bikes have that high bar that seems ouchy and potentially dangerous for boy junk (or girl junk for that matter, but especially boys')?

Girls' bikes have as their only purpose the prevention of girls showing their underpants when riding wearing a skirt. Usless as a side saddle otherwise. Structurally they are less sound than the proper triangle of a "boys" (or not fucked up bike). There is much less chance of doing an injury to your business however.

Well showing undies and actually being able to ride wearing a skirt, a woman who rides a bike in trousers might as well move in with Gertrude Stein and start smoking cigars this instant.

Lesbo Cigars!

El Perfecto, you got a scissors for me to trim this here Swisher Sweet wid?

:)

Thanks, wino. I should have been able to work that one out, but, d'oh. Skirts. It never occurred to me.

Me neither taz, and I'd never asked anyone this question before. So, thanks!

Hugh and the Wino can babysit for me anytime. "Honey, some men mommy met on the internet are going to take care of you for a little while. No, I've never actually seen them, but I'm sure you'll be fine."