Mmmm...Glutius Maximus.

This past Saturday I visited the Bodies Exhibit at the Southstreet Seaport Museum (title is linked). I am not a squeamish person, but I tell you, there was 2 minutes in the beginning where I thought I might not be able to go through there. The Bodies exhibit is an exhibit of real people, their bodies have been preserved by replacing all the water with a polymer. The first thing I saw made me really think. A human body where I could see all the bones and muscle and organs that you and I have within. And our muscles look just like meat.

We are meat.

I mean, upon staring at the muscles, i could think of nothing else than the countless cuts of Beef I have consumed in my life. To some degree, it justifies cannabalism for me. I mean, we are animals on this planet, juts like the ones we eat. Animals attack and eat humans, and I certainly don't blame them. And if I were marooned on a cold mountain in the alps after having survived a plane crash, I would not think twice about cutting a slice from my friends ass to survive. We are, after all, just made of meat like any other animal.

But once I was able to put the image of that out of my mind, the exhibit was truly amazing. I learned a lot about my body, OUR bodies. Most interesting was to see what our blood vessels looked like. MAN we have a lot of blood vessels. To see a glowing, floating shape, all red, in the shape of an arm, was really cool. The section on conception and birth, showing the stages of pregnancy from week to week was also amazing. It would make any pro-abortionist think twice about their decisions. When you see how fast we develop into a little tiny person, the size of the tip of my pinky ( I think 4 weeks).

So, if you live in the NY area, you should check it out. If you have a week stomach....don't. Pay the extra $5 for the audio tour, and try not to go on the weekend, it's a madhouse. I'd like to share with you some interesting tid-bits of info I walked away with:

- Muscles provide heat to maintain body temperature. We shiver to warm up.
- If all our muscles could work together, we could lift 10 tons.
- A baby has 300 bones, an adult has 206.
- Children's bones grow faster in the spring.
- The human brain is 80% water.
- Nerve cells create electrical impulses that reach speeds exceeding 270 mph.
- Every drop of blood passes through the heart once per minute.
- There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
- Every woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have at birth, 250,000.
- The largest cell in a woman's body is her egg, the smallest cell in a man's body is his sperm.
- After conception, everyone spends one half hour as a single cell.