Tuesday:
In addition to our regularly scheduled classes and tutorials, this program also includes a few field trips and supplemental lectures. Tuesday’s lecture was about ownership rights of human tissue. The big argument is over whether tissue is still owned once it has been removed from a body. It comes up quite often nowadays because it is so easy to take samples in hospitals. Anyway, the funniest part of the whole lecture was her explanation of an Australian case in 1908 which set some weird precedents for tissue control law. The case is Doodeward, and it goes like this: A traveling “freak-show” owner had a two headed fetus in a jar. As one would expect, many people considered this disgusting. The police seized the jar for reasons of public decency, and when the man requested its return, they returned the jar, but not the fetus, under the idea that one could not own a corpse. The man sued to recover the fetus, considering it his property. Three judges decided the case. The first judge simply said that the man had no right to the fetus because it was legally impossible to own a corpse. The second judge ruled the other way, saying that because the fetus had been preserved in the jar, it was transformed from being a corpse for burial into a product which could be property. So the decision fell on the third judge. Instead of making some intelligent decision on the legal merits of the case, the judge simply decided that the fetus in a jar could be owned because in his mind, it wasn’t a human corpse, it was a monster! As a monster, it could be owned as property. It’s cases like this that make me really wonder about our judicial system.
Wednesday:
Having spent Monday and Tuesday in Oxford, I was beginning to feel restless, so Wednesday I took off for London. I misjudged my timing and ended up taking off for London in a hurry. I probably should have just taken a later train, but I'd already paid for the cheaper pre-booked ticket, and so I arrived in London at 3pm. Unlike last week, I didn't have a backpack or any textbooks on me, so I enjoyed walking around London. I was going to make a plan on the train, but I got distracted by the novel I was reading, and suddenly I was standing in Paddington with no idea where I was going. It was such a great feeling to know that London was there and I could choose whatever I wanted to do! I pulled out my guidebook and quickly decided on the Natural History Museum.
I really like Natural History Museums, and I’ve been to quite a few, in DC, New York, Paris, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Oxford, and now London. I enjoyed the dinosaur exhibit a lot, especially because I’ve been watching Terra Nova, the new Fox show where people in the future find a portal to the past and end up living among the dinosaurs. If you’re interested in the show, I should warn you that its family-friendly approach means that it gets a bit childish at points, but I still enjoy it.
At the end of the exhibit, there were a few pictures speculating on what might have happened to the dinosaurs. I took pictures of two of the less likely speculations:
In the mammal hall, I learned that one-humped camels can be mated with two-humped camels, producing a camel with one large hump. Who woulda thunk it?
I also really enjoyed this next story. You can read it in its entirety below, but the essence is that an amateur archaeologist pulled prehistoric elephant bones out of the ground, reassembled them wrong, then tried to pass it off as a monster that hung from its tusks at night. It makes you wonder, despite how far we've come in science, what we might still be getting completely wrong. There's just so much we still don't know.
After the Natural History Museum, I couldn't resist dashing into the Victoria and Albert Museum to see if the glass chandelier was still there. It is. It's weird for me to think that I stood in that same hall almost nine years ago, the first time I came to England. I feel like a completely different person now, but the chandelier hasn't changed.
Finally I headed back to Covent Garden Market, where the Royal Opera House is. I was pleasantly entertained by the musicians playing at the market, but annoyed when I was harassed for money for the musicians. I understand that they are busking and that it would only be polite to give them money, but I don't appreciate being harassed. It makes me angry and ungenerous.
When I decided to spend Wednesday in London, I purchased a ticket to see the Royal Ballet's Draft Works. Even though last week I was almost sick of ballet, I wanted to see this because it was cheap, I got a student discount, and, most importantly, I got a front row seat. The booking information specified that I would have to look up to see the performance, but when I got there I discovered that the stage was just at my chin, making it comfortable to see the performance. The draft works consisted of ten short pieces by choreographers associated with the Royal Ballet. They were performed without costumes, and the choreographers stressed that these were works in progress. I was afraid that this would be more like modern art, and hard to understand, but I ended up loving it! It was like ballet at its purest. I was so close I could see everything, from the tears in their tights to the sweat dripping off their faces. When the male dancers spun, the sweat coming off them was like a sprinkler! One dancer did a spin on the floor right at the edge of the stage. If he'd misjudged by a foot, he'd have kicked me in the face. It was awesome! One of the dancers fell, and it was shocking, but it made it feel more human, more real. I saw another dancer curse as he nearly dropped his partner.
The choreography itself was really cool. I don't know much about ballet, but this was edgy ballet, and it made more sense to me. Some of the dances had very clear stories, and some just had very cool music. One of the dances had a very latin flair. Another had a western theme, and I'm telling you now, you haven't lived until you've seen ballet set to the theme from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The whole experience was so amazing that I nearly bought a ticket to return on Thursday, but I finally decided I'd better not.
Thursday:
I got back late from London on Wednesday night, so I napped most of the afternoon away on Thursday. When I finally woke up, I didn't really want to walk to city centre, but I'd been thinking about going to see Spamalot all week, and this was my last chance. So I made the long walk to city centre to see Spamalot. (I must say, I absolutely love getting student rates on theatre). While Spamalot was certainly funny, it wasn't even close to the wonder of the ballet from the night before. Plus, I heard the people behind me reading their program before the show, and so I knew that most of the actors were not playing their primary roles. It seemed as though the actor playing King Arthur was unable to perform, and instead of simply substituting an understudy, replacing him had required three other people to change roles in some complex shuffle. Normally this news would not have concerned me much, but since the show was not the best, I spent quite a bit of time speculating on whether the actors seemed nervous.
As I was walking home after the show, I met some of my friends heading the opposite direction, to the College Bar in St. Anne's. I turned around and went with them. College Bar is really cool because the drinks are cheap, the clientele is exclusively students from St. Anne's, and it closes at 11:20, with last call at 11. This means that I can feel really cool about staying til the bar closes, and still get to bed before midnight. Also, they carry Rekorderlig, which is one of my favorite ciders. I really love Oxford, because I'm only an hour away from the bustle of London. I can take off after class, see a ballet, and be home by 1am, or I can stay in Oxford, which is so small I can walk down the street and run into my friends. In many ways, it's the best of both worlds.
In addition to our regularly scheduled classes and tutorials, this program also includes a few field trips and supplemental lectures. Tuesday’s lecture was about ownership rights of human tissue. The big argument is over whether tissue is still owned once it has been removed from a body. It comes up quite often nowadays because it is so easy to take samples in hospitals. Anyway, the funniest part of the whole lecture was her explanation of an Australian case in 1908 which set some weird precedents for tissue control law. The case is Doodeward, and it goes like this: A traveling “freak-show” owner had a two headed fetus in a jar. As one would expect, many people considered this disgusting. The police seized the jar for reasons of public decency, and when the man requested its return, they returned the jar, but not the fetus, under the idea that one could not own a corpse. The man sued to recover the fetus, considering it his property. Three judges decided the case. The first judge simply said that the man had no right to the fetus because it was legally impossible to own a corpse. The second judge ruled the other way, saying that because the fetus had been preserved in the jar, it was transformed from being a corpse for burial into a product which could be property. So the decision fell on the third judge. Instead of making some intelligent decision on the legal merits of the case, the judge simply decided that the fetus in a jar could be owned because in his mind, it wasn’t a human corpse, it was a monster! As a monster, it could be owned as property. It’s cases like this that make me really wonder about our judicial system.
Wednesday:
Having spent Monday and Tuesday in Oxford, I was beginning to feel restless, so Wednesday I took off for London. I misjudged my timing and ended up taking off for London in a hurry. I probably should have just taken a later train, but I'd already paid for the cheaper pre-booked ticket, and so I arrived in London at 3pm. Unlike last week, I didn't have a backpack or any textbooks on me, so I enjoyed walking around London. I was going to make a plan on the train, but I got distracted by the novel I was reading, and suddenly I was standing in Paddington with no idea where I was going. It was such a great feeling to know that London was there and I could choose whatever I wanted to do! I pulled out my guidebook and quickly decided on the Natural History Museum.
 |
| A beautiful building |
 |
| Argh, field trips. At least they were leaving when I got there. |
 |
| Scary |
At the end of the exhibit, there were a few pictures speculating on what might have happened to the dinosaurs. I took pictures of two of the less likely speculations:
In the mammal hall, I learned that one-humped camels can be mated with two-humped camels, producing a camel with one large hump. Who woulda thunk it?
I also really enjoyed this next story. You can read it in its entirety below, but the essence is that an amateur archaeologist pulled prehistoric elephant bones out of the ground, reassembled them wrong, then tried to pass it off as a monster that hung from its tusks at night. It makes you wonder, despite how far we've come in science, what we might still be getting completely wrong. There's just so much we still don't know.
 |
| The entrance to the part of the museum dealing with the Earth |
Finally I headed back to Covent Garden Market, where the Royal Opera House is. I was pleasantly entertained by the musicians playing at the market, but annoyed when I was harassed for money for the musicians. I understand that they are busking and that it would only be polite to give them money, but I don't appreciate being harassed. It makes me angry and ungenerous.
When I decided to spend Wednesday in London, I purchased a ticket to see the Royal Ballet's Draft Works. Even though last week I was almost sick of ballet, I wanted to see this because it was cheap, I got a student discount, and, most importantly, I got a front row seat. The booking information specified that I would have to look up to see the performance, but when I got there I discovered that the stage was just at my chin, making it comfortable to see the performance. The draft works consisted of ten short pieces by choreographers associated with the Royal Ballet. They were performed without costumes, and the choreographers stressed that these were works in progress. I was afraid that this would be more like modern art, and hard to understand, but I ended up loving it! It was like ballet at its purest. I was so close I could see everything, from the tears in their tights to the sweat dripping off their faces. When the male dancers spun, the sweat coming off them was like a sprinkler! One dancer did a spin on the floor right at the edge of the stage. If he'd misjudged by a foot, he'd have kicked me in the face. It was awesome! One of the dancers fell, and it was shocking, but it made it feel more human, more real. I saw another dancer curse as he nearly dropped his partner.
The choreography itself was really cool. I don't know much about ballet, but this was edgy ballet, and it made more sense to me. Some of the dances had very clear stories, and some just had very cool music. One of the dances had a very latin flair. Another had a western theme, and I'm telling you now, you haven't lived until you've seen ballet set to the theme from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The whole experience was so amazing that I nearly bought a ticket to return on Thursday, but I finally decided I'd better not.
Thursday:
I got back late from London on Wednesday night, so I napped most of the afternoon away on Thursday. When I finally woke up, I didn't really want to walk to city centre, but I'd been thinking about going to see Spamalot all week, and this was my last chance. So I made the long walk to city centre to see Spamalot. (I must say, I absolutely love getting student rates on theatre). While Spamalot was certainly funny, it wasn't even close to the wonder of the ballet from the night before. Plus, I heard the people behind me reading their program before the show, and so I knew that most of the actors were not playing their primary roles. It seemed as though the actor playing King Arthur was unable to perform, and instead of simply substituting an understudy, replacing him had required three other people to change roles in some complex shuffle. Normally this news would not have concerned me much, but since the show was not the best, I spent quite a bit of time speculating on whether the actors seemed nervous.
As I was walking home after the show, I met some of my friends heading the opposite direction, to the College Bar in St. Anne's. I turned around and went with them. College Bar is really cool because the drinks are cheap, the clientele is exclusively students from St. Anne's, and it closes at 11:20, with last call at 11. This means that I can feel really cool about staying til the bar closes, and still get to bed before midnight. Also, they carry Rekorderlig, which is one of my favorite ciders. I really love Oxford, because I'm only an hour away from the bustle of London. I can take off after class, see a ballet, and be home by 1am, or I can stay in Oxford, which is so small I can walk down the street and run into my friends. In many ways, it's the best of both worlds.
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