Journey begins

Went to the Melbourne Museum today - saw the skeleton of a "Great Elephant Bird" (aepyronis maximas) which looks suspiciously like a moa. Apparently this 3 metre tall flightless bird hails from Madagascar, which is interesting to me as it seems likely that there some of that neat-o parallel evolution occurring there. Parallel evolution appeals to me because it seems like evidence of logic in a rather chaotic world. Actually, parallel evolution also appeals to me because it seems like evidence of a total lack of logic in a rather chaotic world.

In the Melbourne Museum you can see big ole stuffed Pharlap. It's unsettling - he looks so haunted, as though the indignity of being in a glass cage being photographed by indifferent field-tripping* school children ineptly flirting with each other and surveying him as an afterthought is too much to bear.

He should be out in a pasture, decomposing (or decomposed by this stage), his flesh rotted and his molecules being absorbed into the dirt. You know that bit in Hamlet where he harps on about how a dead king left in the earth may be fed upon by a worm and then turn by a fish, and the fish caught by beggar and thus a king may go through the entrails of a beggar - there's a logic and a poetry to that cycle. The strength, character, soul, all serves to animate and power someone or something else. It's ridiculous and sad the erstwhile Pharlap isn't powering the legs of a toddler somewhere or causing marigolds to bloom.

Museums are frequently morbid and fascinating temples to mankind's stupidity and curious sense of what is appropriate.

*"field-tripping" school children is not a euphemism for wee pupils running around high on mushrooms, by the way.