Having a gay old time

Honeybuns and I recently visited the National Museum of Natural History, a favourite of both of ours. We started with an astronomy show in the Omnimax theatre, Cosmic Collisions. Rather sensationalistic, but some quite nice computer animations.

Our main target was the exhibition “Rainbow Animals” (yup, that's the original, “Swedish”, name of the exhibition) on homosexuality in non-human animals. They had a couple of (plastic) dolphin pairs in quite explicit positions, but generally the exhibits were just random stuffed animals and we had to contend ourselves with reading about their lascivious natures. They did not show any whelks, but I was much amused to find there is a “Red-faced lovebird”, they must constantly get interrupted at inopportune moments. All in all the exhibition was quite small, but all exhibits were carefully cross-referenced to the relevant peer-reviewed literature, so there is plenty of further reading, should one feel like delving deeper into the subject.



We continued to see the other exhibitions. I've often complained that modern museums are too loud, but now found a very elegant solution to the problem, sound hoods that keep sounds restricted to the listeners standing right beneath them.



In the mineralogy department we found another clever invention: the mineral samples were placed in shelves that could be pulled out, lamps inside lighting up when the shelves were pulled out, very space-efficient and an excellent way to display the rocks.



The museum restaurant on the other hand had gone from indifferent to bad with the latest change of ownership, snagging a chorizo from the hot dog stand outside seems a viable option—for the non-vegetarians at least.

Then, just before we had to leave, we found a most delightful little exhibition on biological diversity, well hidden in the corridor leading to the whale exhibition. Do not miss!