2.17.2009

Day Once Again Saved By Raptors

I just got back home from a surprisingly unfun collegiate field trip, and I feel the need to share this amazing book that I discovered along the way with you all.

For my signage and exhibition class, we drove out to a creepy history museum that was connected to a rundown one-room schoolhouse that I'm about 90% sure was either haunted or taken over by spiders. The point was to look at how exhibits are set up, note how large writing on the walls is, and to gather other miscellaneous information that might help with trade show design. What I didn't count on, however, was the dinosaur factor.

I had just blocked the world's biggest yawn and rocked boredly back and forth on the balls of my feet for the millionth time, and I didn't have much energy left. Things looked bad--my first thought was to try to sneak away from the tour guide and his rambling, incoherent story about how the founder of my college was somehow involved with history, but I knew that would never work because there was absolutely nothing interesting to busy myself with in the museum. It was arranged like a maze of lame artifacts, boring photographs of things from the past, and a bunch of stupid junky mannequins dressed in Little House On the Prairie getup. The only room that might offer salvation was the one we'd entered through--the gift shop.

I quietly backed up from the crowd of students and ducked behind a corner. From there I moved from room to room through the horrifying labyrinth of boredom, and finally emerged in front of--you guessed it--a stack of dinosaur chapter books.

Amazed, I picked one up called Raptor's Revenge. I opened to the first page and read aloud, "A mysterious man was crouching in the bushes and watching the front of the museum and was, focused on a boy tying his shoes." Undeterred by the blatant typo that a quick once-over by any half-blind editor would've filtered out, I read on. The story was apparently about some guy named PaleoJoe (yes, Joe was capitalized mid-name) who was trying to do battle with a raptor or something. I didn't think it was worth the $6 asking price to finish the story, but I can say with near perfect certainty that I already know what would have happened at the end anyway: PaleoJoe and a raptor are in a showdown in a kitchen, and Joe has to hide inside something and use reflections on the shiny metal door across from him to trick the raptor into headbutting an oven. That's the only known way to beat them, after all.

Long story short, I almost had to declare this my first uncool field trip of all time, but thankfully, raptors saved the day once again. Seriously, is there anything they can't do?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lmfao! Jurassic Park!!! <3

That's really hilarious though. I've never been on a college trip :(. One of my professors, however, is giving us Thursday off to do whatever want. He's a nice chap.

Jacklaw said...

I'd say that totally counts as an unstructured field trip! I mean, you probably won't run into any dinosaur chapter books during said trip, but you can't win em all, right?

Anonymous said...

That's my motto: "Win some, lose some." Haha.

And yeah, I totally agree. Things should definitely be decided according to video games. :-p