Shedd Aquarium

Roseli and Ethan went to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the world. I didn’t go because I worked, but I didn’t end up getting any sales.

Sensitivity

Ethan’s been healthy and happy, except he gets all emotional over books and movies. He cried when Goldilocks ate all of Baby Bear’s porridge, and today he cried and cried when Nemo played dead in the fish tank. He’s a sensitive little guy, which is good. We don’t have a TV, so he should be an outlier on the statistic that the average child witnesses 8,000 murders by age 8.

Craftiness

Roseli’s been exceptionally crafty lately. It all started with story time, which she leads at the International Village every Wednesday. Yesterday she painted wooden toys, then we made rainbow fish, and today she worked on toilet paper roll superheroes. These pictures are only a small sample of recent work.

Floating Stone Bridge, Made by Monkeys

I asked an Indian man that I met about why Indian women wear the dot on their forehead. He said that he didn’t know how it started, but that it is a tradition that is millions of years old. “Millions of years” seems a bit of an overstatement. He explained that he could justify saying “millions of years” because NASA has scientific proof that Lord Ram was on the earth 1.7 million years ago. You see, Lord Ram had a wife, and they lived in India. Evil King Ravana lived in Sri Lanka, which was only called Lanka then, and it was a land of pure gold. King Ravana stole Lord Ram’s wife and took her to Lanka. Lord Ram wanted to get his wife back, so he announced that whoever would help him build a bridge (not a boat) to Lanka would go up to heaven with him. Who knows how King Ravana got Ram’s wife to Lanka in the first place. So all the monkeys helped Lord Ram build a bridge of floating rocks all the way to Lanka, a bridge which is still there. The sea levels have since risen since that time, of course, but NASA has found the floating rock bridge just as it was built, and they’ve dated it. How old is it? Exactly! 1.7 million years! So there you have it, scientific proof that Lord Ram was on the earth 1.7 million years ago, and why the India man could make claims about Indian culture being “millions of years” old.

I checked Google Earth, and in fact there is a line of shallow ocean floor between India and Sri Lanka. It’s a logical flaw, however, to claim that the NASA photos “conclusively prove” that Lord Ram and his monkeys built a land bridge, as some Hindus apparently claim. Naturally, the story is man’s attempt to make meaning out of the existence of the sandbank chain.