A Night of Fun at Creepy Campus Crawl

For weeks, the word – or words – of the day have been “Creepy Campus Crawl,” the Halloween event that the museum puts on every year.  This year’s theme is Nintendo, and the museum is flush with talk of Mario and Luigi, Pokemon and Zelda, stations and activities.  Just as they have every year, children start to pour in right at 6:30, dressed as characters from Nintendo, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, or whatever character they can dream up.  (One child comes dressed as a vampire bat.)

 In the front lobby, they meet some of the most classic Nintendo characters - entering a raffle with the Ice Climbers, throwing fireballs with Mario and Luigi, meeting Princess Peach.  Packing peanuts – the snow that the Ice Climbers have to climb – litter the floor, to be tracked all around the gallery, but nobody seems to mind.  Today, the museum is hardly the Museum: it’s instead a place of characters and costumes and candy, and everybody knows it.

When they leave the front lobby, the children make their own Pokemon in the Devonian and Pennsylvanian, aided by the Pokemon trainers, who have put together an impressive array of characters.  Although the Ice Climbers might not be familiar to all children, Pokemon is hard to miss.  Elbowing each other for room at the tables, the children color in their own Pokemon cards – some very detailed, some a quick dash - and then hand them to their parents to carry.

 

In the Meskwaki area, decorated with fluffy clouds to represent the world of Kid Icarus, the children wrap aluminum foil around paper plates to make mirror shields, assisted by Palutena and Medusa, the main goddesses from the game.  When they finish, Pit, the game’s hero, shines a flashlight on the shield to make it shine, and the children head to the Ecology section to build rockets with the Pikmin.   

There’s more fun to be had downstairs – where the Geoscience department has set up shop – and in Bird and Mammal Halls – where you can find rupees with Zelda and play skeeball with the cast of Earthbound – but no matter where you decide to go, there’s always something to do.  Each child leaves with an assortment of crafts – shields, Pokemon, rockets – and an evening well-spent.  And since Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year, it’s only the start of an extravaganza.

 

Halloween is that rare holiday where, for a few hours, you can pretend to be someone else.  No matter the strength of the disguise – after all, the scary looking ghoul is always a child underneath – it’s about the fun of playing pretend, of dressing up, of trick-or-treating and pumpkins and ghosts.  For a few hours, you can climb with the Ice Climbers or write yourself into the Legend of Zelda; it only happens once a year, which makes it all the more worthwhile.  

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Night at the Museum Visits Space!

It’s a cloudy night in Iowa City, but that’s not stopping this Friday’s Night at the Museum, which focuses on the night sky and stars.  The usual standbys are on the schedule – pizza, Hageboeck Hall of Birds and Mammal Hall in the dark – but today’s program features a visit from the Cedar Amateur Astronomers, who’ve brought their telescopes all the way from Mount Vernon and set up shop on the Pentacrest.

Before there’s any stargazing, however, the astronomers have lots to teach – people have been gazing at the stars for hundreds of years, all of them wondering what was out there.  The children learn of astronomers of old times – Eratosthenes, Ptolemy – who thought the planets revolved around the sun.  They learn of astronomers of (slightly) more recent times – Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler – who built telescopes to see farther into the sky.   (The children play with cardboard telescopes for several minutes, looking at everything they can.) It’s easy to think of astronomy as unfixed, unchanging, that for all of history people have looked out onto the stars and come to the same conclusion, but our conceptions of astronomy are constantly changing, as we learn more about the moon and the sun, the constellations and the brightest of stars. 

After a jaunt through Mammal Hall and some snacks in the Biosphere Discovery Hub, the children don their fall jackets and head outside to the Pentacrest, where the astronomers have set up two telescopes.  It’s cloudy, so there aren’t many stars; instead, the children use the telescopes to look right into the Old Capitol.  (Still, some of them find Venus, shouting, “It’s Venus!” and “Hi, Venus!” as they wait.) Not all of them have used telescopes before, and they come back for second and third looks, captivated by the view the telescope gives them – they’ve all seen the Old Capitol before, but not this way.

As soon as everyone’s back in the auditorium, the astronomers load a computer program that’ll let the children see the stars without clouds.  Once they understand what they’re seeing, the children want to see everything – they want to see the stars in all the seasons, from every angle.  The computer program also maps lines on top of the constellations – sometimes the constellations are hard to pick out, composed of bright stars and some very dim ones – and once the astronomers show this feature to the children, they’re hooked.  It’s nature’s very own game of connect the dots, and who can pass that up? They want to see the Big Dipper, the Northern Star, Sagittarius and Gemini, the bear and the fish; they even want to see Andromeda, the closest galaxy to ours.

There’s something about the stars that’s impossible to ignore – why else have we looked at them for so long? We love mysteries – how we love the thrill of the unexplainable – but what’s more, we love to solve them.  Yet the night sky is that one mystery that can’t be solved.  We’re finding clues, making patterns, but the real answer is forever hidden.  And maybe that’s okay. 

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Ethnographic Collection

When it comes to the museum’s collections, Rusty tends to steal the show.  He’s always the first animal we think of, followed by the other animals and birds scattered across the museum galleries: when people ask me what’s really at the museum, I always tell them about the walruses in Mammal Hall, or Dunky, the Devonian age fish in Iowa Hall (after Rusty, of course).

But if you take a trip around Iowa Hall, you’ll find a whole host of other artifacts in the archaeology section – clay pots, beaded jewelry, and who could forget the bear claw necklace? 

And although we’ve written of the birds and animals in museum storage, there are also plenty of ethnographic items in the museum vault, right next to Hornaday’s birds.  Open up the white drawers and you’ll find items from all kinds of far-flung places: beaded vests, ceremonial objects, children’s playthings.  They come from multiple continents – places hard to get to, or hardly there at all – and decades long gone.  Most of all, they come from cultures I’ve never seen and people I’ve never met: looking in the drawers is looking at another place and time.  And wherever, whenever, the item comes from, it’s always somewhere very different from downtown Iowa City or its surrounding corn (and soybean) fields. 

We put a lot of stock in the written word: at museums, I always search for the paragraph or two of explanation accompanying an exhibit, sometimes before I’ve even glanced at the objects.  And the shelves of memoirs and autobiographies at the local bookstore speak to our faith in the written records people leave behind. But these artifacts in the museum vault have no convenient blurbs, no letters or diary entries attached to them – maybe a tag indicating where and when they come from, but not much more.  They speak for themselves, and invite us to fill in the blanks.  Who sewed all those beads? Who carved that arrow? Who really used that toy? And why?

Even if we research and learn more about the artifacts – the ethnographic items in the main gallery, for example, all have a sentence or two of explanation – the questions still stand.  After all, every item in the collections has its own fascinating, and perhaps unfathomable, history.  Each item’s been passed from person to person, hand to hand, over the course of months or years, until it makes its way to our collections, so that you or I can wonder where it came from, and try our hands at filling in the blanks.

 

(And that applies to the rest of the collections, too: where’d those walruses really come from?)

 

 

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian