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The British museum is free. So is the British Library. Gotta love socialism. . We woke up at the crack of christ, and had breakfast with d after t left for work. We intended to spend a few hours in the British Library and then go for a walk, but ended up hanging out in the museum for most of the day. . We saw the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta stone, blah blah blah history blah blah you've heard it all. . One of the coolest things we saw looked like roadkill. It was in an Egyptian exhibit, I think, or it may have been from the middle east. It was a woman's head that had been buried in a cave (it didn't say where her body was). The hair, headdress and everything had been almost completely preserved except it was melted, including the skull, into something that you could have picked up with a shovel. It probably was, picked up with a shovel, that is. . Gretel lent me a book called "Stiff" before she left for her new job someplace below the Mason-Dixon line. I have been reading it a few pages at a time recently, and brought it with me on this trip. I pretended that it was work-related, hoping that it would de-sensitize me to many of the gross things that I come in contact with during the course of my work day. . Side note-- one of the items in my library is a watercolor of an amputated gangrenous arm, blue fingernails, wounds and everything. Another is a plaster cast of a a boy's head and the tumor bigger than his head attached to his neck. You get my drift. . 'Stiff' is what author Mary Roach describes as 'Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,' and goes through all of the different aspects of what happens to your physical being after your soul passes on (or whatever you believe happens after that). She goes through cremation, decomposition, embalming, plastic surgeons practicing facelifts, cannibalism. . And reading this book really HAS worked to desensitize me. Before, I would see a dead squirrel on the side of the road and feel like puking and crying at the same time. I had nightmares for months after running over a chipmunk. Today, I saw a dead baby bird by the side of a little pond and-- nothing. Hmmm... . Don't test me. I'm not ready for suckling pigs or racks of lambs or anything like that yet. . The other interesting thing about the British museum was the lack of erotic Grecian urns. . I, as a teenager, was both repulsed and fascinated by the MFA's collection of Grecian urns. Almost all of them had some kind of erotic scene on them, man on man, three ways, scenes involving fantasy animals or real animals, you name it. The British Library's collection had one, and it had been removed for photography. . And seriously, Chippy and I looked, once we realized that something was amiss. . Was it because the British museum didn't display their collection of erotic urns? Or was it because they didn't buy them when they had the chance? Did the MFA collector just end up with the dregs of urns which were the erotic ones, or was s/he just a perv? British society is pretty uptight compared to American society, but it just didn't make sense. . What the Brits lacked in erotic Grecian urns, they made up for in works of genious at the British Library's collection of 'treasures.' On display, they had two Guttenburg bibles. The first folio of Shakespeare. THE Magna Carta. The only surviving manuscript of Beowulf. Jane Austen's glasses. Finnegan's Wake manuscript. The first copy of the Diamond Sutra. Leonardo's notebooks. An 8th century Qua'ran. Scott's last diary entry from Antartica before he died. Lenin's application for admission to the British Museum using a pseudonym. Beethoven's tuning fork. Elizabeth Blackwells anatomical drawings of plants. Handel's manuscript of "The Messiah" Every single thing they had on display was blow-your-mind fantastic. . It was library mecca. It was nerd mecca. It was as close to heavan as PChippy and I could ever imagine. Now I know where I want to go when I become a stiff.