Rain Rain Go Away, Come Again Another Day…
Published by Haseeb April 23rd, 2006 in Personal, SoftballersDue to inclement weather, today’s South Asian Softball League season opener has been postponed until next week. I was really looking forward to beginning the season. But oh well, the league will have to wait another week till they all lose to the Softballers.
Nonetheless, today marks the end of my spring break. Tomorrow I’ll have to buckle down and get back to work inshallah. But I’m not complaining or sad. Alhamdulillah I was blessed to have a very restful and productive Spring Break. Although I didnt travel anywhere, I got to spend time with many great friends I havent seen in almost a year, and also visit/attend certain great events/exhibits.
Aside from the couple of Mets games I attended, on Thursday, I checked out the Bodies Exhibit with Masood. For those of you unaware of this exhibit, its an amazing exhibit by some Chinese scientists preserved human cadavers using breakthrough techniques preserving human tissues and organs to unprecedented details. All human organs, tissue, vessels, nerves, and muscles were exquisitely preserved. In fact, in the circulatory system section, they had preserved all the vessels of the body by itself, suspended in a tank of some liquid. In the embryology section, they had real fetuses, from days old up to 32 weeks old (like about half a dozen of them). From the perspective as a medical student, its an invaluable learning experience to see these fetuses at their various stages of development, I couldn’t help but wonder how they obtained these fetuses… :-/. There were also bodies cut into very thin cross sections, both horizontal and vertical. Overall, a great learning experience. Inshallah, definitely worth checking out again. This exhibit is supposed to run in NYC through the end of the year.
After the exhibit, I chilled with Masood at the South Street Seaport, and subhanallah that place is really beautiful. We had great weather that day (sunny and 80ยบ). And later that evening, I got to chill with Saleem at NYCOM, and then (FINALLY) went back to visit STONY BROOK.
At Stony Brook, we played Football (I’m glad they’re continuing the Thursday Night Football tradition. I crashed there that night, and the following day played Softball (continuing the After-Jummah Softball tradition). Also on Friday, it was nice to see a familiar face, Sarhan, deliver khutbah. Sarhan is now married with a daughter! Subhanallah!
It was great catching with many people I haven’t seen in a while. I really do miss Stony Brook, but Alhamdulillah, I’m very thankful for those four years.
WE MISS U TOO, HASEEB!!! U SHOULD COME OVER TO SBU MORE OFTEN…
bodies exhibit is awesome, i went on wednesday
this summer is gunna be crazy at stony
crazy lame?
Yeah the BodyWorlds exhibit is amazing from what I hear. Starting with our class last year, NYUCD did away with dissecting cadavers and began using these plastinations for their Anatomy course. They invited the founder of BodyWorlds (and the whole plastinization process), Gunther von Hagens to our school to lecture a few of our classes. This guy is a straight up nut. Seriously, one of those really old, eccentric men who’s totally obsessed with their work. And he’s old school German (his father was a Nazi general or something) so he’s really blunt and rude when dealing with other people. In one of our conferences he said he was “disgusted with us” because we answered a few questions incorrectly. He said he would be “ashamed to ask his nurses in Germany these questions” because they were so easy. What a jerk.
But von Hagens aside, the plastinations were really amazing. I mean they preserved even the tiniest blood vessels and nerves…and you could see them with such clarity! Full body sections in coronal/transverse/saggital planes…they were really excellent instruments for studying human anatomy. And like you said Haseeb, they had cross-sectional slices so you could see how different organs related to eachother/space at various positions in the body. Awesome stuff.
Most of the bodies were obtained from Chinese prisons; his main factory is in China. When he told us where they got the bodies from, there was an awkward silence, and he immediately moved on to a new topic lol. I guess he has some contract worked out with the Chinese government or something. It’s actually pretty sad when I think about it.
But yeah, like I said the guy is obsessed with his work. NYUCD had some crazy ones on display. There was one where a woman was riding her intestines like a witch on a broom. He’s plastinated a lot of animals too…I remember seeing a plastinized gorilla in the BodyWorlds catalogue. He said his next big project was to work on an elephant.
But what’s really eerie are his plans for after he dies. Von Hagens wants his body to be plastinized and put on display so that it looks like he’s plastinizing the body of his own father (who will also be plastinized). I think his father is still alive believe it or not.
As far as the BodyWorlds exhibit itself, I don’t think I agree with putting human bodies on display unless it’s strictly for learning purposes. Like you said bro, this stuff can be invaluable to students…but I don’t think it’s right to display them for any Tom, Dick, and Harry to see. Islam has strict rules on how to deal with the body after a person dies…I don’t think displaying them for entertainment is one of them. :-/
I would say you had a very productive spring break. PEACE
how do u keep such a cool blog and do so much stuff (softball) while in medschool?!?!