Bored of suburban new jersey and online video games (ok, not that bored), we decided that the last saturday of every month will be one-day-roadtrip-day, henceforth. You'd think that I'd bother learning some real HTML or let the programmer put these pages up... But you'd be wrong. We were going to head to the Smithsonian for our first trip, but metrorail scared us enough that we decided to wait until we could investigate this strange concept known as "public transportation" further. Instead, we decided to head up to the Brooklyn Museum of Art to see the Geek exhibit.

About a block down from the Museum is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and this weekend was the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival, so we trekked over there and strolled around after all our geeking. We didn't get to take any pictures of the gardens because we had used up all our memory at the museum, and it had never occurred to me that we may need MORE than the 16MB card for a few hours. The gadens were amazing. There were rows and rows of cherry blossoms, and some lunatic teaching origami to the masses. There were also a bunch of japanese women walking around in traditional garb (which really does look better on 12 year old anime girls). There is also a rose garden, which had long aisles of different kinds of tea plants. One was called Talisman tea, and it was seriously trying to overtake the smaller tea plants. I bet that isn't funny to anyone but me. Anyway, the gardens were beautiful and it's a shame we couldn't take any pictures. Now, on to the geek stuff. And don't ask who this poor woman is who got in the way of my picture-taking:


The exhibit contained a bunch of the original costumes, not all of which we were able to take pictures of due to our inability to set a digital camera to medium or low quality. The Vader costume was breathing, which was pretty freaky. It was also under a lot more glass than the other costumes, so there was no real way to get a decent picture. And I had to cut Salacious Crumb out of the Jabba picture since this one woman kept standing in front of everything for inordinate amounts of time, making picture-taking a daunting task. (Spot the hidden ewok and win a prize).



We had to do a little editing on these, but it certainly isn't because I didn't want you all to see I was wearing a t-shirt that said "geek." on it:

Aside from the costumes, there were lots of production models on display. By the way, if you accidentally get a picture without a horrible flash-glare on it, that means joshua took that picture. Bite me, please.



The concept art and storyboards were probably the neatest thing about it. I wish we had enough memory to take pictures of all of it. There was a really nifty concept painting of the Emporer's Throne Room as an underground lava cave. Too bad we didn't have that extra memory card! If you look closely at one of these, you can see Luke's name is listed as Luke Starkiller. Oh, wait, you can't because I had to resize the images because they were set on massive image quality!



Probably the coolest thing was the inside of Vader's helmet:

Tune in for next month's geek installment, where we may or may not brave Washington, D.C. public transport for the sake of enlightenment.