#SummerSlump, part 2 [August 2018]

This month, everyone’s favorite MLS disaster returns with four more ways to disappoint their fans, their club, and themselves.

August 4, 2018, at Orlando City SC, 3-3 T
They started promisingly. Juan Agudelo scored early off a Brandon Bye long throw. Yes, a long throw in. Christian Penilla doubled the lead as a result of the Revolution pressing Orlando. Orlando scored an open play goal and a set piece goal. Teal Bunbury came on as a sub and immediately made an impact by scoring to put the Revolution ahead again. And then in the fourth minute of stoppage time, Orlando scored the last goal of the game off a set piece. Stoppage time set piece goal against the Revolution. Never heard that one before.

August 11, 2018, vs. Philadelphia Union, 2-3 L
Another day, another loss. The Revolution went down two goals in the first half, came back to tie the game in the second half, and lost in the 76th minute when a penalty kick was called against them for a handball in the box. Andrew Farrell scored his second goal, Wilfried Zahibo got his fourth off of a Diego Fagundez free kick, and Antonio Delamea was called for the handball.

August 19, 2018, at DC United, 2-0 L
I missed this game because it was nationally televised and not shown on ESPN+. I’m not sad that I did, which is kind of sad. Scott Caldwell got sent off for a second yellow for the first time in ~5 years in MLS. I’m not even mad. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of a soul-sucking losing streak, there’s nothing you can do but slide tackle someone with excessive force.

August 25, 2018, at Philadelphia Union, 0-1 L
This was a bit of a lackluster game. Philadelphia’s lone goal was scored on a breakaway that looked offside. The linesman raised his flag but the ref never blew the whistle, so after video review the Union were awarded the goal. Classic case of play to the whistle, but I will say that this was different from Bunbury’s possibly offside goal against Sporting Kansas City earlier in the season because of the time and space between the non-call and the ball in the net. It felt like the ref was about to blow the whistle any second, and Matt Turner did come off his line to try and make the save, but knowing the Revolution one of three things would have happened: 1) Turner touches the Union player, who collapses in agony instantly, and gets a red card, 2) Turner attempts a save, but looks so ridiculous that he ends up on that weekend’s compilation video of the “10 dumbest goalkeepers” and goes viral, or 3) he kind of tries to save the shot, misses, and the Revolution lose to the Union for the second time that month. On the bright side, new signing Michael Mancienne looked pretty solid in defense.

And so the Revolution fell to 7W-10L-8D, with an August record of 0W-3L-1D. They looked good for stretches (when they were scoring) against Orlando and during the first Union game. The rest of the time they were making some of the same dumb mistakes they’ve been making for the past three (four?) years. They don’t even necessarily look terrible all the time. They just do things like leave runners completely open in the box on corner kicks, and in the end, if you put the ball in the back of your opponent’s net more times than they put the ball in your net, you win. Amount of possession, number of shots, shots on goal, saves, and looking pretty don’t matter.

Pinto, kidney, fava, Navy

Featuring Cloud Gate (aka the Bean). And pinto, kidney, fava, and Navy are all . . . types of beans. Ha, ha; I’m hilarious, I know. Our travels in Chicago brought us relatively close to Cloud Gate pretty much daily. I took every opportunity to visit the Bean. And the rest of this post will be nothing but pictures of Cloud Gate, because this is exactly the kind of content you should expect from me by now.

Sunny afternoon Bean

Cloudy evening Bean

Quiet(er) morning Bean

Cloud-containing Bean

Foggy side Bean

Donut Day

On our last full day in Chicago, we did not visit a museum, but I did get a donut. We took the train to the Wicker Park/Bucktown area and discovered a donut shop upon exiting the station. I had a chocolate dipped old fashioned donut. I don’t regret getting this donut, but it might have been even better plain because the chocolate was a little overpowering. Turns out June 1st is National Donut Day, so we also got a free glazed donut that I ate the next day. Still good.

We did a self-guided architecture tour around Wicker Park that my mother got out of a physical guidebook. Yes, they still make those. Yes, people, including my family, still read those. My newfangled cellular device is barely intelligent, I like reading maps, and I’m kind of old and grumpy inside. I don’t like relying on my phone for everything. After seeing a bunch of houses that had no significance for me, we walked around some more and looked at the stores and restaurants before having ramen for lunch. It was pretty good ramen, but I’ve had better in the Boston/Cambridge area.

Back around Millennium Park/Grant Park, we stopped at the library that’s not a library (originally actually a library, now the Chicago Cultural Center). We saw parts of Keith Haring’s Chicago Mural, painted in 1989 by Haring and Chicago public school students. There was also some sort of art, a big dome, and live music of the loud and moderately unintelligible kind. We returned to my brother’s condo for dinner and I watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which was so dumb it was good.

Chicago skyline stitched together in five minutes using Paint

Taken by the Shedd Aquarium/Adler Planetarium

I don’t have a whole lot else to say, so I will mention how we got tickets to all the paid attractions we visited. We opted for the three-attraction Chicago Explorer Pass because based on the activities we wanted to do, this made the most economic sense. The cost is $79 for three attractions ($104 for four, and $119 for five). The prices they list for the things we did are $45.92 for the architecture cruise, $32 for the Field Museum, and $33.95 for the Museum of Science and Industry, a total of $111.87. However, both museum tickets had an extra exhibit/show added to the base price of $24 and $21.95 for the Field Museum and Museum of Science and Industry respectively. But even foregoing the addons, buying tickets individually would be $91.87, so you still come out ahead in this case. Another thing to consider is that you’re limited in what the extra exhibit you can choose is. At the Field Museum, our option was a ticketed exhibit (and I think the mummies weren’t an option); we chose the underground exhibit. At the Museum of Science and Industry, we could pick from one of the giant screen movies; that’s why we saw the ocean show.

The other multiple attraction ticket options are the Go Chicago Card and the Chicago CityPass. The Go Chicago Card is probably the most expensive option unless you’re the kind of person who speeds through museums in a couple hours and are willing to visit 2-3 attractions in a day. The starting price is $109 for one day, but in that day, you can visit as many things as you like out of a list of 28 attractions. Adding days takes progressively less money – I’m kind of wondering now if anyone’s managed to visit all 28 attractions in 5 days ($219) or less. The CityPass gets you into 5 attractions for $106. Three are fixed; the other two have two options to choose from. Note that if you want to go to the Shedd Aquarium, it is not an option with the Explorer Pass, but is included with the Go Chicago Card and CityPass.

To conclude, the Explorer Pass is probably the most versatile for the best value, and was worth it for us on this trip. If I ever wanted to go to the aquarium, I’d probably plan it for a trip when I had time to do everything on the CityPass because tickets for the Shedd Aquarium alone are $40 compared to $20-25 for the rest of the museums. I also haven’t been to the Adler Planetarium, Art Institute, or up to the Skydeck. Also waiting for a good musical to pass through Chicago (or for someone to hand me tickets to Hamilton). Next trip, maybe.

Sue Had It Coming

One of the other major museums in Chicago is the Field Museum, located on Museum Campus along with the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Soldier Field. From Millennium Park, we walked along the waterfront to the Field Museum, entered the museum, and came face to face with Máximo. Máximo is a titanosaur who has taken Sue’s place. Sue the t-rex is currently in storage while a new home gets built for her. We also arrived while a pterosaur was in the process of being hung, which was newsworthy enough for at least one news station to send a cameraman.

Stanley Field Hall, the main lobby of the Field Museum.

Pterosaur to the left, Máximo to the right.

While the Museum of Science and Industry features exhibits containing things people have made, like boats and trains, the Field Museum skews more towards natural history, like rocks and taxidermy. The first exhibit we visited had you imagine that you shrink to a hundredth of your size and explore an underground den of dirt, roots, and insects. We’re going to ignore the scientific implications (hi, Ant-Man) because it’s a cool idea. The exhibit teaches about soil porosity, types of root systems, symbiotic root fungus, and the kinds of insects you might meet.

Just a friendly neighborhood grub.

Next, we walked through an exhibit about conservation, which showed video clips and field notes from an actual Field Museum trip to Peru for rainforest conservation. That led to the Regenstein Halls of the Pacific, featuring objects from and information about various Pacific island nations. From there, we emerged back on the upper level balcony, looked at some of the rocks and meteorites, and then it was time for lunch. Downstairs in the Explorer Café, I uncomplainingly ate yet more museum food before wandering the Field Museum for three and a half more hours.

We returned upstairs to see the gems and jade jewelry. That was followed by an entire hall of plants. We saw maybe three other people in this vast room of pine cones and palm fronds encased in glass. At least some of the seeds were real, but most of the leaves were not. Going through this fake forestry caused us to emerge straight in the dinosaur hall in the middle of the Evolving Planet exhibit. We spent some time visiting with Sue’s friends, then walked backwards through time, watching multicellular land animals devolve into sea blobs and trilobites.

One of Sue's friends, a hadrosaur

Back on the lower level, we covered birds, the cat and dog families, Asian mammals, African mammals, and What is an Animal?. That was the west side of the lower level. The east side contained an extensive exhibit about ancient American civilizations (Mayan, Incan, plus half a dozen others you never knew existed), items from Northwest Coast and Arctic Peoples, and the gift shop. Like the Museum of Science and Industry, you could spend an entire day here and still not see everything. I think we missed a few rooms because of how the exhibits lead into one another, but we saw almost everything in six hours, with a lunch break. I did mention that I like museums, right?

[The post title is a play on the song “She Had it Coming” from (wait for it) the musical Chicago. I wanted to name all the posts about this trip after song titles or lyrics from Chicago, but try as I might, I couldn’t relate a musical satirizing criminal justice to penguins, a U-Boat, or donuts (still to come).]

Scientia et Industria

The first museum of the Chicago trip was the Museum of Science and Industry. I’m going to preface the rest of this post by saying that I love museums. If I have to be vacationing in a city instead of trekking through mud somewhere, museums (and other related attractions) are an acceptable substitute for rocks and trees. Some museums even have rocks and trees inside them. The Air and Space Museum¹; National Museum of Natural History¹; American Museum of Natural History²; Metropolitan Museum of Art²; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston³; New England Aquarium³; Museum of the Earth⁴; Newport Mansions⁵; Casa Loma⁶; Boldt Castle⁷; Henry Ford Museum⁸; Greenfield Village⁸; been to them all, plus more. Do I see the same variations of old furniture, dinosaur reconstructions, rocks, art, planes, trains, and automobiles in all of these places? Yes. Do I care? Not a bit.

[If you’re keeping track of my travels, that would be ¹Washington, DC; ²New York City, NY; ³Boston, MA; ⁴Ithaca, NY; ⁵Newport, RI; ⁶Toronto, Canada; ⁷Thousand Islands, NY; and ⁸Dearborn, MI.]

The point is that even though I’ve seen other model ships, space artifacts, and plasma globes, we still spent six and a half hours seeing the model ships, space artifacts, and plasma globes at the Museum of Science and Industry. We started the day by making our way to the giant dome theater in the space center via the circus and I Spy exhibits. The I Spy rooms were fun; each enclosed area had a scene set up in it, like penguins playing poker, and a list of things to find in the scene. It was basically 3D I Spy. When we reached the space center, we looked around a bit, then saw a show about oceans and fish in the giant dome theater. The Museum of Natural History in New York City has a similar theater where I’ve seen a show about space and stars (twice). I’ve also seen the national parks show at the Henry Ford Museum multiple times, which should surprise approximately nobody at this point.

The draw of the giant dome theater is that the screen is above you and wraps around so that you feel like you’re surrounded by the show. It’s a cool experience to have every once in awhile. After the show, we watched some clips from the Apollo 11 mission as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon (while Michael Collins waited for them back in the command module). The Museum of Science and Industry is also home to the actual Apollo 8 command module. Apollo 8 orbited the moon for the first time and produced the Earthrise photo and Christmas Eve television broadcast where the crew read from Genesis while circling the moon. Of the crew, only Jim Lovell would go on to make another spaceflight, becoming the commander of the infamous Apollo 13 mission, while Apollo 8 was the last mission for Frank Borman and Bill Anders.

The Apollo 8 Command Module

The other main exhibit that we wanted to see was the U-505, a German U-boat captured during World War II. This is probably the biggest unique exhibit in the museum. The exhibit takes you through the events leading up to the capture and towing of the U-boat, complete with animatronics and torpedo sounds. Then the main room contains the U-boat itself, plus things taken from the U-boat such as cans of bread and enigma machines. If you’re doing the whirlwind tour of the museum, and only see a few exhibits, this should be one of them.

U-505

By this time, I was hungry, so we had lunch at the Brain Food Court. Yes, it’s really called that. No, I didn’t see any brains being served for lunch. Like our lunch the day before (and the day after) it was standard museum fare. Sandwiches, soup, salad, noodles, blue jello, etc. I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again – I am not a huge food person. If it’s not too salty, greasy, or expensive, it’s good enough for me. Following lunch, we made our way through most of the rest of museum, seeing the model train, baby chicks, glacier pictures, bicycles, a 727, and the world’s largest pinball machine before calling it a day.

If you really like museums, you can definitely spend a whole day at the Museum of Science of Industry. If you like museums, at least go to see the U-505, the Apollo 8 capsule, the pinball machine, and the chicks. Because how can you resist baby fluffballs?

Fluffiness