You just made me think of Chinese Cruella DeVille and I can't stop laughing. You monster.

I go every so often, I love it there. I went to the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans before it flooded out and I was surprised by how not too much more impressive it was than Newport.

It's been a few years, I need to go again.

Oh I thought this was the Newport Aquarium in Oregon.. I guess they did have a sharkray petting zoo for a while, but I missed it. :(

But I did get to go to one at the Milwaukee Zoo (by far the best zoo I've ever been to, and that includes San Diego) and they were soooo cute. Of course we went during the week so there were field trips full of kids pretty much forcing themselves on the poor guys, basically hitting them just to touch them as they went by. I wanted to yell at them but I didn't, because that's the Teachers'/Chaperones' job, you know, it's the late '00s so EVERYTHING their kid does is beyond criticism.. my mom woulda pulled me out by my ear if I did something like that.. :/

Anyway they're really cute. They have little snacks you can buy, but usually they just come up anyway if you're calm and patient and just geltly wave your hand back and forth in the water because they just want to say "hi." I must've spent 3 hours at that exhibit alone.

Zest, do you remember the coin op machines that would make you burning hot wax figurines of animals? They were me favorite part of the Milwaukee Zoo when I was a kid.

Ah yes, the old Mold-a-Rama. I still have my Samson figure and for some reason a blue Brontosaurus.

I don't remember wax figures, but my folks used to take me to Marine Life in Gulfport, Mississippi when we lived in Mobile. This was between 1974-1976. Out in the lobby, they had a machine that let you get a molded plastic figure of a tyrannosaurus rex or dolphin. I had one of each.

You had to put a lot of quarters in the machine. It had one of those slide-in things like on an arcade pool table or air hockey game. It would heat up a blob of plastic on a metal stem then two halves of a metal mold would clamp over the blob. I guess it heated the plastic, pumped air into the blob so it expanded and filled the mold, then let it cool a bit. Then the mold would open and the finished piece would drop into a hopper so you could collect it.

Unfortunately, the plastic wasn't super-high quality. It got yellowy and brittle with age. The dolphin got accidentally knocked off the shelf and shattered on the floor. The rex just crumbled when I picked it up to pack it away when we moved to Florida.

Yeah, that's sounds exactly like the machines I'm thinking of. The best part was pulling the boiling hot figurine out of the machine without dropping it or burning yourself!

I was only four or five so my dad grabbed them for me. He's done manual labor his whole life and his hands are like rawhide leather in terms of toughness.

I wish I still had my ex's.. one of her's was a defect, like it was stuck between molds. It totally Cronenberged it up, and she wanted to toss it but I convinced her to keep it.