Squid Move Postponed

When I lived in NYC, I had the opportunity to work at the American Museum of Natural History as they were building the new Hayden Planetarium. This was also part of the NASA Digital Galaxy Project to build a map of our galaxy for visualization purposes, which will be the subject of later posts.

I have noticed that every interesting project will also have an interesting meeting, memo, whatever that seems to capture the spirit of a project, or of a place.  This project had many such events, memos, etc, not all of them fun.  But the following email, written here from memory, was one of my favorites.  When I received it, I forwarded it without comment to about 10 of my friends and, unusually, I got a response from every one of them.   One of my friends thought at first that the email was about a "squid movie" that had been postponed.

The name below is made up, I do not remember the name of the person who originally sent it.

_____________________________________________________________________________

To:          all-amnh
Subject:  SQUID MOVE POSTPONED
Date:       July 11, 1999


Due to circumstances that were not entirely foreseen, the giant squid will not be moved on Friday as originally planned.


                     Sincerely, 

                     Rebecca Swanson

                     Research Associate
                     Department of Invertebrates
                     American Museum of Natural History

_____________________________________________________________________________

Smithsonian Article on the Giant Squid

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Giant-Squid-Dragon-of-the-Deep.html

The American Museum of Natural History

http://www.amnh.org/