Here is the requested story of our recent company trip to Washington. Kudos to anyone who understands it--every time I told someone about it, I seemed to see their eyes glaze over halfway through in the maze of agencies, acronyms, TV shows and horribly deformed fetuses. Perhaps it will be more digestible in written form.

So the National Museum of Health and Medicine (previously known as the War Museum), which is part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (the best place in the world to send tissue what got somethin' wrong with it for analysis), on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (where they send most or all of the amputees and other wounded from Iraq), wanted our robot in their museum. We were supposed to have already done the first real procedure and then bring the robot down for a victory lap, its historical significance and museum-worthiness at least partly established. But it had been delayed, and so instead this was a strange blip in the process of getting ready for the procedure.

Getting down there the transportation arrangements were strange in the extreme. Six of us were going. The robot had to be brought down, and for that we rented a cargo van which had only two seats. The boss wanted to ride his motorcycle down. P. was driving her Porsche Boxster, which could uncomfortably fit one more person of normal size. That left me to take the train. I was glad I had done so when P. and S. arrived with awful sunburns from riding with the top down the whole way.

I find the Museum to be a fascinating place. Others had different words for it, such as "I...I don't want to see any of this." Being attached to the AFIP, there's a lot of pathology on view. One of the biggest draws are several items associated with Lincoln's assassination: some fragments of his skull, the doctor's sleeve with Lincoln's blood on it, a lock of his hair, the bullet that killled him, and the probe used to locate it. A favorite of one of the curators are the leg bones of Daniel Sickles, a Major General in the Civil War who had his leg sent to the then-recently established museum after it was shattered by a cannonball, and in later years often went to visit it in the museum, though he was disappointed that they had disposed of his foot (the rest of his life is equally amusing and can be found here). Then there's a preserved elephantiasis-afflicted leg, the world's largest hairball which took on the shape of the stomach in which it was lodged, a preserved brain with spinal cord still attached, and several fetuses with horrible ailments such as anencephaly (no brain). They also have lots of really nice microscopes! The museum director's name is Dr. Noe, which is really pronounced No-eeh, but she refuses to correct anyone who calls her Dr. No.

The black-tie affair that we were there for was the AFIP's annual Ash Lecture, coinciding with the opening of a new collection for the museum, of which ours and one other device were the first items. This year the lecture was being given by two people: David McCallum, an actor who used to play Russian agent Illya Kuryakin on the 60s spy TV show "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.", and who now plays a medical examiner on the show NCIS, a pseudo-CSI offshoot about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service...(pause for breath) and a real medical examiner named Craig Mallak. The lecture consisted of watching clips of NCIS followed by comments from Dr. Mallak about the show's realism. The lecture hall filled up so we sat in the overflow auditorium and watched other people watch it on a video feed. This left the question of whether we should stand up when the people in the main room were asked to, for example when a military brass band played some songs. No one would know if we didn't. But it was a classy crowd and it was silently decided that we should.

The first NCIS clip showed the scene after someone had died aboard Air Force One. There was the classic squabbling between agencies, until the NCIS agents and a Secret Service agent somehow locked out the FBI and 'hijacked' the plane to take the body back to where they could analyze it. I had some trouble myself with the realism of this scene, but Dr. Mallak didn't comment on what I thought was most obvious. There was also the typical lionizing and mythologizing of the agency concerned, with some official solemnly saying "I'll do what I can...but I can't control NCIS." I think in the real world the dialogue might have been more like "Who the @#$! is NCIS?" In later scenes we saw his punky, attractive young assistant, and heard many more lines of stupefyingly obvious dialogue that is presumably meant to sound clever. "What is this?" "It's a flash memory card sir, for a digital camera." "Why the devil did he swallow that?" "He was trying to tell you something!"

Some of Dr. Mallak's portions of the lecture were enlightening for me, such as a short flm about AFDIL, the department that keeps DNA samples of every single person in the armed forces, and that is consulted when remains need to be identified (the film itself really wasn't necessary, it's pretty much a whole lot of shelves and little envelopes). Also the facility that the bodies from Iraq come through, where they can only keep them for 24 hours before sending them to the families, so they do extremely detailed 3D body scans which they can later use to assess the performance of the body armor and such. But this couldn't help but be overshadowed by the Doctor's extremely nervous and nerdy demeanor. His uniform pants were way too short, and he spoke awkwardly, quite the opposite of the charming and comfortable McCallum. Compounding the problem was a very strange glitch in the PA system which sounded like a buzzer going off at random intervals. This seemed to only occur while Mallak was talking, and each time it caused him to nearly jump out of his seat. We were glad to be able to laugh at him relatively freely in our unsupervised overflow auditorium.

Other stuff...after tweaking it for several hours straight the robot suddenly stopped working 20 minutes before the black-tie people were to arrive, and some gears had to be lubricated with motor oil from the boss's bike, which worked like a charm. The affair was catered, but being in a museum, there was pretty much nowhere to put down your plate or glass, and so several people tried to put theirs down on a table which was symbolically set with a POW/MIA flag. Not getting much of a chance to eat ourselves, we went afterward to Ruby Tuesday (there aren't many options in Silver Spring, MD after hours), where after 45 minutes we were told our check had been lost on its way to the kitchen, and we'd get the food for half price with free dessert. The boss and I took them up on some cheesecake.