30 December 1999
Zanesfield, Ohio correspondents Bruce Bargar, Polly Bargar,
and roving correspondent Anne Bargar

Newspoetry Cultural Review, 12/26/99:

The New, Revamped Center Of Science and Industry (COSI)

located in increasingly mall-like Downtown Columbus

AP (Associated Poets) Yeah, we're complaining about the degeneration a place that most of you have probably never heard of. For the un-initiated, this place used to be really interesting. It WAS a museum where you could learn about science, industry, natural history, labor history, the human body...needless to say, Newspoetry would have dug the old COSI. We were told that this is one of the top museums of science and industry in the country. And it WAS, until November, 1999. If this is still considered to be the case, I'd hate to be the poor bastards at the 7th or 8th-ranked facility.

In its new incarnation, this museum rises to new levels of vomit, elevating naked stupidity to an art form. For a rather exorbitant entrance fee, the previous museum led a visitor through a variety of interactive displays, many innovative exibits, and a planetarium show at no extra fare. The ability, after a hefty parking charge and higher entrance fare (including inflation), to cover the current facility in approximately nine minutes, (including 1. the one or two displays that actually awaken the imagination, 2. the displays that were broken or not functioning, and 3. an entire empty gallery scheduled for exhibition the following year, but 4. outside of a planetarium show at extra cost), does not exactly constitute an improvement.

In short, it sucked. The current directors appear to be a bunch of stupid, ass-wiping ninnies. (Of course, it is always necessary to wipe one's ass when the occasion demands.) Would you like me to stand in your living room, in front of dinner guests, demonstrating how to examine one's testicles? I can have my doctor teach me how to feel for cancer and other "nasties." I don't need to pay an exhorbinant entrance fee to get into my doctor's office, after paying outrageous parking fees! Hrmph.

After all, what happened to all those classic exhibits, such as the giant jaw that lit up to show spectators exactly what a cavity and other "ickies" looked like, hmm? And what about the charged aluminum ball that made your hair stand on end? Or the Hall of Presidents, or the Street of Yesteryear (sans bad actors), or the train exhibit? Or the nice little stroll through time that one could take, catching a glimpse of the Black Death without actually falling over dead? Or the coal mining exhibit, or the Hocking Valley Caboose? Or are the memories of the current staff as short as their foresight? Or that of their overly-paid uninsightful focus-group-driven pompously-dressed badly-performimg smelly nincompoopie consultants?

We even froze our asses off in the arctic loo! The curators could have at least warned us that we were stepping into a working demonstration of primative public restrooms. And it took us a while to realize that that video arcade was actually a display of the history of video games. Not that this wasn't interesting, but we had to pay to play them. This would have never happened in the old museum! Hrmph! To the stocks with all the stupid miserable bastards! Now THAT would be an interesting exercise in the consequences of public stupidity, wouldn't it? That's what they should get for dumbing down and completely removing the content from what used to be a perfectly good museum.

Well, it used to be that one could reccomend stopping in Columbus for a day to see COSI. We now recommend that people bypass Columbus, that great shopping mall of central Ohio, altogether. Although one can still check out the Franklin Park Conservatory, before someone turns it into an mall-like, white empty-walled, MTV-style abomination.