Hello downtown Phoenix people! It’s T.J. Triolo, your guide to staying inside. I have more things for you to do this week while you’re stuck inside your home. One of them actually involves aquatic animals. Why? Because they’re calming, fun to watch and adorable, especially the otters. I swear they’re like water cats with how they play with each other. Anyway, here are your activities for the week!
Hubble Space Telescope Mission Operations 360-degree Virtual Tour
The famous Hubble Space Telescope may be floating around in space, but really, do you think that with something that important the telescope is the only part of its mission? All the controls for flying the telescope and monitoring it are located at the Space Telescope Operations Control Center in Maryland. I tried saying “Space Telescope Operations Control Center” five times fast, and I stumbled over my words. With this virtual tour, you can check out what is only a dream workplace for a lot of people.
Louvre Online Tours
If you’re sick of looking at museum collections in the United States, why not look at something a little bit more … French? The Louvre has a collection of online tours that lets you look through different parts of the museum, including one for Egyptian antiquities. I guess you could say “That belongs in a museum!” about everything in these collections. However, I doubt any of it was stolen by archaeologists with whips thwarting ancient curses, so check it out! The artifacts aren’t haunted. Or at least, I hope they’re not.
Shedd Aquarium Facebook Page
The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago has a lot of videos they share on Facebook featuring their amazing aquatic animals. I checked it out and got to see otters playing with a snowman. If you don’t think these adorable little guys playing with snowmen is cute, I have no words that can describe you. They also have footage of fish, turtles and more. Now for my question: Where are the most important of fish (or at least my favorites), the loaches and the clownfish?
The Power of Breath Webinar
Wed. April 29
Starts at 12 p.m.
This webinar focuses on the power of breath to regulate your health, including how to remain calm. I’ve found that calm breathing certainly helps me! The session also features yoga techniques to help improve your well-being. Maybe that’s Yoda’s secret to being so calm: Not only his use of the Force, but yoga. Then he’d be yoga Yoda. I couldn’t help myself, that was too good a play on words to pass up.
National Theatre at Home
Every Thursday
Starts at 11 a.m.
The UK’s National Theatre is putting on plays every week on Thursday for you to stream for a week for free, giving you the closest thing to seeing a play in person from the comfort of your couch, or bed, or wherever you happen to be. Now ideally, you’d have a TV with 3D the size of a stage so that it’s as close to the real thing as possible, but I think a stage is probably wider than any single room in my apartment. With that in mind, it’s unfortunately not a realistic possibility, so take pleasure in the smaller version you get on whichever of the array of devices you can stream YouTube on.
Contact the reporter at tjtriolo@asu.edu.
Downtown Devil's community section editor. I also write the Downtown Digest, a weekly column with things to do, with experience writing news articles and creating news videos as well. Graduating from ASU in May 2020.
