A Night At The Museums With Mark

Last night was Denver's annual Night at the Museums, when from 5:00 P.M. until 10:00 in the evening almost all of the city's museums are open to the public, free of charge.  Since most of these places charge around $12 or so for admission, this is a real deal.  My friend Mark and I took full advantage of this by visiting the Molly Brown House, built in 1887 and home of the "unsinkable Molly Brown" of Titanic fame; the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts, which honors artist Vance Kirkland, who for many years was head of the University of Denver's Art Department; and last but not least, the Forney Transportation Museum, which is currently featuring an exhibit of classic Jaguars (the cars, not the animals).  Mark is a big fan of Jaguars, and belongs to the Rocky Mountain Jaguar Club.  I took the photograph on the left of him posing in front of his dream car, a Jaguar model something something something (as you can tell, I am something of a car buff myself).

I mentioned to Mark that this was the very same car driven by Inspector Morse, the title character in that British crime drama that takes place in Oxford, England.  And when I looked at the license plate on the back of the car, I saw that this fact was also known to it's owner, as seen in the photo on the right.  I like Morse because he was grumpy, and always insisted to Detective Lewis, his assistant, that they needed to head to a local pub for a pint or two, in order to help their thinking. This series was based on the novels of Colin Dexter, and Dexter felt that John Thaw, who played the role of Chief Inspector Morse, was the perfect personification of his character, so much so that when it became known that Thaw was dying, Dexter killed off Morse in his book The Death of Morse. Thaw himself starred in that final episode of the Inspector Morse series.  A truly great tribute to Thaw.