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Hey kids, check it out — an educational exhibit brought to you by the Philadelphia Zoo, which starts off by lying to you. Welcome to the education system.

A gazillion? Excuse me, but… that isn’t even a real number.

Photos via myphl17.com

The new show, featuring the work of New York-based LEGO-freakdaddy Sean Kenney, actually required a total of 259,450 LEGO bricks. Which is a fucking lot of LEGOs, don’t get me wrong, but it sounds pretty fucking lame compared to a gazillion. So thanks, for the lesson in disappointment.

Photo via myphl17.com

“Creatures of Habit: A Gazillion-Piece Animal Adventure” (groan) aims to educate its visitors about the importance of preservation in a clever way — with an exhibit made entirely out of plastic blocks, which take hundreds of years to decompose.

Sometimes, even banana peels don’t decompose once they reach the landfill. For sanitary reasons, modern landfills are lined on the bottom with clay and plastic to keep waste from escaping into the soil and are covered daily with a layer of earth to reduce odor. The landfill, then, acts like a trash tomb—the garbage within receives little air, water, or sunlight. This means that even readily degradable waste objects, including paper and food scraps, are more likely to mummify than decompose.

Yum!

Anyway, the real point of this post is that I think LEGO sculptures kind of appeal to the nerd in all of us, no matter how shriveled and frail. And Sean Kenney is some kind of LEGO-Saruman.

Photo via myphl17.com

Photo via myphl17.com

One time, long ago, I was in the car with my Dad and he accidentally ran over a large tortoise in the road. Now, that’s not very environmentally friendly — although it really did look like a plastic trash can lid to me, too. Anyway, it’s not such a sad story because the tortoise was completely unscathed! Maybe a little psychologically scarred, but that’ll only add to his mystery.