Ten Very Unusual and Interesting Museums
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The Museum of Bad Art (MOMA) has taken it upon itself to collect over 700 works of the worst the art world has to offer. Their website has a great layout, fascinating reiews of the works, and behind the scenes details on the provenance of paintings. Works are divided into portraits, landscapes, and the hard to categorize "unseen forces". You really should spend some time looking around the online gallery.
The Atomic Testing Museum is dedicated to preserving those treasured memories of a time when the U.S. detonated huge nuclear weapons right out there in the Nevada desert. Good times. This is a serious museum with Smithsonian Institution connections If you stop in please pick me up a copy of their book, the "wonderfully written" 'Bombs In The Backyard'. The best thing about this museum? It's minutes from the Las Vegas strip.
What a twistedly demented little museum in the strangely named town of Le Roy, New York the JELL-O Gallery is. The website is inexplicably small on the monitor screen, the descriptions vague as to what a museum visitor will see. Most of the description details the famous folks who pitched JELL-O: Bill Cosby, Jim Nabors, Lucille Ball. At the bottom of the page is the intruiging "JELL-O Brick Road" which when clicked on appears to do virtually nothing at all. Great chance to make a pun based on the 'Wizard of Oz' I suppose. Did they know that the first network radio version of the 'Wizard of Oz' was sponsered by JELL-O? Probably not.
'Metz Bicycle Museum' houses an incredible collection of antique bikes with dozens of them available to view online. It's pretty interesting to see the odd and varied types of human powered vehicles thast appeared over the years. More fascinating is how soj many avid collectors have more than one interest. Tucked away in the museum is a huge collection of antique figural bottle openers also. Who would have guessed?
About a half-hour drive from the Robot Nine headquarters is the National Museum of Funeral History. Filled with creepy and hard to resist looking at goodies, exhibits this month include The Lives and Deaths of the Popes with a real Popemobile on display. Also Enbalming Techniques of the Civil War.( $7.00 enbalming for an enlisted man and $13.00 for an officer) Another long time display is this incredibly ornate horse-drawn hearse. I know, now you are dying to visit.
For all the poop on human waste disposal there is the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets. I am sure the museum is filled to capacity with the historical artifacts of plumbing design, but my visit to the website went down the toilet when the links 'Virtual Tour' and 'Photo Gallery' got clogged up.
Name a person, field of study, hobby, or thing and there probably is a museum dedicated to it. Toaster! Just like that here is Toaster.org, a website all about the Toaster Museum in Seattle, Washington. This was not just thrown together. These folks love their toasters and the beautifully laid out site includes history, collection information, art, advertising, everything you might ever need or want to know about mechanically browning bread.
I love small town America and Pauls Valley, Oklahoma is the small town surprising home of the 'Toy and Action Figure Museum', home to over 10,000 things that every kid visiting would love to take out of the display case and play with. Is this where all of those old McDonald's toys end up? I'll bet they have a G.I Joe like I had as a kid, when he was a real man and stood a full twelve inches tall!
'Velveteria' of Portland, Oregon holds 300 of the 1,000 paintings on black velvet in the museum collection. Do you love those poker playing dogs, Mexican bandits, naked ladies, and endless Elvis'? It may be time to make the trip to the mecca of black velvet. The only thing cooler than their huge collection of specialy art is their awesome name, Velveteria!
Who would have thought that there would be a museum devoted to all things penis, in Iceland of all places. The Icelandic Phallological Museum has an intense and dedicated curator named Sigurdur Hjartarson who gladly shows guests the collection of over one hundred penises. Reindeer, whale, rat, mice; Sigurder is 40 out of 42 in his quest to own a penis of every native Icelandic mammal. (I am not clear on whether that includes a human penis!) Creepy and disturbing is the collection of other penis related artifacts. I'll just let you wander over to his photo gallery and look around. The website seems to be undergoing some construction so for a funny story about the Penis Museum visit read this article.
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