This Belongs in a Museum
Bringing you museum-approved grammatical errors and typos since 2010.
Oh, and sorry - I DO NOT FOLLOW BACK!
I remember taking an Earth Science class in high school (or was it middle school?) but I don’t think the Museum of Earth History has anything to do with science…or truth for that matter. This little Creationist museum, first located in Arkansas before moving to its present day location in Texas, features exhibits based on fundamentalist Christian theology. In case you didn’t already know, Creationism holds that the Earth is just a few thousand years old and that the biblical account of Genesis is indeed factual (as TLC once sang, “Baby, that’s actual and it’s factual”). It doesn’t matter if findings in paleontology, astronomy and physics disprove creationism, recent surveys show about 45% of Americans believe the Earth was created by God within the past 10,000 years. So it sounds like Creationism (and its museums) are here to stay.
You heard of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood? Well, the museum believes that it caused the extinction of dinosaurs. Even though most scientists agree an asteroid struck off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago (see the Chicxulub crater) wiping away most animal and plant life, including dinosaurs. There are actually replicas of dinosaurs being carried aboard Noah’s famous ark. Amazing they fit, but also happily went along for the ride, no questions asked!?! And if that’s not crazy enough, a Tyrannosaurus rex is exhibited living in harmony alongside Adam and Eve, making the dino a herbivore rather than a carnivore, which I believe is impossible (kind of like the whole story of Adam and Eve). Another exhibit depicts the Ice Age, where the last dinosaurs existed with woolly mammoths until the cold and hunting by cavemen caused them to FINALLY die out.
Before the museum left Ar-Kansas for Texas it was part of the Christian theme park known as the Holy Land Experience. I’d say get your tickets now, but it closed in late 2012, but may reopen when God comes through with more funding. For people who couldn’t make the trip to the real Holy Land, all they had to do was take an electric tram over 50 acres of pagan altars, biblical scenes (including Moses’s desert tent tabernacle) and even an impressive replica of the Great Wall of Jerusalem. The believers were then treated to a play called “The Great Passion” (better than the Mel Gibson version apparently). Well, at least there is still a Holy Land in Orlando, Florida (read this shit for a laugh)…oh, and the Middle East. But hopefully God will hear our prayers and Jerusalem, Arkansas will return to its former glory!
Continuing with yesterday’s presidential theme, today is the 40th anniversary of LBJ’s death. He was only 64 years old, which is insane because he looked about 75 when he was JFK’s VP about 15 years before. He was actually only 9 years older than JFK. Crazy, man. But I guess people looked older back then for many reasons: life was harder, health care wasn’t as good, people were eating less preservatives…I don’t know.
Anyway, let’s get to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. It’s located at the University of Texas and houses everything you’d expect to find in a presidential library; 45 million pages of historical documents, 650,000 photos and 643 hours of his recorded telephone conversations (the one where he orders better-fitting pants because “the crotch, down where your nuts hang - is always a little too tight” is obviously the greatest thing a U.S. President has ever done). Between 2011-2012, a multi-million dollar redesign took place and many of the exhibits were updated. Since it re-opened to the public last month, one of the highlights is the joke-cracking LBJ robot.
Apparently the robot has been part of the museum since 1997, when it was donated by the Dallas department store Neiman Marcus, which no longer wanted it. The robot used to lean against a fence dressed like a cowboy (here’s a video of the pro-war comedian) with the sound of sitcom canned laughter, except that shit’s real, yo. His jokes were all recorded at official state dinners. Well, the museum felt the ranch setting never quite fit (just like LBJ’s pants) with the five cleaned-up versions of jokes he tells. So robotic LBJ was stripped of his western wear and now wears a suit, while standing at a podium in front of political cartoons. It’s all so funny! Hahaha! But don’t worry LBJ still tells the same five jokes. Phew.
There are art museums and there are car museums. But what about an art car museum? Even though a light rail system opened about a decade ago, Houston has always loved automobiles of all kinds, largely due to the lack of real public transportation and urban sprawl in this Texan city. Considered to be the “Art Car Capital”, Houston opened the Art Car Museum aka “Garage Mahal” in 1988 to celebrate the tradition of this form of outsider art. The collection includes not only art cars, but bicycles, motorcycles, roller-skates and many other types of motorized vehicles all decorated in unusual ways. Among the best known items on display are a rabbit shaped car clutching a basket of eggs and a giant “Roachster” with antennas that burn fire. And if you want to see these wheels in action, you can always attend the annual Art Car Parade in May. Anyway, I wonder if that bunny gets good mileage?
Fourth of July is one my least favorite holidays, not that I hate America or anything (okay, maybe sometimes). I just hate what the holiday has become…loud, obnoxious people blowing up fireworks and drinking lots of beer. Exactly what the founding fathers had in mind, I’m sure.
Anyway, let’s put political judgements aside for once as we visit the American Freedom Museum in Bullard, Texas. Housed inside a 15,000 square foot building on a Christian prep school campus, this isn’t some small shack in the middle of nowhere, but a real (and well-financed) museum dedicated to an abstract concept that could mean many things. But here the that concept means war, Presidents…oh, and did I say war? The timeline of American Freedom begins with the Battle of Lexington and ends during the War on Terror with a uniform of an American soldier killed in Afghanistan and rubble from Ground Zero. Other highlights of the 600 item collection? You can sit inside a C-47 transport plane, admire a lock of George Washington’s hair, rate the cleanliness of Adolf Hitler’s knife and fork (Uh, is that freedom? I don’t think so!), read a poem by John Quincy Adams and count the bullet holes in an American helicopter shot down during Vietnam. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the Hall of Presidents, which features documents signed by every President from George Washington to Barack Obama. Of course this shit costs money, but remember freedom isn’t free, especially when it comes to American museums about American freedom. FUCK YEAH!
In case you’ve never heard of a magic lantern, let me tell you. That’s why I’m here. The earliest known slide projector, Laterna Magica as it is sometimes called, dates all the way back to the seventeenth century when a German Jesuit first wrote about directing a light through a lens to project an image. Therefore, a camera obscura captures images, while magic lanterns cast them. Those images were first painted on glass and then projected with oil lamps (with much improved light over time) onto buildings, cloth drapes or wet screens. Unfortunately, most machines were kept in a separate room, with only the aperture visible, in order to scare people into thinking they were seeing magic or ghosts. Actually the first ever projected image in 1671 was of a person burning in hell. Nice. Until the use of the motion picture camera in the 1890s, the magic lantern and the zoopraxiscope were considered the only projection technology available. It is weird to think how magic lanterns impacted the world for over two-hundred years and then just disappeared into history, kind of like VHS and eight-track. Today the Magic Lantern Castle Museum in San Antonio, Texas houses a private collection of these historic projectors with 75,000 related objects, ephemera and historic text. Owned by Jack Judson, who started restoring and collecting them in 1986, the museum is by appointment only. But it is the only museum in the world dedicated to magic lanterns, proving once again there is a museum for everything.
Not wanting to repeat myself like I did yesterday, I bring you a brand new museum, typical of this blog in that it appears to be a hoarder’s dream come true. On Short Horn Street in San Antonio, Ed Clark’s Year-Round Christmas House has been a longtime holiday tradition for both Texas residents and tourists. According to the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ed’s wife died and her favorite holiday was Christmas so the house is decorated with all the things she loved and then some, a maze of lights and robots winding around the entire yard, doormats that sing, ceilings covered in bows and ringing jingle bells up and down the walls. Every inch of the house is covered with some piece of tinsel or Santa figurine. Ed keeps buying stuff and has ran out of room (even after an expansion) so his cars are now decorated with Christmas items. This year marks the twentieth year that Mr. Clark started this endless obsession with the holiday. What can I say? This is a place for people who start buying Christmas shit in May, listen to Mariah Carey warble “All I Want For Christmas Is You” long before Thanksgiving and have at least twenty boxes of Christmas decorations in their garage that they never use or will ever throw out. And if you don’t believe the extremeness of this guy’s house, just check out this photo set.
On this date in 1885 the soft drink Dr Pepper made its first appearance at a drug store in Waco, Texas. The drink is not a real doctor, therefore the period is silent, or more like invisible to the seeing eye. Today a museum in Waco pretends to celebrate this “peculiar 23 flavors in a can” but is actually trying to keep your mind off David Koresh.
The permanent exhibits in the historic building include a recreation of the old drug store where it was invented, early bottling equipment, a 1924 delivery truck and over 100,000 other related items. What better way to relive the 1980s than with a cheesy advertisement (see above)! Or maybe that ad is from 1991, which we all know falls under the ‘1980s’ category, so whatever. I gave up drinking soda permanently about ten years ago, but when I occasionally have a relapse this is probably the only thing I can stand to drink, with maybe a good root beer a close second. But most soda tastes weird, so just give me something else, please. Like a bottle of wine of something. Thanks.
And in case you were wondering where the Dr Pepper Capital of the World is located, more Dr Peppers are sold in the Roanoke Valley area of Virginia than any other metropolitan area east of the Mississippi River. What a freakin’ accomplishment!
Usually I’m telling you about some strange museum that no one ever visits. But this time I thought I’d turn things around and share a picture with you that belongs in its own museum. As you try to think of a name for our new museum, let me get busy writing the label. Here’s a rough draft.
Robert Miller (Flickr Photographer/Attorney)
San Antonio Taxidermy Museum, 5 July 2005
Fujifilm FinePix S3000 Photograph
Gift of Tumblr, Inc.
2011.01.1
“An exploration of the circle of life, Teddie Nugent Jr. symbolizes the birth of a new narrative juxtaposed with dead animal flesh. The warthog, deer and impala are not creatures at random, but connected through a relationship with concrete properties. The animal horns suggest physical pleasures of sexuality, aiding in the possibilities of existence, of a new synthesis. An indeterminate allusion, the father depicts the need for a parenting license, inevitably returning one to nature’s realism, like the hunting license that terminates all of God’s creatures.”
Please, a moment of silence on the second anniversary of Michael Jackson’s surprising death and the first anniversary of me standing outside his birthplace in Gary, Indiana sweating my ass off with hundreds of strangers.
There are so many Michael Jackson wax statues in North America, it was hard to choose just one. From Toronto and New York to St. Louis and Las Vegas, it’s like a traveling tour of melting Jacksons. But I finally settled on a young Michael statue (because I have a thing for the Jackson Five) from Louis Tussaud’s Palace of Wax in Grand Prairie, Texas. Another highlight from the Palace? Demi and Dustin of course!
Old Route 66 ends in Vega, Texas at Dot’s Mini-Museum. Dot (may she rest in peace) and her daughter collected items related to the Mother Road as well as other stuff like Avon perfume bottles and cowboy memorabilia (some of which is now part of a cowboy boot tree) all stuffed into a 8 x 20 foot shack.
The “museum” is about the only thing to see or do in Vega, whose only other claim to fame is that it’s halfway between Chicago and Los Angeles along Route 66. You might bump into someone who got lost here back in the 1930s and has never left.
