On this date in 1863 West Virginia became the 35th state of the United States when it separated from Virgina during the American Civil War. I didn’t know a state can divorce itself. Something we tells me one day my home state of Illinois will do this one day. Speaking...
This has probably been the fastest March I’ve ever lived through in my life. The more time you waste, the more you lose…or something like that. Anyway, I’m sure time moves pretty slow in Spillville, Iowa. It’s home to the Bily Clocks Museum, an old brick building dedicated to the...
Dolls scare the shit out of me, especially when I know they’re sitting all day in a museum doing nothing but staring back at people. At the Brighton Toy and Model Museum, in the former forecourt of the railway station, there are over 10,000 antique toys on display, including these...
One of my closest friends is a Monopoly collector. She has like a gazillion versions of the game, including vintage and digital ones. I remember when we were walking down the Strip with a “Las Vegas” version in our possession. Some random dude yelled at us, “Hey, what are you...
A taphophile is someone who loves cemeteries and funerals, which is completely different from necrophilia, a sexual attraction to corpses. Did you know there is a law in Egypt called “Jamaa-ul-Widaa” (“Farewell Intercourse”) in which men can have sex with their dead wives up to six hours after their death?...
When it comes to house museums, there will always be the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, like The Breakers, or a place where Abraham Lincoln once slept, like the Soldiers’ Home, but what about the buildings not connected with the rich and famous? What about the houses that should be...
On this date in 1966 the Beatles performed their final full concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Beatlemania swept the world in the 1960s, and it still continues to this day. If you’re a Beatles fan, you’d expect to see the band in bronze form in their hometown of...
Formerly known as the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy is a must-see for science nerds everywhere. There are over a thousand objects, including globes, barometers and microscopes from the last five centuries. But the most interesting part of the museum is...
Sorry to disappoint you guys but the Amber Museum is not about everyone’s favorite character from the movie Clueless. Besides being the name of annoying bitches everywhere, it’s also a hard translucent brownish-yellow fossil resin used for making jewelry and other ornamental objects since at least the 4th century BC....
After you study and analyse museums intensely for over a year, visiting them on a nearly daily basis, there is nothing that leaves a significant impression in your mind. You feel like you’ve seen it all. Most of the time you’re just plain bored. But that all changed for me...
