Weird things I learned about the state of Rhode Island: It is considered an offense to throw pickle juice on a trolley, one cannot sell toothpaste and a toothbrush to the same customer on a Sunday and, last but not least, one is breaking the law if he or she...
Barney Smith, curator of the Toilet Seat Art Museum, posing with his collection of toilet seat creations. He now has over 1,000 pieces. Smith numbers, photographs and catalogs each seat, including the work’s particular inspiration and information about who donated the seat materials. So next time you’re in San Antonio,...
An eclectic shop/museum supposedly established in 1967 by a Portland (Oregon) explorer named Conrad Talmadge Elwood whose love for all things weird caused him to have a dream of the store (which he promptly forgot) is not a new sketch from the tv show Portlandia. The store is actually real,...
I don’t know how many of you are aware of the Odd Fellows but I’ve always noticed their buildings while traveling around the country. Believe it or not, they have a museum in Wisconsin (unfortunately it does not have a website or any other info source). Luckily, Matt from the...
As 2011 comes to an end and we enter our last year on Earth (the Mayans were conspiracy theorists) let’s give a shout out to the museums of the past. By past, I mean dead, no longer exist, gone to museological heaven…or something like that. One museum I wished had...
Since it started in 2006, the Sadness Museum has traveled to many places throughout the United States. Makes sense. Who really goes in search of sadness? It usually comes to you. It is the first museum of its kind where the so-called visitors are the curators. You can send “sad”...
The famous saying “a man’s home is his castle” is especially true when it’s made of beer cans. Because you’re not a real man unless you drink crappy watered down beer out of an aluminum can. DO YA HEAR ME, PEOPLE!?! A set of four shining towers, Cano’s Castle in...
Remember when Tim Burton used to make good movies? Well, a devoted fan opened a museum last year dedicated to one of Burton’s earliest works, and no, we’re not talking about Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (even though that’s not a bad idea). In the middle of New York City, one can...
Dover, Ohio’s Warther Carvings Museum was started by Ernest “Mooney” Warther, who dedicated his life to carving a single block of wood. The result of all this hard work is the “plier tree”. It has 511 interconnected pliers carved from over 30,000 cuts to that one piece. Besides the tree,...
First of all, it takes a brave man to want to read a leaflet by Miss Deb, let alone a mid-century mother and her young daughter. In the 1960s, Kotex promoted menstrual pads for young girls with the marketing idea to catch them while they’re young. “Deb” stood for young...
