A little refreshing randomness from around the globe
It’s been called ‘disturbingly informative.’
The Mutter Museum of Philadelphia houses medical oddities. Within this museum’s walls sits the cast of the world-famous Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, Grover Cleveland’s cancerous growth, and Joseph Hyrtl’s precious collection of skulls. The museum has 20,000 such items.
The Mutter hopes to remind people of medicine’s recent past, and […]
They stuff dead bodies in suitcases. For science.
Tennessee’s Body Farm consists of bodies in varied, and educational, states of decay. In the initial years of forensic science, estimating a time of death was done as much by intuition as it was by data. The data, unfortunately, was hard to come by, because no one had […]
Pigeon racing is not a sport played for glamour, but for love.
Pigeon racers - a rank of characters almost exclusively made up of elderly, aging men - often wait for days on rooftops, straining their eyes against the horizon. They’re on the lookout, stopwatch in hand, for the precious pets that they have often bred, […]
It’s a beauty pageant. With muskrats.
The Miss Outdoors Pageant has been a long-running staple of Golden Hill, Maryland. As it happened, this beauty pageant shared the stage with another contest: the World Championship Muskrat Skinning Contest, which drew crowds of hundreds. The contests usually take place, back-to-back. But these days, some contestants decided to enjoy […]
A Czech-American artist started his own reliquary.
He had plenty of raw material: he lived in New York City. Through friends and friends of friends, he began to collect bits and pieces of celebrity which - through the magic of relics - were themselves imbued with the bizarre power of fame. In this way, Barton Lidice […]
A Latvian man built a castle. By himself.
It was meant as a a monument to his lost love, his ‘Sweet Sixteen.’ Lovelorn in his native Latvia, Edward Leedskalnin fled for Florida, where he spent the next thirty years, building. He worked for most of every day, subsisting mostly on sardines and crackers. In his […]
The Serpent Mother is apocalyptic, and beautiful.
Her metal skeleton stretches 168′ long, and she breathes fire. Her entire being is shot through with propane, which erupts into flame at forty-one distinct spots along her spine. The flames are controlled by audience participants. So is the hydraulic head, and jaws.
It was first seen at Burning Man. […]
The Republic of Molossia has a population of four.
It is presently in a state of perpetual martial law, courtesy of the ‘foreign menace over the border.’ This border encompasses all of fourteen and a half acres, most of which can be found just outside Dayton, Nevada. There resides President Kevin Baugh, his wife, two children, […]
It was founded by a psychiatric nurse, on the site of a former whiskey factory.
The Visionary Art Museum now stands as a testament to the self-taught. Exhibited here are the creations of street people, farmers, scientists, and the occasional eccentric loner in a mountaintop cabin. Who else, really, would take the time to forge a […]
It’s called a ‘rocketbelt.’ Not a ‘jet pack.’
This is not a misnomer, really. Your average rocketbelt consists of two tanks of ‘rocket-grade’ hydrogen peroxide, which you attach to your back. Add nitrogen, and the fuel suddenly expands in volume by a factor of 5,000. The whole mixture then gets converted to steam, which reaches about […]
