Museum of Jurassic Technology
Sat, Nov. 3rd, 2007 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterLook, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija, I am finally posting!
Last Saturday,rachelmanija and I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
While we were walking there, Rachel asked me, "So... what do you think the museum will be? I say this just because the museum is best experienced completely unspoiled."
"Er," I said. "I don't know? I was thinking something like steampunk technology. Or maybe dinosaurs, since it's Jurassic!"
We then talked about how we had both loved dinosaurs as kids and pretended to be them. Rachel said that being the T-Rex was always best, and she demonstrated by growling, waving her arms like giant dinosaur jaws, and lumbering down the street.
Until she noticed that the car parked on the side was not, in fact, unoccupied like we had thought, and instead had two women sitting there, staring at her.
Rachel says to not click on the link if you think you will ever be able to visit the museum (*cough*Yoon*cough*).
The museum is located behind a locked metal door; you have to ring a doorbell to get in. Right by the doorbell is a little display of dead moths pinned out above a vase, just to get you in the right mood.
Once we were in, I immediately zeroed in on an old-fashioned-looking poster advertising "The Effulgence of the North." Alas, we couldn't make that exhibit. There were more dead moths, thimbles, and really strange and interesting books.
On the inside, the museum was small and very dark, and instead of steampunk technology, the first display I noticed was a mounted fox head. If you looked through special glasses, you could see the projected film of a man barking like a fox inside of the fox head. I'm not sure if the display was meant to show the man's skill or to show how people once thought little men sat in fox skulls to make the noise. Quite honestly, given the content of the museum, I would not be at all surprised if it were the latter!
Other really cool things included microscopic pictures made out of butterfly wing scales and diatoms. The placard noted that the artist had to breathe through a tube just to create the pieces! I thought this was much funnier than it probably was, but then again, we all know I am twelve. We saw a room dedicated to trailers and trailer parks and collections found in trailers (crocheted things, crazy teacups, pincushions), tiny sculptures of the pope and Napoleon posed in the eyes of a needles. We saw an exhibit dedicated to a bat that could fly through solid lead. Alas, the audio was broken, so we didn't get to see all of it. Upstairs, there was a display dedicated to cat's cradles and various string figures, and a mysterious room lined with rather sentimental oil paintings of dogs with Russian names. One of them had real flowers placed in front of it and a candle burning.
Both Rachel and I were very puzzled until we saw the placard explaining that the room was dedicated to the dogs of the space program. How awesome is that? And there was an eternal flame going for the first dog in space!
Rachel then had an extremely surreal experience, in which she wandered into a room and heard someone asking her if she wanted tea. I had actually seen a link for the museum's Russian Tea Room on their website, so I wasn't as surprised.
But anyway! I didn't get any good pictures because they didn't allow flash and my hands aren't steady enough for the longer exposure time. But I did manage to note down some of my favorite exhibits and placards!
"Rotten Luck: Failing dice from the collections of Ricky Jay" was a collection of broken dice made from all sorts of materials. We walked in just as the audio explained, "The dice have never looked better."
There was an exhibit on stereo pictures, including some really ghostly stereo photos of flowers showing delicate petals standing out when you used the special glasses. An example of historical stereo pictures was on display: "Stereo reindeer test." It was a picture of a reindeer. In 3D, with the right glasses.
The amazing bat was in the display "Bernard Maston, Donald R. Griffith, and the Deprong Mori of the Tripiscum Plateau." I thought the title sounded just like one of the Nini Mo books that Flora Segunda reads, or like a truly awesome Indiana Jones adventure.
I'm not sure what "Geoffrey Sonnaberd - Obliscience: Theory of forgetting and the problem of matter" was about.
The cat's cradle exhibit was titled "Fairly safely venture: cat's cradles and their venerable collectors," and it was hosted by the International String Figures Association. I was really tempted to get one of the association's journals on sale in the gift shop, but I didn't.
My very favorite exhibit was "Tell the Bees: Belief, knowledge, and hypersymbolic cognition," which was basically on folk remedies. It included duck's breath as a cure for something, with an exhibit of a duck sticking its head in an infant's mouth. There was a bottle of urine, as urine was supposedly dabbed places for luck or something. Rachel and I looked at each other and giggled, mouthing Sweeney Todd's "Smells like piss. Looks like piss. Must be piss! Piss with ink!" There were also mice on toast. Like, actual little dead and dessicated mice on a slice of toast. Rachel tried to prevent me from seeing the rodent tragedy, but I saw it and was traumatized anyway. Some of the beliefs I had known about, like dressing boy babies up like girls to confuse evil spirits or babies born with the caul still on being able to use the caul as protection later in life. Others I had never heard of, like telling bees news of a family death and waiting to see if they would accept it.
And at the end, we saw a display of crank letters an observatory got. One of them ended with "Huray for the Jews we will soon rule the world some felows do not like us but we got the monay huray huray" [sic]. Given all the random anti-Semitism this month, it seemed fitting. Somehow, I am guessing the letter was not written by a Jewish person...
Anyway! The museum is highly recommended and deeply strange, and I love it. In fact, I loved it so much that I bought a book on it called Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, since the subtitle alone was worth the price.
rachelmanija, I am finally posting! Last Saturday,
rachelmanija and I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology.While we were walking there, Rachel asked me, "So... what do you think the museum will be? I say this just because the museum is best experienced completely unspoiled."
"Er," I said. "I don't know? I was thinking something like steampunk technology. Or maybe dinosaurs, since it's Jurassic!"
We then talked about how we had both loved dinosaurs as kids and pretended to be them. Rachel said that being the T-Rex was always best, and she demonstrated by growling, waving her arms like giant dinosaur jaws, and lumbering down the street.
Until she noticed that the car parked on the side was not, in fact, unoccupied like we had thought, and instead had two women sitting there, staring at her.
Rachel says to not click on the link if you think you will ever be able to visit the museum (*cough*Yoon*cough*).
The museum is located behind a locked metal door; you have to ring a doorbell to get in. Right by the doorbell is a little display of dead moths pinned out above a vase, just to get you in the right mood.
Once we were in, I immediately zeroed in on an old-fashioned-looking poster advertising "The Effulgence of the North." Alas, we couldn't make that exhibit. There were more dead moths, thimbles, and really strange and interesting books.
On the inside, the museum was small and very dark, and instead of steampunk technology, the first display I noticed was a mounted fox head. If you looked through special glasses, you could see the projected film of a man barking like a fox inside of the fox head. I'm not sure if the display was meant to show the man's skill or to show how people once thought little men sat in fox skulls to make the noise. Quite honestly, given the content of the museum, I would not be at all surprised if it were the latter!
Other really cool things included microscopic pictures made out of butterfly wing scales and diatoms. The placard noted that the artist had to breathe through a tube just to create the pieces! I thought this was much funnier than it probably was, but then again, we all know I am twelve. We saw a room dedicated to trailers and trailer parks and collections found in trailers (crocheted things, crazy teacups, pincushions), tiny sculptures of the pope and Napoleon posed in the eyes of a needles. We saw an exhibit dedicated to a bat that could fly through solid lead. Alas, the audio was broken, so we didn't get to see all of it. Upstairs, there was a display dedicated to cat's cradles and various string figures, and a mysterious room lined with rather sentimental oil paintings of dogs with Russian names. One of them had real flowers placed in front of it and a candle burning.
Both Rachel and I were very puzzled until we saw the placard explaining that the room was dedicated to the dogs of the space program. How awesome is that? And there was an eternal flame going for the first dog in space!
Rachel then had an extremely surreal experience, in which she wandered into a room and heard someone asking her if she wanted tea. I had actually seen a link for the museum's Russian Tea Room on their website, so I wasn't as surprised.
But anyway! I didn't get any good pictures because they didn't allow flash and my hands aren't steady enough for the longer exposure time. But I did manage to note down some of my favorite exhibits and placards!
"Rotten Luck: Failing dice from the collections of Ricky Jay" was a collection of broken dice made from all sorts of materials. We walked in just as the audio explained, "The dice have never looked better."
There was an exhibit on stereo pictures, including some really ghostly stereo photos of flowers showing delicate petals standing out when you used the special glasses. An example of historical stereo pictures was on display: "Stereo reindeer test." It was a picture of a reindeer. In 3D, with the right glasses.
The amazing bat was in the display "Bernard Maston, Donald R. Griffith, and the Deprong Mori of the Tripiscum Plateau." I thought the title sounded just like one of the Nini Mo books that Flora Segunda reads, or like a truly awesome Indiana Jones adventure.
I'm not sure what "Geoffrey Sonnaberd - Obliscience: Theory of forgetting and the problem of matter" was about.
The cat's cradle exhibit was titled "Fairly safely venture: cat's cradles and their venerable collectors," and it was hosted by the International String Figures Association. I was really tempted to get one of the association's journals on sale in the gift shop, but I didn't.
My very favorite exhibit was "Tell the Bees: Belief, knowledge, and hypersymbolic cognition," which was basically on folk remedies. It included duck's breath as a cure for something, with an exhibit of a duck sticking its head in an infant's mouth. There was a bottle of urine, as urine was supposedly dabbed places for luck or something. Rachel and I looked at each other and giggled, mouthing Sweeney Todd's "Smells like piss. Looks like piss. Must be piss! Piss with ink!" There were also mice on toast. Like, actual little dead and dessicated mice on a slice of toast. Rachel tried to prevent me from seeing the rodent tragedy, but I saw it and was traumatized anyway. Some of the beliefs I had known about, like dressing boy babies up like girls to confuse evil spirits or babies born with the caul still on being able to use the caul as protection later in life. Others I had never heard of, like telling bees news of a family death and waiting to see if they would accept it.
And at the end, we saw a display of crank letters an observatory got. One of them ended with "Huray for the Jews we will soon rule the world some felows do not like us but we got the monay huray huray" [sic]. Given all the random anti-Semitism this month, it seemed fitting. Somehow, I am guessing the letter was not written by a Jewish person...
Anyway! The museum is highly recommended and deeply strange, and I love it. In fact, I loved it so much that I bought a book on it called Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, since the subtitle alone was worth the price.
Tags:
(no subject)
Sat, Nov. 3rd, 2007 06:44 pm (UTC)I was very taken with "Tell the Bees," too. And the Athanasius Kircher exhibit. And "No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again." And, oh, all of it.
(no subject)
Mon, Nov. 5th, 2007 06:54 pm (UTC)I think we either missed the Kircher exhibit, or it wasn't there, or it was broken. Or something.