Another Roadside Attraction…
Readers still wrestling with the need to finalize this summer’s vacation plans will be grateful to Atlantic Cities for its survey of “9 Utterly Bizarre Museums.” From the sublime…
The Miniature Book Museum in Baku
… to the, well…
The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum in Osaka
… with body parts, voodoo, funerals, Parisian sewers, and toilets in the mix.
And then there is the Mutter Museum in Phildelphia…
…a museum “best known” for its skull collection. Other artifacts include a wax model of a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead, several wax molds of untreated conditions of the head, and a nine-foot-long human colon that contained over 40 pounds of fecal matter.
Also not to miss – the body of the Soap Lady, whose corpse turned itself into a “soapy substance called adipocere better known as grave wax.”
And Boston’s Museum of Bad Art…
The museum’s curators seek “art too bad to be ignored.” The first piece was found in the trash.
Once, the museum would not pay more than $6.50 for a piece, now most are donated by the artists themselves. The most famous piece is Lucy in the Field With Flowers, featuring a woman skipping through a field in a blue dress.
Turn summer into an educational adventure with the help of “9 Utterly Bizarre Museums.”
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As we search for a docent, we might recall that this date in 1881 is the earliest of three competing candi-dates for the invention of the ice cream sundae. In the most ancient of the creation tales, a treat-seeking patron of Edward Berner’s drug store in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, sat down at the soda-fountain counter. Since it was the Sabbath, the customer couldn’t have the desirable, but proscribed-by-Blue-Laws, ice cream soda that he wanted. Berner improvised, putting ice cream in a dish and pouring over it the chocolate syrup that was previously only used as flavoring in ice-cream sodas. And so the “ice cream Sunday” was born. It’s popularity grew, and soon it was ordered throughout the week. Finally, when a glass salesman convinced Berner to order special canoe-shaped vessels for the confection, the spelling of Sundae was changed… or so the denizens of Two Rivers aver; the good people of Ithaca, New York, and Evanston, Illinois beg to differ.
The ice cream sundae in its more modern vessel