Topic: Odd museums

[frailer24]

Whilst reading about the kazoo museum, I found that there is a Jello museum nearby. Anybody else encounter strange museums like that?

[Old Man Ned]

There's a pencil museum in Keswick, UK and if I recall correctly an umbrella museum not far from Lake Como, Italy.  Handy if you want to sketch in the rain I guess...

[Alexei McDonald]

I've been to that museum in Keswick. It has a great shop, if you like pencils.

[Laura]

I used to live in central Tokyo.  5 minutes from my apartment was a parasite museum.  They claimed to hold the largest parasite taken from a live human.  Pretty gross!  I only visited the once - that was enough

[dj]

I once spent a happy half hour in the Mustard Museum in Mt. Horeb Wisconsin (it's since moved a few miles east to Middleton).  Nothing but jars of mustard as far as the eye could see.

[Slack]

I've been to the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, where you'll learn a lot about rope knots. 

[uncle bud]

Potato Museum on Prince Edward Island includes the 'Potato Interpretive Centre'. Competing Potato Museum in New Brunswick.

I have to say that a recent visit to the Sir John Soane Museum in London was one of my favourite museums visits ever. What an odd place. Architectural curiosities everywhere, Egyptian sarcophagus in the basement, Hogarth paintings hidden in the walls, staffed by charming people who are rather more eccentric than your average museum staff, though perhaps not quite as eccentric as Soane appears to have been.

[Stuart]

And then there was Hubert's Museum in NYC. Went  there with a bunch of oldsters (late teenagers, IIRC) back in the mid-sixties. Bizarre, to say the least. Visited it again in the late sixties, but it was a mere shell of its former self. Gone, but not forgotten. Where else could you see the Declaration of Independence written on a grain of rice--and view  it through a magnifying glass right out of the movie "Brazil?"

[frailer24]

Looks like I've some traveling to do!

[Lyle Lofgren]

Don't forget the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, where you can learn the history of canned spiced ham.

And, on a trip through Kansas back in 2005 (on our way somewhere else, of course), we stumbled on the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas. It consists solely of the eclectic collection of one Nellie Kuska, arranged alphabetically in display cases. This photo shows her collection of things starting with "R":

http://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/LizPics/ColbyMuseum4.html .

Lyle

[Mike Billo]

  Some years ago, a Camel Girth Museum opened, around the corner, from my house, here in San Francisco.

  In case you're wondering, a camel girth is a braided fabric that's attached, underneath the camel, to hold a saddle in place, on a camel's back. What is usually called a "cinch" with saddles for horses.

Everyday, the curator would stand outside, looking lonely and forlorn, asking passers-by if they would like to come inside and look at camel girths.

There were few takers.

 Feeling it my responsibility to be a good neighbor, I visited a couple of times.
 The braiding was, in fact, very ornate and quite impressive.

  Not surprisingly, the museum eventually folded