Full Sensory Theater

Only the 1960s would conceive of this. Full patent here.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Dec 18, 2024 - Comments (2)
Category: Inventions | Patents | Movies | Television | 1960s | Eyes and Vision | Head | Smells and Odors

The Thing museum

Yesterday I posted about a recent visit I made to the Last Supper Museum in Douglas, Arizona. On the same trip (in fact, on the same day) I also visited "The Thing" museum, which is off the I-10, about 70 miles north of Douglas (and 50 miles east of Tucson).

The two are both weird museums, but share no similarities beyond that.

The Last Supper Museum is the oddball passion project of an individual. The Thing, on the other hand, is highly commercialized and corporate-owned.

The commercialization begins with the numerous billboards advertising the museum up and down the I-10. Then, when you arrive, you find that it's part of a gas station/travel stop complex. To get to the museum itself you have to walk through a gigantic gift store.





The Thing wasn't always like that. It started out sixty years ago as a roadside attraction run by Thomas Binkley Prince. He displayed a few oddities, such as a car that he claimed had belonged to Hitler, as well as a mummified humanoid body that he called "The Thing" (the namesake of the museum).

Prince died in 1969, and the museum was eventually acquired by Bowlin Travel Centers, Inc.

In the 2010s, Bowlin expanded and updated the museum. They evidently decided to capitalize on the "Ancient Aliens" craze, because the majority of the museum is now devoted to telling the story of an extraterrestrial race, the RAH'thians, and their ongoing interaction with life on Earth, beginning with the dinosaurs and continuing through to the present day.

You walk through a winding exhibit hall, past life-size models of extraterrestrials and dinosaurs (and extraterrestrials fighting dinosaurs with laser guns). The models are pretty cool and very professionally done. The problem is that it all comes across as a bit jokey and tongue-in-cheek, which negates the weird factor.







Questions are frequently posed on the walls.





Finally you arrive at a room in which the original Thing is displayed. The connection between the Thing and the preceding dinosaurs and extraterrestrials wasn't clear to me.

It cost $5 to see the entire museum, which isn't a lot. If you happen to be driving down the I-10, I'd say go see it. But I wouldn't make a special trip to visit it.

More info: RoadsideAmerica.com; Wikipedia.

Posted By: Alex - Tue Dec 17, 2024 - Comments (6)
Category: Aliens | Museums | Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Creatures | Arizona

Xmas Twist

Posted By: Paul - Tue Dec 17, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Holidays | Music | 1960s | Dance

The Last Supper Museum

Down in the small Arizona border town of Douglas (population 16,000), one can find the Last Supper Museum, which hosts hundreds of works of art inspired by Da Vinci's masterpiece. It's a strange location for a museum dedicated to a piece of high Renaissance art — Douglas doesn't really spring to mind as a cultural hotspot — but then it's a strange museum.

Last week my wife and I spent a few days driving around southern Arizona, checking out various sights such as Chiricahua National Monument. So, since we were in the neighborhood, we decided to visit the Last Supper Museum.



Based on its name, you might think the museum would be filled with Christian devotional pieces. And the curator reports that quite a few people who visit it expect this to be the case. But instead, it's the opposite. The museum skews heavily towards the offbeat, weird, and irreverent. It's really about all the bizarro ways Da Vinci's mural has been transformed and reinterpreted by modern culture.

So, for instance, you've got versions of the Last Supper done in unusual mediums such as banana fibers, coal, shoes, tupperware, and ostrich eggs. You've got Last Suppers in which Jesus and the apostles have been replaced by characters from pop culture (a lot of Star Wars, cats, extraterrestrials, Harry Potter, etc.). You've got social commentary, such as a banned-book version of the Last Supper. And mixed in with all this, you find more traditional, devotional pieces, such as some very impressive wood carvings.

Banana Fiber Last Supper

"The Last Slipper"

And then there's the curator, Eric Braverman, who hails from the world of Heavy Metal. He spent years traveling with bands such as Slayer, Metallica, and Megadeath. Much of the funding for the museum came from a donation made by Tom Araya, bassist for Slayer. Braverman totally looks like a metalhead, and that just adds to the weird, idiosyncratic nature of the museum.

We showed up unannounced, but Braverman happily gave us a guided tour for over an hour, filling us in on the backstory of each exhibit. He's definitely a natural showman. At one point he was rolling around on the floor to illustrate a point.

Eric Braverman, Last Supper Museum curator

So, overall I'd say the museum is a must-see if you're in the area. I'd even rank it among the top-tier best weird museums I've ever been to, up there with the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles and Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Detroit. Although I think you really need Braverman acting as a guide to get the full experience of the Last Supper Museum.

More info: LastSupperMuseum.com; Roadside America article about the museum; Arizona Republic article.

Extraterrestrial Last Supper

Ostrich Egg Last Supper

Velvet Last Supper

"Your Last Supper"

Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 16, 2024 - Comments (2)
Category: Art | Museums | Arizona

The Literary Lesbian Society

Here's an example of the changing meaning of words. As the text below explains (from Frank Gluth's history of Oak Harbor), in 1903, one could still use "lesbian" in a non-sexual way. But the latest reference I can find to the club is from 1964, an era when other meanings of the word became dominant.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Dec 16, 2024 - Comments (2)
Category: Clubs, Fraternities and Other Self-selecting Organizations | Education | Regionalism | Sexuality | Twentieth Century

Recipe for boiled microfiche

Back in the pre-desktop computer era, the Social Security Administration stored info on microfiche cards. This created a problem of how to dispose of the microfiche cards when the info on them was out of date. The shredders in the SSA district offices weren't up to the task of shredding them.

The solution: district offices were instructed to purchase crockpots and boil the old microfiche cards for 75 to 105 minutes.

In my college/grad school days, I spent many hours sitting at michrofiche readers. Thanks to digitization, I think that's an experience students today won't have to endure.

Omaha World Herald - May 16, 1979

Posted By: Alex - Sun Dec 15, 2024 - Comments (1)
Category: Garbage, Trash, Waste and Other Detritus | Government | 1970s

What About Thad?

Posted By: Paul - Sun Dec 15, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Family | PSA’s | Religion | Outsiders, Marginals, the Excluded and Low-castes | 1960s

Double Bind

Published in 1978 by the artist Richard Olson, Double Bind consists of only six pages, but good luck reading those pages because, as the title implies, the book is bound on both ends.

I could see this being an interesting addition to a library of odd books, but I don't know how many copies Olson created. I imagine not that many. One of them went up for auction in 2017 with a list price of $200-$300, but remained unsold.

Posted By: Alex - Sat Dec 14, 2024 - Comments (4)
Category: Art | Books | 1970s

Lorraine O’Grady, RIP

Her Wikipedia page.

In the early 1980s, O'Grady created the persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, who invaded art openings wearing a gown and a cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves,[10] first giving away flowers, then beating herself with a white studded whip, which she often referred to as, "the whip-that-made-the-plantations-move".[10] Whilst doing this she would often shout in protest poems that railed against a segregated art world that excluded black individuals from the world of mainstream art, and which she perceived as not looking beyond a small circle of friends. Her first performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was in 1980 at the Linda Goode Bryant's Just Above Midtown gallery in Tribeca.[11]

Posted By: Paul - Sat Dec 14, 2024 - Comments (0)
Category: Art | Avant Garde | Performance Art | Ineptness, Crudity, Talentlessness, Kitsch, and Bad Art | Music | Twentieth Century | Twenty-first Century

Unusual Punishments of the Theodosian Code

In 429 AD the Roman emperor Theodosius II established a commission to write down all the laws of the Roman Empire since 312, covering all the Christian emperors. The resulting work was the Codex Theodosianus (or Theodisian Code).

In his book The Triumph of Christianity, biblical scholar Bart Ehrman lists some of the more unusual punishments included in the codex:

• Imperial bureaucrats who accepted bribes were to have their hands cut off (Theodosian Code l.16.7)
• ineffective guardians of girls who had been seduced were to have molten lead poured down their throats (Theodosian Code 9.24.1)
• tax collectors who treated women tax delinquents rudely were to "be done to death with exquisite tortures"
• anyone who served as an informer was to be strangled and " the tongue of envy cut off from its roots and plucked out" (Theodosian Code 10.10.2)
• slaves who informed on their masters were to be crucified (Theodosian Code 9.5.1.1)
• anyone guilty of parricide "shall not be subjected to the sword or to fire or to any other customary penalty, but he shall be sewed in a leather sack, and, confined within its deadly closeness, he shall share the companionship of serpents" and then thrown into a river or ocean "so that while still alive he may begin to lose the enjoyment of all the elements" (Theodosian Code 9.15.1)

James Joyce was evidently familiar with the Theodosian Code since he referred to the final of these punishments in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Chap 3, during the section where the priest is describing the torments of hell to the school boys):

Posted By: Alex - Fri Dec 13, 2024 - Comments (2)
Category: Law | Ancient Times