A very strange museum in Culver City, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. I guess the best way to describe it is as a collection of exhibits that used to be shown in other museums, in other words, a history museum about other museums. But they don't make this obvious, since all the exhibits are presented as fact, no matter how unbelievable they seem. When my uncle and I went there, he thought at first that it was a fundamentalist museum of natural history. We saw:

  1. An exhibit on a bat that was able to tunnel through solid objects, since it used X-Rays instead of sound waves in its echolocation.
  2. The life story of an opera singer that suffered from chronic forgetfulness.
  3. A collection of letters written to Mt. Wilson Observatory from various cranks.
  4. A 4-Dimensional theory of memory, that accounted for precognition.
  5. An overview of obselete superstitions.
  6. An exhibit on the birth and evolution of the mobile home, and a few displays of antiques collected by trailer park inhabitants. They were shown like other museums might display treasures of Ancient Egypt.
  7. And my own favorite, a collection of microscopic sculpture, such as Abraham Lincoln in the eye of a needle, or a flock of birds, less than a millimeter tall, sitting on a 'wire' of human hair.

If you ever visit LA, then screw Universal Studios and check this place out instead. They're on the web at http://www.mjt.org

Perhaps a quotation from the mission statement of the Museum of Jurassic Technology will serve as trenchant summary of their peculiar sense of natural history:

..the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities..

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