Peculiar

A friend of mine recently told me about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Being that my parental units have been in town, I thought it would be something they could talk about to their friends when they got home. What the heck is it, you ask? I'm still wondering. Their website says that "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." I saw things today that were cool and other things that I still don't understand. Entire rooms were dedicated to such topics as the child's game cat's cradle, mobile homes, a guy who crafted miniature figures into the eyes of needles (the Pope, Goofy, etc.), the dogs who were part of the Russian space program, and a presentation about some sort of bat that supposedly flew through the left arm of a 5-year-old and then the child was said to be able to heal warts and skin diseases with the left hand thereafter. Particularly notable was the room containing information on superstitions of yesteryear. For example, there are people who believed that if you had teeth extracted, that you had to treat those teeth in salt because animals might then gnaw on your extracted teeth and you would be at risk of growing back the teeth of the animal that chewed on your extracted teeth. Or it was said that if you harbored ill will against a bridegroom, on his wedding day you could open up a pair of scissors, then call his name. If he turned towards you, you were to then snap the scissors shut, thus preventing him from ever consummating his marriage. Ah the power! If this were true, crazy ex-girlfriends around the world would be an even greater threat. My favorite was a supposed cure for bedwetting: eating mice on toast or in a tasty mouse pie.

The museum docent, who couldn't have been more perfectly cast for such a place, informed us that there was a movie upstairs that many patrons swear rivals the work of documentarian Werner Herzog. I beg to differ. It was a meandering Russian film that made little sense about a librarian who wanted to solve "the problem of death" by finding a way to achieve universal resurrection. He was very disturbed by the idea that in death people are buried and become "ancestral dust" and then essentially, future generations are eating those people because our food comes from the soil. We walked out and were then promptly served some tea and cookies by another docent. If you've never been, you have to go at least once, at least to sit for a moment in the room about magnetics to listen to quite possibly the most ethereal sounding bells that are suspended on a wheel from the ceiling.

After the museum, we went more mainstream and saw "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" at ArcLight. I loved it! I thought Penelope Cruz was a ball of fiery magnificence. Now I want to go to Spain and pursue a little international adventure...