The Bunny Museum was born on Valentine’s Day, 1993 when Steve Lubanski gave his then girlfriend (now wife) Candace Frazee a white plush bunny clutching a heart, an homage to her nickname for him, “Honey Bunny”. It became a “thing” for the couple, and according to Candace, who is also an expert on angels and Swedenborgian theology, they have been giving each other bunny gifts daily ever since. The couple won the Guinness Award in 1999 when they hit over 8,000 and have never looked back, turning their modest Pasadena home into a bunnicopia of collectibles, all painstakingly dusted and organized by theme. They share their bunny palace with 5 live rabbits, the freeze dried remains of pet bunnies past, and some regal looking cats, including a friendly bengal cat named Benji.

There are lots of pictures of the Bunny Museum at Atlas Obscura. Link

Art Conservator Gwynne Ryan

Dead sharks? Edible statues? Contemporary artists rely on exotic materials to push the boundaries of art. And they’re using a new breed of conservators to fix things when they go bad.

Forget the white coats, Forget the magnifying glasses and tiny brushes. Sure, classical art conservators still spend their days and nights obsessing over ways to remove centuries of grime from Renaissance frescoes, but contemporary art preservation is an entirely different picture.  After all, how do you save a putrefying shark? How do you deal with an avant-garde video installation that’s blinking out? And what do you do when the industrial-grade fireworks stuffed in the headless cow carcass stubbornly refuse to light? Modern art represents the Wild West of art preservation -a world in which artists push the envelope with outrageous ideas and materials, and conservators use any means necessary to keep those works in one piece and on display.

We asked top pros to share the inside stories behind some of the most outlandish and challenging conservation projects. Norman Rockwell paintings these ain’t.

(Image credit: Fickr user Rupert Ganzer)

“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by Damien Hirst
The shark was, well, rotting. Despite its portentous title, Damien Hirst’s 1991 masterwork was pretty straightforward: a dead tiger shark suspended in an acrylic glass tank filled with 224 gallons of water. The problem was that the huge fish began to decompose almost immediately -Hirst had failed to preserve it properly. To stem the stench, London’s Saatchi Gallery pumped bleach into the water, but that only made the shark decompose faster.  None of this stopped an American hedge-fund manager from buying the work for $8 million in 2004, making it one of the most expensive contemporary art sales ever.

An almost comical series of attempts to preserve the putrid predator ensued. Hirst and his conservators had the shark skinned and its hide tanned and mounted onto a fiberglass skeleton. But the result, intended to inspire terror, looked like a rejected prop from Jaws 3-D.

So Hirst threw in the fish towel. He struck a deal with the buyer: For a six-figure fee, he simply acquired another dead shark from an Australian fisherman, and this time preserved it with formaldehyde. Shark number two is a foot shorter, but its gaping jaws are wider and scarier. If all goes well, it will last 250 years. “That piece is like the Sistine Chapel, it’s so iconic,” says Gwynne Ryan, sculpture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, who has worked on other Hirst pieces. “Will we look back on all these changes and say: ‘God, what a ridiculous thing to do?’ It’s kind of hard to know.”

As for shark number one? It went from a multimillion dollar artwork to 1,800 pounds of biological waste in the blink of an eye.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ian T Edwards)

“Video Flag” by Nam June Paik
Even back when cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions were the norm, repairing one was a headache. It meant hauling the heavy box to a cluttered shop, where a guy named Murray in a stained shirt would place it on a shelf, and then call you two weeks later with a Kansas-sized bill. Now imagine having to fix 70 of them, with the added problem that CRTs are obsolete and Murray is retired or dead.

That’s what Jeff Martin, another Hirshhorn conservator, is facing with Nam June Paik’s “Video Flag,” a kaleidoscopic wall of 13-inch Sanyo CRTs that evoke the United States and its flag. So far, Paik’s 1986 masterpiece has held up well, but some of the monitors, just like your grandma’s old set, are well past their warranties. “They’re electronics, and they wear out,” says Martin. “What happens when they all need to be replaced?”

Since CRT monitors are no longer being made, buying new ones from Best Buy isn’t an option. Nor is substituting modern TVs; that fuzzy scan-lined picture that made you dump your old CRT for for a plasma or LCD screen is inseparable from the piece’s conception. Worse still, putting the exhibit in protective storage and hauling it out every ten years or so isn’t an option: The TVs need to be powered up periodically or the diodes break down chemically.

So what are the folks at Hirshhorn doing? They’re stockpiling old CRTs like mad for use as spares. But as Ryan points out, “There are only so many CRT monitors in the world. Our conservators are going on eBay like crazy people to buy them up. And they’re already running out.”

“Building Steam 190″ by Donald Lipski
An industrial rubber glove filled with rice, then capped off with a porthole for people to peer inside… sounds like a disturbing artifact you might find in a German tourist shop. For the private collector who bought this work by enigmatic modernist sculptor Donald Lipski, however, it was disturbing on a whole other level.

The first problem: After only a few years, the glove ripped. Even worse, the rice became infested with the larvae of tiny cigarette beetles. It was up to Glenn Wharton, a conservator now with the Museum of Modern Art, to tell the collector the bad news: Two-thirds of the artwork -the glove and the rice- would have to be replaced.

Restoration went well at first. Lipski told Wharton where to find an exact duplicate of the glove and even sent him imported specialty rice (apparently Uncle Ben’s wouldn’t cut it). Wharton then subjected the grains to a freeze-thaw-freeze cycle to kill any latent infestations. Victory! The piece went back on display. But, two years later, Wharton got another call: The rice was infested again, this time with a far-gnarlier breed of lice. At this point, Lipski suggested replacing the rice with ricelike plastic “sprinkles” that he had considered using originally.

“I had a hard time with this,” Says Wharton. “Here’s an artist coming many years later saying, ‘Let’s just change the material aspect of the work.’” After much discussion with Lipski and the owner, the necessary changed were made, but Wharton and his associated suggested that the date of the work be amended to reflect the modifications. Case closed, but due diligence still doesn’t tell us what we really want to know about “Building Steam.” Why?

(Image credit: Flickr user Roberto C. Madruga)

“Palimpsest” by Anne Hamilton
Great art may be timeless, but when the theme of the work is how memory fades over time, conservators know they’re in for some kind of special meta-Hell. “Palimpsest” is a room wallpapered from ceiling to floor with thousands of tiny faded notes written by the artist’s friend, some buried in beeswax. To complete the uplifting message that we’re all headed for senility, there’s also a tank of snails chomping contendedly on two heads of cabbage.

“It requires a whole village to put this thing together,” says Ryan, who is overseeing the work’s installation at the Hirshhorn, the third time it’s been recreated. And while the piece is a bear to assemble, the biggest hurdle is, believe it or not, legislative. Since the work’s initial showing in 1989, snails have been classified as pests by the government. “You have to get special permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Ryan explains. “And then you have to prove you’re not just going to unleash them into the wild afterwards.”

The last time the work was on display in 2005, getting the clearance took longer than expected, and the exhibit opened with replacement mollusks: a selection of garden-variety slugs dug up from the lawns around the museum. When the snails finally did arrive, their treatment was appropriately high-concept. The staff gorged them on fresh veggies, then rotated them in and out of the exhibit on a precise schedule. The snails had it pretty good, in fact, until the end of the exhibit’s run, when, in accordance with the law, they were executed by autoclave. So much for preservation.

(Image credit: Janine Antoni/Luhring Augustine)

“Lick and Lather” by Janine Antoni
The strange thing isn’t that Antoni made a hyperrealistic impression of her upper body using dental molding materials. Or that she cast a series of busts, 14 in chocolate and 14 in soap. Or even that, to mimic the effects of aging, she licked the chocolate and bathed with the soap. What’s strange is that at no fewer than three galleries (in Venice, Dublin, and Philadelphia), visitors have bitten the noses off the chocolate sculptures. Afterward, there was real discussion about leaving them that way. “Do you repair it?” asks Ryan. “Or does that make this one unique?”

The decision was made not to repair the noses (or prosecute the offenders). But as the components age -handmade soap has a shelf life of only three years and chocolate not much longer- “Lick and Lather” continues to pose prickly conceptual questions. “What happens if the artist is no longer around?” wonders Ryan. “The busts can be recast. But who bathes with it?”

Maybe one of those nose biters can volunteer?

(YouTube link)

_______________________

The article above, written by Allen St. John, is reprinted with permission from the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

This collection of dubious medical devices reminds us that sometimes, medicine is best left to the doctors. Exhibits on display include a phrenological machine that gauges personality by measuring the size of bumps on the head, a foot-powered breast enlarger, and glasses and soap products designed for weight-loss.

You can still have your phrenology read by the fully functional machine today, and as the machine outlines the bumps on your skull, the phrenology reader “maps” intelligence, morality, and much more. Machines such as these were all the rage at State Fairs of the early 1900s, as were other questionable medical devices. The infomercials of their time, these snake oils and pseudoscience gadgets could cure impotence, tell how smart you were, and make you live forever.

Read more about this strange museum within a museum at Atlas Obscura. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user A.M. Kuchling)

Santo or “the Saint” is “one of the most famous and iconic of all Mexican luchadores” Over his life he produced numerous B-Horror/Action films for Mexican cinemas. In 1972 he may have made his greatest film ever. Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, the plot is fairly straight forward. The wrestlers stop in Guanajuato and all the mummies come alive to attack them. Obviously. (There is a motive. Something about one of the mummies avenging his defeat by Santo’s grandfather… or something…)

The film proved to Santo’s most successful, and the mummies even got their own series, starring in such films as Robbery Of The Mummies and Castle Of The Mummies.

Atlas Obscura has clips from the movie, in which the real mummies appear, but they do not perform in action sequences -they have real live stunt doubles for that. Link

Take a museum tour like none you’ve ever seen! Astonish Me is a short film about newly-discovered species created by writer Stephen Poliakoff and director Charles Sturridge to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF). Link -Thanks, Danny Smits!

If you’re really curious, you can check out the official unveiling of the World’s Largest Big Mac featuring Ronald McDonald himself.

Link via Insanewiches
Photo: Henry Ray Abrams/AP

There’s an amazing collaboration between man and insect on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, a cloth woven purely from the silk of over a million Golden Orb spiders. This magnificent textile, naturally golden in color and seemingly imbued with it’s own luminescence, took over four years to make after eighty gatherers spent five years gathering the silk. Such a feat has not been attempted since 1900, when a spider silk textile that disintegrated over time was created for the Paris Exposition Universelle, and it’s not surprising that such a feat is almost never attempted, for the spiders with the best silk can only be found in Madagascar. But is all the effort really worth it for a piece of cloth that isn’t long for this world?

Link Image via John Brown

Link image via Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press

jAdis is, on the surface, a prop shop in Santa Monica, California. It was opened by Parke Meek in 1976 and filled with things he built, collected, and worked on since he was born in 1924. Although he died last year, jAdis remains as a monument to his life and interests.

In truth, the place defies definition. Part museum, part curiosity shop – Jadis represents a lifelong interest in technologies and their evolution in the pre-computer era.

As photographer Kasey McMahon said, “Parke was steampunk before it had a name and they’re working hard to keep the place alive.” See an artful gallery of the offerings at jAdis’ new website. Link

(Image credit: Kasey McMahon)

If you loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler as a kid, you’re probably going to be applying for this position before you even finish reading the post. For the second time, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry is inviting one lucky person to be a 24/7 guest at the museum for an entire month. Kate McGroarty did it last year and had a blast. The chosen person will receive $10,000 to eat, live and breathe the exhibits. Last year, Kate helped paranormal investigators document unexplained happenings on a German submarine in the building, got to read the books in the Colleen Moore Fairy Castle tiny book collection, played in a tornado and helped hatch some chicks, among many other things. It seems like a pretty amazing experience. If you’re interested, you need to have your application in by midnight on July 22. Be sure to let us know if you apply.

Even if you don’t apply, you should check out Kate’s blog from last year’s Month at the Museum. I just lost half of my evening there.

Link via Gizmodo

In the 70s and 80s, Polaroid’s founder, Edwin Herbert Land, provided prominent artists with custom-made cameras and film not available to the public. Big names like Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Ansel Adams were fans of the limited-edition technology and used it often, resulting in the 44,000-piece collection of Polaroid masterpieces now owned by Vienna-based WestLicht Museum of Photography. They’re displaying 350 of the photos now in Austria, but if you can’t catch a flight in time to check it out, Flavorwire has a preview. Link

Image: Patrick Nagatani/ WestLicht Collection

The city of Lille, France had a beautiful municipal swimming pool. It was an Art Deco masterpiece built between 1927 and 1932 by the architect Albert Baert. But over the years, the support underneath the pool was weakened, and it was declared unsafe in 1985. Instead of abandoning the building, the city undertook an extensive renovation project, turning the facility into a museum called the La Piscine-Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André Diligent. The locals just call it La Piscine. See more pictures of this beautiful building at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Flickr member graham chandler)

Artist Cyprien Gaillard made a pyramid for an art installation at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The pyramid had a total of 72,000 bottles of beer, each inside their blue case boxes. According to the artist, the project was to illustrate the theme “Preserving a monument goes hand in hand with destroying it.” The destroying part of this pyramid included letting the people viewing the work climb on it and drink the beer. link

Bemused tourists watched as the man sank into the 1100 litres of peanut butter – enough to fill more than 2000 regular-sized jars. He has been asked to pay for the damage after leaving a trail of footprints.

“It is normal that people pay if they damage the art,” spokeswoman Sharon Cohen told the Rotterdam-based newspaper.

The pricey installation – created by the artist Wim T. Schippers in 1962 and known as the Peanut Butter Platform – has suffered similar mishaps in the past.

He was the third person to step into the exhibit over the years. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Patrick Wenmakers)

I don’t know how many of you left your heart in San Francisco, but over 16,000 women left locks of their hair in Cappadocia, Turkey. Welcome to Chez Galip’s Hair Museum of Avanos:

Ever since 3000 BC, Avanos has been known for its high quality earthenware, made from the mineral-rich mud of the Red River, but in recent years, the town has mostly been mentioned in relation to a unique hair museum created by skilled Turkish potter Chez Galip. The unusual establishment, located under Galip’s pottery shop, is filled with hair samples from over 16,000 women. The walls, ceiling, and all other surfaces, except the floor, are covered with locks of hair from the different women who have visited this place, and pieces of paper with addresses on them.

The story goes that the museum was started over 30 years ago, when one of Galip’s friends had to leave Avanos, and he was very sad. To leave him something to remember her by, the woman cut a piece of her hair and gave it to the potter. Since then, the women who visited his place and heard the story gave him a piece of their hair and their complete address. Throughout the years, he has amassed an impressive collection of over 16,000 differently colored locks of hair, from women all around the world.

Link – via Street Anatomy

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts rented a billboard sign for their exhibition “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting.” It featured a portion of the nude painting Venus Rising from the Sea. It didn’t stay nude.

Apparently, someone thought it was just a little too nipple-y outside. Even if this is some kind of Midwestern modesty thing, at least the vandal did grant Venus a saucy red strapless deal–hardly sensible blizzard-people attire.

The MIA’s PR staff held a little pow-wow with Clear Channel, who offered to take the billboard down immediately. But head of PR Anne-Marie Wagener was tickled.

“Without those words it did look as though someone’s trying to censor it,” she says. “But with ‘Brrrr!’ it has that whole sort of funny element. Because it is cold!”

They’ve decided to leave Venus and her new wardrobe up.

Link (contains art nude) -via reddit

Remember the story of the eccentric Frenchman Louis Mantin, who ordered that his opulent mansion and estate be turned into a museum 100 years after his death? National Geographic has a gallery of photographs from inside the mansion, showing the decor and some of Mantin’s possessions, like these battling frogs. Link -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Jérôme Mondière)

Now, the Nonmuseum has hundreds of useless items on display, and has just celebrated its 100,000th visitor. Among the many eccentric inventions of this unusual museum, you can find a Portable Anonymizer that’s supposed to keep your identity a secret in real life, a foldable  snow sled, a guillotine for finger nails, and even a Champagne Cork Catcher – a device that keeps the cork from flying away when you pop open the bottle.

The object shown, housed at the Nonseum, is the foldable sled. Link -via the Presurfer

Mantin only had a few years to indulge his aesthetic fantasies. Knowing that his death was approaching, he made a will in which he made sure his treasured house would be saved.

“In the will, he says that he wants the people of Moulins in 100 years time to be able to see what was the life of a cultured gentleman of his day,” said assistant curator Maud Leyoudec.

“A bachelor with no children, he was obsessed with death and the passage of time. It was his way of becoming eternal.”

When the 100-year mark passed, the house remained abandoned and in no shape to open to the public. Isabelle de Chavagnac, a descendant of Mantin’s, threatened to exercise her right to inherit the mansion if it didn’t open as a museum. She didn’t really want the estate, but her actions forced the local government to allocate funds for renovation. The house then opened as a museum, as Mantin wished, in 2010. BBC News has a video tour of the home. Link -via Gizmodo

Dr. Chevalier Jackson was a laryngologist who spent a good deal of his career retrieving objects that his patients swallowed or inhaled. And he kept them all. He retired with a collection of over 2,000 bizarre items that had once been inside his patients.

Jackson retrieved these objects from people’s upper torsos, generally with little or no anesthesia. He was so intent on assembling his collection that he once refused to return a swallowed quarter, even when its owner threatened his life.

“He was a fetishist, no question,” said Mary Cappello, the author of “Swallow” (New Press), a new book about Jackson and his bizarre collection. “But his obsession had the effect of saving lives. That’s kind of amazing, and lucky for us that his madness made possible forms of rescue.”

The collection is set to go on display at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia on February 18th. Link -via Bioephemera

The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar is a stunning example of contemporary architecture fused with traditional cultural sign posts.  It is one of the most remarkable buildings in the Persian Gulf but sadly, not so well known out of its locale.

The idea that contemporary Islamic culture is inward looking was contradicted from the word go by the invitation to IM Pei to be the chief architect of the project. The Chinese born American considered by many to be a master in his field was gently coaxed out of retirement to design the building. Most agree he has done a stupendous job. You may know him for, among many other projects, the glass pyramid outside the Louvre.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

The cement sculpture, called ‘The Collector’, shows a figure who records bottled treasures in logbooks. It weighs four tonnes and is anchored 26 feet under the sea. Divers watch a yellowtail damselfish nibble on algae growing from the sculpture’s pant leg, which its creators hope will eventually sprout colourful coral.

About 400 life-size casts will be submerged off the resort of Cancun by the end of 2010. It is hoped that the low-acidity cement figures, designed to be anti-corrosive and mimic rock, will be transformed over time into artificial reefs. Some will be in shallow waters for snorkellers to enjoy.[...]

“The park managers were looking for an alternative to manage the tourists. The idea was to concentrate everyone in one place,” said de Caires Taylor, who has also built an underwater sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies.

The 400 figures, weighing 180 tonnes in total and to be named ‘Silent Evolution’, will be submerged in a barren, flat expanse of the park, which lies between Cancun and nearby islands.

Link | Photo: Reuters

He was eight, and desperate for a cleaner of his own, when he spotted a red Goblin 800 lying on a rubbish dump. "I took it home, wiped all the muck off it, plugged it in, and it worked," he sighs. "That was one of the most fantastic moments of my life."

By the time he reached his teens James already had 30 vacuum cleaners. One by one his other interests – sport, music, books – bit the dust. "I suppose you could say that vacuum cleaners took over my life," he says.

"I loved the look, the feel, the sound of them. You can’t really explain it to people who don’t have the same enthusiasm. It’s like some people love vintage cars or clocks. For me it was vacuum cleaners."

One of his party turns is to put on a blindfold and identify the host’s vacuum cleaner by its engine note.

Link (Photo: John Robertson)

People using Search the Collections… will find images of more than 100,000 objects… The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to more basic inventory information which might include the maker, provenance, production technique and style… Users explore the site by clicking on images that scroll across the screen or by accessing the powerful search engine that identifies objects by type, maker, date, material or location in the V&A. Google maps show places of origin. Text mining technologies also allow searching of all the text associated with an object so for the first time researchers are able to move from one theme to another.

The example shown above is a board game from 1804 – “The New Game of Emulation Designed for The Amusement of Youth of both Sexes and calculated to inspire their Minds with an abhorrence of vice and a love of virtue.”  It was marketed as a morality game designed to lead children “to admire and adopt the virtues of Obedience, Truth, Honesty, Gentleness, Industry, Frugality, Forgiveness, Carefulness, Mercy, and Humility; and to view in their real colours the opposite vices of Obstinacy, Falsehood, Robbery, Passion, Sloth, Intemperance, Malice, Neglect, Cruelty and Pride.”  It is one of hundreds of games in the “games” category of the online collection.

Link, via.

A trip through the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago will make you glad you live in the modern world instead of the “good old days”! Wired has a gallery of exhibit photos ranging from a skull that belonged to a trepanation patient to early x-ray machines. Pictured is a vest used in 1899 to correct scoliosis. If this were posted as a “What Is It?” I would guess it to be an instrument of torture. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Last year, the Jiangsu Head Investment Group and the government of Nanjing, China held a competition for designing a museum for the automobile’s history and achievements.  Italian architect Francesco Gatti and his team won with this entry featuring an interactive element: you drive into the museum.

The architect describes the museum as a “movie sequence in which the principal actor is the car”, a building where two car-related panorama go hand in hand:   on the one hand the architect’s conscious attention to motorway aestheticism and urban scale – the structures and materials remind one of a viaduct – and on the other, his transportation into the museum of the ergonomics of the interior of a car.  The furbishing and details within the edifice are related to and on a scale with its specific functions and it is not difficult for the visitor to imagine that he is in a car on a highway, rather than in a museum.

Link (rendering courtesy of 3GATTI.)

To accommodate armchair tourists too timid to risk life and limbs, the Italian government funded the creation of The Virtual Museum of Iraq, showcasing pieces dating from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian eras and more.

Check it out: Link – via Neal Ungerleider’s True/Slant blog

For the final time, people will gather here Saturday on two closed-off blocks of Main Street to celebrate National Mustard Day. There will be free hotdogs with mustard — there’s a $10 surcharge for those who dare to request ketchup — mustard painting and music by the Poupon U Accordion Band.

The Mustard Museum draws up to 30,000 visitors a year. Link to story. Link to Mustard Day website. -via J-Walk Blog

In a rare statement Banksy said: ‘The people in Bristol have always been very good to me – I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum. [...]

He added: ‘This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my ictures up rather than scrape them off.’

The exhibition – called Banksy Versus Bristol Museum – consists of more than 100 items and will run for three weeks.

Link

Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf came from a long line of talented glassmakers. As a hobby, Leopold began making glass flowers from illustrations in natural history books. So beautiful, accurate and delicate were these models, a buzz began to generate in his hometown in Germany, and a local aristocrat commissioned 100 glass orchids. Leopold’s son, Rudolf joined him in the painstakingly intricate work. Thus began a prolific career in natural history glassmaking, ending in the largest commission of their lives; an order from Harvard college for over 3000 plant and flower models for their botany students. Leopold didn’t live to see the completion of the project, but Rudolf continued on without him, working alone from 1895 – 1936, three years before his own death.

Link to story. Link to more photographs at Flickr.

(image credit: Curious Expeditions)

Miniatur Wonderland in Hamburg, Germany is the largest model railway in the world. With 7 miles of tracks in an area of over 16,000 sq ft, 200,000 people, 4,000 cars, 800 buildings, it features 6 geographic regions including America. It’s a work in progress (!) with a goal of more than 13 miles of tracks. The builders have already clocked in more than 500,000 hours of work.

This video is a presentation of this amazing attraction; make sure you watch the ‘small’ control room @ 3:35.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

Back in 2000 Stark convinced the Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, City Countil that they needed a tourist attraction and the toy museum would solve the problem. Five years later the museum opened its doors.

Inside is one of the largest action figure exhibits in the world, from a Star Wars display to a Batman shrine, the amount of figures the museum has on display outweighs its display space, meaning figures are on constant rotation so every character and creation gets it due.

Since opening in 2005 the museum has had visitors from every state in the U.S. and over thirty foreign countries, totaling over 40,000 visitors. Wired has gallery of pictures if you can’t go in person. Link

(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Every inch of Marvins Marvelous Mechanical Museum's 5500 square feet of floor space with 40 foot ceilings containing an array of buzzing and clattering new and vintage mechanical devices and oddities. Overhead dangle signs, animatronic dummies, over 50 airplane models gliding along a steel rail, vintage fans of all types, and classic sideshow posters. Marvin himself travels the world looking for odd coin operated devices, both new and old. Some of his machines are custom made just for him, and can not be seen in operation anywhere else. Marvin's is also listed in the World Almanac's 100 most unusual museums in the U.S.

Link

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Luci.