"The Museum of Jurassic Technology"

At the end of our seminar class the other night, we watched a "cheesy" video (Ryan Griffis' description) about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California.

The film we watched is called "Inhaling the Spore" and focuses on David Wilson, the museum creator, and the magic of his creation. I was thoroughly delighted, overjoyed, and enchanted by the whole film and the people in it, and frantically wrote notes in the dark as we watched.

I wrote:
This guy is the embodiment of it! So curious - accordion-playing on the street, such a wonderful, magical sort of man. Like a wizard.

Old museums are related to a "cabinet of curiosity" and made no distinctions between god-made or man-made, beauty or grotesque. Somehow they were just "out of the realm of ordinary experience."

(Example, the carved fruit stone who's caption card told of the myriad of impossibly complex animals carved into it. It "Plays with your credulity when it comes to those side captions" but there really IS one of those fruit stones to those exact specifications somewhere else.) Its amazing what you will believe because the side caption tells you to.

"We don't know exactly why they laugh, but we think its wonderful." David Wilson says

The book written about this museum is called "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology" by Lawrence Weschler. And I very much want to read it.