Museum of Jurassic Technology! *image heavy*

[JoitheArtist]

I wish I'd gotten some pics of the guy who was at the desk: he was a young guy with a great beard, odd voice, and wearing a waistcoat!!! He was AWESOME!

The door leads into the museum store (on my way out, I bought a bestiary, translated from a 12th century Latin text!), and then into the museum proper.

We went for the Athanasius Kircher exhibit first. The rooms were inky black, with pools of light on the exhibits: incredibly atmospheric and absolutely stunning to look at. My photos don't capture it at all.

First off was this ring of water-filled glass globes, with little homunculi in them. It was some sort of contraption to show magnetism...or something. I wasn't clear on the concept, and half the exhibit info is invented BS anyway. But it looked COOL.

We could hear this weird jingling sound, mixed with a lovely medieval song, and went into the next room to see...STUFF!

There was this AWESOME bell wheel: it would move, and all the bells would ring. I'll post a vid of that later. And then these little empty dioramas, that when you looked in through these two plates of glass, little glowing figures would appear!!

And a whole thing about how Kircher demonstrated that if the Tower of Babel had succeeded in being built to the moon, it would have knocked the Earth out of its rotation.

[JoitheArtist]

Updated--IMAGE HEAVY!

Pics!!!

Ok, here's the entrance to the museum. It's in this slightly seedy part of LA. When you face the door, there's a fountain and random ostrich egg, on the right is another random display. It almost feels like entering a secret society or something.

[Green_Fairy]

is it bad that when i first saw the title, i thought of dinosaurs with hammers?

[Andara Bledin]

(photos posted on Facebook at the moment; Photobucket won't let me upload from this computer for some reason--I'll try to find an alternate option in a few minutes)

If you don't care about other random people potentially using the images and the inability to delete anything, go with tinypic. I use it all the time, particularly for throw-away forum posts.

^-.-^

[BookstoreEscapee]

OK, that sounds cool. I gotta go to bed but I'm gonna bookmark that site and look at it some more later.

[JoitheArtist]

I spent my afternoon in what must be the repository of at least half of the world's supply of pure AWESOME.

http://www.mjt.org/

It's the most bizarre place...one whole set of rooms dedicated to the work of Athenasius Kircher, a room of exhibits of bizarre superstitions, an oil portrait gallery of all the dogs in the Soviet space program, and room of bizarre letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory in the early decades of the 20th century.

SO. FREAKING. COOL.

(photos posted on Facebook at the moment; Photobucket won't let me upload from this computer for some reason--I'll try to find an alternate option in a few minutes)