The fire gutted the museum's gift shop and caused significant smoke damage to several exhibits.
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LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology damaged by fire
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In 1988 it was all in good fun.
I get your point, but I don't think it would be a problem for any actual visitors.
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Oh, no! I have never visited in person, but I frequently browse through their website, and I've bought quite a few of the cards and other tchotchkes they sell online. Will make a donation forthwith.
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I've visited this delightful museum three times, but not in 20 years. I hope they pull through...
Edit: Donated via the link in the article to offer more than just hope.
Edit: Donated via the link in the article to offer more than just hope.
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Some things can just be (silly). The idea that "everything is political" is a tool of analysis that has been confused for a commandment on how everyone should behave and everything should be shaped all the time. It is not.
You will be much happier - and readier for the real fight - if you create a mental enclave for yourself where it's ok for some things to just exist. Don't confuse wearing yourself out on silly museum names for "making change."
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Read the book in undergrad. Hope they’re okay.
Fun pairing with that book: The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher. If you like museums and The Willows by Algernon “weird pre-lovecraft” Blackwood.
Fun pairing with that book: The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher. If you like museums and The Willows by Algernon “weird pre-lovecraft” Blackwood.
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@Readercathead, where do you get arson from fire? It's easily the least probable source of ignition for any conflagration.
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I went there years ago. To say the place is weird is an understatement. But I’m glad it exists.
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They've got a decent number of exhibits online, and quite an excellent online gift shop.
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If you've never visited , this place is truly sublime. Its mix of the odd, the oddly dubious, the dubiously true and pure fiction is a brilliant essay on the nature of pedagogy and institutional knowledge. The extensive exhibits concerning one "Geoffrey Sonnabend" are as compellingly weird and confusingly cross referenced as anything you'll ever see.
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When I visited, they gave you a lovely cup of tea and biscuits when you got to the end of the museum.
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This is one of the probably 1000 places in LA that I take for granted as existing here but never getting around to visiting. This should be a wake up call to visit such a cool place and justify living in such an expensive area.
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I want to hear more of this. I know when they were delivering the main mirror, it had to be enclosed in a bulletproof enclosure, as a very threatened evangelist crowd in the middle of the country didn't want the telescope finding 'the secrets of God', and took shots at it.
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Here's another one most people aren't aware of. The SciFi World museum opening soon in Santa Monica. Everything from Star Trek to Firefly and in between.
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The initial LAFD reports said the fire was started "near the mail slot," but I'm not seeing that in subsequent new articles (and some of the news reports have removed that line).
The closest I can find now is https://www.audacy.com/knxnews/news/local/fire-causes-smoke-damage-to-museum-of-jurassic-technology where it says it "started near a mail window by the first-floor entrance."
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It does sound amusing but I wish they had more historical prehistorical artefacts. The Jurassic period was more technologically advanced than we give them credit for.
Do they at least have one of these?
Do they at least have one of these?
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Not just a joke, but one very much intended to give pause and make you think. "But there's no such thing as a 'Jurassic Technology'!" is precisely the reaction the designers are hoping to provoke. In essence, this is a "museum about museums" - as the article describes, the exhibits are a highly eclectic mix of authentic, authentic but off-kilter, and fabricated(?) artifacts. You're forced to wonder what is real, what is not, whether the explanatory texts are accurate & truthful, etc. I assumed "Athanasius Kircher" was some made-up figure until I googled the name and was surprised to discover he was a real person - but it was still hard to know whether the museum was faithfully presenting his work or mixing truth and fiction. It inspires a sense of both wonder and skepticism - which is an attitude it probably wouldn't hurt to cultivate when visiting any "normal" museum. (Not nihilistic skepticism, but more like a healthy questioning of one's assumptions. I realize in this day and age it may feel like our culture has gone overboard in undermining its epistemic foundations.)
Very glad they were able to stop the fire in time!
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It was obviously one of those radical liberal illegals paid by Soros to destroy God's Truth that humans and dinosaurs coexisted! /s
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Now that I have heard of this place (thanks again, Ars!) I'll keep tabs on it and find time to get up there after it re-opens.
I'm assuming this refers to "David," but have to imagine it extends to the co-founder, also. Could well be my kind of peeps.
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You should visit when it reopens ! I found it really whimsical and engaging. Like a Douglas Adams novel. This description from Google maps hits the nail on the head:
“Quirky, fascinating, portal to another world. Requires an earnest and sincere effort to follow the instructions, connect the stories, actually read the artifacts like the curators intended”
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I'll have to add this to places to visit. Sounds like a similar vibe to the Mustard Museum
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Having been there in person I can say, as others have, that anyone who thinks this is some sort of right wing crackpot museum hasn't been there.
I too assumed that this was more in line with a "creationist" museum, a place built to delude and confuse homeschoolers and aid parents who want to otherwise undermine basic public education. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is not that.
It is a parody of that, if anything. Though I wouldn't describe it that narrowly.
I will admit to not being terribly taken with it, it was rather reading intensive and I was killing time before going to the airport and I don't think I had enough time to engage with it well. But before anyone interprets that as a slight I tend to not love that sort of eclectic mini attraction (ex: Winchester Mystery House was not my thing).
If you like quirky weird stuff it might be up your alley. Not an attraction for kids though.
Just don't lump them together with the Mantracks and other creationist wackos.
I too assumed that this was more in line with a "creationist" museum, a place built to delude and confuse homeschoolers and aid parents who want to otherwise undermine basic public education. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is not that.
It is a parody of that, if anything. Though I wouldn't describe it that narrowly.
I will admit to not being terribly taken with it, it was rather reading intensive and I was killing time before going to the airport and I don't think I had enough time to engage with it well. But before anyone interprets that as a slight I tend to not love that sort of eclectic mini attraction (ex: Winchester Mystery House was not my thing).
If you like quirky weird stuff it might be up your alley. Not an attraction for kids though.
Just don't lump them together with the Mantracks and other creationist wackos.
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I don't know much about creationism, but I don't think it involves the Jurassic period, and I wouldn't think that's the kind of joke they would ever make.
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I went there once back around 2015, with a Meetup group. It was certainly quite odd. It felt like a bunch of random collections put together, many of them not in the best of shape (broken or missing stuff), and it felt like half the time the museum was trying to get one over on visitors as to whether this stuff was really 'real'.
The open air rooftop is where the tea garden is located, with 'doves', which I think were actually just pigeons with a overhead net preventing them from flying out.
The whole thing felt a bit like a performance piece that we were invited into.
Honestly, a friend of mine said the best way to appreciate MJT was to go there a bit under the 'influence'. It made more sense that way.
The open air rooftop is where the tea garden is located, with 'doves', which I think were actually just pigeons with a overhead net preventing them from flying out.
The whole thing felt a bit like a performance piece that we were invited into.
Honestly, a friend of mine said the best way to appreciate MJT was to go there a bit under the 'influence'. It made more sense that way.
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Funny you should mention that, I strongly recommend Dan Olson's documentary called Mantracks. Which is a deep dive into the people who believe that there is evidence that man and dinosaur existed at the same time. Though fwiw this is usually under the guise of "Young Earth" creationists trying to rectify the existence of dinosaurs despite believing the earth is only a few thousand years old.
So you're right they would not use the term Jurassic because they reject the entire geologic timeline. But some of them do believe in dinosaurs, or rather they cannot reject the existence of dinosaurs outright and thus distort it to confirm their biblically defined version of history.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UDXdqqJQPE
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