29 Weird Museums - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep.210)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon

This is Mental Floss on YouTube. And did you know that Kansas has a barbed wire museum with 2400 different examples of barbed wire

There's an actual antique barbed wire society that runs it, and apparently the museum is a real hot spot for barbed wire collectors

It's like their Tinder. Anyway, that's the first of many weird museums I'm going to tell you about today in this video

brought to you by GEICO. If you like meat puns, and frankly who doesn't, look no further than the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota

It's also affectionately referred to as the Guggenham, the Porkopolis, and the MoMA, or Museum of Meat-themed Awesomeness

Wait a second. Did someone just say Guggenham and Porkopolis? That means I get to put two quarters in the staff pork chop party fund

Anyway, at the Spam Museum you can learn about the history of Spam, test your knowledge of Spam with some trivia

But really, Mark, who are the real winners? Those who know a lot of spam trivia or those who don't

Speaking of the MoMA, the MOBA, or Museum of Bad Art, is located in Somerville, Massachusetts

It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like, a collection of really bad art

As the museum is basically located in a basement, they have a few galleries around town

including one by the men's restroom at a local movie theater. The National Museum of Funeral History can be found in Houston, Texas

It has the biggest collection of funeral artifacts in the United States

because, you know, where else are you going to find a full-scale recreation of Abraham Lincoln in his coffin

There's a museum of Pez memorabilia in Burlingame, California. It contains every Pez dispenser ever, 900 in total, including those much-sought-after Ice Age II Pez dispensers

If exhibitions like Innovations in Spinal Surgery and Injury, Death and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia sound interesting to you

then you should visit the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. You can also see actual pieces of Albert Einstein's brain there

So wait, you're saying that this is not actually the real Albert Einstein? Also, you can see a gigantic colon from a person who died of toxic megacolon

If the Mütter Museum sounded fun to you, I have some bad news. The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis is now closed

but you can still find parts of its collection at the Science Museum of Minnesota

I just hope they held on to the foot-operated breast enlarger and the prostate gland warmer

You know, Mark, I've had a lot of thoughts about my prostate gland, but none of them has ever been I wish this were warmer Leela hair museum can be found in Independence Missouri To quote its website it the only hair museum in the world with hundreds of wreaths and thousands of jewelry pieces made from human hair

It also contains locks of hair from Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, and Michael Jackson

all three of whom, by the way, once owned monkeys, is a fact I made up

If you've ever seen a horror movie, you're probably going to want to skip the Vent Haven Museum of Ventriloquist Dummies in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

Also, if you haven't ever seen a horror movie, sorry. Sorry, ventriloquist museums, but, you know

You know. I think you know. 800 dummies can be found there, plus it has an annual convention that attracts over 600 ventriloquists

That's a lot of dummies. Alright, let's move on to something more highbrow, an Icelandic penis museum

At the Icelandic Phalological Museum, you can find over 280 penises from 93 species

They're especially proud to have penises representing almost every mammal that's found in Iceland

What, so like people, horses, and lemmings? Sorry, Iceland. And now allow me to smoothly transition to talking about the Washington Banana Museum in Auburn, Washington

Its curator is Anne Mitchell Lovell, a proclaimed, quote, long-time scholar of banana consciousness

and she has collected almost 6,000 banana artifacts into one place. A man named Robert Wadlow holds the Guinness World Record for tallest man

He was 8 feet 11 inches tall when he died in 1940

But if you're curious as to his shoe size, you can find one of his actual shoes at the Giant Shoe Museum in Seattle

Spoiler alert, that's the only actual shoe in the museum that was ever used. The rest are just art

There's only one parasite museum in the world and it can be found in Tokyo. You can learn all about parasites and even look at 300 specimens

And don't worry, they do have a gift shop. And if you're already in Japan for the Parasite Museum, don't skip the Ramen Museum

You can eat, shop, and race slot cars. The museum has a slot car track that's 30 meters long with six lanes

What does that have to do with ramen? Apparently nothing. Speaking of food, the Burnt Food Museum is located in Arlington, Massachusetts

Museum founder Debra Henson was inspired when she was trying to heat up apple cider, received

a long phone call, and then discovered that her cider had gotten so burnt that it could

stand on its own. Displays at the museum include thrice potato and why sure you can bake quiche in the microwave The website of the International Towing and Recovery Museum insists you quote set aside several hours to view the arrays of displays and exhibits

The museum can be found in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and contains both a Hall of Fame

and a Wall of the Fallen for those who died while towing

The six-story Museum of Clean is located in Pocatello, Idaho. Its true claim to fame is the world's largest collection of vacuum cleaners

almost a thousand of them, but it also has washers, toilets, brooms, and much more

You can learn how neon signs are made at the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, plus you

can see and learn the history of, wait for it, signs. Croatia's Museum of Broken Relationships was founded by two artists who encouraged people

to donate items from relationships that have ended. This can be anything from wedding dresses to letters to a glass horse

The website says, the museum offers a chance to overcome an emotional collapse through

creation by contributing to the museum's collection. But that doesn't seem necessary

I mean, I've done a lot of post-breakup creating without ever donating to a museum

Like, I created an empty ice cream pint where there had once been a full one

I created a lot of text messages I probably shouldn't have sent. And of course, I have created several lakes of tears

Speaking of museums dedicated to things I know terribly well, there's a beer can museum

in Massachusetts. It contains 5,000 beer cans from over 50 countries. The curator, Kevin Logan, started collecting beer cans when he was just 14 years old and

eventually started a full-fledged museum out of his collection. You know what they say, find what you love and do it for the rest of your life

In Middleton, Wisconsin, you can find the National Mustard Museum founded by Barry Levinson

He says that after the Boston Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series, he was at a supermarket

and heard the Mustards whisper, if you collect us, they will come

Now, the Mustard Museum has over 5,600 mustards, and the Red Sox won a World Series

But do they have DFTBA mustard? Also in Wisconsin, the Spinning Top Museum in Burlington

If tops aren't really your thing, never fear, because they also have a yo-yo exhibit

The museum has a total of 2,000 spinning tops, yo-yos, and other spinning toys

So many, in fact, it'll make your head spin. Meredith, what did I say about puns

In Keswick, England, there's a pencil museum, and there you will find the world's longest-colored pencil

Because I know that's something you've been waiting for. Another museum dedicated to a common item the Lock Museum in Terryville Connecticut Here you will find surprise a bunch of locks Including a pin tumbler lock from Egypt that 4 years old The Lamp Museum in Bruges has a total of 6 antique

lamps. In case you're not convinced that this is a great time, we went ahead and looked

up the TripAdvisor reviews for you. User SAT007 claims was okay, had the whole place to ourselves

That's a ringing endorsement if ever I heard one. The International Museum of Toilets in

in New Delhi contains all kinds of cool toilets from history, like an 18th century French toilet

that looks like a bookcase and toilets from 2500 BCE. And if you've been marathoning finding Bigfoot, then maybe it's time for a trip to the Bigfoot

Discovery Museum in Felton, California. I mean, this museum has everything, except for Bigfoot, of course

You can look into local history, watch Bigfoot documentaries, even see actual plaster, hand

and footprints from Bigfoot himself, which seems like something that should be in his mom's garden, not at a museum

But if you prefer your animals, you know, less fictional, there's a cat museum in East Malaysia

Along with cat figurines and toys and paintings, there's an actual mummified cat from ancient Egypt

Aw, we would never sell you to the cat museum. Just kidding, anyone with a thousand bucks can have this cat

And finally, I return to my salon to tell you about the Gelato Museum, which opened in Carpeggiani, Italy in 2012

At the museum, you can learn all about the history of gelato, but more importantly, there is a tasting room

Thanks for watching Mental Floss here on YouTube, which is made with the help of all of these nice people and was made possible by our friends at Geico

Every week we endeavor to answer one of your mind-blowing questions. This week's question comes from Elise the Police, who asks, when was the first ice cream truck invented

That, Elise, is an important question. Well, good humor bar inventor Harry Burt created the first ice cream trucks in the 1920s

To combine the booming trends of fast food and automobiles, he bought 12 refrigerator

trucks to distribute good humor bars around his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio

And he made sure that the trucks followed the same route every day and rang a bell as they drove

At first, kids would come outside to investigate the noise, but soon it became synonymous with

the ice cream truck and, you know, Pavlov, the bell ringing, you know the story

If you have a mind-blowing question you'd like answered, please leave it in comments below. Thank you again for watching

And as we say in my hometown, don't forget that someone has dedicated her life to banana artifacts