The Rosetta Stone sits on a pedestal in the middle of a corridor in the British Museum. It’s not behind a rope or anything - I had my picture taken with my ugly mug right over it. You could easily touch it, although clearly you weren’t supposed to. The freaking Rosetta Stone! (This was back in '98. I think they improved the security a bit but couldn’t find a cite.)
The Statue of Liberty was much smaller than I thought it would be. Without the pedestal, you could probably throw a rock and hit the head.
The Mercury Redstone launch vehicle looks like a length of sewer pipe painted white with a pup tent on top of it. It gave me new respect for the early astronauts - Shepard and Grissom must have had King Kong balls to ride on top of that thing, although they wouldn’t have been able to fit King Kong balls in the capsule.
When I went to work for the gubmint, I saw some launch vehicles up close, close enough to touch. You know how sleek and smooth they look in the photographs? Up close, they look like someone carved them out of Play-Doh with a spatula. (It’s the foam insulation - hard to get a smooth surface>)
Hyperelastic, I did touch the Rosetta Stone. Just a little. I couldn’t resist, don’t tell on me, please!
I know I posted to this thread ages ago, but I don’t think I mentioned the Dead Sea. What no one tells you about the Dead Sea is that it fucking HURTS. The salt gets into your skin and begins to sting. I couldn’t be in the water for more than about ten minutes before having to rush out to wash all the slimy salt off (they have freshwater showers on the beach). You have to wear flip flops in the water, too, or you’ll cut your feet on the salt crystals on the seabed. And I bet that would extremely uncomfortable.
It’s worth the pain to experience it, though. I tried jumping up and down in the water and my feet didn’t even hit the bottom. Like jumping on a trampoline. Completely bizarre place.
Ray Borque[sup]*[/sup] had the opportunity to touch the Stanley Cup a few times during his career, but he wouldn’t. His last year in the league, his team won the finals. The officials handed the Cup to the team captain, who handed it straight to Borque. He knew that touching the Stanley Cup was something that had to be earned.
About four years ago, I took a tour of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s storage facility on the outskirts of D.C. They never really publicized it, you had to call ahead, and space was pretty limited. On the day I went, there were a lot of no-shows, and one guy who worked there took us into a building that’s not usually on the tour. It was cooled below 60 degrees, and they store all the rubber items there so they’ll be preserved. It was a small building. In the back corner, next to a set of unused SR-71 tires, was a pallet with the original tires from the Spirit of St. Louis.
When Lindberg came back from Paris, he went on a barnstorming tour around the country. During that time, he wore out a set of tires and new ones were put on. Those are the tires that are on the plane now, hanging in the museum on the Mall. But they kept the originals. Those are the tires that touched down at Le Bourget airfield in Paris. I was at the back of the group, and on the way out I could have reached out and touched them. I didn’t. I hadn’t earned it.
Am I weird? Whenever he was introduced at a hockey game, or did something special, I think the organist should have played the Swedish Chef music from the Muppet Show.
When I was at the Grand Canyon early this summer, there was a huge gathering of amateur astronomers from all over. We went to check out their “star party”, I reluctantly, expecting a handful of people with little dinky telescopes. Instead, there were easily over fifty people there, some with absolutely massive, high-tech telescopes. The night sky over the Grand Canyon is like nothing else: impossibly dark and clear. We could literally see the Milky Way. We could see star clusters billions of miles away. We could see individual teeny craters in the moon. We could see Jupiter’s moons, Saturns rings…it was mind-blowing in so many ways.
Have to agree that Italy, the southern portion anyway, is amazing. Rome and Naples despite/in spite of the dirt and grime are beautiful, the history, the poeple, the food, the culture, the zest for life! I want to go back so bad.
Folks have mentioned view of mountains from their homes that others find amazing, For a little over 3 years, I had a lovely view of Mt Vesuvius from my balconey.
Florence was lovely and beautiful and the Uffizi was amazing as was the Ponte Vecchio, but getting off the main tourist routes and into where the people live is best of all.
The Amalfi coast road, surviving a ride on it is exhilarating and the views are nothing to sneeze at.
Prague was humbling. A favorite. An university town from the days of alchemy, you can still sense the ancient magic as you walk the cobble stone streets.
In Spain, Guernica, at Reina Sofía, Spain’s national museum of modern art. Stunning.
much of the survivng Ed Wood entourage- Dolores Fuller, Paul Marco, Conrad Brooks, the Rev. Lyn Lemon, Forrest J. Ackerman- all but the good Rev looking like older versions of their younger selves, all also being quite pleasant, & the good Rev being an elderly white-haired gallant Southern gentleman who spoke with me for about ten minutes & had nothing but good to say about Ed. Btw, Dolores was stacked! I really doubt Ed stretched out her sweaters that much.
(I saw them at the NuArt theatre premiere of the documentary The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr.)
The Ackermansion- half of it was well-kept displays of Horror/SciFi movie memorabilia, half of it was disorganized clutter in states of decay- all of it was
historical & much of it, including the clutter, priceless
Uncle Forry was a hoot! I love the old fart!
Catherine Zeta-Jones across the street at Sean Connery’s Grauman Theatre handprinting- she was so thin!
The King Tut sarcophagous! I saw it in L. A. two months ago- it wasn’t as long as my arm! He was beyond dwarfish!
Ohhhhh, that was just the sarcophagous for his liver!
heck, that was pretty impressive- handcrafted ornateness for a frikkin liver!!!
Graceland- a few days before last Christmas (almost got stuck in the big snow/freeze)- a panoply of Americana, quasi-Christianity & good ol’ rock&roll-
Elvis was America in microcosm- loving Momma, Jesus, food, cars, sex & drugs!
A glimpse of his grandeur, his potential & his tragedy. What was majorly surprising was what a reader he was- the Bible, sports, history & lots of metaphysical stuff.
I didn’t read all the replies, but the first thing that came to mind was the Iwo Jima monument. I knew it was big, but I had no idea it was that fucking huge. I get freaked out just thinking about it.
Six pages and no mention of the Parthenon?? I loved Athens alltogether - for the few days I was there in 1998. Our hotel was across the street from the National Gardens and the Temple of Zeus. It was across the street!!! The way the old and new co-existed was fascinating for someone from Indiana, where our oldest buildings might be 250 years old - most of the old ones are more like 150 - 200.
The Alamo. Yes, I know that downtown San Antonio is next door. But still…if you read a good history of the Alamo and then visit it and visualize while walking the perimeter, it’s awe-inspiring.
The San Jacinto Battlegrounds. The second most important war in US history only lasted 20 minutes and it was right here. You can start at Houston’s campsite and walk across the battlefield to Santa Anna’s campsite and visualize that afternoon. And then go visit the Battleship Texas memorial. Old Sam would have given his left nut to have that baby operational and present on April 21, 1836.
The Meteor Crater. It’s a HUGE hole in the ground that was created in a split-second by a mass of nickel-iron smashing into the ground at about 40,000 mph.
The Grand Canyon. It’s an even huger hole in the ground that was created over eons by water erosion. And it totally defies description. As the light changes over it, it seems to morph into something else every minute. And it is beautiful beyond belief.
The Battleship Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor. It’s small but it hits you like a ton of bricks. And what amazed me is that there is still oil leaking out of the fuel bunkers of the Arizona after all these years.
The Chung-Moo Memorial near On-Yang, S. Korea. Very lovely grounds and the memorial itself is beautiful. Dedicated to the memory of Admiral Yee Sun Shin, who is credited historically with the development of the first armored battleship in naval history.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house. I was about 12 or 13 years old when my mother insisted we take a detour out into the middle of nowhere while driving to visit family in Pennsylvania, and I grumped and groused about it the whole way, because why would I want to see some stupid house? … until we got there and took the tour, and it just took my breath away. The dedication to creating something that integrates and flows so perfectly with the nature around it is amazing. I still remember how floor in the living room was made of stones from the river below, with certain stones lacquered to a shine to make it seem like a stream was flowing from the fireplace; how all the wood pieces in cabinetry were selected to have the grain flowing together naturally and unbroken; how any non-“natural” elements (like the cast iron kettle in the fireplace, or the iron windowframes) were painted a dark red. I spent much of my adolescence having idle daydreams about making a billion dollars and buying it and living there. I’d like to go back, although I think the house is not holding up as well as it could…
Shinjuku, Tokyo. Well, Tokyo as a whole, but Shinjuku in particular just sort of blew me away. At the time when I went to Japan, I’d lived in Manhattan for three years, so I wasn’t expecting one of the world’s other super metropolises to be that different, but it was. In New York, you can turn a corner and end up on a quiet, calm street, but it seemed like every inch of Tokyo’s sprawl was just filled with people (and as your typical whitey in Japan, I also got the eye-opening experience of being in the severe minority for a change) and light and life. Everything is stacked high and packed tight, and it’s really an amazing experience to be there.
On the other end of the Japanese spectrum, Mt. Haguro in Yamagata prefecture amazed me with the kind of big nature that I’d never seen in the states, despite growing up in a log cabin in the middle of a forest. Haguro is one of three sacred mountains in the area around the town where my brother lived, with a number of temples at the top of it, and, most famously, an 800-year old set of 2,446 carved stone steps winding their way down the mountain through a forest of the biggest and most ancient trees I’d ever seen (including one gigantic cedar that was said to be over 1000 years old, considered very sacred by the monks on the mountain). The path down was also dotted with several dozen small shrines. It was both an amazingly beautiful and spiritual place, and I don’t think I’ll ever see anything else like it. (for the record, my brother dropped me off at the top of the mountain, climbed the stone steps alone, and then we climbed down the stairs together. I think my experience of spirituality would have been much different if I’d tried to climb up, since I would have died around, oh, step 400. )
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