There Are Too Many Museums

I came across a Snapple fact printed on a pack of vitamins this morning. Before you flame my ass for being a lib, they're not my vitamins. They're the vitamins of a woman who is under the impression that they're not a scam. Obviously, we know that vitamins go right through you. You just pee them out. Deranged body builder Steve Michalik (dead, shot himself) said that.

Or at least Stu Feiner said that Steve Michalik said that. Stu Feiner kind of just says shit. After about 10 seconds of research I came across this article on Steve Michalik's training methods. It sounds like he took a pharmacy's worth of vitamins every day.

Physical Culture Study - "He uses a liquid protein supplement and a meat protein powder that he mixes with orange juice. He also takes 1000 units of vitamin E, 5000 mg. of vitamin C, 100 Liver tablets, and a B-Complex and Mineral tablet. These are taken each day."  

Who knows. Maybe Steve eventually saw the light and kicked the habit. The jury is still out on vitamins. But anyways, even if vitamins are a scam, I don't think they would lie on their packaging. Plus a quick Google search confirms it to be true.

11,000 Starbucks
14,000 McDonalds
35,000 Museums
117,341 Libraries (irrelevant, but damn)

Assuming that museum statistic is accurate, I'm thinking America needs to re-evaluate what qualifies as a museum. I have a hard time believing that an average of 700 places per state are worthy of museum status. The percentage of them that are profitable has to be insanely low. Is that where my tax dollars are going? To museums? Thanks Biden..

I bet a bunch of museums are just passion projects. Some guy in a rural town rents out a small space for $400/month to store his collectables and decides to charge people money to see them. I imagine that's the case for a lot of the weird ones. Take 'The World's Only Mothman Museum' for example. This is clearly a person who has a deep passion for Mothman and wants to share it with the world.

It's smart that they specify 'World's Only', just incase somebody driving by thinks, "No thanks, I'll just wait until I come across the next Mothman Museum."

Then you have places like the Moist Towelette Museum in East Lansing, Michigan. The Moist Towelette Museum is located inside of the Michigan State University Planetarium. The man who "runs" the "museum" just happens to work there. He spent 20 years of his life collecting moist towelettes, then one day decided to put them all in the corner of his office. That's it. That's the museum. I doubt he even got permission. I assume he just did it one day and nobody at the planetarium bothered to stop him. If this guy was able to gain official museum status, we clearly need stricter guidelines. 

There's tons of other bizarre museum across the country. In Austin, Minnesota you can visit the SPAM Museum to learn fun things like, 'What is SPAM?' and 'How Many SPAM Cans Tall Are You?'. 

My favorite thing about the SPAM Museum is if you go to the website, you can click in the bottom right hand corner of the screen to 'Chat With A SPAM Expert'. I wanted to ask a funny question, but I didn't have the heart to mess with Alyssa the SPAM Expert. I'm sure she's slammed with plenty of serious inquiries. No need to SPAM her.

Unless they're not making an honest living. Come to think of it, museums sound like the perfect money laundering front. You don't really have inventory that you have to account for. You can just claim an uptick in visitors. I would imagine that you could claim donations. People love donating to museums. That could very well be what Barney Smith of the Barney Smith Toilet Seat Art Museum is up to was up to (he's no longer with us). You're telling me this guy didn't have a little side hustle going?

Gatlinburg, Tennessee is the capital of stupid fucking museums (i.e. Titanic Museum, Salt & Pepper Shaker Museum, others). It's the capital of stupid fucking things in general. The whole city is kind of like a museum. I really shouldn't disparage Gatlinburg. It's actually a pretty awesome place. I can appreciate somewhere with an identity, and Gatlinburg's identity is 'Tourist Attraction'. It's the ideal place for a midwestern family with young-ish children to take a vacation. 

They have the Gatlinburg Pinball Museum ($20 for unlimited pinball), a 'Ripley's Believe It Or Not' , AND a 'Ripley's Believe It Or Not Putt Putt Course'. It's the perfect place for any child that hasn't quite hit puberty yet.

But unfortunately, most museums don't feature an excess of bizarrely niche collectables. If so, museums wouldn't have such a bad rap. Most museums are WAY more boring than that. Museums attract the most boring members of society, and a majority of them are tremendously awful places to spend a day. Consider the Dialysis Museum in Seattle, Washington. There you can visit some of history's most iconic dialysis machines such as the Kolff-Brigham Rotating Drum Kidney, the Mini-I & Mini-II, the Drake-Willock Dialysis Machine, the Suitcase Kidney, and the Boen Home Peritoneal Dialysis Cycler. Look how boring this picture is. I would rather be hooked up to a dialysis machine than spend a day at this museum.

As horrible as that sounds, the Dialysis Museum is still probably in the top 10% of most interesting museums. I've come to learn that just about any house or building that has ever been lived or worked in by a historical figure qualifies as a museum.

"In this room we have the desk that Abraham Lincoln's brother in-law sat for 3 days a week from the years 1855 to 1858." (things of that nature).

Wikipedia has a list of every museum in every state. Here is Ohio's list. A good amount of Ohio's museums fall under the category of "Historical Houses". There's the Austintown Log House, Benninghofen House, Blakeslee Log Cabin, Chrisholm Historic Farmstead, the Cooke-Dorn House, and that's just 3 letters into the alphabet. Take a look at the size of this bitch.

If you put all 35,000 museums on a wheel and gave it a spin you'd have about a 1% chance of landing on something interesting. Or maybe that's just me. Some people love history, and I shouldn't shame them for that. Plus, schools need to take bad field trips somewhere. Some might enjoy spending a day at the Glendower Mansion operated by the Warren Country Historical Society. Or the John Smart House. Or the Kennedy Stone House. Or the Samuel Spitler House Community Museum. Or if you're not into historical houses, maybe you'd enjoy the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor.  Or the Dayton International Peace Museum. Or Joshua Reed Gidding's Law Office (picture below, yes that's really a museum). You get the point.

I'm not even sure what the point of this blog was. I just saw a fact on a pack of vitamins and went down a museum rabbit hole. I think my original point was that America needs to redefine what constitutes a museum. But I guess if you don't call them museums then what are they? As long as it has things to look at I guess it has to count. I wonder how long it would take somebody to visit every museum in the country. Is that even possible? It's probably one of those things where by the time you finish, they'll be 500 new museums you have to visit. Maybe Barstool will pay for me to try it. I could make a run at the crown for worst Barstool content ever produced.