San Francisco has some world class museums and also this one

My kid drew up this baroquely complicated contract for when she gets to take a skip day from school and of course I didn’t read it before I signed it but then she showed it to me and said she was taking last Friday off. Wife had said it was ok as long as she had straight A’s and I guess the kid is smarter than me because I never got straight A’s in my life but lo and behold. So we both took Friday.

Whilst casting about for something to do, we some how landed on Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum which is, of course, in Fishermans Wharf. I realized that kids today have no idea that Ripley’s was a big innovator in the Weird Stuff space and there was a weekly newspaper column when I was a kid and maybe a TV show? (Aha, some internet searching reveals there was a short-lived Ripleys TV show in the 80’s.) But I think the whole Ripleys thing has mostly passed from the cultural zeitgeist and today exists largely as a series of museums in tourist locations. I haven’t looked but I’ll bet you anything there’s one in Myrtle Beach and Gatlinburg and Hollywood. (OK now I checked and I was right.)

Right off the bat shit gets real - they have the wreckage of a car that was flattened in the 1989 earthquake.

Fucking grim, right? This was the car that Buck Helm survived in for FOUR DAYS before being pulled out alive on the Cypress Structure in Oakland. (Sadly, Helm died a month later of respiratory failure.)

Luckily the rest of the “museum,” such as it is, was less dark but in some ways just as depressing. But before we get to that, it’s important to note that this museum is REALLY into shit built out of toothpicks and/or matchsticks!

Steven J. Backman, who created this, is a prolific toothpick artist. Check it out. There’s also a toothpick cable car and a ship and I don’t even remember what else.

Some of it is pretty fucking racist!

The plaque next to this grotesquerie informs us that “a tour guide in China once guided American dignitaries through the streets of Chungking by the light of a candle in his head” which was supposedly inserted through his scalp. First of all, bullshit, and second of all, this is the kind of “mysterious Orient” shit I thought we left behind by now. Gross.

A lot of it has this kind of off-brand wax museum quality, plus a lot of “shrunken heads” (which often turn out to be fraudulent - I have no opinion on the authenticity of the collection here). By the time we got to the Horse Rosary it was starting to give “Shit we found in Uncle Harry’s attic after he died” more than "museum.”

If you’re itching to see some shit, a weekday morning at 10:15 am is a good time. We were the only people there apart from a German family who seemed to be enjoying themselves. Anyway, we both thought it was pretty meh and went to the Musee Mecanique nearby to play air hockey. My daughter who, like most San Francisco natives, loves telling you she’s a San Francisco native, got a kick out of the tourists.

LeRoy Robert Ripley, who created the franchise, was a pretty interesting guy himself. He not only created the original comic strip, he was the New York State handball champion and is buried in Santa Rosa. As it turns out, Ripley was born in Santa Rosa so I guess that makes sense. He also married a 14 year old when he was 29, as was the style at the time, or not, I don’t know. Jim Carrey was going to play him in a movie directed by Tim Burton but luckily that never happened.

IN OTHER NEWS I have accepted an invitation to appear on radio show Roll Over Easy on BFF.FM. I have to say because it airs at the exact time I’m getting my kid ready and taking her to school and all that stuff I rarely get a chance to listen to it live but I was listening to some old episodes to get caught up and on one recent show local personality Broke-Ass Stuart referred to the old Tosca, before it was reborn as a fancy-ass Italian restaurant, as a “dive.”

Respectfully, Sir, I must disagree. As someone who spent a good amount of time in Tosca in the early 00’s, it was a little run down but certainly not a dive. I mean, the bartenders wore matching white jackets and the jukebox only had opera and Sinatra and, most crucially, there were no TVs. It had a vibe, but none of the hallmarks of a dive (e.g., sports memorabilia, dollar bills stapled to the ceiling, a moose head wearing sunglasses, Bud Light on tap). It may have not been classy, but it was classy-adjacent. RIP old Tosca.