Cool Pick Hotel

Not Your Average Museum

One of the earliest promises of the graphical World Wide Web was access to images from the great museums and archives of the world. TV commercials for Internet service providers still show wide-eyed children enraptured by glorious scans of photos of classical art and architecture. The home pages of internationally known museums can show you a lot of famous paintings and pretty pictures, but there are plenty of lesser-known museums that deserve a look.

Allow us to be your guide for a tour of some specialized museums on the net that may or may not exist in the physical world.

CreatAbiliTOYS

Here we learn what happens when advertising itself becomes the product. The museum boasts over 650 toys based on commercial icons like the Jolly Green Giant, Poppin' Fresh (a.k.a. the Pillsbury Dough Boy) and Bibendum. Okay, I didn't know who Bibendum was either, until I saw him on the page. You might know him as the Michelin Man, but did you know he was designed more than a hundred years ago? The CreatAbiliTOYS site lets you search for toys by brand name or by keywords like character names or types of product. Though the frames on their index page need a little work, the pictures are sharp and each includes some history on the toys, many of which have otherwise disappeared from the market. Without this page, I never would have known that Aunt Jemima had a partner. Ten points to you if you've ever heard of Uncle Mose. There are also image maps that double as exhibit pages so you can wander through display cases of toys as if you were really in the museum. Using progressively tighter scans, you can get an overview of a showcase, pick a shelf, and study each item individually. The actual museum is in Coral Gables, Florida, but since you can't touch the exhibits there, there's not much reason to go when you can see every bit of it online.

Words and Pictures

The Words and Pictures Museum in Northampton, Mass., opened in the mid-80s in a small "roundhouse" building. Established by the creators of the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," the museum honors the artists of comic books and the history of combined visual and verbal communication. Its collection includes panel pages and cover paintings by some of the finest painters in the world as well as special features and games that allow the visitor to become the comic book artist. Though the page is still under construction, initial designs indicate that the site will be quite worthy of Words and Pictures.

Annals of Improbable Results

Had enough of those fact-filled but mind-numbing science museums? The Annals of Improbable Results (AIR) is a science magazine that specializes in humor for physicists, chemists, biologists, archaeologists and a load of other big-brained -ists who've spent a little too much time in the lab. Derived from a semi-monthly magazine, AIR features links to quasi-scientific documents on subjects like "Launching Stuff with Liquid Nitrogen" and "How to make a Hologram by Hand." Created by the same people who brought us "The Journal of Irreproducible Results," AIR is the definitive site for mad science by mad scientists.

American Financial History

Right around tax time, it's quite natural to start wondering how America got itself into the twisted corporate jungle it's become in just 200 short years. Next time you're in New York's financial district you can drop by the Museum of American Financial History. That is, if it's open, which isn't likely since the museum keeps bankers' hours. Worse, than bankers' hours, actually...it's only open three hours a day. But their web site is open all the time so you can trace the country's monetary situation from a copy of a U.S. Treasury Bond signed by George Washington to the unwieldy national debt of today. There's also an extensive biography of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury and the "Father of American Finance."

Kooks Kooks Kooks

Based on her book, "Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief," Donna Kossy's web site, "Kooks Museum," showcases her personal collection of scientific oddities, ideas and inventions. She defines "kooks" as those who truly believed in their creations and concepts, no matter how unconventional or outlandish. Some of the pieces in the collection have moved from the medical forefront to the realm of quackery, like Scurvy-grass and the science of goat glands. Others, like The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, were created by people who believed themselves to be gods and saints. In addition to her own text and images, Kossy includes links to sites featuring such kookery as the "Kindness Guarantee" and the "Stormfront White Nationalist Resource Page."

Front Page