It is a compelling programme and one that has kept me totally engrossed over many a long and boring road journey.
The following is just some of the items on exhibit. Some are self explanatory, others a bit of an enigma and the rest, well, you may want to look them up in various reference works which is what I intend to do as well on the subjects of Arthur Craven, Grimsvotn, Nyapun and the phenomena spreading amongst the sheep population of the world whereby they just know, by collective and morphic thought, to get over a cattle grid by rolling on their woolly backs.
- The giant hornet of Chang Jiang.
- The curators of the Natural History Museum.
- A yeti.
- The modern scarf knot (aka, the Sean Lock neck knot).
- A pineapple.
- An Anderson shelter.
- The concept of privacy.
- Arthur Craven.
- Absolutely nothing (i.e. what it was like before the Big Bang, before anything existed).
- Father Christmas.
- Pliny the Elder.
- The Battle of Waterloo.
- A hairy angler fish.
- The Nottingham alabasters.
- Phlogiston.
- The Monster (please note, you can only see this exhibit in a universe with 26 dimensions).
- The Big Bang.
- Epping Forest.
- An infinite amount of silence.
- A British Railways bridge plate.
- Grímsvötn.
- The urge to press red buttons you know you shouldn't press.
- A Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud.
- The Holmdel Horn Antenna.
- Don Quixote.
- Helen of Troy.
- Alan Shepard's six iron.
- A sheep rolling over a cattle-grid.
- A chimpanzee rain dance.
- Complete world knowledge.
- Matt Ridley's nameplate from his office door at Northern Rock.
- The Holy Grail.
- Hannah Hauxwell.
- The perfect English spot rabbit.
- A P-51 Mustang.
- The notion of tempting fate.
- Inventions that are now used for things they weren't originally designed for.
- The Omega Point.
- Charlie Chaplin.
- A procrastinator (a device for storing time).
- The Great Exhibition.
- 10,000 tigers.
- Spider-Man.
- The Milgram Experiment.
- The ten worlds from Buddism.
- A gay bomb.
- A choir of singing sand dunes.
- Michel de Montaigne's medallion.
- A total eclipse.
- Barry Marshall.
- Humphrey Davy.
- Saul Bellow.
- Nyapun (a very useful guide from Malay).
- Pictures of animals wearing clothes.
- International Ignorance Day (but we don't know when it is).
- Jack Benny's vault.
- God.
- A Curta calculator.
- A book containing all the jokes in the world.
- A cassette tape.
- A tank full of seahorses.
- A single Shreddie filmed at an angle of 45° (aka 'The Diamond Shreddie').
- An invisibility cloak.
- The essential trifle.
- The first story ever told.
- The super-ego.
- TV detectives.
- The waffle generator (a device that gets you out of awkward conversations by making you say nothing but clichés).
- A High Street psychotherapist.
- A carved walrus baculum (aka a penis bone).
- The word "dord" (it means density).
- An invisible coronal mass ejection.
- A stupid German.
- A tot of rum.
- A dung pat.
- A travellator.
- A security coffin.
- Johannes Kepler's drinks dispenser.
- A poorly knitted jumper made by your nan.
- A puya raimondii.
- Chrétien de Troyes.
- The ghost of curiosity.
- The object of desire.
- St. Columba's Psalter.
- The child of a human and a neanderthal.
- Friday the 13th Part III 3-D.
- A tab of LSD.
- A bubble.
- An authentic portrait of Jane Austen.
- The Aldrin Mars Cycler.
- Friendly poisons (e.g. botulin).
- The reports by Prof. John Trinkaus studying things that annoy him.
- The compass Henry Morton Stanley used to find Dr. David Livingstone with.
- Mark Watson's glasses.
- A silver denarius struck by Anthony and Cleopatra to celebrate the Battle of Actium, that was found in Barnsley.
- A third class ticket on the London Necropolis Railway.
- A living statue.
- A dozen defecated ant heads.
- A sandbag.
- A funny-o-meter (a way of measuring just how comedic something is).
- A judge-nudger (a device to give judges electric shocks to wake them up if they fell asleep in court).
- Grigori Rasputin.
- A eureka moment.
- A lizard popping a wheelie (running on just its back legs).
- An elm tree.
- A field full of agave plants.
- An intelligent machine.
- C.B. Fry’s mantelpiece.
- The Prospero satellite.
- The Richard Nixon interviews with David Frost.
(Source; The Museum of Curiosity. BBC Radio 4)
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