Amazing and Unusual USA

This new guidebook certainly seems as if it would make a fine Xmas present for your favorite WU-vie!

White Sands National Monument

Do they still let you sand-ski in the park? Or are you only allowed to look at weapons of mass destruction?

Greenwich Village 1960

Maine Solar System Model

The residents of Aroostook County, Maine constructed a scale model of the solar system which you can see as you drive along Route 1 from Presque Isle to Houlton. The sun, located at Presque Isle, reaches up to the third floor of the Northern Maine Museum of Science. The earth, a mile away at Percy's Auto Sales, is a styrofoam ball 5.5 inches in diameter. Drive another 4.3 miles to see Jupiter. And Pluto, forty miles away at the end, is a one-inch-diameter wooden ball.

Everyone seems to use a different mnemonic to remember the planets in the Solar System. The one I learned is "My Very Elegant Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Porcupines."

To remember the points of the compass I always have to repeat the phrase "Naughty Elephants Squirt Water".

Baconhenge

While others are off at church on a Sunday, why not stay in and have a pagan breakfast celebration, with Baconhenge.


Ingredients include 12 pieces of french toast, a pound of bacon, a potato, onion, mushrooms, and a dozen eggs. I can't wait to try it! (via J-Walk)

Nit Wit Ridge

Continuing the travelogue, on Friday my wife and I drove up north from San Luis Obispo and did the tour of Hearst Castle. It was worth seeing, but for my money it wasn't as interesting as "Nit Wit Ridge" located about fifteen minutes away in nearby Cambria. Nit Wit Ridge is like the anti-Hearst Castle, being a mansion built entirely out of junk. From sierrasol.com:


They're not kidding when they say it's built out of assorted junk. How many toilets can you spot in the picture below? (I see at least four.) Unfortunately Nit Wit Ridge is not open to the public, so I was only able to admire it from the outside.

Madonna Inn Urinals, etc.

Reporting in from the road: I spent Thursday night at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. It was as over-the-top kitschy as promised. One of the main tourist attractions there is the urinal in the downstairs men's bathroom. People make special trips to see it. The novelty is that it's a waterfall urinal, but unfortunately it was out of order when I was there... so no waterfall. Still there was a steady trickle of tourists wandering into the restroom to see it, including many women with their giggling young daughters following behind. So if you're a guy who actually wants to use the restroom, you're out of luck.

The upstairs men's urinal featured a trough. Interesting, but there were no tourists lining up to see it.

While in San Luis Obispo we also checked out Bubblegum Alley, to whose walls people have been sticking used bubblegum for decades. Opinion about the alley is split between those who think it's really cool, and those who think it's filthy. For instance, while there we overheard a mother ordering her obviously fascinated son, as they walked through it, to keep his hands behind his back and not touch anything. No one seems to know exactly how the tradition of sticking gum to the walls started, but Wikipedia reports a rumor that it may have originated during the 1950s out of a rivalry between the students of San Luis High School and Cal Poly: "As soon as the Poly students suspected that the High School was trying to out-do them on the gum walls, the college students stepped up their game and immediately became more creative, thus launching Bubblegum Alley."

All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.