OT: Smithsonian Antics
Truff,
Nice letter. I know a lot of the curators at the
Smithsonian, and you'll be heartened to know that
this kind of thing happens every day down there.
Every single curator has a list of favorite
nutballs who send in stuff. Whenever the lunch
gossip gets boring, somebody trots one out for
a coupla laughs.
Your New England archaeologist, however, didn't
just get a rejection letter. He got a citation
for creativity above and beyond the call of duty.
That's something of an honor, actually. <ggg>
Similarly, I did some work on the correspondence
of Charles Darwin earlier in my career, and once
he became famous, he started getting weird things
from all over the world. There was some guy in
Illinois who kept sending him bird parts, convinced
that he had found proof of the "inheritance of
acquired characteristics" because the momma bird
had been run over by a horse cart and had thusly
acquired a mangled wing, and then, according to
the sender, she had given birth to a whole flock
of baby birds with congenital mangled wings.
As of January 1997, I find myself the curator of
a small museum here in Troy, New York, and the
parade of odd items has already started. There's
nothing very good to report yet, though, just the
odd broken microscope and rusty piece of nondescript
metal from a local backyard. We're the site where
the armor for the U.S.S. Monitor was made, and so
far I've not had the heart to display any of these
treasures alongside the three leftover pieces of
Monitor armor that we have in our collections.
History certainly is fun. <ggg>
Cheers, Tom (long IOM) |
