Birthday Presents, and The Libby Museum
First, on arriving in New Hampshire yesterday, my mother gave me my birthday presents. They included the complete Season 3 of the Muppet Show on DVD, a new pocketknife (thank goodness, I lost mine two weeks ago, and it's been like missing three fingers) and some goggles that words alone cannot describe:
They make you see binocular magnification at about 10x power. They also give you this weird weird cross-eyed look. Oh, by the way, shown here is one of my father's flannel shirts that I wear when I come home to New Hampshire and it is cold. I look like a redneck mad scientist, I dunno.
Mama and I took a little trip. We went to Wolfeboro, but on the way we passed this statue in Center Harbor:
Uhhh yeah. It's either Leda and The Swan, or a naked generically Native American kid nakedly squeezing a non-divine swan. Either way, how in the Hell did this thing get plunked in the middle of a town square? Who thought that was a good idea?
Once in Wolfeboro, went to the Libby Museum. It is one of the old-fashioned private museums, basically a hypertrophic curio cabinet of stuff some guy picked up when he was going to distant lands and bothering exotic peoples. This is the sort of museum that is built into my very soul. It even looks right:
OK, so the chainsaw carvings of bear are not supposed to be there. But they're pretty good. I mean, as chainsaw carvings go.Perpetual gloom.
The exhibits have been almost unchanged for decades:
The jaw of the hoaxed Piltdown Man is still in the evolutionary lineup, though a notation that it's been discredited has been neatly pencilled in.And random grave-robbed bits of actual human beings are displayed without remorse.
On the way home, we stopped at the Moultonboro store, where a little harmless fun is had at tourists' expense (it's really a toolshed).And finally to the Riverside Dairy Joy. For those of you who have never had a lobster roll, let me tell you that you should not actually just slam the whole crustacean in a hotdog bun.