Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Today, the internet decided to create a travel guide for Me, Personally, in the form of a mildly-viral thread about unique museums:

what is the most unique museum u have visited
for me possibly the ramen museum

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— darth™️ (darthbluesky) August 1, 2025 at 2:38 PM

After some thought, the most unique museum I have visited is the Tobacco and Salt Museum in Tokyo. It's unique among oddly-specific museums because it *isn't* someone's collection of Stuff that got out of hand, it's a well-curated museum run by Japan Tobacco, the company which formed when the Japan Tobbaco and Salt Public Corporation privatised. That corporation controlled the import anad manufacture of both both products in Japan until the 80s, hence it makes perfect sense to have a museum on the history of both! They also have an exhibition space: when I visted, they had an exhibition about matchboxes.

Here are some notes on other oddly specific museums I have visited. I included the Shipwreck Museum (Freemantle, Western Australia) in my Bluesky thread, but on reflection, there are a fair number of Shipwreck Museums in the world which approach maritime history through that lens. It's unique in that it's specific to Freemantle, but I gather that many maritime museums are simiarly local.

- The Phallological Museum, Rekjiavik: goes without saying. I found the bull's pizzle particularly enlightening (being familiar with the Fallstaff insult "you bull's pizzle").
- The Musée d'Eroticisme in Paris: Bad, at least as of 2011. Racist in the "insulting anthropologists" way - groups artefects from ancient Europe with items from 19th c Pacific Island cultures as "primitive". Collection of premodern Japanese art is wildly more heterosexual than, statistically, one ought to expect. The section on 19th c Paris was also way Too Straight, and dismissive of primary sources which reported lesbian relationships between sex workers/dancers/etc.
- The Schwules Musem, Berlin: has no permanent collection so every time you visit you get two exhibits on specific aspects of German queer history. When K and I visted there was an exhibition on queer experiences of disability, which was cool in many ways and which I thought did an excellent job with a quiet little corner on Nazi eugenic programs; and there was a fascinating exhibit on the East Berlin squat the "Tuntenhaus" (home to high fag drag queens and trans femmes) in the context of radical squat culture of the 80s.
- The Derwent Pencil Museum in Keswick: personally, I found this disappointing. Not enough museum too much shilling for Big Pencil.
- The Swiss Puppet Museum, Fribourg: why there is a Swiss Puppet Museum, and why it's in Fribourg, are unclear to me, but this was a fun little exhibition.
- The Nijntje (Miffy) Museum in Utrect is an absolute delight
- The Kattenkabinet in Amsterdam: a lovely 17th c house, bought up by a rich guy who has a madcap collection of cat art. There are cats roaming the rooms that you can pat.
- The Klingende Sammlung in Bern, which I like to translate as the "Noisemaking Collection". Wind and brass instruments. There's a downstairs with practical examples that they use for school groups - there weren't any the day K and I went, so the guy let us downstairs to try out Making Noises.
- Blundell's Cottage in Canberra. Every historic house is unique - this one I particularly love because I stumbled on it almost by accident, and because it's set up to exhibit / inform about working rural life in that area in the time before the creation of Canberra as a capital - and before Lake Burley-Griffin was created. There's photos in there of other farm cottages on the plain that became the lake.
- The Alpine Museum in Switzerland, which has some fun permanent exhibits - I particularly enjoyed a collection of donated objects relating to mountain sports, a collection of historic skis. When I visited they had a temporary exhibit on "Alpine trades" - heritage local trades and the schemes to encourage young people to train in them. There was an interactive bit where you could make roofing shingles. And they partner with other countries to put on exhibitions related to Mountain Stuff - I didn't see it but there was an exhibition about life in the North Korean mountains while I was living in Bern.
- The Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris. They have a bunch of his lesser-known or unfinished art - that's where I found My favourite St Sebastian. Also they have the room which, after his mother died, Gustave turned into a weird sort of memorial shrine for his dead best friend (also the model for his St Sebastian paintings).
- The Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, ceramics gallery of. This is stretching the "unique" part because for the most part this is a solid Regional City Museum - I went there because they have some of the Staffordshire Hoard on display. But the ceramics gallery is truly unique - comprehensive in its narrow focus on the history of English pottery. They have a lovely medieval travel jug/mug shaped like an owl - the owl's head removes to become a cup. They have a giant fuck-off porcelain peacock. And a LOT of English from the peak industrial period, which makes sense given Stoke was, apparently, not so much a city as five factory towns in a trenchcoat.
- Musée des Troupes de Montagne, Grenoble. Turns out, there are specialist troops for Alpine combat!
and
- The Mechanical Toy Museum in Nara, Japan. There are many toy museums, and I have been to a few of them, but this one is unique. Instead of a large collection, they have one room with tatami mats, and a small collection of Edo period mechanical toys which operate using gravity and simple kenetic mechanics. The attendants don't speak English, but they give you a brochure and let you kneel on the tatami and gently play with the toys.

And while I'm here, let me note some of ( my Oddly Specific Museum wish-list )

I'm a little short on oddly specific Australian museum goals. I did find out from that thread that the Cyril Callister Museum in Beaufort, Victoria, celebrates the creator of Vegemite and his famous product. And apparently that fuck-off porcelain peacock has a twin, kept in the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum in Warnambool (also Victoria).

There's a Printing Museum in Penrith (NSW). I don't consider that unique, there's a printing museum in every third European city - but I should totally check the local one out regardless.

Please, tell me about more oddly specific museums, anywhere in the world.

The dinner was small (midnight departure) and I am very hungry. Feed the Amy, airline! Feed me!

Alas.

I must content myself with cheaply purchased wifi instead.

Ugh I meant to get more of these done before my contract was up, but here we are.

30th April-3rd May: I attended Tokyo Dyke Weekend. I was nervous: in any Anglophone country I would avoid something called 'Dyke Weekend' like the plague, but their website seemed promisingly trans-inclusive, which suggests a likely status of bi-inclusion. I was correct! There were many non-binary people present, at least among the anglophones, and at least one trans woman, who was scheduled to be my roommate for the first night but didn't show up (she'd been ill, and, from the brief words we exchanged on the following day, was probably *also* nervous about room-sharing with a stranger).

I met a bunch of really cool people at DWE, some of whom I added on facebook, and absolutely zero of whom I have interacted with since. It's... I dunno, I've never been good at transitioning 'friend you met in a structured space' to 'real life friend', and the available ongoing social events where I could hang with these people, like Kings of Tokyo drag nights, always ended up seeming like an Expensive Reason To Travel All The Way Into Tokyo And Back.

Conversely I was *infuriated* by a personal safety workshop lead by a US Marine that focused on, basically, don't leave your drink alone, and act confident. Aside from being victim-blamey advice, it was *shockingly* and amazingly clueless of the specific risks posed to queer people by US forces. I was doing crowd control for Sydney Mardi Gras once, on a year when there happened to be a US ship docked in Sydney port the same weekend. We got *special training* on the safety risks they might pose.

A highlight of DWE: I made a bow-tie.

5th May: I went to Yokohama with my colleague T, which was... hmm, mostly a good day out, although his impatience and my food issues are ill-matched. I rapidly decided I love Yokohama, probably because it reminds me of Sydney.

14th May: I succeeded in going to Feminist SFF book club in Shinagawa! We discussed Garth Nix and I got over-enthusiastic and over-Australian. K arrived in Japan, but I didn't see her until Thursday, because work and travel and whatnot.

16th May: met K in Yokohama, found Indian near Minatomirai. It was great but expensive. Yokohama's harbour boardwalk at night was pretty, and, as we unanimously agreed, The Most Darling Harbour Place we had ever seen that wasn't Darling Harbour.

17th May: K stayed overnight with me. I think I made okonomiyaki.

18-19 May: K and I went down to Hakone for the weekend. We stayed at 'K's House', a former riyokan turned into a youth hostel. It has its own onsen, and it was lovely. Also I have now got over the hurdle of Not Having Done Nude Saunas Before (the hurdle isn't that I am embarrassed of being naked: it is a. that there are social expectations about being nude around other people, and b. there are social expectations that women demonstrate a certain level of embarrassment around situations like that, along with 'choosing to see male or female doctors' and so on, and I have had bad experiences with getting the latter wrong, such that I am more afraid of being judged for not being sufficiently embarrassed than I am of actually being embarrassed).

Hakone has a nice lake, and a pretty temple, and a steep mountain switchback train. There was volcanic activity, so we didn't get to take the télépherique over the volcanic mud pools. We did discover that 'cable car' can refer to a funicular in American English, and we agreed this was stupid, and I have now added 'cable-assisted means of ascending mountains in a car, box or train' to the list of things I will only be referring to in French henceforth.

Another amusing feature of Hakone is that when you get off the funiculaire, there is (or was? I couldn't figure out if it was an homage or an ad campaign) a giant backdrop showing an SBB train, and a replica SBB sign saying 'St-Mauritz'. Deeply disconcerting! There were also Obviously Ads, the same ones the SBB were displaying last time I was in Geneva, for the sights you can see in Switzerland by rail. I applaud 'MySwitzerland', who I think are a national tourism agency, for correctly identifying where in Asia they can find people who are a. rich and b. interested in trains and c. fond of hot springs and other things that Switzerland can provide.

20-24 May: nothing remarkable, except that I had my employer observation, and I was Very Anxious. It was fine, but I was way more anxious about it than I ever have been about a work feedback thing before.

26 May: explored Shibuya with K. We were to meet at the Scramble, but I arrived early and, although not jam-packed, it was baking hot and there was no shade to wait in. Accordingly I decamped to the Starbucks in the shopping mall across from the Disney Store (*not* the Scramble Starbucks, that's worse than the Scramble itself), which has 199 seats and is a glorious refuge.

K and I ate at Noodle Stand Ethical Ramen, near Harajuku station, which was good, but their gluten-free option is not as good as the one at Soranoiro. We went to the Meiji shrine, which is under renovation - not that you'd know it, the demountable shrine is Very Impressive in its own right. There were several wedding parties of obviously wealthy people, which were impressive to see. We then wandered through the Meiji Jingu gardens, which used to be an imperial fishing spot. Very cool, very green, very lovely, and also we met a very fancy caterpillar. We finished by wandering out to FLOTO gelato, which is in a very residential area. Gelato good, if small in serving sizes.

AFAIK I did nothing interesting the following working week.

This has been a list of things I did in Japan.

I cooked and ate *two whole meals* today. And hard-boiled some eggs for breakfast/snacking purposes. Between the basic 'foreign supermarkets' problem, the gluten issues, and the tiny kitchen I'm working with (two hot plates, no bench space), all of my spare brainpower is going on food right now.

1. The coffee from vending machines is cold, but the tea is usually hot.

2. Coco-ichi, a chain curry house, have some 'allergen-free' curry options. I did not personally discover this: I declined a lunch invite from someone at the orientation on Saturday, on account of betaking myself and my packed rice salad lunch to the park where there are no glutens. He helpfully came back to report that the place he'd ended up going with a group of other teachers had marked allergen-free options.

3. My mental image of Tokyo is pretty much entirely drawn from the neighbourhood of Shibuya (which was apparently the reference for the setting in Bladerunner. For some reason I'd thought it was Beijing). The quiet outer suburb I'm living in is nothing like that, and that is Okay By Me.
3b. My Shibuya-based mental image of Tokyo did not include 'The Aldgate', a British style pub in the second floor of one of the narrow buildings. They win points by virtue of having more gluten-free options than most UK pubs in the actual UK do.

4. Honey lives between the japanese teas and the western-style teas. I discovered this after three laps of the supermarket. On initially finding it, I thought perhaps it was because honey is a sweetener for tea, but then I realised the Nutella also lives in that section. I'm FAIRLY sure no one puts nutella in tea (although... there is hot chocolate powder in that aisle too. You could make some pretty great nutella hot chocolate if you wanted).

5. There's a national park type thing about fifteen minutes walk from here, with gentle walking trails and a 'sakura hill'. A++, good work, Machida-shi.

6. It's much easier to serve up vietnamese style rice noodles if you use chopsticks as your serving utensil. (This discovery really courtesy of bedlamsbard, who mentioned 'cooking chopsticks' on one platform or another. Otherwise I would never have thought of turning to my new hello kitty chopsticks in absence of a spaghetti lifter or salad fork.)

I've set up some photos from this week (plus another cache of Darkest Lancashire photos that I found on my camera, left from last year) in my Tumblr queue. They probably won't feed through to speculumannorum, though, because that relies on a bunch of IFTTT scripts, and google are blocking IFTTT from accessing google email accounts from 31 March. I will, I guess, eventually set up IFTTT to route through something else, but the whole system i have going involves two different IFTTT accounts and three gmail accounts, so. It will take a while to repair. In the meantime, speculumannorum_feed will keep working, I assume.

I was down in Oxford this weekend, mostly to see friends, and realised with just enough time to spare before last entry that I had time to see the 'Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft' exhibition. I hadn't been prioritising it, because... well, honestly, because the kind of excitement I saw about it when it opened was mostly of that annoying 'witchcraft as feminine aesthetic' kind. But my colleague R had the exhibition catalogue at her place when I was there last and spoke highly of it.

And folks, it is GOOD.

Some things about this exhibition:

1. The first thing you see when you walk in is a ladder to nowhere, and the path goes under it. If, as most people will do, you dodge around the ladder, you end up in the first room of exhibits, with the preamble on the walls. The preamble stakes a claim for 'magical thinking' as endemic to human processing, and four of the five exhibits in that room are examples of the kind of thing you'll find throughout - protective charms, a voodoo doll, etc. One of the protective charms is definitively Christian, and only one is non-European. The FIFTH item is Pitt Rivers Object 1926.6.1, glass flask reputed to contain a witch. (Early 20th c Suffolk)

2. It's incredibly well done, and nothing over-stated. There's relatively little in the way of extrapolation signage, but what is there is for the most part designed to draw your attention to similarities between contemporary superstitious practice and the objects on display. The room containing objects associated with love magic, for instance, also has a wall display of broken love-locks removed by the city of Leeds from one particular bridge. The room full of hearth caches indicates at the start that the animal bodies/hearts found under hearths are presumed to be protective against witchcraft, and outlines the difference between 'cunning folk' and 'witches' in early modern practice. In describing the actual items they're very restrained, careful to include the word 'possibly' in phrases like 'possibly magical carving', and almost entirely eschew speculation on why particular objects ended up under particular hearthstones.

3. In its understatement it's also a beautiful exercise in anthopologist snark. It places pilgrims' badges next to love charms, and it does so without making a big fuss either in the direction of 'a lot of orthodox christian practice is superstitious' or 'a lot of things that look like paganism in the early modern record were practiced by devout christians'. It draws its contemporary analogies to folk ritual, like the love-locks, not to religious practices that claim descent from either medieval christian or pagan practices.

3a. Also there's a 'unicorn' (narwhal) horn missing its tip, which was apparently stolen by Robert Dudley as an aphrodisiac. I love the specificity.

In short: A Good. Only on until 6 Jan, do recommend if you have the chance.

It's been a while. Travelling happened! So did travelling book acquisition, in both e-book and hard copy format. I also had to make the final cull of my unread books shelf - five or six into my luggage for the next six weeks, some to give away, and the rest into long term storage.

Currently Reading: Various, but the most significant is Lord of the Rings, which I bought in e-book (thereby convincing myself to give up my paper 'reading' copies) and read during the UK trip. I'm having a lot of feelings - a mix of new observations, interesting interpretive crossovers between book and movie, amusing takes based on now not taking it so Seriously, and just... feelings. Now is an interesting time to essentially climb back inside 16 y old me's happy/safe place - although it is amusing that I've finally achieved the perfect balance between my ideal holiday and mum's. I now appreciate the attractions of Small Towns (although as there's only one of me, I can spend much more time eating cake and drinking interesting drinks than we did on family budget holidays), and of going for walks; but I get to combine those (often simultaneously - I perched on a stile above Cheddar and read) with long stretches of reading LOTR per day. Excellent.

Recently Finished: This selection covers the week before I left for conferences, and the first part of the conference trip, I think.

The Edge of the Abyss by Emily Skrutskie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Huh. On the one hand, this showed excellent worldbuilding, and some interesting character development. On the other hand, it was too rushed, and skimped its logic in the conclusion. It should've been book two of a trilogy, not the conclusion of a duology: I kind of wonder if it was originally planned as 2/3 and cut down to publisher demands.

Toad Words and Other Stories by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was absolutely adorable. Some of the stories and most of the poems I recognised from Ursula's blog, but some were new, and it was great having them all in the one place.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Oh, wow. I think this book may be to my early 30s what 'Portrait of a Lady' was to my early 20s. I spent the first third of the book torn between a desire to give Lucy Snowe a stern talking to for her poor life choices, and a desire to convince her to run away with me, that we might be anti-social together.

The depictions of Lucy's social insecurity - the moments when she returns from being with her friends and closes off her emotions, her hopes, her everything, because she just does not believe she deserves or can expect even the simplest of friendship ongoing: those were, ouch. Very well sketched, shall we say?

Her ??love interest?? is an absolute weirdo. More interesting, in some ways, than Professor Bhaer - my problem with feeling cynical about Jo March's marriage is I do LIKE Bhaer and I genuinely /like/ their relationship. Lucy and M. Paul, on the other hand: I don't even know what to think. The only thing they have going for them is a mutual appreciation for each other's weirdness, but as that includes all the reasons why neither of them is or really wants to be married, it's... hard to picture. And as Teh Queer Scholars are quick to point out, in some of the early prolepses, Lucy describes herself at the time of retrospectively telling the tale as wearing clothing typical of an old maid, not a wife or widow. So. That's. A thing.

The play scene was definitely Something, too. Sharon Marcus aint wrong about this book, is all I have to say here.

A Summer for Scandal by Lydia San Andres

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was really interesting - engaging plot and side plots, detailed but unsual-for-the-genre setting, romance that Worked, thoughtful approach to the types and politics of sex in context.


First Position by Melissa Brayden

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Hmm. Setting good. Plot and sexual tension, good. Prose very flat. Relationship dynamic sparking off the page; actual sex scenes varying from 'meh' to '... wait, has this author ever had sex with, or BEEN, a woman?'


The Doctor's Discretion by E.E. Ottoman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was notably better than First Position, and does some really interesting work with realising a trans and/or intersex character (his anatomy is not described in terms that compare it to cis and normative anatomy, so it's not possible to tell). The 'heist' part of the plot is pulled off well, but the main ship fell a little flat, I thought, and the book overall was... too short to develop a proper romance plot level of to-and-fro.

Up Next: What have I saved from the storage? 'Death on the Cherwell', which I picked up in Leeds, and a book from Persephone Books in London. 'The Queer Child', and... some others I've forgotten.

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Music notes: haven't added anything new for a while, although the pre-order for Amy Shark's 'Love Monster' finally came in, and I like it. Kind of reminds me of Little Birdy.

Seen on the eastern shore of Derwent Water, July 2017:



More photos from that expedition and others are slowly drip-feeding through to speculumannorum_feed

Things that happened today: walking down the street, gesticulating with one hand, I collided with the hand of a man gesticulating and pontificating in arabic. For a brief, and somewhat alarming, moment we were holding hands.

Hello hello it's time for another round-up post! Not sure that anyone reads them, but I having started I shall continue. As with previous such posts social media has probably given you some idea already...

( Pictures, nattering, etc )

But none really of Birmingham, since I didn't do much touristing there. I have some photos of All Saints Brixworth on my other camera yet to dig out, though...

( Neighbourhood safety, a man and his robot, and giant dessert )



Then Geneva put on a lovely sunset for my return, as if to show off the fact that there's still daylight here after 5pm and the temperature is above 10 degrees...