One Of A Kind

There was an article about unusual museums in the Travel section of today's Post-Dispatch. Some of them were quite interesting:

• The Devil's Rope Museum in McLean Texas, which has more than 1,000 varieties of barbed wire.


• The Jell-O Museum in Le Roy, New York, that's all about the wiggly dessert.


• Leila's Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri, where you can see locks of hair woven into intricate wreaths and displayed in frames.
  
  However, much as I would enjoy visiting these places, I don't have the time or resources right now. One of the museums, though, could be seen from the comfort of my computer chair. Today I visited an online-only museum.
  
  The Flashlight Museum includes the history and photos of flashlights dating to 1899. Stuart Schneider, the "curator", is quite the Renaissance man; the tagline for his Website is Unusual Museums of the Internet. You can find information on fluorescent minerals, cemetery ghosts, a Halloween museum, a Halley's Comet Museum, a Space Memorabilia museum and more. He's written several books and even manages to be a lawyer in his free time!
  
  However, I came to see the flashlights, so I clicked through to the Flashlight Museum. It was very interesting, containing galleries of antique flashlights and a very detailed history of flashlights and their uses. The information was arranged by category on several pages.
  
  I thoroughly enjoyed my "trip" to the museum today. There were no guards giving me dirty looks for getting too close to the exhibits. I could spend as much time as I wanted reading the labels and not have to worry about getting in someone else's way, and the "tall guy" that always seems to block my view of things wasn't there.