{"id":52277,"date":"2013-03-23T05:12:31","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T11:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wend.ca\/?p=52277"},"modified":"2020-06-20T21:47:11","modified_gmt":"2020-06-21T01:47:11","slug":"ripleys-believe-it-or-not-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wend.ca\/?p=52277","title":{"rendered":"Ripley’s Believe it or Not, San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s campy, creepy and a tad bit sad, but I can’t keep myself away from sideshow museums where displays are corny and reminiscent of 1950s Barnum and Bailey<\/em> America when everything that wasn’t American was considered “odd.”<\/p>\n

This particular Ripley’s museum is like all of the others. It has the typical Jivaro shrunken heads, vampire-slaying kits, two-headed animals, profiles of fat\/skinny\/tall\/animalistic people, featured cultural events that really aren’t so unbelievable (e.g. Para Hara in Sri Lanka<\/a>), and write-ups that seem to be written for a third-grader. <\/p>\n

It’s best to just meander and see what catches your fancy… I rather enjoyed watching other people’s reactions to the displays. <\/p>\n

I will, however, give the SF version of Ripley’s Believe it or Not<\/em> this: unlike the wax museum<\/a> next door, there was an attempt to pull together oddities from San Francisco and keep the context of the city the museum is in. <\/p>\n

The most fascinating for me was seeing a car (supposedly Buck Helm<\/a>‘s car) that was crushed when the Cypress Street Viaduct fell onto Interstate 880 during the Loma Prieta earthquake. This, in turn, drove me to go to YouTube where I found lots of videos from the earthquake<\/a>.<\/p>\n