The Museum Of Curiosity

List of Exhibits in The Museum Of Curiosity

Written by: Ian Wolf
Published: Monday 12th October 2020

This is a list of all the donations currently stored in The Museum Of Curiosity, divided up into their respective galleries (the series in which they were donated).

Unbroadcast Pilot (Curated by Bill Bailey)

- Some purple cloth created using rotten murex snails.
- The smell of the warm, wooden pews in St. Mary's Church in Stoke Newington at dawn.
- A hairy angler fish.

Gallery 1 (Curated by Bill Bailey)

- The giant hornet of Chang Jiang.
- The curators of the Natural History Museum.
- A yeti.
- The modern scarf knot (aka, the Sean Lock neck knot).
- A pineapple.
- An Anderson shelter.
- The concept of privacy.
- Arthur Craven.
- Absolutely nothing (i.e. what it was like before the Big Bang, before anything existed).
- Father Christmas.
- Pliny the Elder.
- The Battle of Waterloo.
- A hairy angler fish.
- The Nottingham alabasters.
- Phlogiston.
- The Monster (please note, you can only see this exhibit in a universe with 196,883 dimensions).
- The Big Bang.
- Epping Forest.
- An infinite amount of silence.

Gallery 2 (Curated by Sean Lock)

- A British Railways bridge plate.
- Grímsvötn.
- The urge to press red buttons you know you shouldn't press.
- A Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud.
- The Holmdel Horn Antenna.
- Don Quixote.
- Helen of Troy.
- Alan Shepard's six iron.
- A sheep rolling over a cattle-grid.
- A chimpanzee rain dance.
- Complete world knowledge.
- Matt Ridley's nameplate from his office door at Northern Rock.
- The Holy Grail.
- Hannah Hauxwell.
- The perfect English spot rabbit.
- A P-51 Mustang.
- The notion of tempting fate.
- Inventions that are now used for things they weren't originally designed for.

Gallery 3 (Curated by Jon Richardson)

- The Omega Point.
- Charlie Chaplin.
- A procrastinator (a device for storing time).
- The Great Exhibition.
- 10,000 tigers.
- Spider-Man.
- The Milgram Experiment.
- The ten worlds from Buddism.
- A gay bomb.
- A choir of singing sand dunes.
- Michel de Montaigne's medallion.
- A total eclipse.
- Barry Marshall.
- Humphrey Davy.
- Saul Bellow.
- Nyapun (a very useful guide from Malay).
- Pictures of animals wearing clothes.
- International Ignorance Day (but we don't know when it is).
- Jack Benny's vault.

Gallery 4 (Curated by Dave Gorman)

- God.
- A Curta calculator.
- A book containing all the jokes in the world.
- A cassette tape.
- A tank full of seahorses.
- A single Shreddie filmed at an angle of 45° (aka 'The Diamond Shreddie').
- An invisibility cloak.
- The essential trifle.
- The first story ever told.
- The super-ego.
- TV detectives.
- The waffle generator (a device that gets you out of awkward conversations by making you say nothing but clichés).
- A High Street psychotherapist.
- A carved walrus baculum (aka a penis bone).
- The word "dord" (it means density).
- An invisible coronal mass ejection.
- A stupid German.
- A tot of rum.

Gallery 5 (Curated by Jimmy Carr)

- A dung pat.
- A travellator.
- A security coffin.
- Johannes Kepler's drinks dispenser.
- A poorly knitted jumper made by your nan.
- A puya raimondii.
- Chrétien de Troyes.
- The ghost of curiosity.
- The object of desire.
- St. Columba's Psalter.
- The child of a human and a neanderthal.
- Friday the 13th Part III 3-D.
- A tab of LSD.
- A bubble.
- An authentic portrait of Jane Austen.
- The Aldrin Mars Cycler.
- Friendly poisons (e.g. botulin).
- The reports by Prof. John Trinkaus studying things that annoy him.

Gallery 6 (Curated by Humphrey Ker)

- The compass Henry Morton Stanley used to find Dr. David Livingstone with.
- Mark Watson's glasses.
- A silver denarius struck by Anthony and Cleopatra to celebrate the Battle of Actium, that was found in Barnsley.
- A third class ticket on the London Necropolis Railway.
- A living statue.
- A dozen defecated ant heads.
- A sandbag.
- A funny-o-meter (a way of measuring just how comedic something is).
- A judge-nudger (a device to give judges electric shocks to wake them up if they fell asleep in court).
- Grigori Rasputin.
- A eureka moment.
- A lizard popping a wheelie (running on just its back legs).
- An elm tree.
- A field full of agave plants.
- An intelligent machine.
- C.B. Fry's mantelpiece.
- The Prospero satellite.
- The Richard Nixon interviews with David Frost.

Gallery 7 (Curated by Phill Jupitus)

- A mobile phone in Kenya that will cost £10 to buy in the year 2019.
- The crater on the dark side of the moon named after occultist rocket scientist Jack Parsons.
- A single pubic louse.
- A smile.
- Chuño (freeze-dried potatoes from South America).
- A bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk.
- The alphabet.
- Some type of tiny wasps (a possible cause of morgellons).
- A parasitic wasp.
- The front porch.
- St. Edward's Crown.
- A sea squirt's brain.
- The Old Bailey.
- The Woolsack.
- A Disney animator's desk.
- The Institute of Cognitive Stupidity.
- London's hidden rivers (e.g. the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Westbourne, the sewers etc).
- A laughing tree.

Gallery 8 (Curated by Sarah Millican)

- The Analytical Engine.
- A BBC Micro.
- A Williams-Kilburn Tube.
- The Vows of the Peacock (a medieval manuscript with very rude pictures in the margins).
- Part of a time machine made by the Federation of Damanhur (a utopian colony).
- A microchip implanted into a human brain that can read all thoughts.
- The 18th Amendment to the US Constitution (the Prohibition Act).
- The equation for the perfect marriage.
- William Shakespeare's chucklemuscle.
- PG Wodehouse.
- The Deep Space Climate Observatory.
- A toilet.
- The New Emperor's new clothes (clothes that change colour when you lie).
- A star clock.
- The monkey mirror (which reflects your appearance as a monkey).
- A black pawn that was on top of a pile of chess pieces that were all balanced on top of a rook.
- A human tongue.
- A fart.
- A pygmy sloth.
- A Lucida 3D laser scanner.
- Fifty Shades Of Grey (for being the world's most famous example of fan-fiction).

Galley 9 (Curated by Noel Fielding)

- A pantalon (an extinct musical instrument).
- A witch bottle (used to protect against witchcraft).
- Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde.
- Some random dogs that wandered the streets in the 1970s.
- A plastic box the size of a shoebox used to detect microscopic alien life in the stratosphere.
- A entirely deep fried wing of the Museum.
- A fly on the wall in a meeting between lexicographers Francis Grose and Dr. Samuel Johnson.
- Some wild fig trees.
- Rarajipari (a long-distance Mexican game using wooden balls played by men in skirts).
- A human pheromone (currently just a ticket as we are waiting for one to be discovered).
- An albino lapwing used by Sir Mick Jagger in 1966.
- A Cottingley fairy.
- Hildegard of Bingen.
- A retro 1970s spice rack.
- Narnia red (a non-existent colour).
- A short-faced bear.
- A copy of A Treatise on Astronomy by Gerolamo Cardano, kept by and stolen from John Dee.
- Crossroads Motel.

Gallery 10 (Curated by Jo Brand)

- Oganesson, tennessine, moscovium and nihonium (the four most recently discovered elements).
- A history book that won't be published until 2222 AD.
- A ship's anchor.
- Lycra.
- A wayzgoose (a day when a printer isn't working).
- A ploughman's lunch.
- A book of Tom Swifties (he wrote factually).
- The colour mauve.
- The speed of cheese (a unit of time based on how long it takes to cut cheddar).
- Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's manifesto declaring the rules of Dogme 95 films.
- A snail glued to a board.
- Stone age selfies (cave paintings of human hands).
- Emilia Lanier
- A pair of virgin death watch beetles.
- An alabaster statue of four World War One soldiers charging across No Man's Land, which on closer inspection depicts Captain Blackadder, Captain Darling, Lieutenant George and Private Baldrick from Blackadder Goes Forth.
- The Longplayer (a piece of music that began on New Year's Eve 1999 and won't end for another 1,000 years).
- The smell of coffee.
- CNN (for accidentally helping getting Donald Trump elected US president).

Gallery 11 (Curated by Romesh Ranganathan)

- The entire population of the Netherlands.
- A museum cozy (i.e. yarnbomb the Museum).
- A replica of Richard III's feet bones.
- A Siouxsie and the Banshees concert at Chelmsford Odeon on Sunday 26th July 1981, with support from John Cooper Clarke and an animated version of Ubu Roi.
- The theory of deterrence.
- Alexis Soyer.
- The descant recorder.
- The International Space Station.
- Watts Towers.
- A Moomin.
- A dogwhistle.
- A button from Sir Donald Wolfit's King Lear costume.
- A Victorian skirt lifter.
- A letter by Charles Darwin from 1880, wrongly believed to be sent to Karl Marx when it was in fact sent to the lover of Marx's daughter.
- Some magma.
- A burst balloon and a hunny-pot.
- The maternal instinct.
- A bunch of grapes.

Gallery 12 (Curated by Sally Phillips)

- Ganesha.
- The Moon Under Water (the ideal pub as described by George Orwell).
- "Mad Jack" Churchill.
- A half-folded towel.
- Georges Couthon's rolling chair / wheelchair.
- A Blue Peter badge.
- Tooting Broadway tube station.
- The mati (i.e. the evil eye).
- Kevlar.
- The concept of hygge.
- The Large Hadron Collider.
- A saucy limerick.
- The perfect cave.
- Dillie Keane's own homemade, slow-made chutney.
- The Australian word "googies" (meaning "eggs").
- The attentionometer.
- The bus seat that Rosa Parks refused to give up.
- Football Manager.

Gallery 13 (Curated by Lee Mack)

- Tai chi
- A corn on the cob with different coloured bits of corn on it.
- The littlest window in the world (currently in The Land of Green Ginger, Hull).
- The world's worst wedding list.
- Deep Blue.
- A tin of corned beef.
- A karaoke version of "I Will Survive".
- A single atom of iron.
- An old-fashioned tube of toothpaste.
- Tomy the Talking Tutor.
- A coin-pushing arcade machine.
- Graeme Le Saux's Sony Walkman from 1987.
- Prince Albert.
- Some MiG Fighter Aircraft that were buried in the sand in Iraq.
- A pair of false teeth.
- A labelling machine.
- A mirror that reflects the masterpiece that you will never complete.
- A vial of Bridget Christie's tears.

Annual Stock Take

- The concept of boredom.
- Things that are so mediocre they normally they wouldn't be remembered.
- The smell of an estate agent.
- Laughter.

Gallery 14 (Curated by Bridget Christie)

- Test cricket.
- A slotted screw.
- A sign saying "Live, Love, Laugh".
- A terrarium.
- A ship in a bottle.
- A cabbage.
- The Extra Dimension Observtory (a lab in the future).
- The Fruits of Philosophy published by Annie Besant.
- A tin of tobacco.
- A microphone.
- Maurice Ravel's royalties.
- A grant for 60 acres of land in the Poyais (a country that was made up for a con trick).
- A half-burnt candle (a product that helped to kickstart Fortnum & Mason).
- A 19th century cemetery gun.
- A scale model old-school gypsy caravan which doubles-up as a night light and a drink's cabinet (an example of prisoner art).
- A swarm of fruit flies.
- A bionic arm.
- The feeling you get when a wild animal trusts you.
- Inspiration.
- A 3M M23 8 Track tape machine featuring a recording of Something by George Harrison.
- A pair of real eyebrows.

Gallery 15 (Curated by Alice Levine)

- Agatha Christie's favourite mug, a 990ml mug displaying the words "Don't be greedy", from which she drank cream.
- A mobile phone inside a crystal ball (representing horoscope apps).
- A giant balloon used in the sport of balloon hopping.
- A Dutch upright bicycle.
- A welwitschia mirabilis plant.
- Victoria Falls.
- A moon jellyfish.
- A virtual reality medicial patient.
- The centre of the universe.
- Bowerman's Nose.
- An equals sign, i.e. =.
- Every printed work in the world.
- A bottle of Mount Gay rum.
- The Starship Enterprise.
- The perfect after-dinner sing-song.
- A wildflower meadow.
- A headtorch.
- A tardigrade.

Gallery 16 (Curated by Holly Walsh)

- A blue badge.
- A self portrait of Catharina van Hemessen.
- Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.
- Sweden's Dragon Gate.
- A 19th century mechanical beard with detachable whiskers.
- The Biggles books by Captain W. E. Johns.
- The view from the surface of an alien planet.
- The high seas.
- The missing piece of the jigsaw.
- A button that when pressed tells you your talent.
- Some NASA faecal simulate.
- The River Lea.
- A perfectly soft boiled egg.
- Two copies of the Bible given to Bruce Dickinson.
- The Real Housewives Of New York.
- A church of laughter.
- A pack of Xoloitzcuintli (Mexican hairless) dogs.
- The sunrise after a night shift (in tribute to all the NHS teams who worked during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Gallery 17 (Curated by Anna Ptaszynski)

- A vinyl record.
- Drosophila melanogaster, aka the common fruit fly.
- Charles Dickens and all of his works.
- The unwritten second-half of Kubla Khan.
- A white hole (the opposite of a black hole: a hole which nothing can enter).
- A jar of marmalade.
- Steve Nallon's larynx.
- A hognose snake in a tupperware box.
- 10 to the power of 39 litres of soup.
- The concept of getting lost.
- The Red Book Of Appin.
- A map of the world.
- A CHIS (Covert Human Intelligence Source, aka an informant).
- A raman spectrometer.
- A bee orchid.
- A Game Boy Colour.
- A termite mound.
- A megalodon tooth.