Believe it or Not

POP ART: Annabelle probably spends two hours (or six) a day drawing. Her default is My Little Pony related characters, but in order to stretch her, I'll throw out ideas once in awhile.

Saturday, I asked her to draw me a Tootsie Pop attempting to escape its fate.  I loved her answer to the challenge! :)

BELIEVE IT, OR NOT:  This weekend, right before it skedaddled from Seattle, we managed to squeeze in a visit to "The Science of Ripley's Believe it or Not" exhibit at the Pacific Science Center.

One of the first things that greeted us was a burned toast installation.

 Dontcha just love it? Why doesn't my burnt toast look this way!?

There were a number of interesting pieces of art in the display, including this portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. made from postage stamps.

And here's Barack Obama carved out of a phone book!

And isn't this portrait of Ben Franklin made from computer keys cool?

One treasure (oddly tucked away inside a drawer in one part of the exhibit) was a letter from Gen. Patton to Ripley. In it, Patton was recounting what sounds like a stellar shooting session during the Olympics in 1912. (I had no idea Patton was an Olympian.)

And what appeared to be Ripley's passport was tucked into another drawer.

Honestly, I'd forgotten the man behind the "Believe it or Not.'  To me, in recent years, all thing Ripley related to annual books with wild colorful photos of oddities aplenty. I'd nearly forgotten everything about the genesis of the franchise, Mr. Robert Ripley.

He was an excellent athlete, but when a professional baseball career didn't pan out, he turned to journalism. He was also an excellent cartoonist, and on a slow news day (I can relate!) he resorted to writing a column about something fanciful - a 'believe it or not.'

The rest, is, as they say, is history.

They had posters on display of Ripley's first and last comics side by side.

We worked our way though oddities aplenty. I honestly don't even know what this orange suit was supposed to represent. I didn't see a sign explaining it.

The kids both took a moment to feel a meteorite.

There were a number of casts of interesting animals and/or their parts, including this enormous shark jaw!

I think my favorite attraction was the animatronic of Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man ever. At age 22, when he died (unfortunately from an infection caused by a leg brace), he was 8-feet, 11-inches tall.

There was a captive audience in a quiet corner of the exhibit where a video showed how shrunken heads were made. A sign in the exhibit encouraged visitors to respect the dead. Hopefully this photo is a testament to the person it represented a century plus ago. It's certainly not meant to sensationalize shrunken heads.

There were a number of interactive, tech-driven exhibits. Here, the kids did well on a quiz about adaptations.

NOT QUITE YET: I hoped to get up this morning and watch video of the SpaceX resupply mission blasting off to the International Space Station, *and* watch its first stage make history by landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. 

              Photo: SpaceX
BTW, I love the name of the barge: "Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship." :)

Unfortunately, today's launch was scrubbed at the last second, when "engineers observed drift on one of the two thrust vector actuators on the second stage that would likely have caused an automatic abort," per a SpaceX Tweet earlier today.

It's now slated for Friday, super early, or late, depending on how you look at it - 2:09 a.m. Pacific Coast time.