Unusual Life

Frederic Chaubin is chief editor of the French magazine Citizen K, and also a photographer who has been attracted by strange architecture in the former Soviet Union. The photos he takes in countries like Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Georgia, reveal an extraordinary, almost sci-fi world. PingMag takes you to the world of Soviet style architecture with Frederic Chaubin in this incredible series of photos.

New World of Coca Cola — Atlanta

Quench your thirst for information about a quintessential American beverage at the New World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. This multisensory, multistory museum includes a 4-D theater (combining 3-D with graphic special effects) and a display of the world’s largest collection of Coke memorabilia, including an original Coca-Cola-themed Norman Rockwell painting. There’s also a pop-culture art gallery, a fully-functioning bottling line and a tasting room with more than 70 Coca-Cola products on tap.

Food Museum Slide Show

Weird Houses of Utah (most from Strange Cosmos).

This museum consists mostly of toilet seat lids decorated by Barney Smith, a retired master plumber now in his eighties.

At last count, Smith had 645 toilet seats and lids in his garage at 239 Abiso Avenue in the San Antonio suburb of Alamo Heights (210Ð824Ð7791). Each item has a different theme. Some themes are more serious than others. “The last toilet seat I hung up was of the Columbia (space shuttle),” Smith said. “I’ve got the patch that they wore on the front, nd on the back I’ve got a newspaper clipping that says ‘Columbia Is Lost.’”

Deceased hornets are glued to one toilet seat and lid combination. “Please open slowly, do not disturb,” reads the message on the lid. Lift the lid and you see the bugs underneath.

“These are yellow jackets,” Smith said. “One of them stung me on my head, and I just said, ‘I’ll put you on my toilet seat.’ ” Now that’s what I call a payback.

Another lid has a photo of Miss America on it. (Miss America probably didn’t figure she’d end up being so honored, right?) Another toilet seat lid is covered with dog tags (from dogs, not soldiers), and still another is decorated with somebody’s swizzle stick collection of swizzle sticks.

Smith selected toilet seats as his motif because he has connections in the plumbing supply business who give him damaged toilet seats they can’t sell. He said the neighbors don’t complain because the garage museum hasn’t attracted a lot of tour buses.

Ironically, the museum has no bathroom. “I got plenty of toilet seats, but no toilet,” Smith admitted.

Toilet Seat Art

Weird Houses in LA link

Since 1984, Jon Barnes has been carrying tourists through Aspen in the back of his 1978 yellow Checker cab. Now he’s carrying thousands more virtual visitors online. The vintage taxi is enough to stop traffic. But over the years, Barnes has been accumulating more and more cool stuff — electronic keyboards, drums, lasers, lights — until by the early ’90s, it became more a vehicle for entertainment than transportation. Now, the Ultimate Taxi is on the Internet, broadcasting images of passengers and Aspen scenery through a cutting-edge wireless network, designed by Harvie Branscomb with Sun Microsystems Aspen research lab funding the wireless broadband project.

Ultimate Taxi

Buckminster Fuller with models of the Standard of Living Package and Skybreak Dome. “[Fuller] believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources,” Kolbert writes in The New Yorker. There is an exhibition about Fuller at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance,” Kolbert writes. “Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?”

The New Yorker Bucky Fuller slideshow

Buckminster Fuller Exhibit at The Whitney