Unusual Life

Each spring, Atlas Obscura organizes a global event called Obscura Day.

On Obscura Day thousands of people, all over the world, go out and explore interesting and unusual places. Sometimes they organize the event, sometimes folks organize it themselves! Over the past two years nearly 10,000 people have attend over 200 different events on Obscura Day.

The Atlas Obscura is the definitive guidebook and friendly tour-guide to the world’s most wondrous places. User-generated and editor curated, the Atlas is a collaborative compendium of amazing places that aren’t found in your average guidebook.

And this month, Saturday, April 28th is Obscura Day, an international celebration of unusual places, full of expeditions, back room tours & explorations of the hidden wonders around the world.

FIND YOUR OBSCURE PLACE IN YOUR OWN HOMETOWN!

Since we’re located in Seattle, we’ll tell you about Atlas Obscura’s two places in the Seattle area that are weird and wonderful enough to be included in the official Atlas Obscura Day celebration, the Official Bad Art Museum of Art and a tour of the Inscape Building and the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore.

Tour #1: Atlas Obscura Day at the Official Bad Art Museum of Art, sponsored by Hendricks Gin, a “Gin made Oddly”.

All day is Atlas Obscura Day at Cafe Racer and the Official Bad Art Museum of Art.

Doors open at 10AM Saturday, April 28th. Have breakfast, peruse the Bad Art in the OBAMA, enjoy some “Hendricks Obscure Punch”.

Schedule is as follows:

2:00pm View in amazement an incredible array of bugs, marine invertebrates, isopods and lepidoptera from “Bug Man” Don Ehlen.

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3:00pm Musical performance by Operadisiac, a surreal opera comedy duo that is sure to delight

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4:30pm Performance by God’s Favorite Beefcake, featuring Shmootzi The Clod of Circus Contraption fame, with music and sword swallowing and God knows what else.

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6:00pm (or thereabouts) the Nu Klezmer Army will entertain with their honkin’ versions of old time favorites.

… The hijinks continue until 1am.

Tour #2: Tour of Inscape building and Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore
Peek into Seattle’s past with a tour of the city’s 77,000-square-foot former Immigration and Naturalization Services building, plus a visit to the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore for rare D.B. Cooper, UFO, and Bigfoot-related artifacts.

SPONSORED BY HENDRICKS GIN!

The International Banana Club was founded back in 1972 by Ken Bannister, T.B. (Top Banana). This clubs purpose is to keep you smiling, get you more attention and recognition, give you a vehicle to keep spirits up and stay in good health.

What looks like a banana-is curio shop to us, serves as a networking vehicle for the founder and other members.

After all, the banana is the only fruit shaped like a smile

International Banana Club on Atlas Obscura

Banana Blog

The Cave, located in Richland, Missouri, is the nation’s only restaurant located in (you guessed it) a cave, serving American steakhouse/seafood and Italian fare. The space may not get much natural light, but it has waterfalls, fish ponds, and even a view of the Gasconade River.

The space began as a natural cave that served as a dance hall in the 1920s, situated three stories up on a limestone bluff at a campground (visitors can still rent the cabins). Back then it was not spacious enough for 225 to dine, as it is today; the rest was carved and blasted out over the course of four years.

More weird restaurants from MSNBC

If UNUSUAL is what you’re looking for, step right this way…

Our friend, Steve, is a great guy who has a thing about collecting unusual treasures to surround him in his home. The collection is incredible, astonishing, visually overwhelming, and sometimes disarming in nature. We’ve posted several times in the past about Steve’s passion for finding items which are unique, yet compliment other items in his multi-layered mix of visual spectacle. Today’s post is a video filmed by Unusual Life’s Marlow Harris. To say his home is a museum of wondrous treasures is an understatement. Marlow’s new video captures of the true essence of Steve’s incredibly strange home. Enjoy!

Steve invites you to take a tour of his Weird House in Seattle

Here are links to our previous posts featuring Steve and his home with many more photos and videos…

Steve’s Strange House ! – from August 2009

Comics, lawsuits, science fiction and a very unusual home from 4/07

Extreme Home Tour – November 2010

Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, known as Haas & Hahn, saw potential in places that most Brazilians view as unsightly, undesirable and terrifying. Favelas like Vila Cruzeiro and Santa Marta drip with sewage and ring with gunshots and police sirens, but Haas & Hahn wanted to give local residents a source of pride. The Favela Painting Project started with a huge mural called ‘Boy Flying a Kite’ and expanded into covering nearly every surface in Santa Marta with cheerful shades of green, blue, pink and yellow.

Slums into Rainbows

Gage Academy supporters recently took a tour of several artists homes and studios around the Seattle area in the Mighty Elvis Mobile. Hilarity ensued.

Gage Academy received a donation of $50 in gift certificates, so midway into our tour, we stopped at Dick’s Drive-in for lunch. Delicious!

We started the tour at Close Enough Engineering with Kim Hall and Steve Walker, then went on to the Paint-by-Number Salon and moved to the home and studio of Kelly Lyles, the home of Steve Bard and then ended the day at the beautiful home and studio of Ginny Ruffner.

Santa’s Village, originally uploaded by Frank and Candi.

Awesome photo set of abandoned amusement parks around the U.S.

I know nothing about this place but am morbidly curious as to why, why, why they decorated it in this fashion. More photos at Dangerous Minds:

Mountain Googie, originally uploaded by Chimay Bleue.

This unusual building is near Lake Tahoe in Incline City. This was originally an Orbit gas station and has been vacant since around 1998. They’ve been arguing about whether to demolish it or turn it into a Visitors Welcome center for years. Most locals are not fond of the building.

It’s a great example of Googie architecture, modern and eye-catching, awaiting the future in the land of tomorrow.

Incredible little house that is part-organic, part-pop culture. A miniature Flintstones House of delight.

The Heidelberg Project is an outdoor community art environment located in Detroit. The elements of the canvas contain recycled materials and found objects, most of which were salvaged from the streets and each work of art is carefully devised to tell a story about current issues plaguing society. As a whole, the Heidelberg Project is symbolic of how many communities in Detroit have become discarded.

The HP is the brainchild of native Detroit artist, Tyree Guyton. It began in 1986 and was originally designed as a creative response to ongoing blight and decay in the neighborhood in which he grew up.

The Heidelberg Project, as it came to be known, developed into a block long environment consisting of free standing found-object constructions and abandoned buildings and trees adorned with found objects. Much of the area and works are are simplistically painted upon with multi-colored polka dots being the signature icon.

The Heidelberg Project

Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica, CA

Voodoo has too many extreme doughnuts to feature just one. Some aren’t suitable for Unusual Life — we’ll refer to them as “anatomical” — but others are at once outlandish, deliciously addictive and rated G. Like the Bacon Maple Bar: a buttermilk topped with maple frosting and slices of crispy bacon; it sounds odd but really just mimics that marvelous moment when your pancake syrup runs into your breakfast meats. Voodoo also does wonders with cereal — try the Captain Crunch, Fruit Loop and Cocoa Puff doughnuts — and before health officials stepped in, patrons could even feast on NyQuil and Pepto-Bismol varieties.

Extreme Doughnuts at Voodoo Doughnut
22 SW 3rd Ave. | Portland, Ore.