Amsterdam's 7 Oddest Museums

Everyone goes to gape at Van Gogh and ogle Rembrandt. But where are the neck violins and fluorescent rabbits? The bong displays and erotic music boxes? Amsterdam has a sublime assortment of oddball museums. 

1. Kattenkabinet: Art devoted to cats – including works by Picasso and Rembrandt – hangs in this creaky old canal house.

2. Tassenmuseum Hendrikje: The Museum of Handbags and Purses shows arm candy throughout the ages, with lots of sparkling celebrity clutches.

3. Torture Museum: Spooky galleries display skull crackers, finger screws, a guillotine and the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg.

4. Sexmuseum Amsterdam: Good silly fun, especially the penis-encircled baptismal font and automated farting flasher.

5. Electric Lady Land: The world’s first museum of fluorescence lays out glow-in-the-dark rocks, rice and rabbits. Trippy!

6. Pianola Museum: Listen to rare jazz and classical tunes unroll on vintage player pianos.

7. Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum: Ganja galore in the Red Light District. Browse the whopping pipe collection and roomful of big-budded plants, then send an e-postcard of yourself in a pot field.

DC's Most Peculiar Museums

The Smithsonian grabs all the glory, its multiple venues rising up around the Mall like an educational fortress. But where are the giant hairballs and handcrafted mayonnaise-jar bongs? Here:

DEA Museum - One minute you're watching a video called One Sniff Can Kill, the next you're admiring an array of tightly rolled doobies. The federal, taxpayer-funded Drug Enforcement Administration curates the wares (located in the agency's lobby), which range from counterculture propaganda to undercover pimp gear like rabbit-fur jackets. Read more here.

National Museum of Health and Medicine - You might want to go light on breakfast before visiting the brains, spines and other body parts in jars. The stomach-shaped hairball leaves a lasting impression, as does Lincoln's assassination bullet and bits of his skull.

Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary Museum - Antique glass medicine bottles and Martha Washington's Scouring Compound line the shelves of the 1792 shop.

Woodrow Wilson House - While it's swell to see how genteel Washingtonians lived and socialized in this 1920s home, the chatty docents are the real draw. They spill the beans on today's neighborhood elite, everything from which ambassadors shack up in their embassies illegally, to spot-on directions to the Clintons' nearby home (recognizable by the muscular Secret Service dudes sitting out front in SUVs and staring you down).

This is part 3 of a DC series. Part 1 covers DC's top 10 free things to do. Part 2 covers where Mayor Barry smoked crack, Nixon wiretapped and other scandal sites.

Reflections on the Guillotine

Think "guillotine" and an image of Marie Antoinette comes to mind, all poofy haired and silk gowned, maybe wielding a dessert fork (though she never really said, "Let them eat cake"). Marie lost her head to the timbers of justice 219 years ago today.

You can see the guillotine that decapitated her in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London. (Remember, Tussaud got her start making wax death masks for victims of the French Revolution, including Marie Antoinette.)  Other places for guillotine tourism include:

*  Paris, at Rue de la Roquette and Rue de la Croix Faubin (near the 11th arr) - Indents in the street mark where the guillotine stood outside the Prison de la Roquette, where 69 beheadings took place. Atlas Obscura has more here.

*  St-Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland in eastern Canada - The guillotine sliced just once in North America, and it was on this French island-territory. The blade remains in the L'Arche Museum. Its bloody backstory is here.

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin would surely be appalled to know the device that bears his name ended up with such a nefarious reputation; he meant for it to be a humane way to die. The last guillotine dropped in 1977.

Museum Day Outcast #3: Fluorescent Museum

The world's first museum of fluorescence is a hippie-trippy treat. It's called Electric Ladyland, and it radiates in Amsterdam. Even if you didn't eat a space cake before arriving, you're gonna feel like it, as grey-ponytailed artist and owner Nick Padalino takes you to his gallery/shop's basement and shows you all kinds of glow-in-the-dark objects, from psychedelic sculptures to luminescent rocks.

Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles' 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and other tunes play on the stereo while you learn about the naturally fluorescent rabbit, and wow your friends with the fact that the most fluorescent place on earth is…drum roll…New Jersey, USA (lots of incandescent minerals in the ground there).