Welcome back to a little bit of Brilliance. 10 Minutes of it to be exact. Assuming you can read THISFAST! There’s a lot packed into the latest blog. Today, we’ll cover 5 Museums You Shouldn’t Visit This Summer, 4 Upcoming Movies You Shouldn’t Miss, the Secret Ingredients in Cosmetics, and Superhuman email! (Actually, our Review of the hottest thing in email,  Superhuman email, will appear in our next blog. Why, you ask? This blog was too long and we were also too lazy to write about it.

Speaking of being lazy, we have a special treat for the Hard of Reading. Today’s blog has 20 photos and 4 videos.

Please accept my apology for the long interval between blog posts. There are two explanations. One, sometimes Life just interferes. As Rosanne Roseannadanna used to say on Saturday Night Live, “It’s always somethin!”

A second explanation is that I try not to write about much of what’s already out there. That’s why in today’s blog, I’ll let you in on museums you shouldn’t bother to visit And I cover things you may not know about, like the secret ingredients they put into cosmetics, like whale vomit, cow urine and crushed beetles.

Yuk! Oh, they’ve disguised the ingredients so you won’t recognize them. But if one of your moisturizers makes your skin look and feel hydrated, don’t be surprised if it contains Nitrogen-rich urea and guanine, otherwise known as bird poop.

Let’s get started.

STAN: That was a pretty abrupt ending to Goldfarb’s introduction to today’s blog.
HARRIET: Sometimes he just can’t think of a good segue way. And his name’s Goldenberg, Stan. Jack Goldenberg
STAN: Yeah, that’s what I said, Goldfish.

Five Museums You Shouldn’t Visit This Summer

Summer is made for soaking up the sun. Breathing fresh air. Or just splashing around in any available water hole. But if it rains, museums offer the perfect detour. You can find details on what museums might interest you all over the Internet, so instead, we’ll tell you what museums you should avoid. Here are five museums that aren’t worth the trip. From anywhere.

The Museum of Bad Taste
707 St Peter Street New Orleans, Louisiana

It’s been said that one bad thing can lead to another (Trump to Pence, see what I mean?) and that was certainly the case when I discovered the Museum of Bad Taste featured on the New Orleans Weird Homes Tour. The Weird Homes Tour looks kinda cool. You can check out the short YouTube video posted below. But The Museum of Bad Taste is just a one-joke stop that won’t even appeal to people who enjoy drive-by auto accidents.

You can afford to miss the Eiffel Tower bar stools, rocket-shaped cocktail shaker, pink poodle pitcher and the bullet-shaped, beehive-ready sit-down hair dryer. I’ll include a picture of what you’ll miss here, but trust me, you won’t miss it.

But if you’re in N’Orlins (aka New Orleans) and you’ve filled up on beignets (New Orleans signature deep fried pastry) and coffee with chicory at the famed Cafe Du Monde, our Travel Editors at 10 Minutes of Brilliance recommend you take in the Weird Homes Tour, just steer clear of the Bad Taste Museum.

Here a photo of one tasteless Museum and a short video of the Weird Homes Tour.

Bad designs, wrong choices and poor taste are in store for you if you visit New Orleans Bad Taste Museum. Avoid it like the Plague. In fact, you’d have more fun at the Plague, assuming, of course, pestilence is your thing.

 

 

MMuseumm (No, that’s not two typos!) The World’s Tiniest Museum
4 Courtlandt Alley, New York

The World’s Smallest Museum, MMuseumm, is only 36 square feet. That’s one eighteen thousandth the size of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s so tiny, it fits into a former elevator shaft and it opens right onto the street.

The World's Smallest Museum

When you walk by The World’s Tiniest Museum, don’t blink, or you’ll miss it

As expected, there’s not a lot to see there. The Mmuseumm’s “Collection,” if you could call it that, includes an ISIS Gold coin, dice carried by prison inmates, a fast food meal box from a fake fast food franchise, a pile of rocks and a pair of men’s underpants.

Underwhelming, isn’t it?

Also on display are knockoff products that mimic real American products. A box of toothpaste looks it’s from Colgate, but on closer inspection, the brand name is “Colcote.”  A knockoff of the world’s largest selling cookies, Oreos carries the logo “Oleos.” Not funny. Not clever. Not worth a visit.

According to The NY Times which reviewed the MMuseumm, “Another collection of objects at Mmuseumm tells stories that are disturbing in a way that pictures at an exhibition might not be: things that people, mostly people of color, were carrying when they were shot and killed by the police.” But none of the items are real, they’re just replicas of the actual items.

Even the The Gift Shop is a disappointment. Unless you’re enthralled by “rare items” like a bag of chips, souvenirs, pencils, 3D postcards, practical jokes, and everyday items for daily use. Better you should visit one of the 68,236 7-Elevens. You’ll find and pretty much the same stuff, plus they’ve also got Slurpees.

The Museum of Failure, Formerly in Sweden, Is Taking Its Last Breath
6801 Hollywood Blvd. #277, Los Angeles

Depending upon how you look at it, Sweden’s Museum of Failure is a huge success! Because it failed! It closed recently when Samuel West, the American entrepreneur and licensed psychologist who founded it, went bankrupt. The irony of the Museum’s failure was not lost on the Founder.

“I could put myself and my story into the Museum of Failure,” he said. “I’m up s**t’s creek now, but I can’t help laughing that it’s so absurd.”

At first, the original Helsingborg Sweden Museum was so successful it generated three spin-off exhibitions, in Toronto, LA, and Shanghai.

But success led to more failure and it looks like even the one remaining site for the Museum of Failure in Los Angeles will close at the end of the summer. The Museum houses a collection of over 100 failed products and services from some of the world’s best-known companies. Visitors who make it there will get an insightful and entertaining glimpse into the risky business of innovation.

In case you can’t make it to LA before the Museum of Failure closes, here are a few of the failed products you’ll miss.

It doesn’t matter how great it might have tasted or how convenient it was, but beef lasagna from Colgate toothpaste? Who are you kidding? It sounds quite disgusting. Good thing they didn’t try to market their anchovy-flavored floss!

 

This coffee-flavored version of Coca-Cola lasted about two years, then Coke pulled Coca-Cola Blak from the market. It had a bad aste and its racial implications doomed this product from the start. Well, I guess it’s black to the drawing board.

Blockbuster videotape

Blockbuster’s failure was not their product. It was not understanding what business they were in. Mistakenly, they thought they were in the business of renting video tapes. In reality, they were in the business of delivering entertainment. Netflix came along and ate Blockbuster’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then snacked on their leftover popcorn.

 

Apple’s Newton Message Pad could take notes and send faxes, but its poor handwriting capabilities made it impractical. People just couldn’t decipher what they had written. According to Wired, “The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth.”

The Museum of Bad Art Features Art Too Bad To Be Ignored
55 Davis Square, Somerville, Massachusetts

Every museum has its standards. That’s as true for Paris’ famed Louvre Museum as it is for the Museum of Bad Art. (Full disclosure here. They were once a client of mine.) It’s just that the Museum of Bad Art has very, very low standards. You won’t find any art here that would be accepted in any other collection, except maybe for the trash collectors.

The Museum of Bad Art prides themselves in displaying art that no one else would ever exhibit. Much of their extensive Collection was found in the trash. Let that be a lesson to you.

While I had originally suggested this was a museum you should miss, I take that back. The Museum of Bad Art is truly fascinating and worth a visit. It’s closed now for renovations, but check back with their website to see when they’re scheduled to reopen. Here are a few of their best, I mean worst, examples:

The Dance of Family Relations painted by Jake (?)  36″ x 48″, Oil on Canvas. It was rescued from the trash in Brooklyn, NY in 2003.

Take a look. Nine elderly people surround a long, coffee-like table, seemingly about to enjoy a meal…of buildings? Most of them gaze directly at the viewer, while two of them share a private joke. Also, two of the people are out of focus, indicating they may be dead. The feast before them lacks detail. At the top of the painting, images of cell division (mitosis) are interspersed with representations of Doc Edgerton’s iconic strobe photos of a bullet shattering a light bulb.

I think the painter did one hell of a job! Don’t you?

Muiseum of Bad ARt Swamp picnic

Swamp Picnic painted by Ted Cate, Jr. 21″ x 30″  Oil on art board

More power to the artist for owning up to this monstrosity. An attractive couple enjoys a private moment at the water’s edge. The artist seems to be sharing his vision of a dystopian future in which fashion-conscious hipsters living with rising sea levels and widespread pollution wear bright green “his and hers” hazmat suits. Touching? No.

Museum of Bad art painting

I don’t know who painted this and I can’t even accurately describe this masterpiece. Apparently, it’s been defaced!

Andres Serrano’s Absurd Museum of Trump

Good News, it’s closed. You’ve been spared!

It’s a marriage made in Hell. The most unAmerican President in American history is celebrated with a museum created by a digusting, I mean distinguished, artist, Andres Serrano, whose claim to fame was that in 1989 he passed off a urine-soaked crucifix as art. Naturally, that pissed a lot of people off.

This nightmare museum creation from Serrano is technically called The Game: All Things Trump and although it attracted some early media attention, the museum closed not long after it opened (supposedly, according to plan). So, if slowing down to see a car wreck is your thing, you can read about it here, then enter what’s left of the museum anytime the internet is open.

Personally, it’s not worth you’ll time to see this distressing collection of MAGA material. So you’ll miss seeing the Cavalcade of Crap that includes a bunch of Trump paraphernalia he branded, marketed or signed, including kazoos, steaks, dolls, soap, cuff links, diplomas, hairspray, condoms, his infamous reality show as board game, and a crusted sample of Trump and Melania’s wedding cake from 2005.

As one critic aptly put it, the only thing missing from this horrendous excuse for a museum was Trump’s moral compass. And that has still never been found.

Here are a few examples of what you missed.

Trump’s ego would fill a black hole and artist Andres Serrano’s curated a museum that is a fitting tribute for the Commander in Briefs.

The New Yorker wrote a wonderful article on Trump University entitled, Trump University–It’s Worse than You Think.Or, if you missed the hyperlink You can read about it here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trump-university-its-worse-than-you-think

 

Trump’s 1994 Birthday bash featured the Twit in Chief as the Lord of the Financial Jungle. Strange. No mention of his multiple bankruptcies or losing more money- than anyone else in America!

Even Hillary made it to the Trump Museum of Media-ocrity.

4 MUST SEE Movies — the Most Anticipated Movies of 2019

Before I recommend 2019’s MUST SEE movies, I want to give you some good advice. Ready?

Don’t take my advice on MUST SEE movies! Here’s why. At one point in my career, McDonald’s set me up in my own marketing and sales promotion agency. At that time, I was McDonald’s 85th agency. That meant there were 84 other agencies and consultants vying for McDonald’s attention because it was a cash cow. Literally.

My competition was fierce. Many agencies had 50 or more people working on their McDonald’s account. I had, wait, let me check. Oh yeah, I had just me.

So, to stay ahead of my competition, I had to know about things before the other 84 agencies and consultants did. What kinds of things? Everything from the cost of potatoes two years down the road to what movies were expected to be hot in the future. If potatoes were going to cost less in the future, it would a good time to suggest a french fry promotion. And McDonald’s was always looking for blockbuster kids movies because they could be promoted on Coca Cola cups or Happy Meals.

I used to read movie scripts BEFORE they went into production so I could beat my competition recommending a movie McDonald’s should know about.

STAN: I think Moses is lost in the desert again.
HARRIET: What’s that supposed to mean, Stan?
STAN: It’ll be another 40 years before Goldfarb gets to the point. This was supposed to be a piece about MUST SEE movies.
HARRIET: Just cool it, Stan. He’ll get there. He just likes to set up a story sometimes.

Where was I? Oh yeah, so one day I was in California at Columbia Pictures. I was meeting with David Begelman, the President of Columbia Pictures. He agreed to let me read scripts the media hadn’t already heard about so I could beat my McDonald’s competitors in recommending a hot movie.

At one point Begelman’s secretary buzzed our meeting. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Begelman, but Steven’s here and he wants to drop off a script.”

“Send him in,” David said.

A scruffy-looking, unshaven man, maybe in his mid 30’s, wearing jeans and sneakers, came into Begelman’s office and handed him a script. He thanked David for seeing him, but said he couldn’t stay. He had a meeting to go to.

Steven left and David put the script on his desk and we continued our meeting. It wasn’t appropriate for me to ask about the mystery script in front of me because obviously Begelman didn’t want to talk about it.

Of course, the less he talked about it, the more I wanted to know what it was about.

With the mystery script in front of me, I glanced at it once without attracting Begelman’s attention. It was upside down and I could.barely read was the title.

A week later, I met with McDonald’s marketing executives to tell them about my California trip and the upcoming movies in Columbia’s pipeline. The only movie I recommended they use for a  future Happy Meal promotion was the movie Annie.

McDonald’s National Marketing Director, Chuck Rubner, asked me, “Are there any other movie scripts we should consider?”

“Nah. There was one script. I saw it upside down on David Begelman’s desk. But I wouldn’t recommend it. It didn’t even have a title yet. Just initials.

“What’d it say.?”.

“E.T. Just the initials E.T. It can’t be a very hot movie if it doesn’t even have a title yet!

And that’s why you shouldn’t rely on my advice on what are the TOP MUST SEE MOVIES for the rest of 2019.

But just in case you’d don’t want to follow my advice about NOT following my advice, here are the 4 Most Anticipated Movies for the rest of the year. Well, according to me. But what do I know?

The Kitchen (Just out this weekend)

Rotten Tomatoes, the popular reviewer-curator website for film and TV, says. “The Kitchen is one of the most anticipated movies of this summer.” Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss star in this adaptation of the comic miniseries about a trio of Irish mobster wives during the 1970s who decide to take over their husband’s crime businesses after their husbands are arrested by the FBI and sentenced to three years in prison.

The trio of mob wives prove to be effective criminals, not only with the protection racket they run, but also rubbing out crooks who get in their way. Don’t go if you’re looking for Melissa McCarthy to show off her comic chops. But if you’d enjoy a somewhat violent , always entertaining movie where women are the heavies, you’re in for a treat.


Where’d You Go Bernadette
(August 16)
Director Richard Linklater’s mystery comedy-drama features Cate Blanchette as a Seattle woman who goes missing. Clues are revealed in emails, letters, (Quick, someone tell millennial what a letter is.), FBI documents, communications with a psychiatrist and an emergency room bill. It was based on the runaway best seller by Maria Sample and it’s a real mystery from start to finish.

Bernadette Fox (Blanchette) seems to have it all — a beautiful home, a loving husband and a brilliant teenage daughter. When she disappears without any cause, her concerned family sets off on an exciting adventure to solve the mystery of where she might have gone


Official Secrets
  (August 23)

This American-British political thriller stars Keira Knightly and Matt Smith of Dr. Who fame. Knightly cunningly plays Katherine Gun, a British government linguist who leaks a top-secret email to the London Observer. It exposes an illegal United States National Security Agency plan to bug diplomats at the UN and blackmail them so they vote in favor of a plan to invade Iraq. Ralph Fiennes is excellent as a defense lawyer for Gun.

Gun risks everything to stop an unjust war, but her government brands her a traitor.It leads to an exciting explosive chain of events yjat ignites an international firstorm, exposes a vast political conspiracy and outs Gun and her family in fear for their lives.

 

Star Wars: The Rise of Luke Skywalker  (December 20)
What could be more anticipated for worldwide Star Wars fans than another saga from a galaxy far away? Especially since it’s the final episode of the nine-part Skywalker saga. In Star Wars: The Rise of Luke Skywalker (aka Star Wars Episode IX), the surviving Resistance faces the First Order once more as Rey (Daisy Ridley) Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron’s journey continues. With the power and knowledge of generations behind them, the final battle commences.

The final Star Wars space-opera is produced, co-written and directed by J.J. Abrams and it’s the most anticipated film of 2019. if it lives up to its hype, it promises to be one of the biggest, most successful movies of all time. Be there.

 

The Not-So Secret Ingredients in Cosmetics: Shark Oil, Whale Vomit, Cow Urine, Crushed Beetles and Bird Poop?

Oh, the ingredients they put in cosmetics. If only you knew.  Guess they figure that saying your hair dye has crushed, dried female beetles or that your perfume contains whale vomit might make it seem, well, less attractive.

Our research staff here at 10 Minutes of Brilliance decided to uncover the code words cosmetics manufacturers use to hide the real ingredients.

“Gigi, I love your hair color. How do you make it look so glamorous?”
“Oh, thanks, Tiffany. it’s crushed beetles.”

Here are the real ingredients you didn’t know you were using

SQUALINE moisturizes dry skin with shark oil.  Although I don’t think it does the same thing for sharks.Then again, when was the last time you saw a shark with dry, wrinkly skin? No, no, not counting Shark Barbara Corcoran!

AMBERGRIS is an ingredient in some perfumes. It sounds French, like a fine white wine from Côtes du Rhone. No wonder they don’t tell you it’s WHALE VOMIT.

CARMINE imparts a beautiful red color to cosmetics and hair care products.It’s a natural pigment derived from dried, crushed female BEETLES. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

ALLANTOIN is a gentle, effective skin moisturizer that increases skin smoothness. If they only used allantoin from plant sources, it’s no big deal, right? But it is also be obtained from COW URINE. And that’s gotta piss some people off!

NITROGEN-RICH UREA AND GUANINE help bind moisture to the skin, making skin look and feel hydrated. Then again, it’s really Nightingale excrement, aka BIRD POOP.

Bringing Statues to Life

We pass by statues every day. And that’s just what most people do. Pass them by. But some brilliant people have found a way to inject a little bit of themselves into these formerly lifeless figures. One Staff Photographers at 10 Minutes of Brilliance captured their moments of stardom. Well, either that or I just found them on the Internet and shared them with my Readers. Oh yeah, that’s what I did.

bear statue

statue pulling passerby's pants down

statue strangling Spiderman

statue lifting up man off the ground

STAN: I don’t get it.
HARRIET: That’s not exactly Breaking News, Stan! You still don’t understand Crayons.
STAN: Well, they are quite complex. What the Hell is Burnt Umber anyway?
HARRIET: Actually Stan, that color was retired by Crayola in 1990.
STAN: OK, but that’s not what I really wanted to ask. Wasn’t Goldman supposed to end today’s blog with something about Superhuman email.
HARRIET: Yeah, but this blog post has gone on long enough.
STAN: You can say that again.
HARRIET: This blog post has gone on long enough. Now say Goodnight, Stan.
STAN: Goodnight, Stan. Good night, John Boy.

OK, Brilliant Readers, that’s all we’re covering today.  Now you can get on with your Life. Thanks so much for stopping by. If you enjoyed the blog, please leave a brief comment. If you didn’t, please leave your comment somewhere else.

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