Inside the Guide
Festivals and Events
With almost a hundred events celebrated annually in the state, there's hardly a dull moment, festively speaking. Most of the festivals, celebrations, and events are based on politics, pop culture, eccentric lifestyles, or on themes created simply as a reason to have fun. In this category you'll discover where (and, perhaps, why) folks gather to moon Amtrak trains, race worms and banana slugs, compete for pillow fighting or faux drag queen titles, hold an Urban Iditarod, or honor weeds and tarantulas with festivals of their own.
Peculiar Pursuits
 These are strange activities pursued by others, or activities that you can pursue yourself, should you be so inclined. For example, this is where you can indulge your desire to perform on the high wire or the flying trapeze, attend a cowgirl boot camp with your mother, or join the rock/paper/scissors movement. You’ll also learn about the artist in residence at the San Francisco dump and a church that worships John Coltrane.
 Museums and Collections
Throughout California you’ll find quirky museums and halls of fame proudly displaying the odd and curious, the result of years spent amassing some mighty strange and bewildering collections that have usually been the focus of their founder’s lives. The range of California collectibles includes asphalt, bananas, celebrity lingerie, PEZ containers, hand fans, yo-yos and "proof" of Bigfoot. Americans are among the world’s most skilled and prolific collectors, sometimes creating objects just for the sheer joy of collecting them.
 Eccentric Environments
'Outsider artists', those with no formal art training who become obsessed with creating one specific kind of art, are responsible for the eccentric environments described here and California is home to more eccentric environments than any other state. In this category you’ll find things like a colorful, three-story mountain made of hay, adobe and old paint, a house made of bottles, an underground garden, and an opera house so remote that the owner had to paint an audience on the walls.
Often these creations are the result of a syndrome dubbed concretia dementia, an excessive compulsion to build using whatever materials are readily available, usually concrete, bottles, cans, scrap metal and other industrial and household junk. This dementia most often strikes people in their later years. The majority of eccentric environments you can visit here were built in the early and mid-1900s, before the advent of drugs to control compulsive behavior. Today, if one of your relatives started building a concrete and scrap-iron tower in your backyard, you’d have them on Prozac—and in a Lazy-Boy-- in no time, squelching their propensity to turn your home into a tourist attraction.
Quirkyvilles
Quirkyvilles are towns with a twist, places with some strange claim to fame that sets them apart from the mundane. Whether it’s a town that speaks its own language, a living ghost town, or one that passes absurd laws in the hopes of changing American culture, these hotbeds of quirk are worth a detour, if only to find out what on earth their citizens are thinking.
 Tours
Big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco can best be appreciated by taking tours, especially of – and by – the offbeat. Listed are dozens of tours led by knowledgeable guides who are themselves interesting characters or are leading a tour that fits the eccentric theme. You can ride an antique fire engine across the Golden Gate Bridge, tour Muir Woods with a comic political activist, ride the dunes in a Humvee, or walk the streets with a certified ghost hunter.
 Odd Shopping
Californians rank among America's best when it comes to shopping and our gift shops are famous for catering to tourist whims as well as whims you never knew you had. Among the bizarre offerings you'll find is Skeletons in the Closet, the Los Angeles Coroner's Office gift shop; a place manufacturing the "paraphernalia of conjure" for all your spell-casting needs, and shops selling everything from new clothes for dogs to used clothes for humans that have been previously worn by movie stars.
Quirky cuisine
Memorable for their quirky character, these restaurants are included not for the quality or price of their food, but rather because they provide an entertaining eating experience. They also give you an alternative to the utter predictability of America’s chain restaurants. Most of these establishments are run by highly individualistic people or by corporations who know how to make eccentricity pay. You can dine surrounded by 105 aquariums or by 9,000 neckties, eat Manchurian ants sprinkled on potato strings, order take out barbeque at an auto repair shop, or watch artists do their work while you’re eating.
 Rooms With a Skew
Entries for these four-dozen quirky quarters include a faux safari, converted rail cars, over-the-top fantasy theme rooms, a former hospital B & B, and entire ghost towns. Like the eating establishments above, you can expect to find some very out-of-the-ordinary individuals behind those front desks as well as some very out-of-the-ordinary experiences.
 Attractions
Kitschy, kitschy koo. Here you’ll find the offbeat and wacky attractions like weird buildings, strange amusements, and the kind of kitsch roadside for which California is famous. While some are professionally designed and managed, others are homemade and quite funky. Among them you can feel music as it moves over, under, and right through you or enjoy one man’s idea of a Playland-Not-At-The-Beach.
Just plain weird
This catchall category describes people or places that defy labeling, although it could be said that most of the entries in this book could fit in this category. So, if a listing didn’t fit naturally into one of the other categories, or if it has a multiple personality, it ends up here.
 Quirk Alerts
These are entries worthy of extra attention, either because the story is just too weirdly wonderful to be missed or because it's a not-to-be-forgotten eccentricity that no longer exists. Most of them are of the "You just won't believe this" variety.
|
