Little Details

I’m awed and delighted by the sort of monuments to their obsessive special interests, in sprawling fractal encyclopedic detail, that people have posted on the web to share: there’s an invaluable body of folkademia out there.

1. Flutetunes.com: https://www.flutetunes.com/

Since 2009, the people at Flutetunes.com have been posting a new public-domain flute score every day at 10:00 UTC on the nose, listing the composer, history, key, time signature, BPM, and genre, including downloadable sheet music, MP3s, and MIDIs (the last are adjustable for key and tempo, for the sake of transposition.)

The website's database is exhaustively searchable by genre, nationality, composer, difficulty, and arrangement; this is where I was able to find out that the piece Lizzo famously performed on James Madison’s crystal flute was “Carnival in Venice”, and that the meandering oboe solo that opens “1984” on David Live was in fact Debussy’s “Syrinx.” They’ll even post arrangements of original compositions contributed by volunteers (they’ve got an arrangement of that Creative Commons YouTube and Tiktok favorite, Kevin McLeod’s “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys.”)

Flutetunes.com also includes a variety of other flute resource pages: articles on flute technique; outlinks where one can buy flute sheet music for works still under copyright; a virtual metronome; templates for printable staff paper, and a compilation of further miscellaneous flute-related links. The two site operators are so determinedly anonymous that they won’t even accept donations; they’re the Phantom Flutist Enablers.

2. The World Carrot Museum: https://tinyurl.com/world-carrot-museum

The Junior Woodchucks’ Guide to Daucus carota, courtesy of John Stolarczyk of Skipton, England. Carrot art, biology, cultivation, history, recipes, folklore, and pop culture are all covered here; should you ever need to know about the British government’s propaganda campaign to promote carrots during World War Two rationing (with posters, mascots, and period recipes!), or what the deal is with that lone purple floret on a Queen Anne’s lace blossom, or musical instruments made from carrots, the World Carrot Museum’s happy to oblige.

(Note that the website has been down since September 2022; the above URL is a Wayback Machine archive. Stolarczyk still has an active Twitter devoted to all things carrot: https://twitter.com/carrotmuseum?lang=en)

3. The Museum of Menstruation: http://mum.org

(Warning: the front page is text-only, but some links are NSFW.)

Harry O. Findlay’s Museum of Menstruation is a grand rambling cross-referential time suck covering cultural, historical, medical, and commercial aspects of the subject. Just a few of the topics this display aisle of menstrual esoterica covers: Belts to hold sanitary pads (and if you remember those, you've almost certainly outlived your menstrual worries); artwork with menstrual themes; home remedies for menstrual discomfort sent in by his readers; various religious attitudes toward menstruation; historical menstrual hygiene methods.

Since Findlay has grown old, and doesn't think that he as a cis man is the ideal curator of such a museum, he's sent out an invitation to anyone--preferably a current or past menstruator--interested in taking over his work and hosting his physical collection: http://www.mum.org/future.htm)