Rick's List
Did you know there was an Antarctic Exploration Museum and Post Office? It's true.
There's also the Perlan Wonders of Iceland exhibition and ice cave in Reykjavik.
How about the Norwegian Glacier Museum?
And, yes, also in Norway, there's the North Pole Expedition Museum.
If there's a theme emerging here, it's Ice. I'm fascinated by these places because I'm in the process of reaching out to each, as well as science and meteorology departments at universities across the globe as long as they're Nordic or in one of those Land of the Midnight Sun places.
And why? Because I've become obsessed with a naturally occurring phenomenon that happened in the freezer of our antiquated kitchen refrigerator. I like to call it The Unicorn Ice Cube and I feel it should be shared with the world. What happened:
1 . We're too poor to have a refrigerator with its own ice maker, so we still have to manually fill up those segmented plastic trays with water from the tap, then creep across the kitchen from the sink trying not to spill, and carefully, with the skill of a neurosurgeon extracting a splinter from the brain of a anesthetized patient, who for some reason ended up with a thin spike of wood in his prefrontal lobe, delicately place the ice tray on the freezer rack UNDER the other four trays whose cubes are already formed.
2 The other day, I opened the freezer and extracted a tray and ... there was a cube with a frozen stalagmite of ice rising from the otherwise flat surface — a sort of inverse icicle, if you will — and it looks as though a unicorn horn is emerging from the cube.
3 Explain to me HOW THAT HAPPENED, ye scientists and meteorologists and glaciologists and, for that matter, any bartenders who might've run across such an unlikely development.
4 We don't have any type of deep freeze or laboratory-quality thermo-unit in which to safely keep and protect the Great Unicorn Ice Cube, and I fear for its safety. At present, the Great Unicorn Ice Cube just sits precariously on a wire insertion shelf, huddled next to a box of frozen White Castle Cheeseburgers and some odd fake sausage made of chaffs of wheat and rye and stalks of asparagus that my vegetarian wife claims tastes like real boudin but which, of course, tastes nothing like boudin.
5 Several times a day, I pad downstairs from my office and open the freezer door to get a glimpse of the Great Unicorn Ice Cube. I have no illusions; if I don't hear back from one of these ice-happy museums, someday the horn will break off our cube and I'll be sad.
6 Ars longa vita brevis? Not in the case of the Great Unicorn Ice Cube. Long may it freeze!