From my dealer acquaintance of mine on the other side of the country:

"Hi Ronn,

We drove to see the Machines of Leonardo da Vinci exhibit. Basically, an Italian group had taken the codex and built full scale replicas of da Vinci's machines out of wood. Very very cool. Most of the large scale objects were hands off and each item was clearly marked with a hand surrounded by a red circle with a line though it. Before we went in each and every person was told that items with this symbol cannot be touched.

I know you know where I'm going with this...

Some were fairly self explanatory, worm screws and such, others like the expanding wings I'd like to have seen a video of them working. I'm very visual. Some things just don't go through the thick skull till I see it in action and then all falls into place.

So anyways, my husband was having a FANTASTIC time. I was mainly blown away by the swimmers hands, saddle leather stitched into webbed duck feet gloves that fit over your hands. Very sculptural and modernistic! Vodder or Wegner could have been the designer.

We were having fun standing back watching people touch things they shouldn't be touching and generally acting like some of my least fav customers. The kind that have to handle everything and without any sense of care.

There was a full size replica of the printing press that da Vinci had designed in hopes of mass producing copies of his work for sale. The same design was used later for the Gutenberg Bible.

Enter the Dumbass. She has no excuse, this is one of the "do not touch" machines.

She strides over and grabs the handle. She pumps it up and down and after a few yanks, realizes it goes side to side. So she's slamming the press back and forth and calling to her friends to come check her out. A crowd has gathered and we all can see what is coming. I'm happy to watch because this was one of those machines that I really wasn't sure how the bag of sand was of use until seeing it in motion.

We should have been recording this, the girl was a bruiser and it was bound to happen.

One of her friends points out that it wouldn't make an imprint and she needed to press down on the handle once the tray was in place. I did mention these were hand carved wooden models and were not meant to be used, right? Left, Right, Down, Left, Right,

DOWN-SNAP!

25 jaws drop.

Time slows to a stop. It's as if all lights have gone out save for the golden spotlight on the machine and the girl scrambling to shove the snapped dowel back into place. It sheared off completely. It'll have to be drilled out on
both sides. There is no fixing it. Finally she turns around with the classic deer in headlights look, she is desperately trying to decide if anyone had seen her do it or if she could get away with dropping the handle and walking away unseen.

It was classic. Strangely she wasn't immediately frog marched out of the museum. Wasn't even asked to leave. Holy Crap! One of the museum guides a very young girl maybe 20, took the broken handle and walked off to go talk to someone. Maybe being a weekend, there was no curator on hand?

My husband turned to me and said "THAT was worth the whole trip! I wish we had been taping that!"

Upstairs we noticed a total lack of guards, all the paintings were within reach (no rope no plexi) and if I was the type of jerk off that apparently go to museums these days I could have easily put my fingers all over the surface of oil paintings dating to the 1700s.

Weird!"