When we think of the world's great museums, we tend to think of the Louvre, the Guggenheim or the Victoria and Albert. We do not immediately think of the Dog Collar Museum, the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum, the Museum of Broken Relationships or Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum. Yet scattered across the globe are museums dedicated to every conceivable subject, from bananas to Bigfoot, lawnmowers to leprechauns, teapots to tapeworms, mustard to moist towelettes, and pencils to penises. Many are serious collections housed in grand buildings, others are located in tiny premises and are open to visitors by appointment only, often the result of one person's crazy lifetime obsession. This book lists the world's 100 weirdest museums in order of quirkiness, encompassing such delights as The Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall, a museum in Kentucky that houses 800 ventriloquists' dolls, the Museum of Bad Art in Massachusetts, the Paris Sewer Museum, the French Fry Museum in Bruges, the Museum of Contraception and Abortion in Vienna, the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum in Tennessee, Japan's Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum (quite possibly the world's only museum devoted to instant noodles), and the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg, home to Peter the Great's collection of oddities including deformed fetuses and the decapitated head of a love rival preserved in vinegar. After all, what holiday is complete until you have seen a 300-year-old decapitated human head in a jar? Each entry will include address, contact and admission details, so the next time you are in Berlin there is no excuse for missing out on a visit to the Currywurst Museum, the world's leading museum dedicated to sausages in hot ketchup.

When we think of the world's great sporting events, we tend to focus on spectacles such as the World Cup, the Olympics, the Derby, the Monaco Grand Prix or the University Boat Race. Yet there is also an alternative world of competition where participants risk life, limb and often dignity for meagre rewards in truly weird sporting pursuits. Step forward the Indonesian sport of sepak bola api, a variation of football in which the barefoot players kick a ball that is on fire; Germany's Mud Olympics, at which competitors play soccer, volleyball and handball while knee-deep in mud; yak racing from Mongolia; Oregon's Pig-N-Ford Races where drivers speed around the track while carrying a live pig under one arm; and Australia's variation of the Boat Race, the Henley-on-Todd Regatta, where, instead of rowing, teams carry their boats along the dry bed of the River Todd. This book lists geographically the world's 100 weirdest sports events, giving full details of their rules and colourful history. They include the grotesque (the national sport of Afghanistan is buzkashi, in which riders on horseback aim to drag the headless carcass of a dead goat towards their opponents' goal), the dangerous (Japanese hardcore wrestlers batter each other with glass fluorescent light tubes instead of their bare hands), and the downright daft in the form of the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships, the World Flounder Tramping Championships, the World Gravy Wrestling Championships and the World Shin-Kicking Championships. Races are staged in all kinds of transportation. Canada is home to the Great Klondike Outhouse Race (for portable toilets), the Vancouver Bathtub Race, and the Windsor Pumpkin Regatta; Colorado hosts the annual Emma Crawford Coffin Races; and the pride of Yorkshire is the Great Knaresborough Bed Race, where teams push a bed (containing human occupant) along a 2.4-mile course that requires a wet crossing of the River Nidd. Animals feature heavily, too. As well as traditional races for ostriches (complete with jockeys), cockroaches (no jockey required), armadillos, sheep, and Oklahoma City's splendid Dachshund Dash, rubber-duck racing is one of the fastest growing sports of recent years with events being held in several countries. Other competitions test an animal's ability to do more than just run or float, such as elephant polo, dog surfing, camel wrestling, rabbit show jumping and pig diving. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that in the near future we may even be treated to synchronized pig diving. Although the plunging porkers might disagree, the appeal of many of these sports is enhanced by taking part. If cheese rolling or volcano boarding are too energetic for your taste, ice golf or underwater hockey too uncomfortable, and lingerie football wouldn't show off your legs to best effect, you could always enjoy more leisurely pursuits like the world championships in rock, paper, scissors or pooh sticks. If, on the other hand, you prefer a watching brief, you could try your hand at cow patty bingo, a North American contest where a field is divided into numbered squares, and contestants bet on which square the cow will take a poop. It is probably the only occasion in life when you can make money from one number two on top of another.

Sixty extraordinary years of Eurovision, from Céline Dion to Dustin the Turkey, from Abba to Conchita Wurst - the drag acts, the bad acts and all the nul points heroes. For 60 years the Eurovision Song Contest has existed in a parallel universe where a song about the construction of a hydro-electric power station is considered cutting-edge pop, where half a dozen warbling Russian grandmothers are considered Saturday night entertainment, where a tune repeating the word 'la' 138 times is considered a winner, and where Australia is considered part of Europe During those sixty years we have witnessed scandals: in 1957, Denmark's Birthe Wilke and Gustav Winckler enjoyed an outrageously long 13-second kiss because the stage manager forgot to say 'cut' during the live broadcast. We have witnessed national outrage: the 1976 Greek entry was a savage indictment of Turkish foreign policy in Cyprus. But most have all we have witnessed silly costumes, terrible lyrics and performers as diverse as Celine Dion and Dustin the Turkey. This book chronicles the 100 craziest moments in the history of Eurovision - the drag acts, the bad acts, the nul points heroes and the night in Luxembourg when the floor manager warned the audience not to stand up while they applauded because they might be shot by security forces. It captures some of the magic from this yearly event that continues to beguile and bemuse in equal measure.

Journey through a universe of forgotten truths.