For Murky Legal Reasons, There's A Warehouse Full Of Clown Eggs

Depending on your particular formative experiences, London's Clown Gallery-Museum is either the most terrifying place on Earth or just exceedingly weird: a building full of eggs with clown faces painted on them. To answer your question ("Good God, why?"), when a clown signs up with the organization's official clown registry, they submit their personal makeup design to be painted onto an egg so their signature look can't be copied.

It dates back to 1946 when a clown named Stan Bult started painting clown faces on eggs as a hobby for some godforsaken reason, and his buddies apparently thought it was a better way to record their designs than, like, taking photos or something. Please enjoy this 1950 archival footage of the process that has the most incredible narrator imaginable:

In the intervening decades, the collection has ballooned (sorry) to around 250 eggs that are just lying in wait to give you pause every time you think about making breakfast.

It turns out this isn't actually a legal method of establishing copyright, but it's understood in the clown community that you don't copy someone who's been egged. (Violators risk getting taken out in the most bizarre-looking drive-by.) The gallery-museum is actually housed inside a church known as the "Clown Church," where at least one clown's remains have been scattered. Who told clowns they needed to be weirder?

Top image: Marc Lewis/Flickr