(Photo: Cooper Hewitt)
And I don't open up my box of superlatives like that without good reason. The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum owns this rare and bizarre artifact of early Nineteenth Century Dutch origin. It's both a birdcage and a fishbowl.
The fish live in the glass at the top. But the sphere in the center of the bowl doesn't open to the fishbowl. It opens only to the birdcage at the bottom. A bird inside the birdcage can fly up into the sphere. When it does so, it would appear to be flying in the midst of the fish.
-via Messy Nessy Chic