“With or without promotions by the industry, adults have developed hobbies, if not obsessions, involving the construction out of toothpicks and glue of replicas of everything from a crucified Christ to the Titanic and other historic steamships. . . . The Christ, which was made up of 65,000 sandwich, flat, square, and round toothpicks, took 2,500 hours of work to glue into place. The rock guitarist Wayne Kusy used 194,000 toothpicks to make a sixteen-foot-long replica of the Lusitania. . . .
    Stephen Backman, who took two and a half years to craft a thirteen-foot replica of the Golden Gate Bridge out of thirty thousand toothpicks, describes himself as an ‘artist working in toothpicks.’. . . Another sculptor, Michael A. Smith, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, produced a fifteen-foot-long, 850-pound alligator by gluing together about three million toothpicks, which took him about three years.”

—Henry Petroski, The Toothpick; Technology and Culture, 2007.