BIG OL’ QUARTZ Since 2021, an 8,000-pound hunk of Arkansas quartz has welcomed visitors to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Standing at more than 7 feet tall, the Berns Quartz is on display at the museum’s north entrance on Constitution Avenue and is located across the hallway from a Moai statue from Easter Island, according to a representative with the museum that we emailed with last week.

“It remains one of the museum’s most popular attractions,” they said.

The impressive — and massive — mineral specimen is the largest in the museum’s collection and took about two months to unearth from the Ron Coleman Mine near Jessieville. The rare quartz was named for California real estate developers Michael and Tricia Berns, who bought it from the mine for an undisclosed sum and donated it to the museum.

The Coleman family has been mining quartz in the Ouachitas since the 1940s. Kevin Coleman, president of Ron Coleman Mine, helped oversee the installation of the quartz in its new home in 2021.

“We actually had a ‘Night at the Museum’ movie-type of thing,” he said last week. “We were there all night.”

Business Insider did a story about the quartz and how it came to be displayed at the museum. The video has almost 4 million views.

Coleman figures that the quartz will stay at the museum for a good while, and he’s impressed by how it is displayed.

“It’s the very first thing you see when you come into [that] entrance into the museum. My family and Arkansas in general are super well-represented. For me to be involved with that, it’s something I never dreamed would happen on that scale.”

LOVING HER JOURNEY

Actress Annie Murphy, who memorably portrayed the lovable airhead Alexis Rose in the hilarious series “Schitt’s Creek,” spent some time in northeast Arkansas last week.

Murphy was in Jonesboro visiting a friend, according to Sarah Doss, executive director of the Downtown Jonesboro Alliance. The actress also checked out the local cuisine, dining at The Recovery Room, Skinny J’s and Cregeen’s, all on Jonesboro’s Main Street.

“Schitt’s Creek” aired from 2015-2020 on the CBC in Canada and is available on streaming services. The series is about the Rose family, who lose their megafortune and have to relocate to the small town of Schitt’s Creek, which dad Johnny Rose once bought as a joke. The show inspired a plethora of funny memes, including one from an early episode of Alexis saying: “Umm, yes! Love that journey for me.”

In a post shared last week by the Downtown Jonesboro Alliance, there is an image of an autograph Murphy gave to a fan at The Recovery Room that reads: “Love this journey for you!”