In early December, the House Freedom Caucus—a group of conservative Republicans aiming to push their party rightward—released a detailed agenda for the first 100 days of the new administration. The document consists mostly of hundreds of existing rules they'd like to see repealed. Some are expected targets: climate regulations, Title IX provisions, the National School Lunch Program. Others are a bit more surprising—they also want to roll back conservation standards for ovens and dishwashers, and block rules that would restrict tanning to consumers over 18.

But high up at the top, in box 3A, flops an unusually scaly legislative actor: the catfish.

An unexpected political hot potato, the regulatory status of catfish has beleaguered Democrats and Republicans alike for nearly a decade. The story of its rise to controversy involves multiple nations and years of legislative strife—and, perhaps, a rare opportunity for bipartisan consensus.

Catfish has long been an important part of the American diet. Native Americans and European settlers stewed and fried them by the millions, and the first large-scale aquaculture endeavors in America were catfish farms, which began stretching across Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in the 1960s. A few decades later, though, a competitor emerged: pangasius, or "Asian catfish." A major export of Vietnam, pangasius began swimming into American markets after the U.S.-Vietnam trade embargo was lifted in the mid-1990s, and quickly gobbled up a large percentage of the market.

This has sparked what is known as the "Catfish Dispute"—an ongoing argument between American and Vietnamese producers. Catfish Farmers of America, the industry's main U.S. trade association, has sued the Department of Commerce repeatedly. Although they have won some victories—all Vietnamese catfish must now be labeled "Made in Vietnam," for example—it hasn't been enough to stop the torrent of competition. And so in 2008, they took an unusual step: they asked to be more strictly regulated.

Their argument, at the time, was food safety. "There were a lot of Youtube videos [of Vietnamese fish farms] floating around that were not appealing—it's not a situation that you want to have your food come from," says Dan Flynn of Food Safety News, who has reported on this saga since the outset. Together with a few food safety groups, Catfish Farmers of America pushed for more stringent inspections. Thanks mostly to the influence of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, the 2008 Farm Bill contained a special provision moving catfish inspection duties from the FDA to the USDA.

Up until this bill, food inspection responsibilities in the U.S. were clearly delineated: the USDA checked out meat, poultry, and eggs exclusively, while the FDA took care of everything else, including our favorite whiskery fish. "This goes back to the days of Upton Sinclair," says Flynn, "based on the principle that meat should be subject to continuous inspection."

While the FDA does random inspections, the USDA checks all the domestically produced and imported goods under their jurisdiction, unless they are confident that the countries and states producing the goods have similar inspection standards.

 

Deciding to treat catfish—and only catfish—like beef or chicken throws a wrench in the system. "When you walk into a facility that processes seafood, you see cod coming down the line, you see shrimp coming down the line, or tuna. All of those products are regulated by the FDA," says Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, a U.S. seafood industry trade group. "Now stop the presses—quite literally!—refit the manufacturing, and roll the assembly line again for catfish, and now USDA is the regulator."

It is—and here Gibbons uses that bogey-word that sinks so much legislation—duplicative: "We do not need the police department and the sheriff standing at the stop sign to make sure people don't run it."

So far, though, this wrench is largely hypothetical. Before the switch could be made, there had to be a plan in place—and this was a slow, seven-year process, full of tug of wars, inter-agency drama, and arguments over what exactly a catfish is. "Millions were spent, both agencies had responsibilities, and no catfish really got inspected," Flynn wrote in 2014. The USDA didn't look at its first fish until spring of 2016.

Despite these setbacks, some supporters of the bill have held the line. But Giffords and others doubt their motives. "It's a running joke in Washington that this has anything to do with food safety," he says—instead, he casts it as a blatant attempt to undercut free trade. Plus, he says, individual catfish farmers are jumping ship, fearing that the regulations will make life harder for them, which Giffords diagnoses as "a classic case of 'be careful what you wish for.'" (Catfish Farmers of America did not respond to requests for comment.)

Meanwhile, nouveau catfish inspection has gained a lot of enemies on both sides of the aisle. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has deemed the program unnecessary ten times. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen has repeatedly sponsored amendments that move toward eliminating it, along with Republican Senator John McCain. (In a 2013 article in Politico, McCain called the species in question a "crusty mudfish," and accused it of being a "bottom-feeder with friends in high places.") Other senators have accused it of violating various aspects of the World Trade Organization treaty, which would leave the U.S. open to disputes from other countries, and fear it may lead to boycotts on American goods.

Nowhere is this sentiment more apparent than at www.repealcatfish.com, a website dedicated to getting rid of the inspection program. Run by the National Fisheries Institute, the site contains a lot of convincing arguments for supporting the repeal—and, thanks to its smorgasbord of custom videos, cut-and-paste infographics, and heated slogans, it's also a good way to viscerally understand exactly how fed up the regulation's opponents are. There are multiple comparisons to the Emperor's New Clothes, and an infographic entitled "The Twelve Days of Catfish," which suggests that they would like you to bring this issue up at a Christmas party. "Unless you've been living under a rock, you know everyone's urging Catfish Repeal," the homepage promises.

Perhaps, in this divisive political age, catfish repeal will be what finally unites us. Maybe the controversy will land the U.S. in World Trade Organization court. Or maybe the catfish will remain stuck in limbo—neither cat nor fish, neither meat nor seafood, inspected either double or not at all. It's hard to tell. As Flynn says, chuckling: "The more years it goes on, the stranger it gets."

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The main Amtrak stop in Buffalo, New York is known informally as ‘America’s Saddest Train Station’. A modest, one-story brick building, smaller than the average house, it currently sits with a blue tarpaulin covering its roof, which partially collapsed during a storm in September 2016. It's a symbol for the struggles and hardships, most of them economic, Buffalo has faced in recent history.

But a little further east is another train station, lying forlorn and mostly forgotten. It also happens to be one of America’s Art Deco treasures: the old Buffalo Central Terminal.

Opened in 1929 for the New York Central Railroad, the Buffalo Central Terminal was every bit as grand and opulent as Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, Philadelphia’s 30th Street station and Washington DC’s Union Station.

These were the days when Buffalo was known as the Queen City, built on the strength of automobiles, livestock, steel, and other heavy industries prospering along the seam of the Erie Canal, connecting New York to the Great Lakes. Buffalo thrived to such an extent it was chosen to host the prestigious 1901 Pan American World’s Fair. At this point, Buffalo was the eighth-largest city in the United States.

Designed in stunning Art Deco style by Alfred T. Fellheimer, the principal architect of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, it featured an ornate dining room, telegraph offices, luncheon rooms, soda fountains and liquor stores. It even had its own in-station tailors. Towering over the Terminal was a 17-story, state-of-the-art office complex for the New York Central Railroad. This was the golden era of refined, luxurious train travel; of sleeper cars, red caps, and the romantic sounding lines like the 20th Century Limited, the Chicagoan, the Empire State Express and the Knickerbocker. In its heyday, Buffalo Central Terminal was servicing 200 trains a day.  

But the decline in Buffalo’s economic fortunes, and the rise of domestic airlines and automobiles, spelled the end of the grand Terminal. In the early hours of the morning of October 28, 1979, the last Lake Shore Limited train service heading west left Buffalo. The grand old Terminal was never used again.

For decades, the building was left abandoned, silently falling apart, while the surrounding neighborhood similarly declined. But the spirit of the Nickel City is strong. No more so than in the recent efforts of the non-profit, Central Terminal Restoration Corporation (CTRC), which has been fighting to not only preserve the Terminal, but restore it to its original magnificence.

The cavernous, ornate ceilings are cathedral-like in size, and echo with the sounds of footsteps on the marble and concrete floors. Stenciled lettering above empty doorways shows where there were once newspaper stands, ticketing offices and deluxe services for the luxurious Pullmans.

Adjacent to the shoe shine kiosks is a long private room, that like most of the Terminal has been all but stripped of anything that could be sold. But the faded markings on the floor show the imprint of curved U-shaped dining counters. It is easy to imagine a din in the building and the excitement of passengers waiting for the grand cross country trains, or newlyweds heading to Niagara Falls, or the tens of thousands of GIs who passed through here on the way to Europe.

One of the largest problems facing the Terminal is in keeping the elements out. Carl Skompinski, a Buffalo resident who has been working with the non-profit group that has owned the Terminal since 1997, says that once they found kids had broken in and were ice skating across the Terminal floor.

“I got involved because I grew up in the area,” Skompinski explains. “I’d like to see it reopening as a multi-use facility with offices, condos or apartments in the tower, a publicly opened concourse and Amtrak station. I’d like it to be a gathering place for the community and be able to be self-funding.”

With the current Amtrak station downtown in such a state of disrepair, there have been calls in Buffalo for a new station. Skompinski and his group argue that there’s no need to build a new one when the beautiful Central Terminal is ready to be used. “The main line runs past the Terminal already,” says Skompinski. All Amtrak would have to do “is run a couple pair of tracks to the old platform building.” 

But the building itself would need extensive repairs. Forty years of neglect have seen much of the original fixtures either stolen or stripped, particularly in the mid 1980s, when the Terminal was sold off in a foreclosure sale. One ornate Art Deco lamp found its way into a Hong Kong nightclub. Today, the CTRC maintains excellent security, preserving what is left, and gradually refitting the Terminal. But the process is expensive and a labor of love; each glass bulb for the ornate outside fixtures costs $220, and there are over 20 to replace.

While Buffalo doesn’t attract the numbers of tourists of other major East Coast cities, it is a city rich in history and architectural treasures—none more so than the forgotten beauty of the old Central Terminal. 

Perhaps the best chance for the Terminal’s rejuvenation lies with Canadian property developer Harry Stinson, who was named as the designated developer of the site by the City of Buffalo and the CTRC in 2016. Plans include a hotel, offices, stores, restaurants, housing and entertainment spaces. Whether the trains return to the station is yet to be determined.

Among the world’s plants, the nightshade family is one of most prolific and most useful. Among its 2,500 species are some of the humanity’s favorite foods (potatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes) and distractions (petunias, tobacco). This family of plants was thought to have diverged from the morning glory family somewhere between 49 and 67 million years ago, but that was something of an educated guess: their delicate fruits rarely fossilize, and archaeologists had only ever found a few seeds linking the present-day plants to the past.

In a new paper in Science, though, a team of scientists reports on the discovery of two small fossils of ancient nightshades of the physalis genus, which includes tomatillos, ground cherries, and husk tomatoes. These two specimens, with their delicate husks preserved around them, are about 52 million years old and show that the nightshade family is much, much older than previously realized.

The fossils were found in Laguna del Hunco in Patagonia, Argentina, an area that scientists have been studying for about a decade. Of the more than 6,000 fossils found there, these are the only ones from the physalis genus and, according to Peter Wilf, the lead author of the Science paper, “the only two fossils known of the entire nightshade family that preserved enough information to be assigned to a genus within the family.”

The scientists identified features on the fossils that clearly placed them in the same genus as today’s tomatillos: they named the ancient species Physalis infinemundi, after its place “at the end of the world,” in Patagonia.

Before this discovery, molecular dating had indicated the the physalis genus was only about 9 to 11 million years old. The fossil indicates that it evolved about 40 million years earlier than that. Since these husky plants are on the recent end of nightshade evolution, the discovery also indicates that nightshades as a family are likely older than anyone had imagined.

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, traditional performances like the Peking opera were denounced as bourgeois and classist. In their place, Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, introduced "Eight Model Operas." These new performances that were intended to replace the old and promote the ideology of the young People's Republic. One of them was 1964's communist ballet, The Red Detachment of Women.

The ballet tells the story of a peasant girl, Wu Qinghua, who escapes from slavery on Hainan Island to join the Red Army and form a new China. In this scene, she stumbles upon the army's camp after surviving a brutal beating at the hands of the vicious "Tyrant of the South." Wu is given a rifle and warmly accepted into the ranks of the Women's Detachment, who plan to rescue the other peasants from the oppressive landlords.

The Red Detachment of Women, which was adapted from a 1961 film of the same name, was based on the true experience of an all-female Special Company of the Red Army during the Chinese Civil War. They survived a brutal attack on Hainan Island while their male counterparts did not, and were honored by Mao himself. Perhaps because of the heroic, proto-feminist tale, or maybe just because it was good entertainment, the ballet became intensely popular. This version of the ballet was filmed in 1971, and a performance was staged for Richard Nixon during his landmark visit to China in 1972.

Even for all of its political camp, The Red Detachment of Women remains a favorite in the ballet world for its music and choreography, both of which take from Chinese folk traditions. Watching the ballet in its entirety, it's hard not to be moved by the melodrama of the many tableaus in which the youthful rebels raise their fists to a distant horizon—an image straight off a propaganda poster.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.

In late 2015, photographer Marcel Heijnen was walking around his new neighborhood of Sai Ying Pun in Hong Kong. Although a long-time resident of the city, he was new to this particular area, and he noticed a cat perched the counter of a small local shop. A year later, his portrait of the cat, whose name is Dau Ding, ended up as the cover to Heijnen’s new book Hong Kong Shop Cats.

Heijnen regards the small stores where the cats lounge and doze as “beautiful photogenic subjects in their own right." They are places where, says Heijnen, “time seems to have stood still, devoid of branding and all the other modern-day retail trickery we’ve grown accustomed to”.    

The Hong Kong cats are regarded as lucky, Heijnen notes in his book, and from his photos, they clearly provide companionship. In one image, a cat sits close to his owner, mirroring him, in a room of textiles. In another, a cat looks sleepily away as his owner dozes behind him. 

AO has a selection of Heijnen’s unique portraits of Hong Kong’s shop cats.  

A balanced breakfast is an important meal in just about every society in the world, but not many of them require a blood sacrifice. If that is the sort of thing you’re looking for, though, feast your eyes on the “blood pancake.” 

The traditional dish, known asveriohukainen in Finnish and blodplättar in Swedish, is exactly what it sounds like: a flapjack made with a healthy helping of blood.

Such pancakes originate from more of a utilitarian background than from a Twilight message board. Today, blood from the butchering process, at least in most large slaughterhouses, is treated as a waste product, or used in fertilizer, fish food, and even cigarette filters. But blood can be as hearty, and usable, part of an animal as many of the meatier parts.    

Blood can be found in a number of traditional recipes, most famously in European blood sausage and black pudding. There are also lesser-known dishes such as Germany’s schwarzsauer, a soup made of blood, spices, and vinegar, or China’s blood tofu, which is just blood that has been allowed to congeal into a soft consistency.

If the sight of a deep cut is the type of thing that can make you pass out, then blood foods probably aren’t for you. But if you can stomach the idea of eating cooked blood, it’s actually quite healthy. Like eggs, blood is high in protein, making it a simple source of the nutrient. In addition, blood is extremely high in iron, which can help stave off anemia (although it also gives it that metallic aftertaste). In addition to its health benefits, blood makes an excellent replacement for eggs in cooking, acting as a binding agent, and easily whipping up into a dense foam. Perfect for things like pancakes!

Blood pancakes seem to have originated from Finland and spread across Scandinavia, especially to Sweden. There are a number of variations on the recipe, but the core ingredients are generally the same: milk, flour, sometimes even an egg, and blood. Usually the preferred blood used in the recipe is pig’s blood (available from the butcher), but people have also used their own blood, and more specifically, menstrual blood.

On their own, blood pancakes end up being a savory dish, so many recipes call for enhancing the natural flavor by adding things like onions, spices, bread crumbs, and molasses. The only other body-fluid-specific requirement is to strain the blood to remove any clots that may have formed. Which really hammers home that you’re cooking with blood, in case you forgot.

Once the batter is prepared, the pancakes can be cooked just like any other flapjack. No matter the color of the batter, the cakes usually take on a dark, nearly black color as the blood cooks. They are often described as a bit denser than your standard fluffy pancakes, and definitely retain the metallic tinge that often turns people away from blood-based foods.

The pancakes are often served with lingonberries, or lingonberry jam, which can help cut the coppery flavor. Or, as the Nordic Food Lab suggests, you can add rye sourdough starter to the mix, which also helps hide the taste of blood.

While consumption of blood-based foods is not as popular as it once was, blood pancakes are still a fairly common dish in Finland and Sweden. There are brands that sell sleeves of already-cooked blood pancakes—a sanguine alternative to Eggo waffles. 

A museum in Tel Aviv discovered that it had been hiding a 90-year-old grenade that was still active.

The Haganah museum tells the story of the Jewish underground army that became the Israel Defense Forces. The museum is located in a house built in 1923 that served as the secret headquarters of the Haganah.

Recently, the staff found a very old grenade just sitting in a cupboard. It was created in a “private arms factory,” according to the Times of Israel. (The Jewish Press calls it a “underground lab.”)

The museum called the bomb squad. Here they are taking the bomb away:

The plan is to neutralize it and return it the museum as an example of the type of munitions used in the pre-state conflict that ended in the creation of Israel.

In 1803, when the United States bought New Orleans, along with the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase, the city had only about 8,000 people living in it. Planned on a tight grid, the city stretched just eleven blocks along a curve of the Mississippi River and six blocks back from the levee, to Rampart Street.

A little more than three decades later, New Orleans had become a world port, and in 1836 edged out New York City as the busiest export center in the United States. The population had grown to more than 60,000 people—many of them Anglo-Americans who, to the alarm of the city’s Francophone natives, had flocked to the port to make their fortunes.

Today, New Orleans trades on the languid charm of its French and Spanish past to lure visitors to its historic center, but in the early 19th century, American newcomers to the city had no patience for Louisiana's old guard, known as creoles, whom they saw as Catholic, corrupt, and overly permissive to the city’s large population of slaves and free people of color.

But in New Orleans, the American upstarts lacked the political power to change the city’s ways as fast as they would like. Instead, in 1836, the city’s Anglo-Americans convinced the state legislature to split New Orleans into pieces—three semi-autonomous municipalities divided along ethnic lines. For more than 15 years, the city was divided, while the Americans consolidated their power and re-shaped the city to their own ends.

The idea of dividing New Orleans between the Francophone old guard and the Anglophone newcomers first came up in the 1820s, when rival military factions would challenge each other’s authority, edging towards but never quite exploding into violent conflict. In his book Louisiana in the Age of Jackson, Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., the Louisiana historian who has studied this period most closely, tells how American-led sections of the militia would refuse to follow orders from foreign French officers who still held military positions. When Americans held command, the French would reciprocate.

At times, different factions of the militia would march through the streets, showing off their defiance and power, and it was during one such conflict that a local American editor, R.D. Richardson, started calling for the city to be split along ethnic lines. A rival French editor, who had fought for Napoleon, responded by offering five dollars to anyone who’d give Richardson a good whap over the head.

There were two main areas in which the entrenched French creoles made the incoming Americans crazy. The first was infrastructure: when the U.S. bought the Louisiana territory, New Orleans had no paved roads, no street signs, and no colleges. Much of the population was illiterate, and justice was dispensed according to the French legal code: Tregle calls the place “a colonial backwash of French and Spanish imperialism.”

The second was the permissive culture: Sunday in New Orleans means sitting at a café and going out dancing or perhaps to a horse race. In this city, black and white people mingled more freely than elsewhere in America, and even slaves had more leeway to move freely than in other cities.

All this shocked the Protestant, Puritan-minded American settlers, many of whom came from places in the South where the movement of black people was highly restricted and regulated. (Meanwhile, the native creole population was appalled by the crude Americans, who they called Kaintucks and vulgar Yankees.) The Anglo-American settlers tried to change everything from the city’s laws to the looser culture, but even as they gained power of New Orleans’ commercial life, they did not have enough political power to mold the city as they would have liked.

After the conflicts of the 1820s, the newcomers kept trying to split the city—if they couldn’t fix the whole place, at least they could control part of it. About a decade later, in 1836, Anglo-Americans finally got their way. New Orleans was divided into three municipalities, one Anglophone and two Francophone.

The three sections of split New Orleans roughly correspond to the today’s Central Business District, French Quarter, and Marigny neighborhood. The Second Municipality, which the Americans controlled, began at Canal Street and went upriver, past the place where the Pontchartrain Expressway cuts through the city today. The First Municipality included all of the French Quarter, from Canal to Esplanade Avenue, and the Third Municipality stretched downriver from there, through the Marigny towards today’s Bywater neighborhood. Each municipality had its own police force, its own schools, its own infrastructure, and services. In the First Municipality, English was the language of commerce and government; in the other two, French dominated.

When this story is told quickly, it’s usually said that New Orleans was a place neatly divided between old and new, French and English, a more multiracial society and a white one, with Canal Street as the clear border. But according to the work of Tregle and later historians, the divide was not initially so stark as legend might have it.

When Americans started moving to New Orleans, they moved first to the French Quarter, on the upriver side, closer to Canal Street. Only once that section of town filled up did they continue building into Faubourg Ste. Marie, the newer suburb on the far side of Canal. It was always desirable to live in the French Quarter, where by the 1830s Chartres Street had become a major commercial thoroughfare, dotted with American shops selling books, jewelry, and other goods. On the other side of Canal Street, it was common for prominent Francophone creoles to make their home in Ste. Marie, too. To the extent that there was a clear dividing line between the old and new populations, it was at St. Louis Street, close to the center of the city.

But once the city was divided in three political entities, the distinctions between the Second Municipality and the other two started to grow. Trade in the Second Municipality thrived, and bustling warehouses and insurance companies started going up on Camp and Magazine streets.

The growing economy led to a housing boom, where Greek revival architecture mixed with the brick-faced warehouses of a northeastern port city; one traveler noted that the American part of the city “lacked that mellowness of age and charm of the bizarre which set old New Orleans apart.” Whatever it lacked in beauty, though, it made up for in wealth and city services: the Second Municipality soon had a modern school system, as well as new wharves, gas lights, and paved streets.

On the other side of town, the area below Jackson Square was suffering, as poverty increased and the old French houses aged. The Third Municipality, sometimes called the “The Dirty Third,” was in particularly bad shape, since the waste of the rest of the city floated downriver to pollute its shores, air, and water. By the time the city was reunited, in 1852, its wealth had concentrated upriver: Tregle found that by 1860 the area upriver of St. Louis Street had 76 percent of the city’s taxable property.

More than any other American city at the time, New Orleans could claim to be a diverse place where people of color had more freedom than elsewhere in the South. But during the period where white newcomers divided the New Orleans, the American values and laws that were shaping both the city and the new state of Louisiana were reducing those freedoms quickly. The American values imported to New Orleans included not just an emphasis on better infrastructure and education, but on more legally encoded racism, that was strictly enforced.

“On the upper side of town...white inhabitants were often times more hostile to the very notion of free people of color,” writes Richard Campanella, a contemporary historian who studies New Orleans geography. The white Americans who were gaining power were uncomfortable with the rights that slaves and free people of color had in the city and sought to restrict their movements and freedoms. There was also a second major wave of white people coming to the city, who saw themselves as being in conflict with the black population. During the 1830s, immigrants from Ireland and Germany flocked to the New Orleans and made it a majority white city for the first time: in 1835, white workers protested black employment in certain desirable jobs.

As much as the division allowed trade to thrive and infrastructure to improve in parts of the New Orleans, it was mostly to the benefit of white, American-born people. When the city did merge back into one city, it was only because the Anglo-Americans had enough power to control not just commerce but city politics, too. With the influx of immigrants, they outnumbered the Francophone old guard. The immigrant-heavy suburb of Lafayette was incorporated into the city, becoming today’s Garden District. Only once the Anglo-Americans could shift the whole city to their own ways did they let it become whole again.

At first glance, the unfamiliar alphabet above, pressed into the page beneath our own, seems a bit opaque. With its streamlined swoops, angles and dashes, it appears to belong elsewhere—like writing from the past, or the future, or a different planet.

Put it a little time, though, and you'll find it's not so hard to figure out what's going on. This isn't a cipher, meant to leave people out—it's a system, invented to let people in. This is Moon Code, a reading language for the blind which, although overshadowed by Braille, has given a specific population the chance to read again for hundreds of years.

Moon Code was invented by Dr. William Moon, a bookish lawyer and teacher from a village in Kent, England. As a young man, Moon had wanted to be a priest. But an early bout of scarlet fever left him blind in one eye, and, as the years went on, his remaining sight slowly eroded. By the time he was 22, he couldn't see at all.

Moon had already learned several of the existing reading systems for blind people. At the time, there were various species of "embossed letters," which were ordinary Roman letters that stuck out of the page, sometimes printed in italics or uppercase for increased ease of touch. There was James Hatley Frere's "Frere system," a phonetic alphabet made up of various shapes and symbols, with each based on a particular sound. And there was the still-familiar Braille, which had been introduced a few years earlier.

Although Moon continued his studies after going blind, he found his immediate priorities were changing. He began sharing his knowledge, opening a school in his home to teach other vision-impaired people how to use these existing systems. 

But in the classroom, he found problems with each of them—especially when he tried teaching them to adults. Embossed Roman letters were too confusing, due to their "numerous lines and intricate forms," he wrote later, in The Consequences & Ameliorations of Blindness. The Frere system, while simpler, was "burdened with numerous contractions," and encouraged incorrect pronunciation. Braille, "although useful to children, is also found unsuitable for the adult," especially "if he be accustomed to rough manual labor"—calloused fingers found it hard to distinguish the dots.

In 1845, in response to these frustrations, Moon took matters into his own hands. He invented a new method, which he called "Moon's System of Embossed Reading," but which soon became known as "Moon Type," or "Moon Code." The Moon System is also based on Roman type, but each letter is simplified into a basic set of lines or curves: "A" is an inverted V, "B" is a simple fishhook, and "S" is a forward slash. By removing excess strokes, the shapes are left, in Moon's words, "open and clear to the touch."

In a strategy borrowed from Frere, pages of text were arranged in "ox-ploughing succession"—the first line is printed left-to-right, the next right-to-left, and so on. Instead of returning to the beginning of the page each time, and potentially losing her place, the reader can move her hand continuously, like an oxen marching up and down rows.

Early experiments were promising. "Many who for years had made futile attempts to learn by other systems, have easily accomplished this," he wrote. "Many of those who could read before losing their sight, have learnt it in one lesson." The rugmakers and basket-weavers, whose calloused fingers he originally had in mind, could manage it easily. Even better, both blind and sighted people could pick it up extremely quickly, and teach others in turn.

With the help of some friends, Moon had Moon Code printing plates made up, and began publishing a monthly magazine from his house. He soon moved on to the Bible, which he printed in chunks. He kept up his teaching, which gave him more and more ideas—after meeting a blind girl who thought that horses walked upright on two legs, he started embossing illustrations, and he also issued music, maps, and geometry lessons.

By 1875, Moon had printed, in his own words, "37 volumes of Religious Works, 53 Biographies, 49 volumes of Tales and Anecdotes, 27 of Poetry, [and] an Atlas of the Stars." He spent the rest of his life traveling the world, teaching his system at various schools and societies. By his death in 1894, groups everywhere from England to Norway to Syria taught Moon Code, and circulated books. 

Although Moon Code was, at one time, one of the world's more popular reading systems, it was quickly surpassed by Braille, which, with its all-dot format, is much easier to print and produce. Moon Code "is almost never offered as an alternative format for items such as household bills, bank statements, and restaurant menus," writes the Royal National Institute of Blind People. But the group still encourages its use, especially among the audience Moon originally envisioned: people whose lives have left them with less sensitive eyes and fingers, who still want to make their way across the page.

The ice in the Copenhagen Zoo's Arctic Ring is cold, but the gossip is hot: as the Local reports, one of Denmark's sexiest polar bear couples is breaking up. Ivan and Noel, two of the exhibit's main attractions, will soon be going their separate ways, the Zoo recently announced.

The two have made it work since 2007, when Ivan left the Moscow Zoo to move in with Noel. But in recent months, things have fallen apart. "They simply don't like each other," zoo spokesman Bengt Holst told a local broadcaster, who added that Noel "often swims back and forth in the enclosure because she is stressed."

Ivan will soon pack his things and move to the Scandinavian Wildlife Park in Djursland. Among his welcoming party is a female named Nuno, who, insiders say, is single and ready to mingle. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

In the spring of 2013, local news stations in Overland Park, Kansas began reporting sightings of peculiarly magical structures along the wooded Tomahawk Creek Trail. Miniature houses with doors, pathways, and mailboxes were hidden within the nooks of tree trunks.  

The video clip above by Blackburrow Creative gives a rare look at the mysterious Firefly Forest—a community of “gnome homes." Each tiny house was unique. People walking down the trail could open the hinged wooden doors to see a tiny bed, a pair of wooden clogs on the floor, a tea set steaming with dry ice. One house with the address 12 Hollow Tree Lane had labeled moving boxes that disappeared and was later replaced with furniture.

However, the houses featured in the 2013 video mysteriously vanished from Overland Park in June 2014.

Park officials were not responsible for the whimsical installations. No one knew the identity of the craftsperson behind Firefly Forest. It remained a secret until 2015 when a 17-minute documentary titled “The Gnomist" revealed the artist to be a woman named Robyn Frampton.     

The film produced by Great Big Story shows how the gnome homes struck wonder and provided comfort within the community. At one house, people could write notes to fairies that Frampton would secretly collect.

For about a year, Frampton crafted the tiny houses. In 2014, she and her family moved to Utah, taking the gnome homes with them. Only one remains: a turquoise wooden door with the sign "The Little Owl," dedicated to a three-year-old girl Allie Fisher who had died of brain cancer.  

Even though Frampton's original tiny fairy structures are gone, her work has been recaptured in the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. Staff created the Enchanted Forest display, which has 13 intricate gnome homes. In Saratoga Springs, Utah Frampton continues making mystical homes, constructing a massive multi-level fairy house carved into a 1,200-pound tree trunk. You can also buy your own fairy door crafted by Frampton.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

On a cold, snowy night in January 1875, Captain G. C. Armstrong couldn’t get a cab.  

Cabs at the time were single-horse, two-wheeled hackney carriages, with a small interior that barely protected the fare from the elements and a seat at the top rear that didn’t protect the driver at all. Because it was illegal to leave a cab unattended, drivers were expected to “sit on the box” in all kinds of dreadful weather, as the brilliant Cabbie Blog explains, or pay someone to watch their cab while they nipped off to the pub for some warmth, food, and probably drink.

On this particular snowy night, Captain Armstrong – a baronet who was also the editor of The Globe– wanted a cab to take him from his home to his offices in Fleet Street. So he sent his servant round to the cab stand to fetch him one. But though there were cabs, there were no cabdrivers; those, the servant found, were all in the pub, sheltering from the storm blowing outside. And they were, to a man, too drunk to drive. When the servant returned home without a cab, he got an earful – and Captain Armstrong got an idea. Why were there no places where a cabdriver could get dry and warm without having to pay for a pint – possibly too many pints – and someone to watch his cab?

Within a month, Armstrong had teamed up with a group of like-minded philanthropic worthies, including the 7th Earl of Shaftsbury, and started the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund. Their idea was to build small shelters at existing cab stands where cabdrivers could take a break from the elements and grab something to eat or a warm (and non-alcoholic) drink. The proposed shelters, outlined in an article that appeared in the February 20, 1875 edition of the Illustrated London News, would be no more than 17 feet long by six feet wide, and 10 and a half feet tall, leaving just enough room inside for 10 to 13 (thin) men. There were railings on the roof to tether a hansom cab’s horses, and the shelters would have facilities for cooking and water. By the end of the year, at least 21 shelters – all painted the same shade of glossy hunter green, with black roofs and trims – were built and doing a brisk business in tea and coffee, chops and sausages, and bread and butter.

Even if the details of the Armstrong story aren’t quite accurate, says Jimmy Jenkins, a cabdriver for 42 years and the current director of the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund, there is a kernel of truth. Cabmen were often forced into pubs to get out of the weather, and they did sometimes drink too much; a group of worthies did form to deal with this problem in a very Victorian way. And, of course, as the story illustrates, it wasn’t solely for the benefit of the downtrodden cabman, his body buffeted by icy winds and driving rain and blisteringly cold snow, that the shelters were built.

“You got to remember, this was started by the aristocracy and it was to their benefit to have cabs. It’s quite logical really, it was for their benefit, really – they could get home quicker,” explained Jenkins, who on the phone sounds a bit like a pre-Hollywood Michael Caine. “This is what it’s all about: It was beneficial for the aristocracy because they could get home quicker, and they had more access to taxis.”

The story of London– its rich, poor and aspiring – can be told, in part, by its transportation. Hackney coaches for hire have been a part of the urban streetscape since the time of Elizabeth I, when wealthy aristos would rent out their carriages to less-wealthy aristos; the first taxi rank, according to the London Vintage Taxi Association, was established outside the Maypole in the Strand in 1674, with liveried coachmen and standard rates. The hackneys’ standards fell as their numbers rose; by the 1760s, there were at least 1,000 “hackney hell carts” clattering down London’s fetid streets. By the 1830s, the word “cab” entered the Londoner’s vocabulary with the introduction of the two-wheeled French-style “cabriolet,” and the cabriolet – with its exposed seat on the top – was the style that would dominate through the end of the century.

Cabmen did have a raw deal, and by the 1870s many people knew it. Several cities, including Birmingham, had already introduced similar shelters for the benefit of their cabmen, and in 1873, plans were afoot to build a “cabmen’s room” at the new Kingston railway station, just outside of London in Surrey. If the philanthropically-minded citizens trying to build the room raised enough money, the article from the November 15, 1873 Surrey Comet reported, they could make the “room” big enough to shelter the horses as well.

The idea to build a similar shelter in London first appeared in Lloyds’ Weekly Newspaper in early December 1874 (which may undermine the veracity of Captain Armstrong’s tale); the article described how a cabdriver trying to keep warm in London’s wet winters had to choose between waiting “out of doors with his blue fingers to his lips, or his arms flapping against the breast of his greatcoat, or else he must go into a public-house and pay for the privilege of warming himself by buying ‘something to drink’ that he does not want.” By the end of the month, according to a December 31st article in the London Evening Standard, a charity was formed and already appealing to the public for donations. 

The cost was put at £75 per shelter, according to the Evening Standard, including the gas and water facilities; other sources say the building cost was as much as £200. While donation would pay for the initial outlay, the shelters were expected to be self-sufficient within a few months of opening – cabmen would pay a small “subscription” fee of not more than 6 pence a week to keep the place staffed and working. To deal with the problem of who watched the cabs, the first two cabs in the stand would stay “live,” their drivers ready to take a fare, and keep an eye on the cabs whose drivers were having a bite or a cuppa. (This, notably, is still the case today.)

This being Victorian London, the shelters also served a social and moral purpose, to raise the status of the cabdriver in society. They all maintained the same strict standards of conduct: Cabmen were prohibited from gambling or playing cards, and in some shelters they were asked not to discuss politics. The explicit purpose of the shelters wasn’t only to keep London’s cabbies out of the elements, but also to keep them out of the pubs, so drinking alcohol was right out of the question.

By December 1903, there were 45 cabmen’s shelters scattered throughout Greater London, serving some 4,000 cabmen every day, according to the Fund’s 28th annual report, reported in The London Daily News. Though the project clearly worked, it wasn’t quite the self-perpetuating scheme the Fund’s creators had hoped; for one thing, as Cabbie Blog points out, the shelters lost money during the summer months, when the weather wasn’t so terrible. Even then, the Fund lamented, “It is a matter of regret that the work should be carried on under the disadvantages of insufficient income.” The number of cabmen’s shelters continued to rise, however, although it’s unclear how many there were at the height of their popularity; some figures claim 61, others 65, while Jenkins put the number at 114. 

But in that year, 1903, the London’s crowded streets would change in a way that would eventually doom the shelters: The first gas-powered motorcars, French imports, began prowling the roadways. The next 15 years saw the motorcar taxi trade grow in fits and starts (the name “taxi” came from the “taximeter”, the device that measured the distance the vehicle travelled). After the disastrous, deprived years of World War I, the motorcar dominated the cab trade and the need for cabmen’s shelters was necessarily decreased; the last horse on London’s streets was taken out of service in 1947.

“Basically, a horse could only go so far before having a rest… that’s why there were so many shelters,” explained Jenkins. “If a driver was taking a fare, for instance, from St. James [central London] up to Highgate [north London], that’s a six or seven-mile journey for a horse dragging a carriage. The driver would know he could go to Highgate there would probably be a shelter there, rest his horse and get a drink himself.” But after motorcars entered the picture, “You didn’t need so many shelters, you could get about quicker and you didn’t need to water a horse.” Many shelters fell into disuse; the Blitz’s nightly bomb raids between 1940 and 1941 did for the rest.

There are now only 13 cabmen’s shelters left standing; 12 of them are still operational. Eight of those are Grade II listed, meaning that they cannot be demolished or altered without permission from the local government, but all, Jenkins said, are cared for under English Heritage, which protects other important sites such as Stonehenge and Dover Castle. In the early 1990s, the Heritage of London Trust helped the Fund refurbish seven of the shelters.

Jenkins has been in charge of the Fund for the last eight years, and in his tenure has overseen the refurbishment and modernization of seven of the shelters. Some of the shelters have been moved completely – Russell Square’s shelter used to be Leicester Square’s shelter – and the Temple shelter, next up for refurbishment and sitting squarely where the proposed pedestrian Garden Bridge is expected to be installed, is being moved.

“The last one we just finished which was St. George’s Square had an almost total rebuild,” said Jenkins. “They have to be brought up to be modernized to conform with health regulations, food and hygiene regulations.” This has also meant some changes to the interior size; in renovated shelters, there is only enough room for about eight cabdrivers (the shelters are still only open to cabdrivers, although the non-driving public can order take-out at the window).

The cost for the St. George’s Square renovations came to around £40,000, Jenkins said. The Fund’s income comes largely from rents paid by the shelter-keepers to the Fund, although Jenkins said that the Fund subsidizes the shelters’ electricity, gas, and water bills. Since Jenkins began, rents have doubled and he says they’ll be going up again, to £150 a week, in 2017. But shelter-keepers are staying at their posts: The longest-serving shelter keeper has been at the Pont Street shelter for more than 30 years.

Rents aren’t the only source of revenue for the Fund. In recent years, the Fund saw a big boost from a deal with Universal Studios, which licensed the design for the shelter to use in its Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction. Where the shelters sell bacon sarnies and paper cups of coffee to cab drivers in London, in Orlando, they sell cuddly stuffed Hedwigs and plastic souvenir cups of butterbeer to Harry Potter-mad tourists.

While the future for the London black cab might seem bleak, with the advent of cheap car-hire Uber, London’s mayor has recently pledged support to the embattled black cabs, setting aside £65 million to help the cabs become more energy efficient and forcing all cabs to accept credit card. But even if there weren’t any black cabs, to give up on a living link to the forces that moulded London’s city streets is unthinkable, said Jenkins: “Why would you want to give away your heritage, why would you want to give up something that has been passed down to you? Surely it’s better to preserve something like that.“

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Roughly a year and a half ago, I made a pitch that we were due for a magnetic-tape comeback similar to the one we’ve seen for vinyl. (I titled it after a Frank Turner album, because Frank Turner is cool.)

Now, we haven’t seen that magnetic-tape comeback just yet, but it might help if I did my part by highlighting tape-format obscurities.

One of those obscurities worth a mention is the Elcaset, just one of Sony’s many attempts to create a new standard of some kind.

The ‘70s-era format was a middle ground between reel-to-reel tape, which was too bulky for mass consumption, and the already-standardized compact cassette, which was gaining steam in car stereos. It solved the weaknesses of the cassette—mainly imperfect sound due to limited space—through sheer size. The device, as Ars Technica notes, was roughly twice the size of a standard cassette.

So why didn’t it sell? Two reasons: First, Sony made the device with the assumption that cassette tapes wouldn’t get better. With the addition of new materials, such as chromium oxide, the quality of the standard cassette got a lot better, and tape players quickly improved as well.

And the other? As Techmoan notes in this 2014 clip, no officially-released pre-recorded music ever came out on the format, meaning that all you could really essentially do with it is record your own music—likely from the radio or a vinyl format—onto a giant tape that you can’t put in your car. (Ars notes that this was because Sony at the time did not have a significant content business, something that you definitely couldn’t say about Sony now.)

The thing disappeared by 1980. But on the plus side, they were selling a tape-based product that had already healed the wound. You may have heard of it. It’s called the Walkman.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

In 18th-century England, it was best to be wary of any hands that reached too close to your hair. They could belong to a wig snatcher.

The 1776 engraving above depicts one of the carefully plotted hair heists. A wealthy woman walks along a high orchard wall in the latest fashion—an enormous headdress wig trimmed with lavish lace and ribbons. Suddenly, the intricately combed and curled set of hair is lifted from her head by a monkey perched on the wall, revealing her bare head. 

Socialites had to be extra cautious of wig snatchers. Throughout England and Europe, finely powdered perukes, also called periwigs, were in vogue among royal courts and the upper class. The more ornate and towering your wig, the higher your social standing. The expensive and easily removable headpieces led to a series of wig thefts: surprisingly elaborate and creative robberies involving animals, long poles, and young boys hauled on the shoulders of impostor butchers.

One of the most successful wig-stealing schemes involved concealing young boys in baskets and under blankets, according to Andrews. In an episode in England, a boy rode in a butcher’s tray carried on the shoulder of a tall man. As the pair walked passed a victim, the boy twisted the periwig off the head and the man would take off in the opposite direction, leaving the confused owner clutching at his or her now bald head.

The same tactic would be used with boys hidden in baskets held by wig stealers, writes Robert Norman in The Woman Who Lost Her Skin (and Other Dermatological Tales).

In addition to using monkeys, wig thieves also employed dogs. One boy would harass a finely dressed, bewigged gentleman as another seized the hair and toss it to a dog, explains Margaret Visser in The Way We Are: What Everyday Objects and Conventions Tell Us About Ourselves. All three would split down different alleys and later meet up to celebrate their plunder. Meanwhile, the bald victim would often be more concerned about covering his head and pride than running after the thieves, Visser writes.

The social elite in both France and England also had to beware of the highwaymen who roamed country roads. Thieves known as "chiving lays" would lurk behind hackney coaches, which were forced to roll slowly down narrow and poorly paved streets, and slice the back of the carriage to snatch a wig from the passenger’s head, explains Geri Walton. Highwaymen riding on horses would also target coaches, stealing wigs and quickly riding off.

In one heist, highwayman John Everett had an interesting means to obtain a better wig—he forced a man to trade. Fiona McDonald notes in Gentlemen Rogues and Wicked Ladies:

“Everett fancied a bob wig that sat atop the head of a Quaker seated in a coach with a number of other passengers. Everett pulled it off the man’s head and swapped it with his own second-hand tie wig (which he had bought, not stolen). The tie wig made the man look like a comical devil and the rest of the coach party burst out laughing. The robbery ended with all parties going their separate ways without any hard feelings (except perhaps from the Quaker).”

Everett was arrested shortly after this robbery, and was detained in prison for three years. However, many wig thieves often got away without punishment. For example, Christopher Matthews was accused of stealing a valuable wig in 1716, reports indicating that there was little doubt he had committed the crime. But the chief prosecution witness strangely did not come to his trial, and the jury were “oblig’d to acquit him,” explains Gregory Durston in Whores and Highwaymen: Crime and Justice in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis. It’s implied that Matthews may have been involved in witness’s attendance.  

In England, only 4.3 percent of all types of theft cases were brought to the Old Bailey during the 18th century, and 70 percent of those accused were found not guilty.

Precautionary measures were taken to prevent wig theft, writes Andrews. According to The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, colonial wigmakers sometimes added a drawstring or small strap and buckle at the back of the wig so a wearer can fasten the wig tighter. However, it’s unclear whether or not these features were developed as a result of wig theft.

As they grew out of style and taxes were imposed, large periwigs lost their value and the inventive plots to steal wigs became part of the past. Still, the fear of wig conspirators was potent, as 18th-century English poet John Gay once wrote:

Nor is the flaxen wig with safety worn:
High on the shoulders in a basket borne
Lurks the sly boy, whose hand, to rapine bred, 
Plucks off the curling honours of thy head. 

 In 1785, a man named Thomas Baldwin lived out an 18th-century dream: he floated over Chester, England in a hot air balloon. When he came back down, he puzzled over how to share this rare experience—the "white floor of Clouds," the "exquisite and ever-varying Miniature" of the buildings, and the look of the rivers, "infinitely more serpentine" than ordinary maps would have you believe.

Along with pages of rhapsodic description, he settled on three illustrated plates, for which he had specific viewing instructions: put it on a table, roll up a piece of paper into a little telescope, and look through it while moving it slowly over the drawing, so you can have your very own balloon experience.

In an age of transatlantic flights and Google Earth, Baldwin's suggestions seem a bit quaint. But in his time, when almost everyone was stuck on the ground, Baldwin's attempts to pin down an accurate sky-view were heroic. Over the following century, entrepreneurs, military spies, and tourist boards alike would follow his lead, transforming some of the world's most vital views into lovely, quirky "balloon maps."

"Ballooning had a profound effect on the epistemological mode of being in the world and viewing landscape," writes historian Lily Ford, who examines Baldwin's work in the Public Domain Review. According to Ford, Baldwin was ahead of his time—no one would draw a balloon map for decades after his initial attempts. But in the late 1700s, as balloons began rising over France and Britain, stories of high-flying pursuits inspired ordinary civilians, who began seeking out different modes of seeing. The invention of the panorama in 1792 was accompanied by a new type of entertainment, Ford writes: the view-from-above.

Entrepreneurs would install a 360-degree view of a city or a battle in, say, a large barn, and patrons would pay to climb up a tower and look down at it. The effect was so realistic that people would sometimes get sick, writes Ford. Meanwhile, growing leagues of balloonists finally had a good metaphor for their own experiences—the view from the basket brought to mind nothing so much as a panorama, they wrote, over and over.

American balloonists got to put these analogies to the test during the Civil War, when the Union Army used balloons for scouting and surveillance. Not much mapmaking went on from the balloons themselves—it was pretty shaky up there. But stores soon filled with panorama-style depictions of different "Seat[s] of War," perhaps inspired by these imagined views, and complete with crossed swords where battles had been.

As the war ended and the century wrapped up, the balloon map found new purpose: as an invaluable tourism tool. The same qualities that made panoramas exciting and war understandable could make vacation hotspots look exotic, yet accessible. "[These showed] the landscape and coastal areas in a realistic, picturesque manner" while also highlighting area amenities, writes Matthew Edney of the Osher Map Library in an email. "Balloon maps" of various Massachusetts shore towns, created by draftsman F. Kimball Rogers in the late 1870s, sold for 25 cents and came with detailed information about beaches and summer homes. An 1896 map of Lubec, Maine looks like a toy town, with each local business carefully listed underneath.

Although most of these maps were actually constructed from a ground-level point-of-view, their makers were happy to keep up the illusion of weightlessness. In 1902, the Boston and Maine Railroad gave to its passengers a Baldwinesque "Bird's Eye View" map of the White Mountains—the summit of Mt. Washington front and center, with the other peaks and ravines, carefully labeled, swirling around it. With its painterly hues and unique perspective, the map is quite clearly a work of imaginative illustration. But it still came in a small booklet with a hot air balloon in the front.

Take a look at some more of these "balloon" and "birds-eye" maps, and enjoy this very particular view into the past.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

In Muscat, Oman, an Emirates flight was preparing to head to Dubai, when staff found a snake hiding in the plane's baggage hold.

According to the BBC, the airline has not said what type of snake was found on the plane or how large it was. But it was a notable enough snake that the flight was canceled, as the Times of Oman reports.

The snake was discovered before the plane took off, Emirates said. 

This past November, though, a snake made it into the air without detection. It climbed out of the overhead bins mid-way to Mexico City:

La vibora voladora...ja ja ja. Una experiencia única en el Vuelo Torreón-México, vuelo 231 de Aeroméxico. Eso si...Prioridad en aterrizaje. pic.twitter.com/qwDk6Wtszw

— Indalecio Medina (@Inda_medina) November 6, 2016

As the BBC points out, snakes end up on planes more often than one might expect. The snake flying over Mexico had much easier time than the scrub python that flew from Australia to Papua New Guinea in 2013 on the wing of a plane.

Really, snakes are adept at ending up in many places humans would rather not find them. In the past month, one snake—a young anaconda—found its way into the toilet of a home in Arlington, Va, while another, venomous species was discovered in a Christmas tree in Australia and three more were found in a package at a post office. 

Only snakes on a plane, though, have had the honor of being featured in the 2006 Samuel L. Jackson movie Snakes on a Plane.

Even the International Space Station needs its batteries changed every once in a while. This past Friday, NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson took on the task, beginning the swapping-out process during a six-hour spacewalk.

The current batteries, nickel-hydrogen units that recharge in the sunlight, have been powering the ISS for 18 years. This year, they'll be replaced by a lithium-ion design, which have a better storage capacity and are essentially just enormous versions of cell phone batteries, Whitson told NASA TV.

The swap is a two-trip effort—the actual batteries will be plugged in this Friday, Space.com reports. This time, Kimbrough and Whitson installed adapter plates and electrical connections. In the process, Whitson tied the record for most spacewalks by a female astronaut—seven.

Next time you balk at getting on the ladder to replace your smoke alarm batteries, take a deep breath and think of these two.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

One-hundred-and-thirty-seven-years ago, someone carved a tunnel in the base of a massive sequoia tree in Calaveras County, California. For all the years since then you could walk through it, or just look at it, and think about the impact humans have had on the world's natural resources. 

But on Sunday, nature exacted its own retribution, felling the tree in a storm. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, visitors used to be able to drive through the tree, though, lately, it's been open only to hikers. The tree was known as the Pioneer Cabin Tree, and was one of several that were carved out in the 1800s to promote tourism. 

But according to the National Park Service, carved out trees had their time and place. 

"Sequoias which are standing healthy and whole are worth far more," the park service said. 

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Of the many things that we lost in 2016, one of the saddest losses might have been a purely cultural one.

At the end of 2016, the Carnegie Deli, an iconic slice of New York City, served its last overstuffed, overpriced pastrami sandwich.

(That’s despite an on-the-table, quickly rebuffed offer from a New York restaurateur to buy out the owners for $10 million.)

The Jewish deli will survive—Katz’s is still with us, for one thing—but it’s still a bummer.

All of which made us reflect on a small part of a Carnegie Deli meal: the pickle, that brine-y piece of cucumber that offers a contrast to many a meal with its sharp taste and memorable crunch.

It was enough of the Carnegie Deli’s identity that you can actually buy a pickle-scented candle from their still-operational online store.

But of all the objects that we pickle, only the pickled cucumber goes by the simple one-word nickname "pickle," an iconic if still curious gastronomic institution. But how long have pickles been with us?

Their history, it turns out, might be as unusual as the fact that at diners everywhere, when you order a burger, there along side it, nearly all of the time, is a cheap, salty vegetable, its raison d'etre, aside from custom, apparently unknown. 

Cucumbers reportedly experienced their first dip in the brine in 2030 BC, according to PBS’ The History Kitchen. They are believed to have come from India, though the name of the process came from either the Dutch or German words for “salt” or “brine.”

These days we eat pickles because we like them, but in the pre-refrigeration days, pickling was an essential way to preserve food for storage. The process is closely associated with Jewish food due pickled foods being used by Eastern European Jews to get flavorful food during the cold winter months. (They sure beat bread and potatoes.)

These days, pickles have become less necessary and more novel.

They have plenty of reason to exist, of course. For one thing, pickles are one of the most calorie-light foods that you can buy in the store. A single dill pickle spear has just four calories—something largely due to the fact that cucumbers are generally considered to be incredibly low-calorie. The brine doesn’t add any calories, but it does add a lot of sodium, which makes it a bit of a wash as a healthy nutrition source. (On the other hand, some athletic trainers swear by pickle juice as a way to prevent cramps, so it has that going for it.)

The biggest barrier to enjoying pickles might be the vacuum seal on the jars. That seal creates a high amount of pressure, which means you have to work to twist extra hard. But it can be dealt with. This video helps to explain the science behind the problem, while this clip offers an overview of the various jar-opening techniques out there.

If you don’t want to deal with the jar, you can always make your own with a plastic syringe, strangely enough. Over at Instructables, the Oakland Toy Lab explains an alternative pickling strategy that takes just 30 seconds—and a little science.

And you aren’t necessarily stuck with dill pickles, either. For generations, the most popular alternative flavor has been “Bread and butter” pickles, a variety that tastes sweet and sour, rather than like bread and butter. The flavor got its name essentially because the variety’s popularizer, Cora and Omar Fanning, gave their pickles away to a local grocer in exchange for bread and butter.

But the step away from tradition isn’t just limited to the flavor, but the shape. Tiny gherkins, for example, come from a different part of the traditional cucumber family, one that grows extremely undersized. A more obscure-but-interesting variant is the Mexican sour gherkin, which looks like a tiny watermelon. Modern Farmer calls it “adorable, delicious, and easy to grow.”

While pickles maintain a large fan base, not everyone’s a fan. Brian Hickey, a writer for Philly Voice, recently went on a harsh anti-pickles diatribe due to his sheer frustration that they’re included by default with many sandwiches.

“Some of you like pickles. I get that. But you are not decent people, at least not if you think it’s OK for a restaurant to force pickles upon those of us whose stomachs turn at the mere sight or—worstly—smell of those squishy, acidic intruders,” Hickey wrote in his blog post last month.

When asked if he saw any positives about pickles, he simply responded, “nope.” Some people love pickles, others hate ‘em. (I fall firmly in the “love” camp.)

The interesting thing about pickles is that, for decades, it was largely treated as a regional phenomenon in the United States—a family-owned thing that wasn’t really encumbered by advertising. Unlike the cheese curl, they didn’t immediately go national.

That left an opening for a big brand like Heinz to own the market, and there was a period where they were relatively dominant. But in the early 1970s, Vlasic, which started out as a family-owned firm, made a big play—a play that redefined the industry and made pickles as important a part of every pantry as cereal or baking soda. Before the Michigan-based company came along, pickles in many cases were a strongly regional product, sold in much the same way as milk.

But with the company’s factories growing along with its fortunes, it was able to take its Polish-style pickles national in part through well-considered manufacturing strategies—for example, pickles that were too large to be used whole in traditional jars would get reused in other contexts, like relish or as dill spears.

“If you buy a farmer’s crop, you get a mixture of cucumbers. You have to use it all. It’s like the meat business, where they use all of the pig except the squeal,” explained Bob Vlasic, the longtime head of Vlasic and son of company founder Joseph Vlasic, explained in a 1973 Detroit Free Press article.

A big element of Vlasic’s growth was its decision to advertise—a bit of a change from most of its competitors, the largest of which, Heinz, effectively treated its pickle business as a sidebar to the main condiment business. According to a Funding Universe analysis, Vlasic and Heinz each held around 10 percent of the national pickle market in 1970. Around that time, Vlasic introduced its popular animated stork mascot.

Why a stork? Credit an old wives' tale. The company decided to play off the idea that pregnant women crave pickles and created a mascot with a wink and a nod—something highlighted by this commercial.

Eventually, the company gained the slogan, “the pickle pregnant women crave.”

The company’s clever marketing helped it blow past Heinz—while the condiment-maker stayed at 10 percent of the market in 1977, Vlasic’s share of the pickle market grew to a quarter.

But Vlasic has had its share of ups and downs since. In 1978, beset by the price of pickles, it sold itself to Campbell’s Soup, in one of the soup-maker’s largest-ever acquisitions. Two decades later, Campbell’s spun it off, and in 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Initially, it looked like Heinz, which had lost its footing against Vlasic in the pickle aisle, would swoop in, but a new buyer took over and was able to use the firm as a centerpiece of a new food empire, Pinnacle Foods. Pinnacle itself was acquired by Hillshire Brands in 2014.

The stork is still around, but maybe not as prominent as it once was. (It only has roughly 26 more Twitter followers than I do.)

But for a brief time in the 1970s, Vlasic turned pickles into a buzzworthy product by marketing the hell out of them.

“Most of our competitors were manufacturing oriented, generations of fine pickle makers and proud of it,” Bob Vlasic told Forbes in 1997. “We came in exactly the opposite, as marketers who manufactured to have something to sell.”

The industry stagnation that led Vlasic to take over the pickle aisle in the ‘70s hasn’t really faded away. Pickles are tasty, but kind of boring. The pickle sector is mature. It’s hard to make a mass-market pickle hip.

Heck, one of the techniques Bob Vlasic used to convince the public to eat more pickles was downright cheesy. In 1974, Vlasic was credited as the author of a book titled Bob Vlasic’s 101 Pickle Jokes.

The book featured illustrations from well-known cartoonist Don Orehek. According to a 1975 mention of the book in Cosmopolitan, the title had sold 250,000 copies in its first year. People in the ‘70s loved cheesy pickle jokes, apparently.

(How cheesy are we talking? Well, here’s a sample joke: “Who was that pickle-o I saw you with last night? That was no pickle, that was my fife!”)

If that’s the high-water-mark for innovation in pickle marketing, it makes sense that the leaders in the market, including Heinz and Claussen, haven’t really done a lot to move the pickle forward in the past few decades.

But there has been some attempts at evolution in the pickle market, even, as any hipster would tell you, at the artisanal level. Firms like Brooklyn Brine have experimented with offbeat cukes like the Off-Centered Beer Pickle (which, excitingly, infuses Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA into its pickles) and with highly ethical business approaches, like paying its workers $16 an hour.

High-priced pickles have been easy to mock, but some, like NPR reporter Adam Davidson, have been quick to defend the firms’ business acumen.

“Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy,” Davidson write in a 2012 New York Times Magazine essay. “Just don’t tell them that. It would break their hearts to be called model 21st-century capitalists.”

In the case of Heinz, at least, they appear to be noticing the desire for a cuke rethink. Last year, the conglomerate—which has attempted to move beyond dill with two new flavors—Spicy Garlic and Sweet & Spicy.

A driving factor behind this shift, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is segment stagnation. Despite pickles being a $1 billion business, the segment isn’t growing.

As steeped in tradition (and salty vinegar) as pickles are, the question naturally arises: Do pickles need to be the biggest market segment in the grocery store, or even the condiment aisle? Can we embrace tiny cucumbers without the veneer of big business?

And when is someone going to come out with 101 MORE Pickle Jokes? Because that’s a book I would buy.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.