Picture this short scene in your mind: A sleepy country house sits by the side of the road, birds chirping. Suddenly, a bad guy of some sort—maybe a masked burglar, or a mustached knave—enters stage right and tiptoes through the yard, up to the home's window. He peeks inside, gathering information, and then quickly backpedals, shuffling out of the frame again.

Now visualize the same thing, but try putting a score under it. As the ne'er-do-well sneaks around, what music do you hear in your mind? Does it sound something...like this?

If so, you're certainly not alone. This tune, called the Mysterioso Pizzicato, is a musical go-to for sneaky situations, forever associated with thieves, creeps, stalkers and spies. Along with its villainous name, the Mysterioso Pizzicato has a fittingly roguish backstory—to reach its current level of ubiquity, it has had to muzzle history, defy experts, and slip past hundreds of its more musically interesting peers.

No one is quite sure who wrote the Mysterioso Pizzicato. Some think it was J. Bodewalt Lampe, a ragtime arranger most famous for his takes on dance-craze songs like the "Turkey Trot." Others credit J.S. Zamecnik, a composer who wrote scores for silent films at Cleveland, Ohio's Hippodrome Theater. But most agree that the piece started out life around 1916, as a silent film "mood."

"Moods"—short riffs written to pair with different filmed scenarios—were a way for silent film accompanists to combat a unique type of job drudgery. "Movie theaters were open 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week," explains Ben Model, a silent film composer and a resident accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art. "You'd get tired of playing the same pieces."

 In the mid-1910s, sheet music publishers, sensing a need, began churning out folios stuffed with variations on musical tropes, for accompanists to pick and choose between. "There would be an agitato"—a hurried, choppy tune, perhaps for an action scene—"and a love theme, and a march," says Model. "And there would be a mysterioso."

Eventually, composers wrote hundreds of these mysteriosos. Although each was a little different, they had certain things in common—they were minor-key, slow, and "just sound[ed] scary," Model says. In a 1912 issue of The Moving Picture News, silent film theater director Ernst Luz describes the mysterioso as "the most beautiful effect of all." "It should be used for such dramatic action, usually quiet, wherein the ensuing action is in doubt," he wrote.

"Cue sheets"—instructions detailing what type of mood should be played during different scenes—give an idea of the mysterioso's specific use. In A Transplanted Prairie Flower, a comedy-drama from 1913, a mysterioso is recommended for the part where Mary, a country transplant new to New York, sleeps in a chair in her city apartment, until she wakes up and sees burglars trying to sneak in. Andy and the Redskins, also from 1913, requires a "mysterioso of Indian character." No matter what the theme of the film, there was always a scene ripe for a mysterioso, says Model.

Strangely, though, very few of these thousands of scenes seemed to require the Mysterioso Pizzicato specifically. Although it was occasionally mentioned in educational articles about film music, players seemed to eschew it. "I've only ever seen it listed once on a cue sheet," says Kendra Leonard, director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive. Although Model says people hum the tune at him incessantly, he's never come across it in an actual silent film score. Neither has Rodney Sauer, score compiler and pianist for the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

How, then, did it get so popular? The answer likely lies with a different, but related art form—parodies of silent films. When sound came to the movies in the late 1930s, new filmmakers were happy to poke their suddenly outdated predecessors in the ribs. "Warner Bros would make these movies that would make fun of silent films, with corny narration and creepy old music," says Model. (Early cartoons did the same thing—a minute into the clip below, from Van Beuren Studios' Making 'Em Move, a visitor to the cartoon factory walks down a foreboding hallway as the Mysterioso Pizzicato plays.)

There was just one problem: a lot of the tropes these send-ups drew on (people tied to train tracks, caped villains, pie fights) often weren't from silent films at all, but from Victorian-era stage melodramas. Outdated plot points and outdated technology were conflated to form a strange, hybrid genre, which the hip new crowds loved to spoof.

Some of these parodies must have picked up the Mysterioso Pizzicato precisely because it was goofy and over-the-top. Max Steiner, a more serious sound film composer, also began using it somewhat ironically—for instance, in 1944's The Adventures of Mark Twain, it plays under a scene in which the young Twain sneaks up on some frogs.

By now, the Mysterioso Pizzicato has developed a life of its own, showing up everywhere from monster movies to Frank Zappa live performances. Meanwhile, modern-day accompanists largely refuse to embrace it. Model calls the riff "corny and shticky" and hardly, if ever, uses it in his own playing—"many of [the other mysteriosos] are much better," he says. Sauer agrees: "It would be hard to use the piece un-ironically," he writes in an email.

But the Mysterioso Pizzicato doesn't need their help. Somehow, it worms into our ears all by itself—the mark of a true sneak.

At the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, it was long known that the human figure in one of the museum’s most famous exhibits had real human teeth. Recently, though, a CT scan revealed that the figure’s head was sculpted onto a real human skull, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The exhibit shows a man on camelback fighting off three Barbary lions. The diorama was displayed for many years under the title “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions,” but the museum recently changed the title to “Lion Attacking a Dromedary,” a translation of the original French title.

The museum worked with the local medical examiner’s office to scan the entire exhibit as part of a restoration. The head is the only part of the man that’s built using human bones; the rest of the figure is a mannequin.

The diorama’s creator, Edouard Verreaux, worked with his brother Jules to collect and trade natural history specimens in the 1830s and 40s. They were working at a time when it was acceptable in Europe to steal and display human body parts from non-white people, who were often considered less than human. The Verreaux brothers' most infamous piece of taxidermy was made from the skin and skull of an African man, whose body Jules Verreaux secretly exhumed after witnessing the man’s burial.

The museum staff told the Post-Gazette that since there’s little information about the origins of the skull in this diorama, the museum is not considering repatriation. A curator also suggested to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that it could have been stolen from the catacombs of Paris.

The piece reflects a style of 19th century taxidermy that’s long been outdated and was considered tacky even in its day. As the Post-Gazette reports, the piece was originally acquired by the American Museum of Natural History but put in storage after being judged“too theatrical, too gauche, and thus not scientifically worthy of museum display.”

In recent decades, museums have been working to repatriate the human remains in their collections, in recognition that past racism in science need not have a place in modern museums. The remains of the man the Verreaux brothers taxidermied, for instance, were returned to Botswana in the ‘90s. Some museums, though, have chosen to keep or keep on display human remains, even after tribal governments have requested that they be returned.

Items that don’t have a clear provenance are more difficult to handle. In a 2011 report on the Smithsonian’s repatriation efforts, the Government Accountability Office noted that the relevant law “does not discuss how to handle human remains and objects that cannot be culturally affiliated.” The two museums considered in the report had different approaches to those items. The Natural History museum retained these objects; the American Indian Museum worked with tribes to take a custodial role for items that didn’t have obvious provenance. “The American Indian Museum’s philosophy is to ultimately not have any human remains or associated funerary objects within its collection,” the GAO reported.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History intends to put the skull back on display and is planning a symposium to discuss its "historical and intellectual context."

Before you read any further, let's make this clear—save for a few bumps and bruises, all of the puppies involved in this incident are fine.

Okay, here we go: a van filled with 104 puppies crashed in upstate New York on Tuesday afternoon, NBC News reports.

The puppies—schnauzers, boxes, golden retrievers, and terriers—were on their way to mall pet stores when the van's driver lost control and skidded into a ditch.

New York State Police officers came to the rescue, along with the Finger Lakes SPCA. They set up a triage area in a nearby towing facility, and checked each puppy for injuries. A few with minor injuries were treated at a local veterinary hospital, and have since been adopted.

The rest were housed briefly at the FLSPCA and a nearby veterinary hospital before being returned to the transport company. Concerned citizens took to the FLSPCA's Facebook page to ask whether this was the right choice, as it's possible the puppies came from a mill.

"We know of no means to legally confiscate animals only because there is a strong likelihood that a puppy came from [a puppy mill]," the organization responded. Let's hope wherever they ended up is better than that ditch.

Here he comes, creeping through a shadowy alley. It looks like he’s getting away, until a police spotlight captures him against a stark brick wall. In a black domino mask, striped shirt, flat cap, and holding a sack of purloined goods, it’s a BURGLAR!

We can all see the stereotype in our mind’s eye, but where did this cartoonish image come from? The very first instance of the stereotypical burglar is a bit unclear, but the various elements of the figure can be found springing up around the 1800s, though the roots of some costume elements go back even further.

The oldest element of the villainous caricature is the domino mask, which can be traced back to the masquerades of the 17th century. In Venice during the 1600s, elaborate costume balls allowed their mainly upper-class attendees to don masks to obscure their identities so they could be removed from the rigid expectations of their social class. This encouraged an air of clandestine intrigue that is still associated with carnival masks.

Many of the traditional masks of the time were elaborate, full-face masks, but the smaller half-masks, which only covered the eyes and sometimes the nose, were also a popular option, for both men and women. Also in the 17th century, the trickster character of the harlequin came into prominence, and was most often depicted wearing a smaller domino mask, which only surrounded the eyes.

As the tradition of the masquerade spread throughout Europe, the mask eventually became simplified into a black strip that laid across the eyes, with holes cut out so that the wearer could still see. This basic mask, whether directly descended from the world of the masquerade or created simply out of necessity, became associated with ne'er-do-wells who wanted to hide their identity. Depictions of a burglar wearing a simple domino mask can be found as early as 1871, in an advertisement encouraging women to arm themselves for home self-defense. Although the figure in this advertisement is wearing a suit as opposed to the striped outfit that would become more iconic, the early seeds of the trope are plain to see.

Speaking of that striped shirt, they too came from the 1800s. The striped burglar's shirt was originally inspired by the striped, duotone uniform of prison inmates. The striped uniform was introduced as part of what we now call the “Auburn System” of penal management, which began being practiced around 1820. Under this system, prisoners were largely kept in solitary confinement, and made to perform hard labor in complete silence. The uniforms introduced with this system consisted of shirts and pants in matching, horizontal black-and-white/gray stripes, and were meant to make the inmates instantly recognizable, much like some brightly colored prison uniforms do today. The zebra-stripe style of inmate uniform spread throughout the New York penal system to prisons like Sing Sing, and across much of the rest of the country.

It wasn’t until the turn of the century that views surrounding prison uniforms began to shift away from the stripes, towards a more basic style that would not stigmatize the incarcerated laborers quite so immediately (though it’s worth noting that some modern correctional facilities have gone back to dressing inmates in stripes). However, after nearly a century of criminals wearing such a distinctive pattern, the damage was done, and images of criminals in stripes had become part of the cultural lexicon, appearing in photos and political cartoons.

Once the pattern was synonymous with criminality, it wasn’t a huge leap to having a cartoonish burglar wear the stripes. It’s a bit ironic that the stripes real convicts were made to wear so they could be identified would come to represent burglars in the middle of a crime.

Then there is the sack of loot these cartoon crooks are so often seen absconding with, which would also seem to originate in the 1800s, but is probably not rooted in much reality. The origin of the burglar’s bag, which in depictions from the U.K. often bears the word “swag” (yes, pretty much like we would use it today when referring to free promotional items), or in the U.S. with a more universal dollar symbol, leads back to a satirical children’s lyric called Burglar Bill. In this 1888 poem, a burglar breaks into a house and runs into a precocious young girl who convinces him not to rob their house, sending him into a repentant reverie. One early line in the poem, describing the robber entering the home goes:

He is furnished with a “jemmy,”
Centre-bit, and carpet-bag,
For the latter “comes in handy,”   
So he says, “to stow the swag.”

While the tools are a bit archaic (a “jemmy” would be akin to a crowbar, and although a “centre bit” is a bit of a mystery, it is described in one reference from 1889 as a “spinner”), the swag bag is easily recognizable as the inspiration for the burglar’s bag.

On its own, each element of the iconic burglar image has its roots in image of criminal life, but it’s hard to pin down the first time they were all brought together. Silent film expert Fritzi Kramer, creator of the Movies Silently blog, isn’t aware of any instances of the trope appearing in early silent films, although she does point out another key element of the figure: his hat.

“I'm afraid I've never seen the burglar outfit in a silent film,” she says. “The cloth cap was quite common but that was standard working class headgear for both men and women. Also, five o'clock shadows were quite the thing.” This flat cap has been a common bit of headgear for centuries, but it is now often found adorning depictions of crooks and criminals, almost more often than the striped top. In many modern depictions, the flat cap is sometimes replaced with a beanie.  

A likely culprit for creating the iconic burglar image may actually be a children’s book from the 1970s, loosely based on the aforementioned poem, Burglar Bill. Released in 1977, this Burglar Bill was a children’s book by Allan Ahlberg and Janet Ahlberg, and focused on the titular character as he finds a baby and reforms his ways. In the book, the titular figure is illustrated wearing each element of the classic outfit: the domino mask, the striped shirt, the loot bag, and even the cloth flat cap. When he meets another burglar, she too is wearing the domino mask and striped shirt, instantly recognizable as a burglar.

Today, classic elements of the burglar’s look can still be seen in places ranging from the Beagle Boys of DuckTales fame, in their domino masks and flat caps, to the Hamburglar in his striped suit. Actual depictions of the cartoon villain combining all of these iconic elements are rarer since the figure is by its very nature generic, but that low brow criminal figure is still skulking around the collective consciousness.        

In the first season of the hit TV show Westworld, a key character chooses to wear a white hat when he enters the western-themed park. Compared to his black-hatted companion, he starts out a gentleman: he doesn't want to drink or sleep with a prostitute or randomly shoot the park's robotic "hosts." But (spoiler alert) over the course of his journey, his white hat becomes dirtied and dark, until, at a transformative moment, he switches it for a black hat.

This is some heavy-handed symbolism, but it's supposed to harken back to a classic, familiar trope. This is a western, and in westerns, everyone knows, good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black.

But even in the fictional American West, good and evil are not so clearcut, it turns out. Go digging into the history of black hats vs. white hats, and you'll find that good guys wore black, bad guys wore white. "There is no trope or consistency in who wears white or black," says Peter Stanfield, who's studied the B-westerns of the 1930s. The black vs. white dichotomy was never quite so clean as it's now remembered.

If there is a starting point of the idea that bad guys wear black hats, it's at the very beginning of Western films. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter shot The Great Train Robbery in Milltown, New Jersey, far from the actual West. In the film's twelve minutes, a group of gangsters hold up a bank, rob a train, and eventually receive their comeuppance. There's no clear hat symbolism in the film; the gangsters all wear hats, some lighter than others.

But there's one moment in The Great Train Robbery that's more memorable than the rest—the moment at the end, where all of a sudden the camera clearly shows the face of one the gangsters, in close-up, pointing his gun at the audience. He shoots. One, two, six times. He's wearing a black hat. 

That moment became famous. The moment in the James Bond prologue, where he shoots directly at camera, takes inspiration from that shot; Goodfellas, Tombstone, and Breaking Bad all contain homages. But it's harder to trace the influence of the black hat and harder still to find the first good guy to wear a white hat. "Out of all of the Westerns I have seen, there are very, very few of those movies where white hats are worn, either by good guys or bad guys," says Kevin Stoehr, co-author of Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western—perhaps because white cowboy hats weren't particularly realistic. "You can imagine how dirty a white hat would have become in the dusty landscape." 

Of the film scholars I contacted, no one was able to say exactly where the idea that good guys wear white and bad guys wear black came from—there's no influential movie that kicked off the convention. If it does have a starting point, it's somewhere in the 1930s, when low-budget B-Westerns became part of Hollywood's bread and butter. Tom Mix, one of the early Western stars, often (but not always) wore a white hat, and singing cowboys, including, most notably, Gene Autry, may have been more likely to wear them than other cowboys. Perhaps the most famous white-hat-wearing cowboy, the Lone Ranger, debuted on the radio during this decade and first rode onto the screen in 1938.

There are plenty of examples from Westerns film that do fit the white hat/black hat convention. Here, in Gangsters of the Frontier, for instance, a group of four bad guys comes in wielding guns; hero Tom Ritter, wearing a white hat, intervenes.

But there are also plenty of examples that don't fit the convention. In that same scene, there's a guy caught between the bad guys and Ritter who's also wearing a dark hat, as a default.  In John Ford's 3 Bad Men, the villainous sheriff wears white, and the good-hearted outlaws wear black. In scenes of battles, there's often a mix of lighter hats and darker hats, all fighting the same enemy. In a song from around the same time, Mississippi John Hurt sings of a character of ambiguous morality who kills a man for snatching the milk-white Stetson hat from his head. Roy Rogers often wore a white hat, but Eddie Dean, "the greatest cowboy singer of all time," switched it up. Good guy Hopalong Cassidy wore dark clothes. In this golden age of Westerns, good and evil weren't color coded: there was plenty of room for moral ambiguity. 

Somewhere along the line, though, it became an accepted fact that good guys once wore white and bad guys once wore black. It's always easy to imagine that the past was simpler, and modern films sometimes use white hat/black hat symbolism in a heavy-handed way, as an homage to this imagined past. In 3:10 to Yuma, for instance, Christian Bale's good guy wears a white hat, while Russell Crowe's bad guy wears a black one.

In this century, the black hat/white hat terminology is also used to delineate between people who break into computer networks with malicious or good intentions. That story is a little bit less clear cut than it seems, too. In early hacking circles, there was a whole separate term to refer to malicious hacking: those people were called crackers. Across the internet, Richard Stallman, who founded the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, is often credited with coining the term "black hat" hacker, but he says that's not correct.

"I have never used terms "X-hat hacker" because I reject the use of 'hacking' to refer to breaking security," he says. Where did the term come from then? "I don't know where," he says.

On all fronts, it turns out, it's not so simple to divide people into black and white.

Nearly every language and every culture has what are called “filled pauses,” a notoriously difficult-to-define concept that generally refers to sounds or words that a speaker uses when, well, not exactly speaking. In American English, the most common are “uh” and “um.”

Until about 20 years ago, few linguists paid filled pauses much attention. They were seen as not very interesting, a mere expulsion of sound to take up space while the speaker figures out what to say next. (In Russian, filled pauses are called “parasite sounds,” which is kind of rude.) But since then, interest in filled pauses has exploded. There are conferences about them. Researchers around the globe, in dozens of different languages, dedicate themselves to studying them. And yet they still remain poorly understood, especially as new forms of discourse begin popping up.

When a Twitter user writes, “Is this what Trump meant by having Mexico pay for a wall? Because uh...it doesn’t work like that” followed by an emoji of a frog and then an emoji of a cup of coffee, it throws everything into doubt. Like most other things about filled pauses, the Twitter usage is simultaneously transparent and opaque: we know exactly what it means, but when asked to explain it, or analyze it? It turns out we really don’t know.

But researchers digging into the weird world of filled pauses have turned up some crazy, fascinating stuff. Some have taken sentences full of “ums” and “uhs” and edited them out to find out if people react more positively to someone who doesn’t use them. (They do.) Some are putting people in MRI machines to find out what weird neural stuff is going on when people use filled pauses. (Definitely some stuff.) And in Japan, researchers are trying to puzzle out how and why Japanese filled pauses are so unusual.

There is a wide and contentious debate about what a filled pause even is. Ralph Rose, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo who maintains a site called the Filled Pause Research Center, says he tends to use different definitions based on whatever he’s studying at that moment. “I can’t give a definition that I would say most researchers would agree on,” he says. Generally speaking, filled pauses are filed under a broader umbrella of “hesitation markers,” which are words or sounds that indicate...well, something.

Some filled pauses, in some situations, might be used to indicate a delay. They tell the listener, hey, I’m not totally sure what’s coming next, but I’m not done speaking, so don’t interrupt me. Some filled pauses are actually words in their own right: in English, “like,” “you know,” and “so” can be used as filled pauses. Those words have meanings, but when used to fill a pause, they’re not exactly to be interpreted as having the meaning they’d normally have. When someone says, “And then we went to...you know...the grocery store,” they’re not asking you to chime in and confirm that you do in fact know that we went to the grocery store. It’s just there, taking up time. Sometimes those words aren’t even pronounced the same way; “like,” for example, is more likely to have its final “k” sound dropped when the word is used as a filled pause.

Sometimes, as in the Twitter use, they’re used to signal something to the reader (or listener, as the case may be). In that tweet above? That’s signaling that the conclusion (“it doesn’t work like that”) should be obvious. That’s a completely different use case than using it to indicate a delay.

Words, for example “like,” might indicate that the statement that follows it shouldn’t be taken totally seriously. “You know” could be used like the Canadian “eh,” to encourage solidarity between speaker and listener.

Though some researchers have insisted that filled pauses are individual words in their own right, with distinct meanings, many believe that there’s something more fundamental about them. With a few exceptions, filled pauses exist in every language, and are weirdly similar. In English, it’s “uh” or “um,” in Mandarin it’s “en,” in French it’s “euh,” in Hindi it’s “hoonm,” in Swedish “ohm.”

These are all very similar; essentially, they’re a centered vowel which may or may not be followed by a nasal consonant. Let’s unpack that for a sec: one way vowels are described by linguists is in terms of where the tongue is in the mouth when the vowel is made. You can kind of look at the position of the tongue when making all the available vowels in a given language, and if you take, roughly, the middle one? That’s a centered vowel. A nasal consonant is one that’s expressed through the nose rather than the mouth; in English, those are “m” and “n.”

There are very few elements of language that are consistent amongst English, Mandarin, French, Hindi, and Swedish. And yet this one is pretty much the same.

We don’t really know where filled pauses came from, partly because, Twitter aside for the moment, they are oral sounds, and very unlikely to be found in historical written records. (Scholars have the same problem with swear words.) “Despite the lack of records about historical filler usage, it’s probably safe to assume that fillers have always been a part of human language,” says Katharine Hilton, a linguist at Stanford University who studies (among other things) filled pauses. “The reason for this is because they’re very useful words and communicate a lot of information to the listener.” The very earliest recordings of the human voice show that Thomas Edison was an avid user of “uh” and “um.” That’s about as far back as our data goes, but it seems fair to assume they go back further than that. These non-words, these mistakes, these errors: these are basic building blocks of language.

Rose’s research, of late, focuses on second-language acquisition, especially on native Japanese speakers who are learning English. If we ignore the filled pauses that are basically repurposed words (“like,” “well,” “so”), the rest are often surprisingly similar from language to language. But Japanese is different. Studies, says Rose, indicate that filled pauses in Japanese are more common than they are in English.

The most common filled pauses in Japanese, says Rose, are “ano” and “eto,” the latter of which is sometimes used without the final syllable as just “eh.” “Ano” is a repurposed word, meaning something like “that,” as in “that book,” and tends to be used in situations that call for more politeness. So far, not too crazy.

Here’s where it gets fun. Japanese has only five vowels: ah, ee, ooh, eh, and oh. (English is a particularly murderous language in terms of the quantity of vowels.) “There are some speakers who will use any of the other vowels as filled pauses,” says Rose. “The interesting fact, for most of these speakers, is that it happens to be the last vowel that they spoke.”

The equivalent of this in English would sound insane (but also sort of musical). Take this sentence: “So then I went back...uh...to my hometown...um….to see my friends...uh...who I haven’t seen in awhile.” Kind of a lot of filled pauses in that sentence, but that’s roughly how it’d look in English.

In Japanese? It would be more like: “So then I went back...ahhh...to my hometown...oww...to see my friends...ehh...who I haven’t seen in awhile.” How fun is that?

The reasons why people use filled pauses are tough to figure out on a case-by-case basis; largely, they’re seen as involuntary. But there are some theories about why Japanese has such an intense setup of filled pauses. One of those is that, basically, Japanese is a hard language to speak.

This comes back to something called “long-distance dependencies.” In a given sentence, you could say it has a long-distance dependency if the first word in the sentence is directly tied to a word much later on in the sentence, even the last word. English doesn’t do this very often; our setup is usually in the order of subject, then verb, then object.

Let’s take this sentence: “John saw the man who was reading a book.”

It’s a modular sentence, easy to break down. The action (saw) immediately follows the entity doing the action (John).

In Japanese, the structure of that same sentence would be more like this: “John book reading man saw.” Look how far apart the subject and the verb are! In order to speak that sentence, you basically have to know, and keep in your mind, the entire thought. You can’t stumble along as you can in English, where each subject is tied to the action it performs. By the time you get to the end, you may have forgotten what the action was supposed to be, or by whom it was done. “In English, it’s more, just, ‘I can’t remember the next word,’ rather than ‘I can’t remember what the subject of this sentence is,’” says Rose. Japanese syntax requires you to keep a whole mess of stuff in your head for a long period of time. That can be troublesome! So maybe you need a sec to remember where you were going—hence, a higher rate of filled pauses.

Filled pause research is still a fairly new linguistic subject, and not everyone is caught up. Rose, in his work in second-language acquisition, believes that filled pauses should be a significant part of language classes. After all, these...things...are going to be some of the most common sounds a student is likely to hear. They aren’t meaningless, and they aren’t standard: shouldn’t learning them be standard? “Some language programs actually actively discourage filled pauses,” he says. “The advice was, don’t use them. Because if you use them too much, you sound stupid. I was floored when I read that.” There is no evidence, anywhere, that the use of filled pauses is correlated in any way with any measure of intelligence. (Rose, in fact, describes himself as “a frequent ummer.”)

But this stuff is extremely important. What could be more jarring to, say, a native speaker of English than to hear a new Japanese student say, “Could you hand me that...eeeeh-to…book?” The same would be true of an English speaker using “uh” or “um” in his or her new Japanese. It doesn’t only draw attention to your difficulty with the language: it could even negatively impact comprehension, as whoever the student is speaking to would have no idea what the student is doing. In any case, Japan’s amazing, weird filled pauses—as well as the new-ish sarcastic Twitter use—are firm messages. “Uh” isn’t just a noise.

If you've been in the mood to scream at the moon lately, perhaps this time-lapse video of a howling wolf emerging from a blob of clay will provide some catharsis. Or at least offer a bit of creative inspiration for a weekend project.

The seven-hour sculpting process—depicted here in under four minutes—begins with a wire frame and ends with a carefully detailed animal carved out of oil-based clay. Artist WieselRobot, an Austrian sculptor's apprentice, has also carved howling wolves out of wood.

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

Last weekend, a spate of dozens of tornadoes (many of them deadly) raged across the South, including in east Texas, where, on Saturday, Charlesetta Williams, 75, was home watching TV when her son spotted one approaching their home. 

He told her to get in the home's bathtub for protection, and then got in with her. What happened next was some kind of act of destiny. 

"We heard a boom,” she told KYTX. “We were laying in the bathtub in the bathroom, and we heard a boom. Then when we woke up, we were in the yard."

Both Williams and her son survived with just a few bruises and scratches, but their house was mostly destroyed. 

A lifelong resident of east Texas, Williams is used to the area's occasionally volatile weather, but this was something new. 

“I’m a tell you I don’t wanna ride now through another one," she told KSLA.

No one would blame Gumbo the cat for trying to avoid a trip to the vet. Gumbo, who lives in Brooklyn, wiggled out of his owner’s arms on the way to a doctor’s appointment and disappeared. He was found days later, 230 miles away, in a town near Lake George.

He had made it all that way in the engine compartment of another family’s car, and he was still stuck there.

The Post-Starreports that the family noticed the smell of cat urine during the drive, but it wasn’t until they arrived that they heard a faint meow. They opened the hood, and there was Gumbo, “buried deep down under hoses, toward the passenger compartment,” the paper reports. The cat probably spent three or four days in the car before his long journey, after seeking out warmth there. He had filled the area with cat hair and was “lethargic,” animal rescue said, but otherwise was doing fine.

Few people ever saw the images of China girls, although for decades they were ubiquitous in movie theaters. At the beginning of a reel of film, there would be a few frames of a woman’s head. She might be dressed up; she might be scowling at the camera. She might blink or move her head.

But if audiences saw her, it was only because there had been a mistake. These frames weren’t for public consumption. The China girl was there to assist the lab technicians processing the film. Even though the same person’s face might show up in reel after reel of film, her image would remain unknown to everyone except the technicians and projectionists.

For many years photo labs would produce unique China girl images; around a couple hundred women, perhaps more, had their images hidden at the beginning of films. As movies have transitioned from analog to digital, though, the China girls are disappearing.

China girls went by many names—leader ladies, girl head, lady wedge—but they were almost always images of women, and those women were almost always white. They were meant to show the person developing a film that everything had gone right technically; if it hadn’t, the China girl’s skin tone would look unnatural.

Film labs started creating these images back in the black-and-white era. The term “China girl” is thought to date back to that time, although no one has pinned down exactly what it’s supposed to mean. (One popular explanation links it to the porcelain-like quality of the women's skin; another cites the flower-print shirts early China girls wore.) There’s little information, too, about who these women were. Probably some were models or would-be actress; others were women who were dating people who worked in film labs or worked in film labs themselves.

“A lot of them are made up and done up, but some of them look they just pulled some ladies out of the hallway,” says Rebecca Lyon, a film projectionist who runs the Leader Lady Project at the Chicago Film Society. “There are certain women who look grumpy or vaguely unhappy to be there, and I enjoy those. It reminds you that they’re not meant for public consumption.” 

Back in 2011, the Chicago Film Society started collecting pictures of China girls and posting them online. Most of them were found by film archivists or working film projectionists. Once, projectionists might have snipped the images off the end of the film—they’d already served their purpose—and post them around the booth or keep them for a private collection. These days, it’s possible to capture them with a phone camera.

Most of the photos follow unspoken rules. They show the woman from the shoulders up; sometimes her shoulders are naked. They almost always included blocks of grey or different colors, another tool for calibrating the color of the film. Usually they’re looking off to the side. The Leader Lady Project has collected and posted around 200 China girl images, including some unusual specimens showing men, mannequins, and people of color.

There’s little formal documentation of this practice, though. When Genevieve Yue, an assistant professor of culture and media at The New School, started researching China girls, she found that she had to search for terms adjacent to these images—“densitometry,” a part of the quality control process, for instance—to find any information at all. Few film scholars had heard of the China girl; she went to interview lab technicians to better understand these images.

 “It is strange, going into labs, where there are China girls everywhere,” she says. Labs need many, many copies of these images, as they continually calibrate their equipment, so their spaces fills up with the same woman’s face. Sometimes they used the same images for years; in one lab Yue visited around 2010, the image they were using had been shot in the ‘90s. (The woman featured in the image still worked at the lab.) “They’re such a naturalized part of the lab culture,” says Yue. “It’s totally vernacular—one person will teach another.”

Starting in the 1980s, though, it became less common for labs to create their own China girl footage. In 1982, Kodak’s John P. Pytlak developed a standardized image, known as the “LAD girl” or “LAD lady.” (LAD stands for Laboratory Aim Density.) He later won an Oscar for his work. By the 1990s, it was finally dawning on film creators and processors, too, that using a white-skinned person as the universal standard was short-changing people of every other skin tone.

Today, there are still images that might be unfamiliar to the public but are famous among technicians who work on creating images for mass consumptions. Kodak has a digital LAD images, and image software also often includes calibration images. But few labs create their own.

One exception is Colorlab, in Rockville, Maryland, which has been in business since 1972 and is one of the last full-service film labs operating in the country. For years, they relied primarily on Kodak’s standardized LAD girl. But there’s no standardized LAD girl for the newest version of Kodak film, and the lab has revived the practice of making in-house China girl images. The most important part, technically, is the grey patch, where the film’s density can be measured; the person’s face is a more subjective measure of quality. Does it look right? Are the shadow details right?

“In the lab, you’re sitting there staring at the image so critically,” says the lab’s Thomas Aschenbach. “To know that your face is going to be up there and everyone’s going to be looking at it ... It’s hard to get people in front of the camera.” 

In labs where the China girl was used for years, Yue, the New School professor, found that there’s a nostalgia for the practice that surprised her.  “One very old lab person got kind of misty-eyed,” she says. He said she was glad she was researching the topic. “Because it’s a face, it’s more than an instrument. If you’re a lab technician, you’re looking at the same face for every day.”

“When I went into the research, I was ready to be kind of dismissive of the lab culture that produced this image,” she says. “But talking to people—it’s much more complex than a bunch of men leering at women.  It was woven into the life of a film laboratory. Because I have been researching this right before and during the closing of many film labs, there’s this sadness and feeling of imminent loss in all of my encounters.”

For Lyon, collecting images for the Leader Lady Project means documenting that world, in one particular way. “So much work goes into this process that people don’t really think about,” she says. “The women were representative of this unseen world, and the collecting of these images has been a way to push back against the tide, the black hole where all this analog stuff is going into.” By collecting the China girl images, she's both revealing these long-hidden practices and keeping them from disappearing entirely.

France is going through a pet owner's nightmare. For years, the country has been accused of taking less-than-ideal care of its only species of wild hamster. Courts have demanded that they work to raise the species' numbers, or risk massive fines.

Instead, recent research reveals that the hamsters have begun losing their minds and eating their own children—not a great look for the animal, or its would-be caretaker. The culprit, scientists suggest, is too much corn.

European hamsters, or Cricetus cricetus, are nocturnal creatures about ten inches tall. Ideally, they enjoy a diet that contains all the hamster food groups—nuts, legumes, seeds, root vegetables, grasses, and insects. They're great at planning ahead, storing the leftovers in their cheeks and bringing them into their dens for later.

But in northeastern France, most of the fields where these hamsters live have been replanted with just corn. As a result, the hamsters aren't getting enough nutrients—particularly niacin, Agence France-Presse reports.

Scientists at the University of Strasbourg pinpointed the problem in a series of dietary experiments with captive hamsters. Some got wheat with clover-and-worm snacks, while others got corn with the same snacks.

While all the hamsters produced similar numbers of offspring, those fed on corn began exhibiting strange symptoms. Their tongues swelled up and turned black, and their blood thickened. They began freaking out when scientists entered the room, pounding on their feeders. Eventually, they ate most of their babies alive.

These things happen to other mammals who eat too much plain corn, including humans. When scientists added niacin to their feeding schedules, the hamsters got better.

It will be difficult to sprinkle niacin all over the cornfields—instead, the move would be to reintroduce more biodiversity into the crops, Gerard Baumgart, a hamster expert, told AFP. Until then, the farmlands of France will be a massive corn maze haunted by small, fuzzy cannibals.

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.

 A soldier, possibly Peter Prendys, helps Wojtek engage in his favorite activity—snacking. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

On Friday*, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that, among other provisions, bars all Syrian refugees from entering the United States indefinitely. The order has closed the U.S. even to the small percentage of Syrians who are fortunate enough to have escaped their tumultuous country, registered with the U.N., and passed a years-long vetting process.

As Americans across the country express their disagreement with the ban, it's a fitting time to remember one refugee who did great things not just for his adoptive country, but for his entire adoptive species—Wojtek, a Syrian brown bear who, by banding together with Polish soldiers, helped the Allies win a crucial World War II victory, and lifted the spirits of people who really needed it.

In the 1940s, as military powers shattered the boundaries of Europe, the people who lived there were violently shuffled around like so many puzzle pieces. Many residents of Poland, who had been shipped to camps in Siberia after their country was divvied up between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, found themselves adrift when alliances shifted and they were released from the Gulags in 1941. Free, but far from home, people of all ages traveled by foot from Siberia to various destinations. Some found purpose, and a place to go, after the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, which allowed for commander Władysław Anders to form a Polish army on Soviet soil. 

By March 1942, the army was too large for the Soviet authorities to feed, so they set off to join the British High Command in the Middle East. It was a long, rough walk, stretches of march punctuated by encounters with others whose lives had been similarly disrupted by the war. For the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, one of these encounters was with a shepherd boy who was hungry enough to approach the soldiers, and ended up trading a burlap sack for a Swiss army knife, a chocolate bar, and a tin of beef. But the most fateful was with the resident of said burlap sack—a tiny bear cub, recently orphaned by hunters.

An army dog eyes the new recruit in 1942. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

The shepherd had likely been planning to raise the cub as a dancing bear—not a great job for trainer or animal. Instead, the soldiers took him on as a mascot. They named him Wojtek (short for Wojciech, which means "joyful warrior") to instill a fighting spirit in him. They weaned him on condensed milk from an empty vodka bottle, and assigned him a caretaker, a soldier named Peter Prendys who had also been separated from his family in the conflict. 

Soon, the 22nd Artillery reached their destination—the town of Gedera, on the edge of the Negev desert in what was then Palestine. Prendys quickly set about teaching the bear how to be a good soldier, marching next to him in the desert heat, training him to wave and salute, and, occasionally, disciplining him when he stole from the provision tent. 

Wojtek took to the job. He spent his cubhood as a particularly precocious Army brat, hanging his head out of the artillery truck window during supply runs to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon (and later, when he got too big, stowing away in the truck bed). Between missions, he hung out in the camp, begging shamelessly for snacks, racing with the camp dog (a large Dalmatian), and climbing palm trees. He took on a variety of soldierly habits—he developed a taste for lit cigarettes, which he would puff on once before swallowing, and loved beer so much that when he had exhausted a bottle, he would peer into it, "waiting patiently for more." At night, he wrestled with the men—he generally went easy—and then joined them around the campfire (and, sometimes, in their tents to sleep). In the morning he woke up and immediately sought out whoever was on early patrol. If left alone for too long, he would put his head in his hands and whimper. 

A Syrian brown bear enjoys the water. (Photo: Stahlkocher/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Wojtek was no show bear, though. Once, he even caught a spy. A thick-coated animal stationed in a hot desert, Wojtek's favorite treat was a cold shower. He went to great lengths to procure them, standing near the bathing tent and whining until a sympathetic soldier turned the nozzle on him, or decided to dig him a mud bath. Eventually, he learned to turn the shower on himself, and spent so much time there that he was banned from entering without supervision. One day he was delighted to find the door open, but when he barged in, he interrupted a local dissident who had planned on stealing the stockpiled ammunition. The poor guy screamed and surrendered. Wojtek got two beers and unlimited shower time that day. 

His curiosity got him into other scrapes, too—he once stole an entire clothesline's worth of women's underwear from a Polish signals unit during a supply run to Iraq—but he kept his record clean enough that, when the 22nd Artillery was set to ship out to Italy to join the Allies for a major campaign, he was able to officially enlist. Now with a rank and number—and, most importantly, guaranteed rations—Private Wojtek set out for Italy with the rest of the unit on February 13th, 1944. The Italian campaign was long and strenuous—"very often it was necessary to drive day and night, our heavy lorries filled with munitions and other military materials," remembers Professor Wojciech Narebski, a member of the regiment. During this time, he says, just the sight of their "extraordinary nice mascot" lifted their spirits.

A 22nd Artillery Badge, bearing the image of Wojtek carrying a shell. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

But Wojtek became famous for lifting other things. Just a few months after their arrival in Italy, the 22nd Artillery found themselves thrown into the Battle of Monte Cassino, the largest European land conflict of the war, and the cause of over 60,000 eventual casualties. The German army had turned the small mountain pass into a stronghold for their defensive line, and the Allies needed to break through in order to move on to Rome. Wojtek's unit was tasked with driving huge trucks of ammunition to enemy lines via steep winding mountain passes, unloading the stuff, and then driving back to the stockpiles. 

During the battle it was all hands on deck, and Wojtek was left alone. But the bear, at this point, essentially thought of himself as a soldier—or, at the very least, had learned that copying what people did earned him praise, attention, and treats. So when he saw soldiers carrying the crates of shells from the trucks to the battle line, he did so too, braving the gunfire and the shouting. He was helpful enough that when he got bored or tired, his comrades coaxed him back into action with snacks.

The Allies won the battle, and word of their ursine warrior stretched far and wide. The 22nd Company drew up new regalia featuring Wotjek, in silhouette, carrying a shell. As historian Aileen Orr puts it in her excellent book about Wojtek, the bear "had pretty much become a legend in his own not inconsiderable lunchtime.”

Wojtek wrestles with the troops during his first tour of duty in 1942. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

 He may have let it go to his head a bit, and for him, the rest of the Italian campaign was a series of capers: he tried to hunt horses and donkeys, danced on top of at least one roadside crane, and scared so many people swimming on the Adriatic Coast that Orr calls him "the furry Jaws of his time." His postwar life was similarly impish. When the fighting ended, Wojtek and many of his fellows ended up at the Winfield Camp for Displaced Persons in Scotland, where he quickly became a local celebrity, and a comfort to yet more displaced people. “They were stateless, homeless, and penniless; the only things they owned were a few meagre possessions in a bag—and a bear,” Orr writes. His campmates showed their love by building Wojtek a swimming pool and taking him on field trips to local dances, where he lolled near the baked goods tables and listened to the fiddles, which calmed him. Even there, in the grip of intense rationing, "he had two bottles of beer a day," and all the food he needed, says veteran Jock Pringle. Wojtek in turn showed his appreciation by being a chick magnet at said dances, and by helping those veterans who had found work as farm laborers to carry fenceposts through the Scottish fields.

Wojtek enjoying Winfield Camp in 1945. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Slowly, Wojtek's fellow soldiers became less displaced, settling more permanently in Scotland or setting off for other shores. But for Wojtek, the camp was home, and the soldiers were his family. He had not the faintest idea of how to be a wild bear—pretending otherwise would have gotten him attacked by his own species or shot by his adopted one—and life in Soviet-occupied Poland wasn't even that great for people, let alone larger mammals. With great regret, Prendys made arrangements to send Wojtek to the Edinburgh Zoo. The bear drooped in captivity, but he did get a lot of visitors, and they knew what he liked. For the rest of his days, his campmates came by to see their friend, cooing at him in Polish, tossing him candy and lit cigarettes, and, sometimes, jumping into the cage to wrestle. 

Wojtek died in the zoo in December 1963. But to this day, his memory helps the soldiers he served with, giving them an entry point to talk about the war with those who didn't experience it. The bear's continued service is borne out by the many memorials to him scattered throughout different countries. One, a statue that started going up this past weekend, depicts Wojtek and Prendys walking together, the man's hand on the bear's shoulder. They look like a steelier Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, making their way not into some idealized forest, but through the messy, border-tangled world we all live in instead.

*1/30/17: This article has been updated to reflect recent events.

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 surfaces of Shah Cheragh, a mosque in the Iranian city of Shiraz, glisten and shimmer as you walk by. Mosaics made of mirror shards and tiles cover each wall. Glittering chandeliers hang from the ceilings and spots of light dance in the domes. As the above video by Great Big Story shows, being inside is like inhabiting a disco ball.

Shah Cheragh, also known as the Emerald Mosque and the Shrine to the King of the Light, was originally built in the 1100s as a funerary monument to Ahmad and Muhammad, brothers who took refuge in Shiraz during the 10th-century persecution of Shia Muslims. Many additions and renovations have taken place over the centuries. Shah Cheragh is now the third most holy Shia shrine in Iran, and draws a substantial crowd for Friday night prayers. It's not unusual to see worshippers kissing the mirrored walls post-prayer.

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

Out in Idaho and other parts of the American West, winter storms have dumped an unusual amount of snow all over the region. In some places, more than four feet of snow have accumulated, and collapsing buildings have become a real danger. The snow has also driven animals looking for food into towns, and over the weekend one unlucky moose accidentally stumbled into a basement in Hailey, Idaho.

The moose was not intending to sneak downstairs; he fell through a window well into the basement.

Senior Conservation Officer Alex Head, who has some experience getting moose out of homes, was called to the scene. As the Idaho Department of Fish and Game reports, he “attempted to herd to moose up the stairs and out the front door to freedom.”

However, the moose, which presumably had never been in a basement before, was freaked out and did not want to be herded. “The moose was having none of it, charging the officers several times,” the department reported. Head and colleagues decided their best choice was to sedate the moose.

Once the moose was calmed by drugs, the humans were able to remove him from the basement. “With all hands on deck, the sleeping giant was carried up the stairs and out the front door. It woke up in the snow covered street, groggy and confused, but free.”

Have you ever wondered what the tallest active volcano is? Or wanted to compare the height of mountain peaks and the lengths of rivers around the world? So did John Emslie and James Reynolds.

Between 1849 and 1851, topographical illustrator and engraver Emslie and publisher Reynolds devised scientifically based diagrams that measured out these geologic landforms and features in the 12-plate book Geological Diagrams. During the era, chartmakers helped increase accessibility and visibility of the latest scientific research by creating maps, illustrations, and figures depicting natural and man-made wonders around the world.

Emslie and Reynolds “take numbers, acute scientific details, and measurements, weaving them into something that’s beautiful to look at and easier to understand,” wrote Sara Barnes in My Modern Met. Part art and part informational chart, these pieces are early scientific infographics that serve as the foundations of the educational diagrams we see today.

The 1800s were marked by significant scientific discoveries, from the first observation of Neptune to theories of evolution. As early as the beginning of the 19th century when Alexander von Humboldt created what are considered the first infographics, publishers and cartographers designed a wide array of vivid displays to explain these new and complex ideas to the public. Reynolds' publishing business in London printed an enormous output over his approximately 30-year career, responding to the popular demand for information on science and engineering developments. Reynolds worked with several cartographers and engravers, but one of his main collaborators was Emslie.

Together, they produced numerous infographics and maps, and were both elected to England’s Royal Geographical Society—a professional organization dedicated to providing accurate cartographic and geographic information. The appeal and charm of their work comes from a combination of formal cartographic techniques, scientific knowledge, and artistic flair.

Colored by hand and highly detailed, Emslie and Reynolds’ 1851 Geological Diagrams is one of their many artistic portfolios. Maps show the distribution of plants, air currents, and religion, while charts ingeniously splay out major rivers, mountains, waterfalls, and even famous historic buildings.

For example, the panoramic map of principal rivers and lakes line up a selection of the world’s major rivers, visually comparing the lengths of the Colorado, Rhine, Nile, and Amazon rivers. Each are dotted by the major cities that they run through. Above the row of rivers, different lakes including the Dead Sea, the Caspian Sea, Lake Geneva, and Lake Erie are compared. You can see just how expansive the Caspian Sea in Russia and the Black Sea in Turkey are from this view.

In addition to the 12 engraved plates in Geological Diagrams, Emslie and Reynolds also worked together on other volumes and single issues of optical charts, school atlases, and astronomical diagrams. Emslie shows the differences between astronomical and geographical clocks, the earth’s revolution around the sun, and the topographical surface of the moon. Some of the astronomical maps were made transparent, allowing viewers to amplify and highlight celestial bodies and constellations by shining a light through the back.

Currently, a selection of Reynolds and Emslie’s astronomical diagrams from the 1850s can be viewed in person at the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University’s Green Library. Explore more of these early scientific infographics below.   

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

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

The boy that would become Scatman John had a hard time growing up.

Before his massive international hit "Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)," before selling millions of records globally in a style of music that hadn’t been popular in generations, and before he entered the National Stuttering Association's hall of fame, Scatman John was just a kid in suburbia, born John Paul Larkin in El Monte, California in 1942, developing a stutter early in life that made communicating with others very difficult—and got him bullied.

“As a child, I had to fight a few times,” Larkin said in a 1995 interview with Advance for Speech Pathologists and Audiologists Magazine. “I went into a rage a few times. I remember one instance where some neighborhood kids … mock[ed] my stuttering at the top of their voices. That really hurt. It just crushed me. I waited until the next day when they had forgotten about it. I didn’t. I ran after them, and the rage was so strong I would have killed them if my father hadn’t stopped me. But that pain, I hope, has made me into the good person that I try to be.”

Larkin instead turned to music, which became a nonverbal source of creative expression, later gravitating toward jazz piano. He first learned about the scat style of singing listening to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. He worked as a musician—fairly anonyously—for decades, playing piano bars and festivals, until he finally released a self-titled album under his birth name at the age of 42. The album did not sell well, and by 1990, John decided to give his career one last push, moving to Berlin with his wife.

“After several months of going through the usual trials and tribulations of moving to another country and overcoming culture shock, Judy and I managed to secure an agent and I began to get booked into a European hotel circuit and I was well on my way to becoming the best hotel pianist I could be,” Larkin said once. “My feelings were … ‘Success at Last’ … I was so grateful to have actually had the opportunity to make a living as a musician. This, I thought, was as good as it could get.”

In Europe, he found greater acceptance of jazz, which inspired enough confidence that he incorporated singing into his act. Larkin reportedly received standing ovations for some of his performances.

“I began to own that I really could sing, that I was good,” Larkin said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

And once he found that confidence, things changed quickly for him, as his growing musical reputation eventually led to a music contract with BMG Hamburg, which had a unique idea to incorporate his jazz scatting with the house music dominating Europe at the time.

Eventually, he was teamed with producer Antonia Catania, who helped Larkin, then 53, create the surprise hit, “Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)”.

A uniquely ‘90s blend of jazz scatting, rap, and house beats, “Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)” was released along with a video that made the rounds on MTV.

Though the song caused little reaction upon its initial release, steady airplay on mainstream radio gave it enough momentum to chart in two dozen countries, reaching number one in twelve of them, including Canada, Italy, and France. In the U.S., the single got has high as number 60 on the Billboard Hot 100.

And fueled by the massive popularity of the song, the album Scatman’s World would go on to chart in 24 countries, including Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

In addition to strong album and single sales, Scatman also found a home for his music in entertainment and advertising. “Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)” was used in a Good Humor ad campaign and the 1996 Martin Lawrence/Tim Robbins buddy road comedy Nothing To Lose. As perhaps the ultimate sign of ‘90s pop culture respect, the video was even featured in an episode of Beavis and Butthead.

“There should be a name for this kind of music,” Beavis notes.

“There already is a name for this kind of music, it’s called ‘crap,’” Butthead replies.

Scatman John might have just been a one-hit wonder except that his third album, released in 1997, became an unexpected hit in Switzerland and Japan, selling well over a hundred thousand copies.

And it was in Japan where Scatman John truly came into his own. He sold 1.56 million copies of Scatman’s World in Japan alone—where it is the 11th-highest-selling international album of all time.

And with that level of success, he became something of a pop phenomenon, appearing in commercials. He even received his own impersonation, complete with trademark fedora and mustache on the iconic television series, Ultraman. He’s also the example used by TV Tropes for “Big in Japan.”

Unfortunately, it would be Scatman John’s last moment in the limelight. He was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly after the release of his third album, but continued touring until his death in 1999.

From start to end, his career as a pop star lasted four years. But he embraced every moment of it, taking advantage of the platform he had to speak about the issues he really cared about—like stuttering, the subject of his most famous song.

“The fact that I’ve been a stutterer since I’ve been speaking has compelled me to find another way to speak another language,” he said in a speech to the National Association of Communicative Disorders. “My greatest problem in my childhood is now my greatest asset. I’m trying to tell the kids today that Creation gave us all problems for a purpose, and that your biggest problems contain a source of strength to not only step over those problems, but all our other problems as well.”

Andrew Egan is writer and editor of Crimes In Progress. A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in 2011; now, almost six years later, Tepco, the company responsible for the plant, thinks it may have found lost nuclear fuel debris in one of the reactors, Reuters reports.

The company says it may have detected damaged uranium rods below the No. 2 reactor, which was destroyed in the tsunami that followed the 2011 earthquake.

Those rods are melted and highly radioactive. Tesco says its robots spotted “a black lump of material” that may be the fuel.

If the company has located the fuel, it still needs a plan to clean it up. As Reuters reports, Tepco has been using robots to approach the radioactive site, but “as soon as the robots get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless.” Estimated costs for the clean-up are now at $188 billion.

N.B. couple used giant manure heap to harass neighbours, judge rules https://t.co/paIT6yAjMnpic.twitter.com/hc324Z9HwN

— Calgary Herald (@calgaryherald) January 28, 2017

Everyone poops, including cattle, who don't poop more than other mammals, but do poop commensurate to their size—which ends up being a lot of poop, if you have a lot of cattle. Farmers, for decades, have repurposed such poop as fertilizer, but, if they don't, it just piles up. It also smells unpleasant, if you don't like the smell of poop, especially the poop that is fresh and wet and pungent. 

It's that latter category of poop that a couple in New Brunswick, Canada has accused their neighbors of intentionally piling up along their property line, part of a long-running feud, according to the Calgery Herald. The poop, pictured above, would smell whenever the wind blew the wrong way, or after it rained. It was also so large that it was viewable on Google Earth. 

The poop appeared in November 2013, and was removed less than a year later, in October 2014. But in that time the poop was "fresh, unseasoned, wet, raw manure. The smell was disgusting," David Gallant, who sued his neighbors Lee and Shirley Murray over the poop and other issues, wrote in an affidavit, according to the Herald. 

A judge recently ruled in Gallant's favor, awarding him and his wife $15,000 in agreeing that the Murrays had used the poop as a tool of harassment. 

“I have little doubt these activities were initiated by the Murrays and designed to inflict fear, nuisance and harassment against the Gallants,” the judge said.

According to the Herald, it's unclear how the dispute between the two neighbors, who live in a rural area, started, though they have been living in close proximity since the Gallants bought their property from the Murrays in 2001. 

It eventually came down to the poop, and legal action, and, finally, perhaps, some poop justice for the Gallants. Lee Murray, though, says he plans to appeal, claiming that the poop was old and didn't smell that bad. He would never, he said, intentionally put a big pile of cow poop near his neighbor's property line just to harass them. 

“I’m not that type of guy," he told the Herald. 

The tuatara should, by all rights, be extinct by now. The last living members of a 200-million-year-old family of reptiles called the Sphenodontia, the tuatara survived the cataclysm that wiped out the sphenodonts along with the dinosaurs and three-quarters of life on Earth, about 60 million years ago.

Today tuataras are stranded at the end of a broken branch on the evolutionary tree, an intriguing jumble of evolutionary clues and holdovers: Their skulls and sexual habits are birdlike, but they have the crude ears of a turtle and a brain like an amphibian’s. Their primitive hearts and lungs predate all of those. Strangest of all is the vestige of a “third eye” planted in the top of their skull like a scaly pimple.

Cold-blooded and slow-moving, the ancient reptiles—picture a sort of chubby, thick-tailed iguana about the length of your forearm—can only move at top speed for short bursts, after which they have to stop, winded and panting. Their hearts beat just six to eight times a minute, and they can go for years without eating. In the winter, they descend into hibernation so deep they seem dead. A newly hatched tuatara, roughly the size of a paperclip, may take more than 20 years before it’s old enough to reproduce—if isn’t eaten first. Even then, a female may only lay a clutch of eggs every few years.

Just don’t call them lizards. If the tuatara belongs with any group, it’s the “living fossils” —the obsolete species not yet informed of their obsolescence—like the coelacanth fish, the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, and the gingko tree. Native to New Zealand, tuataras were nearly wiped out by the rats that hitchhiked to the isolated continent with early Polynesian explorers. Rats out-ate and out-bred the lethargic reptiles across the mainland of New Zealand, and nearly all the outlying islands. Today, tuataras persist on only 35 small, rat-free islands, a fraction of their former habitat.

Now the nocturnal, burrowing reptiles are staging an unlikely comeback in the bulletproof-glassed “tuatararium" jutting from the back of the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, in the sleepy New Zealand city of Invercargill. The glass, along with an array of motion detectors and silent alarms, is there to dissuade any ambitious rare animal collectors who might think of skirting the law; the last one to try got away with two of the animals before he was tracked down and rewarded with a five-year prison sentence. Thefts aside, the museum’s breeding program has been so successful that, at the moment, it has more tuataras than it knows what to do with.

The icon of the museum’s success is Henry, the original male in the museum’s scale collection and holder of the tuatara record for lifespan in captivity. Henry has been living at Southland for 46 years, during which time he’s served as a kind of ambassador for New Zealand, Skyping into local classrooms and posing for photos with visiting dignitaries. No one knows how long tuataras live in the wild, but Henry is thought to be at least 80 years old, possibly more than 100—an extrapolation based on his size. At one point, his keepers guessed he could be as old as 111, but they’ve since scaled that estimate back down. These days, Henry holds court over more than 80 other tuataras, including 20 breeding females (like his namesake, Henry VIII, he’s not exactly a shining symbol of monogamy). 

After living most of his life in cranky solitude, too aggressive to breed with the museum's female tuataras, several years ago Henry finally had a cancerous tumor removed from his cloaca (the rudimentary reproductive organ shared by tuatara and modern birds). Suddenly, he was ready to make up for decades of lost time. One typical headline from the time: “Henry, 111, is finally in the mood.” 

While Henry has recently retired from reproductive life—a product of both his decreasing fertility and the conundrum of conservation programs, where successful breeders are quickly overrepresented in a captive population’s limited genetic pool—his love life is emblematic of the unexpected success of the Southland Museum’s tuatara breeding program.

That has a lot to do with Lindsay Hazley, who has served as the museum’s tuatara caretaker for the last 44 years. Hazley, a tall, fast-talking man with close-cropped gray hair and a gangly athleticism that belies his sixty-some years, started volunteering at the museum as a high school truant ditching gym class. He worked odd jobs for the staff, setting up exhibits and hanging paintings, until they hired him straight out of high school. The job suited him. Hazley was put to work looking after the museum’s two tuataras, including Henry. 

But since no one had really figured out how to raise tuatara in captivity, he was more or less left to experiment. Breeding was a particular problem, beyond Henry’s outright aggression (luckily for his prospective mate, Mildred, tuataras are capable of regenerating their tails). Captive tuataras often play coy and refuse to mate, or their eggs never hatch, or they hatch only for the baby tuataras to die after just a few days. Until recently, no zoo or program outside of New Zealand had managed to raise a tuatara from an egg.

Hazley’s breakthrough came from talking with a neonatal doctor. Since the museum’s tuataras lived in an enclosure sheeted in UV-blocking gardening plastic, they had trouble with uptake of vitamin D and calcium, losing bone mass and laying thin-shelled eggs that rarely hatched. So Hazley got a special light bulb used to treat premature babies and started to expose newly hatched tuataras to a couple of hours of UV-rich light every day.

After a few months of this, when the tuataras were returned to their UV-poor enclosure, they continued to thrive. Hazley theorizes that, just as premature babies need UV to regulate melatonin, a hormone that helps govern circadian rhythms, tuatara needed some help with their out-of-whack hormones. Whatever the reason, it seemed to work.

Now Hazley finds himself in an unusual predicament: Many of the tuataras he raises have nowhere else to go — not unless another zoo wants them, or until rat-eradication programs clear up more territory.

While New Zealand has put an extraordinary amount of money and effort into the fight against non-native mammals like rats, possums, and stoats, its ambitious goal of making New Zealand predator-free by 2050 still lacks the technology necessary to make it happen. So far, the country’s conservation department has verified 100 islands predator-free since efforts began to eradicate all mammalian invaders. National and regional pest control programs spend more than $70 million a year in trap maintenance, poison drops, and developing new technologies. If tuataras have a future, it hinges on finding more humane, efficient ways to kill rats.

Until then, the museum’s breeding efforts have ground to a halt. For the first time since he came to the museum 44 years ago, Hazley is just letting nature take its course.

Meanwhile Henry is getting on in age, whatever his is. These days, his only public appearances come in the form of the nearly life-size tattoo of Henry occupying Hazley’s right bicep. The tattoo, a 60th birthday present-slash-dare from his daughters, is a sign of the closeness between Henry and Hazley. The two have spent so much of their lives together that Henry reliably appears in his enclosure when he hears Hazley's voice on the other side of the glass.

“He’s looking quite happy,” Hazley reported in October. He would know.