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Watch a Strange Miniature Automaton of Marie Antionette Play a Dulcimer Music Box

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Hundreds of years after her death, Marie Antoinette lives on—as an automaton. For most of her time, she sits idle in a dark room at the Musée des Arts and Métiers in Paris. It's only when a hand cranks the plunking, whirring gears that the miniature robotic 18th-century French queen comes to life.

Built in 1784 by the German cabinetmaker David Roentgen, the automaton is no typical replica of Marie Antoinette. The approximately 20-inch, intricately crafted doll sits playing a dulcimer, a string instrument struck with handheld hammers. In the video, the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrates how the Marie Antoinette dulcimer player, or La Joueuse de Tympanon, works. When wound up, the music box mechanism moves the figure's head and arms, making them dance across the strings and chime out a ping-y tune. The player has a repertoire of eight songs.

The automaton was presented to King Louis XVI, who gifted it to his wife. It's said that the beautiful lace dress was made from fabric of one of Marie Antoinette's dresses, and that mannequin even has some of her real hair. While the Marie Antoinette automaton is a stunning masterpiece, the uncanny rigid movement of her neck and eyes as she awakens may make you shiver. 

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.


When Giant Sequoias Were Sacrificed for Traveling Sideshows

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During the second half of the 19th century, when traveling sideshows were all the rage, the so-called wonders of the world were taken from city to city to be gazed upon by spectators aching to see bearded ladies, tattooed men, and other “curiosities” that often fed the colonialist fantasies of the Western mind. But among many of the attractions included in such shows there was, at one point, an unlikely protagonist: the giant sequoia of the Sierra Nevada.

Native only to this California region, giant sequoias are some of the most ancient and massive beings in the world. The largest specimen, the General Sherman Tree, is the biggest single-unit living organism in mass and volume in the planet. It stands at 275 feet above the ground, and weighs around 1,900 tons. The oldest known sequoias are about 2,500 years old.

Indigenous groups had known about the existence of the giants, but they remained unknown to western settlers until the 19th century, when, in 1851, a pioneer named A.T. Dowd, who was pursuing a bear, stumbled upon the Calaveras Grove at what is now Yosemite National Park. Word spread quickly, and nationalists claimed sequoias as proof of America’s greatness, while scientists from all over the world prepared their luggage and set out to see the trees with their own eyes. Some businessmen, meanwhile, were thinking of profits.

The initial reports and pictures of trees that rose hundreds of feet above the ground and had circumferences of more than 30 feet were, as could be expected, met with skepticism, often aggravated by inaccurate and exaggerated reports.  

But it was a desire to monetize that skepticism and curiosity that motivated entrepreneurs like William Hanford, who bought the Discovery Tree, and with much toil, mining equipment, and steely resolve, felled it. His idea was to take the tree on a sort of traveling sideshow tour and charge people to see it.

An article published in 1853 in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion V.5, describes the process:

[The tree] was taken off in sections, so that it can be placed, relatively, in its original position, and thus give the beholder a just idea of the gigantic dimensions of the tree. [...] Probably it will not be very long, therefore, before our readers will be able to get a view of this monster of the California woods for a trifling admission fee.

The Discovery Tree was then taken to San Francisco, where people paid 50 cents to see it, and eventually to New York. Ward Eldredge, Curator of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, explains that it was a “big deal,” describing it as a sort of Coney Island experience, where the tree would be erected temporarily and people would line up to buy tickets to see it.

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Yet, despite the public’s overwhelming curiosity, Hanford’s costly and arduous project did not prove profitable. The necessity of cutting and reassembling the giant made it appear fake, as spectators claimed it had been assembled from several trees. This was in part because some of the same spectators had fallen for P.T. Barnum’s hoax, which displayed what was actually a coastal redwood.

This failure, however, did not stop others. A tree named Mother of the Forest was the next victim, though this time, the tree was not felled, but rather peeled using scaffolds. The Discovery Tree and the Mother of the Forest were two of only three sequoias known to non-indigenous groups at the time, according to Michael Theune, Acting Public Affairs Officer at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “And we killed two of them,” he says.

The plank peeled from the Mother of the Forest was around a hundred feet, proof of the astonishing size of the trees, yet without the need to cut and reassemble. It eventually made its way to the Crystal Palace in New York, before crossing the Atlantic to be exhibited at the larger Crystal Palace in London, where it was a huge success. The scarred tree remains standing, if also partially consumed fire and dead. The plank itself was destroyed along with the London Crystal Palace in an 1866 fire.

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There were, of course, several other trees that met similar fates, and it’s even said that P.T. Barnum himself managed to acquire a legitimate sequoia plank for his shows. Others were taken to cities across the U.S., displayed at events like centennial anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence and the 1893 World Columbian Exposition.

Exhibitions, though, weren’t the only way people tried to profit off the sequoias. The Mammoth Tree Hotel started to be constructed in 1853 close to where the Discovery Tree Stump was located. A bowling alley was built on top of the body of the fallen tree, while dances and other events were held on its stump.

And then there was the lumber industry, which thought it had struck green gold. It was soon discovered, however, that the destructive fall rendered a large percentage of the tree unusable, and that the wood of sequoias was surprisingly brittle and unfit for manufacturing. Most of the harvested sequoia wood, in the end, was used for matchsticks, fences, and pencils. The lumber industry later gave up, discouraged by the low profit and the ever-growing outcries of conservationists, but not before causing heavy damage on the existing sequoia population, or as much as 34 percent in some areas.

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Almost from the beginning, at any rate, there was criticism, like that of the naturalist John Muir, who said that peeling the Mother of the Forest was "as sensible a scheme as skinning our great men would be to prove their greatness."

Sequoia National Park, Yosemite National Park, and General Grant National Park (later incorporated into Kings Canyon National Park), were created in 1890, while the Calaveras Grove, the site of the Discovery Tree, became protected in 1931. Today, the giant sequoias are considered one of the natural gems of the world, though some of the damage can still be felt, like earlier this month, when the famed tunnel tree fell during a storm.

Five Landmarks of Atomic Nevada

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When the threat of nuclear weapons loomed during the 1950s, a whopping 928 atomic tests were performed in Nevada, mostly in Yucca Flat, a desert drainage site set aside by the U.S. government as the Nevada Test Site. This bout of nuclear experimentation also inspired a strange sociocultural movement uniquely tied to Nevada. In Vegas, there were "dawn parties" where gamblers would continue to carouse until the test signal alerted them to the impending mushroom cloud (and the end of the night). Numerous "Miss Atomic Bomb" pageants were held on the Strip, where the winner was guaranteed to be radiant. 

The Cold War mercifully never turned hot, but half a century later, Nevada is left with the fallout of the atom age— literally and figuratively. Here are five spots that shaped atomic Nevada to pique your curiosity.  (Please note that several of these spots are not accessible to the public, or are only accessible under particular circumstances.) 

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1  Atomic Survival Town

NYE COUNTY, NEVADA

In 1955 a series of 14 nuclear test explosions known as “Operation Teacup” were set off in a swath of the Nevada desert, Yucca Flat, set aside just for this purpose. These tests were relatively common by this point, but this one was particularly memorable for the houses constructed at varying distances from the blasts to test the impact and effects of the explosions.

This cute little village was known collectively as “Survival Town”—or, somewhat less optimistically, “Doom Town.” The homes were populated by 1950s picture-perfect families (mannequins of course), bravely facing their imminent doom, frozen in their daily routines in dapper outfits. Much of Survival Town was decimated with the original blast along with other tests over the years, but some structures like the wooden house above still stand. 

Tours of Survival Town and the surrounding test site are top security and in high demand, but well worth forgoing a cell phone for a few hours. They occur once every month.

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2  National Atomic Testing Museum

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

The atomic age drew tourists to Nevada in droves. People would take a break from casinos on the Strip to sit in the hot desert sun, shield their eyes and watch the mushroom clouds from the biggest weapon known to man. Today, Las Vegas draws a whole new kind of atomic tourist with the National Atomic Testing Museum, a partner of the Smithsonian, which highlights the science, the history, the pop culture and sociology of one of America's most controversial periods. 

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3  Yucca Mountain Repository

NYE, NEVADA

Nuclear experimentation didn't end in the '50s, far from it. Some high level nuclear waste has a half-life of up to 24,000 years, so in 1997 a three-mile-long, 25-foot-wide hole was bored through Yucca Mountain. Its purpose is to store radioactive waste for the next 10,000 years and beyond. Deep in the Exploratory Studies Facility in the mountain, pellets of spent nuclear fuel held in specially configured metal racks will be sealed in wheeled canisters made of a corrosion-resistant metal. 

The project is still ongoing after a number of reversals, but the fate of the Yucca Mountain Repository is in question as review committees make decisions about how to properly dispose of nuclear materials. There were public tours offered in previous years in an effort to sway public opinion, but as of now the only way to visit the federal site is with permission from the government.

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4  Sedan Crater

NYE COUNTY, NEVADA

The Sedan Crater, the largest manmade crater in America, is the result of a massive underground nuclear test. Part of Operation Plowshare, so named to reflect the use of the destructive energy for good instead of as a weapon, the Sedan explosion was meant to test if nukes could be used to displace large amounts of earth. Clearly, they can. When the 104 kiloton bomb was detonated 600 feet below the ground level, it lifted the ground above it into a dome over 300 feet high before it broke the surface, sending a massive shockwave of dirt cascading from its epicenter. According to the informational site that sits at the site today, over 12 million tons of dirt got blown away.

Today the giant crater is still there in the middle of the desert and is safe to visit, although tours occur only on a monthly basis (you can't just drop in). A viewing platform for these guided tours has been built on the lip of the giant divot so that atomic tourists can peer down into its depths. A small amount of plant life is even returning to the crater, making it seem a little less bleak.  

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5  Atomic Liquors

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

While no actual atomic testing occurred at this bar, the oldest freestanding one in town, Atomic Liquors is certainly a part of Nevada atomic history. Originally a simple liquor store, a tavern license and rooftop service were added so customers could tipple a few “atomic cocktails” while watching the blasts 65 miles to the north (it being a time before people were aware of the dangers of observing nuclear testing).

All kinds of customers came: Construction workers drank alongside the Rat Pack, Barbra Streisand kicked back with the staff and played a little pool, and casino workers dropped by at all hours to cap off a long shift dealing blackjack. A kind of respite from the glitzier Strip, the Atomic and its classic good looks drew the attention of Hollywood too, eventually appearing as a set location in “The Twilight Zone,” and later in the films Casino and The Hangover.

Atomic Liquors has held down its corner of Fremont Street for over six decades. The bar was restored to its original configuration, with the famous neon kept intact. You can still order up some atomic cocktails, though the view of mushroom clouds is long gone.

You Can Apply Now to Be an Apprentice Globe Maker in London

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 If you have a steady hand, an eye for detail, and a love of latitude and longitude, Bellerby and Co. would like to hear from you. The London-based company is one of the world’s few remaining traditional globe-makers, and they’re looking to take on an apprentice.

The job may sound dreamy, but it’s not easy. Applicants should be prepared for a long training period. Everyone at Bellerby starts out as an apprentice, and it takes at least six months to learn to make the smallest and simplest globes, and years to make the bigger ones.

This is largely because their globes are all made by hand, with every detail meticulously painted in. It takes a lot of practice to create entire coastlines and mountain ranges with only a bit of paint, including building up muscle memory.

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“Globe making involves a unique set of skills that take a long time to get the hang of,” says Sam Clinch, a globemaker who has been working at Bellerby and Co. for a year and a half, and remembers the challenge of her apprenticeship. “You’re training your hands to remember the curve of the gore.”

Gores are the strips of map laid down over the globe, and apprentices start by applying them to reusable practice globes.

“You make a globe as well as you can and then strip the paper off at the end of the day and start all over again,” explains Clinch. “Gradually you learn from each attempt.”

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It’s a demanding process, but it pays off—Bellerby and Co. globes end up in museums, blockbuster films, and homes around the world.

If globe making is your calling, details on applying can be found on the company’s blog.

A Lot of Money Has Been Raised to Build a Statue for a Supermarket Cat in Britain

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In Saltney, which lies on the northwest border of England and Wales, there was, until recently, a cat that might greet you in the aisles of the local Morrisons, part of a chain of British supermarkets. 

His name was Brutus, and, since about 2010, he'd managed to endear himself to local Morrisons shoppers, eventually scoring over 12,000 likes on his Facebook page.

Brutus was beloved, his owners said, for his "cattitude," often jumping into shoppers' carts just to investigate. 

Brutus died earlier this month from an incurable kidney disease, but since then his owners have launched a crowdfunding campaign to build a statue for the cat at the market. Their efforts managed to take in over £1,000, or around $1,250, in less than 24 hours, according to the Chester Chronicle

"We all loved Brutus and we often shopped at Morrisons just to give him a cuddle," wrote one Facebook user

As of this writing, Brutus's owners have reached nearly half their goal of £5,000, with 23 days left to go. Which means that, for now, a permanent memorial for Brutus is looking pretty likely.

Rest in peace, departed friend, you may soon get the statue you deserve. 

Found: Tiny Grains of Rock That Reveal a Lost Continent

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By the standard of land on Earth, the island of Mauritius is quite young. Rocks found on the island are no more than 9 million years old, a fraction of the age of rocks on large continents, which date back billions of years. Islands tend to be new land, formed relatively recently by dramatic geologic events.

But a new report, published in Nature Communications, identified tiny grains of mineral, embedded in otherwise young rocks, that were much older—2.5 to 3.0 billion years old. Those zircon crystals indicate, the authors write, that underneath Mauritius is a piece of ancient continental crust, hidden below the young island.

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Geologists had already been thinking that seemingly young islands might have fragments of continental crust hidden below. In Mauritius, models had shown that the crust under the island was thick, and zircons dating back hundreds of millions of years had been found on the beach. In their study, the scientists located outcroppings of 6-million-year old volcanic rock. From one sample of that rock, they extracted thirteen grains of zircon; three of those grains had the characteristic of ancient continental crust.

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These results lead the report’s authors to propose that Mauritius and other potential continental fragments, which they call, collectively, “Mauritia,” actually has an ancient continental crust underlying it—there’s a previously unknown piece of ancient continent hiding under the ocean. That land would have formed part of ancient Madagascar and India and been fragmented during the early Cretaceous period, as the Indian ocean formed.

One little piece of that ancient continent, though, stuck around long enough to be covered in young lava and form the island of Mauritius. About six million years ago, tiny specks of mineral from billions of years ago got caught up in a burst of lava and came back to the surface, where eventually scientists were able to discover them.

Feral Bunnies Are Taking Over Las Vegas

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In early 2015, Dave Schweiger, a longtime Las Vegas resident, came home from work to find his teenage daughter sitting on the lawn, surrounded by six bunnies. These weren't the dun-colored jackrabbits of the Nevada desert: they were bonafide domestic bunnies, sleek and multipatterned, with cute ears and fuzzy coats. The Schweigers, who are animal lovers, were unfazed. They started buying extra carrots on their weekly trip to Costco.

But six bunnies doesn't stay six bunnies for long. Within two months, there were 24 living under the Schweiger's shed. When, with the help of a local rescue center, Dave caught them and took them to the vet to get neutered, he found out several of his new friends were pregnant again. "In another month, we would have had over 50," he says. If they hadn't taken action, the Schweigers' yard might have turned into a common, but little-known Sin City feature: the bunny refugee camp.

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The yards, parks and lots of Vegas are home to thousands of feral rabbits. Known as "bunny dump sites" to the legions of volunteers that care for their residents, they're strange places, more tragic than adorable, where the human heart clashes with the limited resources of the state. Released by overwhelmed pet-owners and left to breed, the rabbits now overwhelm any attempt at government control, digging up public property, chewing on pipes, and ending up dead in the sewers. To survive, they depend entirely on the kindness of self-identified "bunny-lovers"—volunteers faced with an impossible task.

Schweiger works near one of the more legendary dump sites, a state-run mental health facility in the center-west of the city. It's home to hundreds, if not thousands, of rabbits—although if you didn't already know that, you might not find out. "You go out to the field and you don't see any," Schweiger says. "I start throwing out hay, romaine lettuce, and carrots, and they just come out of everywhere."

Schweiger runs an awareness-building website called Las-Vegas-Bunnies.com, and often meets other concerned citizens at this particular site to feed and check on the rabbits. In a video from his most recent visit, scores of excited bunnies traipse over the dead grass and under the picnic tables as volunteers strew bits of lettuce across the ground.

The facility was also the site of the most recent official attempt to address the problem. Last year, the state gave V Animal Sanctuary, a local farm and domestic animal shelter run by Sacbe Meling, a $17,000 contract to capture, spay, and rehome a few hundred rabbits. In a Channel 13 News investigation, the state said it expected 80 percent of the rabbits to be gone within six months. But although Meling did what he was supposed to—he says he got 258 rabbits off the property, although many were too sick to rehome—it wasn't nearly enough, and whatever dent he made in the feral population was filled within months.

In Meling's view, his experience illustrates the many intractable issues facing anyone who tries to pull off a long-term fix. "The issue is not one that can be fixed in a couple of months, or even a year, without a proper budget," he says. He estimates that, even if volunteers did all the work, at least $1.5 million would be required—money that citizens could, and likely would, argue should be spent elsewhere. "There's going to be a group that's going to complain, 'Why's that going for animals? Why not for homeless people, or for the vets?'" Meling says.

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In the very small chance you managed to drum up the funds, there's the problem of space—what hoppens in Vegas has to stay in Vegas, but where? "Once you take them, where are you going to put them?" he asks.  "Someone's going to have to float a whole property for rabbits, and I don't see that happening. I think it's just a never-ending issue." The state did not respond to a request for comment.

In the meantime, various volunteers and groups work to make the situation a little more tenable for the rabbits. Their most effective option—"trap, neuter, return," in which bunnies are spayed or neutered and then brought back to the wild—is technically illegal in Las Vegas, as the "release" part of it constitutes abandonment. Instead, they focus on keeping them strong and healthy, so they can survive their lives' many difficulties. They're territorial, and if food is scarce, they'll fight each other. Snow and heat both take a toll on them. Although hunting, culling, or poisoning the rabbits is illegal, there have been rumors of bowhunting, and last summer some volunteers found avocado—deadly to baby rabbits—stuffed deep into a warren.

Schweiger, who walks past a local crew of bunnies every night with his wife, goes through a few 10-pound bags of Costco carrots per week, along with a dozen or so heads of romaine. Evenings and weekends he goes to the state facility, where he regularly leaves big jugs of water. Of his 1500 or so Facebook friends, Schweiger estimates 1200 are fellow rabbit helpers, each with their own chosen territory. "There's people at Floyd Lamb State Park, people at Sunset Park," he says. "We've got a bunch of rogue bunny-lovers all over, feeding."

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Education is another vital prong in the volunteers' approach. A lot of people don't know the truth about pet rabbits, says Schweiger. If people are dissuaded from adopting one before they're truly ready, they're less likely to abandon them—and if they're empowered to treat them well, they might be encouraged to adopt one of the many rescue bunnies that he and others are currently fostering. On a Facebook wall called "Bunnies Matter in Vegas Too," successful rescues with names like Oreo and Patriot twitch their noses and explain what is required to properly take care of them—chew toys, a good pen with a litter box, a local vet who's willing to handle the occasional bout of rabbit colic.

Schweiger himself is back up to seven rabbits—two in the garage, five in the house. If possible, he'd like to rehome them, but in the meantime, he's ok with being greeted by them every evening, sleek and happy in their pens, safe from starvation, poison, and other rabbits. "They're such good bunnies," he says. "If I can ever get them adopted, people would be amazed."

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.

Watch Two Guys in China Duel With Fireworks

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We're living in crazy times, and sometimes you've got to take a few minutes to blow off some steam. Two men in China did just that last weekend, taking to the streets for a dramatic fireworks duel.

Each man began with a packet of fireworks attached to a long stick. They then lit their packets and ran to and fro in the empty road, screaming. After a few moments, the fireworks began to go off, and smoky masses of green and red sparks blasted across the road. When it was over, the two ran off, cackling.

The People's Daily posted a video of the fight on Twitter, where people responded appropriately. "This looks fun as hell though in an odd way," one viewer remarked.

The occasion was Spring Festival Eve, the night before the Lunar New Year. On the Chinese calendar, we just crossed over into the Year of the Fire Rooster. Congratulations, guys—this is absolutely something a fire rooster would do.

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.


Exit Interview: I Was a Black, Female Thru-Hiker on the Appalachian Trail

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The first person to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail, a white man named Earl V. Shaffer, wanted to “walk the Army out of his system.” That was in 1948. Since the 1970s, when 775 hikers completed the trail, the number of “thru-hikers” has doubled each decade so that in the 2000s, close to 6,000 hikers covered all 2,190 miles.

Most of those people still look like Shaffer—they’re white men. Only about a quarter of thru-hikers are women, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and though there’s little information about the racial breakdown of thru-hikers, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of them are white.

Last year, Rahawa Haile, a writer now based in Oakland, California, became one of the very few black women to attempt to hike the entire trail. (She was able to find exactly one other attempting the feat in 2016.) In March, she began in Georgia, the more popular end of the trail to start on, and by the middle of October had hiked its entire length. She carried along with her, too, a series of books by black authors, which she left in trail shelters along the way.

Haile spoke to Atlas Obscura about the challenges and joys of hiking all those miles and the particular experience of being one of the few people of color spending months on the trail.

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When did you first start thinking about thru-hiking?

The first time I climbed a mountain was when my good friend John Coyne took me to Bear Mountain, outside of New York City. He said, "I know you like being outside, I know you love mountains, and they hold a fascination with you. Would you like to hike with me and my family?" I climbed Bear Mountain, and it was a life-changing experience. There was still snow and ice on the ground that March, and I slipped and fell on my butt many times. It’s an intro climb. There are stairs carved into the mountain. It’s not like I was climbing Mount Washington. We were standing on the mountain, and John said, "This is the Appalachian Trail. These are the white blazes." I thought, these marks go from Georgia to Maine, and that’s incredible. And I thought, maybe I could hike this trail one day.

I had a dull real estate-adjacent day job that didn’t pay me well. I was depressed and trying to write on the side. I realized I was the most unencumbered I would be in my entire life. I didn’t have kids or a mortgage. No car payments. I was in decent health. I thought, you either hike the AT at this age—I was 31 when I started my thru-hike—or you wait until you’re 60. You’re not going to get another opportunity. I would meet older people who’d say I wish I had your back, I wish I had your knees. I thought, I still have my back, I still have my knees.  

I told a friend from Portland in October of 2014 that this was something I was going to work towards over the next year and a half. That’s when it started. I spent all my free time researching the trail, the gear I’d need. I stopped writing. I started saving up. I barely went out. I barely bought clothes for myself. It wasn’t until a few months ago when I was looking at photos of readings I gave from 2014 and 2015 that I realized all of them have me wearing the same four shirts.

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There’s a great deal of privilege that goes into thru-hiking. The idea of broke hikers in the wild, where you don’t have to pay for a place to live and your only expense is food—that’s bullshit. You have to buy your gear. You have to travel. You have to take six months out of your life. You have to find a way to feel safe. That’s one of the reasons the trail look likes it does.

I knew that going into this hike it wouldn’t just be a hike: There’s no movement in America for black women that’s just about movement, especially throughout the South.

At the end of January of 2016, I quit my job. My boyfriend and I had split up. I packed all my belongings. I moved my things into my friend’s basement, handed my cat to another friend, and flew to Oakland, where friends were letting me crash for a month. There’s a ton of hiking in the Bay Area, and it was a good chance to prepare. People think that the thru-hike was the biggest thing I did in 2016, but my relationship ended, I moved out of my apartment on January 31, I quit my job February 1. And then I flew across the country on February 2. Those were three very big days.

When did your attraction to mountains start?

I’ve always been outdoorsy. In Florida, where I’m from, that means the swamp, the Keys, the Everglades, the beaches. I try to explain to people that this was a very important factor toward what gave me the confidence to hike the trail—I never felt that nature was a place where I didn’t belong. I know that, historically and through systemic racism, the outdoors was the purview of wealthy, white men. But, growing up, endless exposure to nature was a huge thing to me.

I started reading thru-hiking blogs online. I spent a good chunk of 2014 and 2015 reading them. That’s where most people know of my affinity for the mountains. I kept tweeting about thru-hiking blogs.

There’s a pretty good series of tweets, it’s threaded from a few years back. I wrote, "Wow, thru-hiker blogs have replaced short story collections for me." I considered myself a part of literary Twitter at the time and often tweeted about short stories. I wrote them as well. I said, "I have no idea how these people hike the AT." When I went hiking this year, I responded to the original tweet with “let’s find out.”

That’s the first time I noticed, this matters to me. This is something I can’t stop consuming.

Part of your plan for your hike was to bring books by black authors with you and leave them along the trail. When did you come up with that plan? What inspired it?

In 2015, I started a Twitter project called Short Story of the Day. This was a way to say, “This is the extent that I can participate in literature at this moment.” Diversity matters to me. Many of the most celebrated short story collections are by white men, so on Twitter I published one short story a day by underrepresented groups.

When I thought about 2016—how can I participate in literature this year?—I thought, I want to bring these books places no one likely has. I want to document where black brilliance belongs. There’s so much talk about where the black body belongs. Most of my hike was saying, this is a black body, and it belongs everywhere. These books were a way of me saying, black intellect belongs here, too. I was hoping that by carrying these books and taking them to these incredible vistas, fellow people of color might say, “If those books can go there, so can I.”

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I would leave the books at the shelters. I attempted to create a library of black excellence along the Appalachian Trail. That’s why I focused on short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections—something that people can spend a half-hour reading. People would message me and say, "I found this, and I liked it." Or, "I read this, and it didn’t resonate with me but thank you for leaving this material."

How did your books compare with other books you found in those shelters?

Leaving a book in a shelter is like leaving trash. I don’t think the books I left will be around longer than this season. Many people just leave books because they don’t want to carry them. People will leave part of the book, and that is considered a dick move. No one is going to enjoy reading chapter 17 of a book they don’t know. Books that are left in shelters are also used as kindling, because it’s hard when it rains all the time on the Appalachian Trail to find dry wood.

Mostly, it was Harry Potter as far as the eye could see. I saw many copies of The Girl on the Train. I saw many, many copies of Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. I was surprised that I didn’t run across a single copy of Wild. Tennessee has a Bible in almost every shelter. The people who maintain the trail provide them.  

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What’s interesting to me is that hostels act as libraries. They’re a place where people can leave a book, take a book. In the South, there weren’t that many, but the farther north you went you’d start seeing some Zora Neale Hurston, some Toni Morrison. The best library I saw all trail was in Maine, at a hostel right before the 100 Mile Wilderness. The person who runs it is a former English teacher, and it had a diverse, top-notch library. It was the first time I felt like I wasn’t in the whitest space ever.

I should be clear that the trail itself was the kindest and most generous white space imaginable in America. I have nothing but good things to say about the thru-hiking community. It’s incredibly warm. I don’t know if I’ll ever experience something like that again.

Maybe this is a good time ask you about that. You found the hiking community so warm, as you’re saying, but you also posted on Twitter this one picture of you and a couple of other black hikers with a comment about the intense conversation you’d had with them.

That photo I took—there’s a Confederate flag at that hostel. We had just finished talking about how we were spending our money at a hostel that flew a Confederate flag. The men I was talking to, they tried to get hitches into town—you hitch into town to resupply or take a night off—and they’d be hanging out with their friends, three white guys and a black guy. And people would stop and would say, "We’ll take those three, but we won’t let you in our car."

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There are two sides to the trail. There’s hiking the trail, but there’s also having to go into trail towns. You need food, you need to do that laundry. It’s not the trail that’s the problem with the trail. It’s what it’s like to be bothered in places that don’t expect to see you.

People were kind. Some people said, "I don’t see many people of color hiking, and it’s great that you’re hiking, and I hope that’s okay for me to say." One hostel owner in Virginia was incredible. His name is The Captain, and he came up to me and said, "It’s so good to see a black girl hiking." He said, "I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve barely seen any people of color—I demand to see a summit photo when you get to Katahdin."

We haven’t talked about the actual hiking part of your hike yet... how was your hike?

Holy shit, it hurt. It hurt so much. There were several Triple Crowners on the trail. They had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail, and they were doing the AT to get their Triple Crown. They were pissed. They were like, you don’t have switchbacks. We come from the land of happy switchbacks. On the East Coast, the trails just go straight up. You frequently have, in New Hampshire and Maine, more than 1,000 feet of elevation gain in less than a mile.

The trail is the steepest at its two ends. Most people go northbound. You show up in Georgia, and you don’t have your trail body, and you’re carrying too much weight. You’re going up and down these incredibly steep mountains. There are people who don’t have a ton of hiking experience. The two groups that seemed to have a huge advantage, at least at the start, were runners, especially marathon runners, and chefs, people who were used to being on their feet 70 hours a week. That was a huge deal.

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It was difficult. There were sections of trail where it’s just rocks and copperheads and where it doesn’t look like a trail at all. When I finished the trail, I thought, I will never thru-hike again. But recently I started looking up PCT hikes, and when I looked up photos, I was shocked, like, that looks like an actual trail! A guy I hiked with up north does trail maintenance in Colorado, and he said that often the Appalachian Trail follows the fall line, so you just have this crazy jumble of rocks to climb down.

The hardest thing, though—holy shit, climate change. People were like, how were your feet? Why don’t you ask me about hiking in the mid-Atlantic during the hottest July ever recorded? Because there was no water. There was no water anywhere. Fewer people would have finished the hike if there hadn’t been trail angels leaving huge caches of water at road crossings. That’s the only way I made it through Pennsylvania. In Maine you’re supposed to get your feet wet and ford a stream every day. I had to ford one stream during my entire time in the state. That is bad. That is absurd. I feel like I walked through one of the most severe droughts the East Coast has ever seen, and no one is talking about that.

The Appalachian Trail doesn’t have the system of water caches that the PCT does in the desert. I think you’re going to start seeing that appear.

What are some other strong memories, of good days or bad days?

A low day? All of Pennsylvania was a low day. They call it Rocksylvania. Once you leave the town of Duncannon, going north, it’s really hard, and there was no water, and the temperature was in the 100s. Having your feet ache nonstop, being thirsty nonstop, being more sweaty than you thought possible…nothing was worse for me than the monotony of rock... rock... copperhead... rock... rattler... rock.

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One of my favorite days was in Maine. I was hiking the Saddleback range. I felt so free. It was so beautiful. My body felt so strong. I felt complete freedom. Many people say the White Mountains are their favorite section, and granted, I think the single most beautiful place I hiked was Franconia Ridge in that range. But the Whites are also swarming with tourists. You can drive up to the summit of Mount Washington!

In Maine, there’s hardly anyone. The difference is night and day. It was so freeing. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I was above treeline. The state has one of the most racist governors in the country, and I was thinking, I don’t know how many people who look like me have stood here. I felt so lucky that I got to make myself into what I’d become by the time I reached Maine.

I remember holding the flag of Eritrea in front of the northern terminus AT sign, knowing that I’m probably the first Eritrean to thru-hike. So much of the news that comes out about my country is depressing and rightly so. To have this one positive meant a lot to me, and I know it meant a lot to my parents and to other Eritreans.

We talked some earlier about the whiteness of the trail, but what was your experience with its maleness?

Most statistics report the trail is about 75 percent men. This year, there were so many women—I’d be shocked if it was under 33 percent. It was still a very, very masculine space. But I saw so many women. Some of them had hiking partners, but there were also so many solo hikers. I look forward to seeing the Appalachian Trail Conservancy stats for this year. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think Wild had anything to do with it. There were SO many women. And I didn’t feel the weight of walking as a woman to the same degree as walking as a black person, though both were there. 

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 Talk more about that. How did you feel that weight day to day?

In the day to day, it was fine. Let’s say I’ve left the town, I’m on the trail. You hike, it’s nice, you have nice chats. It’s fine. The day to day wasn’t the weight. The weight was—will I get a hitch into the town? Will the hotel charge me or the person I’m with more, because they’re with me? Will I be followed in the Dollar General? If I stop at the crossing to have a snack, will someone throw trash at me? That happened once.

I was trying to find a thru-hiking blog by a black woman before I started, and I found one. Her name was Chardonnay. She thru-hiked the PCT in 2015 in 4 months. She’s not like a speed hiker. She just put on her pack and walked for 30 miles a day. She started the AT in 2016. I was like, great! One other black woman! She ended up leaving the trail before we could meet in person.

About two weeks ago, I was looking to see if there were any other black women who thru-hiked in 2016 and blogged about it, and I found one. It was called browngirlonthePCT.com. She talked about running into a hiker with a Make American Great Again hat. His trail name was MAGA. I don’t know what I would have done.

Another reason I documented this hike is because there are so few resources for black hikers. If you search on Google, the first result for “black hiker” is a pair of Timberland boots.

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You’ve put yourself out there as a resource for people if they need it; what have you been hearing?

I’ve gotten emails and DMs from people saying how inspired they are. I’m at the far end of the hiking spectrum, though. The extreme is people who go into the woods for six months. Most people want to day hike and go on weekend trips. I’ve pointed so many people to Outdoor Afro, Latino Outdoors, and other organizations dedicated to getting people of color outside. I also bristle when people say there are no black people outdoors. What we consider “outdoorsy” is so narrow at the moment. I do hear from people who say, "I want to hike, but I don’t know where to go, I don’t know where it’s safe."

One of the reasons I did this in 2016 was that I wasn’t so sure I would do it in 2017. If I were planning my thru-hike for this year, I’m not sure I’d go. That’s sad. It’s really, really, really sad. The rule is you don’t talk about politics on the trail, but it’s going to become increasingly hard not to. Especially if you want to talk about diversity or the environment.

Any last thoughts?

There’s already a debate about who the outdoors are for. There are many Americans, especially white Americans, who don’t understand why that question is being asked at all—who say, all are welcome in the national parks, do what I do, go outdoors. Nothing is stopping you. There’s no sense of history whatsoever. 

What gets lost in talking about diversity isn’t just [a question of] how can we can get more people of color outdoors. We have to address how we can get white audiences to acknowledge there are barriers and why that matters. I’ve seen so many people who are like, I don’t understand why we’re talking about race, the outdoors are where we go to get away from it all, why does no one ask why there are no white people in the NBA, etc. There needs to be more work focusing on educating individuals about this country’s history.

One of the most the important things I did on the trail was talking to people. Trying to be patient. I shouldn’t have to be a black ambassador, but I also know I got through to a lot of people, and I hope I can get through to more.

Officials Have Given Up Looking for an Escaped Bobcat in D.C.

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When Ollie, a seven-year-old female bobcat housed at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. escaped on Monday, there was some alarm.

Bobcats are not known to be aggressive to humans, but 13 nearby schools opted not to let children outdoors for recess anyway. Residents, meanwhile, spotted Ollie all across D.C.'s Cleveland Park and Woodley Park neighborhoods, but searchers could never quite catch up to the bobcat, which are known for their evasiveness. 

So on Wednesday, officials said they were giving up, suspending the search because, they said, Ollie's too good at hiding.

Zookeepers had initially issued a "Code Green" after Ollie had been found missing from her enclosure Monday morning, which alerted staff that an animal was out of containment but also signaled that there was no immediate danger.

“I don’t mean to be pessimistic at all but, we’re looking for a cat who could literally be sitting in a tree right next to us,” said Craig Saffoe, the zoo's curator for big cats, according to the Washington Post.

Ollie lived with two male bobcats at the zoo, and it's fair to say that—like any other being who has lived with two men for any stretch of time—she might've just wanted out. 

When the NSA Thought Mind Control Would Be an Actual Military Concern

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A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com and Glomar Disclosure.

Last week, we looked at the early days of the CIA’s foray into extrasensory espionage. Today we’ll be following up with the veterans of the NSA’s psychic wars, which they foresaw being waged well into the ’90s and beyond.

The NSA document, dated from early 1981, calls for a number of steps to be taken, including identifying the potential for mind control.

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Once the individuals had been identified, the Agency wanted to create “cadre’s of talented synergized gifted people … for special problem solving tests.” However, the NSA was afraid that these people could be hard to control “Consciousless [sic] or morbid people of talent must be strictly screened out of active programs because of the danger of severe mental illness and unscrupulous violation of security.”

Beyond personnel available to the NSA, the Agency wanted to build a database of psychics around the world.

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Additional NSA documents, produced by the government later in the year after MKULTRA had been shut down and all mind control programs had been disavowed, show the government’s continued interest in researching mind control techniques, no matter how esoteric they seemed.

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A number of predictions were made about the development of psychic warfare, including that subconscious mind control through telepathy would be possible “by 1990.” The report concluded grimly that “there is no known countermeasure to prevent such applications.”

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At least one prediction came true - CREST documents show psychic trials still being performed as late as 1992.

The rest of the NSA's guidelines can be read here.

Watch a Lot of Giant Chimneys Collapse Around the U.S.

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Some people just want to watch the world burn. Others are happy to look at chimney demolition videos online.

Controlled Demolition, Inc., an implosion subcontractor based in Phoenix, Maryland, maintains a YouTube channel dedicated to its most telegenic acts of destruction. The company conducts controlled demolitions of many kinds of structures, including disused hotels, condos, radio towers, and bridges. And though it's entertaining to watch a concrete monolith collapse like a waterfall, nothing quite beats the "Timberrrrrrr!"-tastic fun factor of seeing giant chimneys come crashing down.

Here are a few highlights from Controlled Demolition, Inc.'s chimney destruction repertoire.

These 165-foot-tall brick stacks in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, were dynamited to death in December 2016:

Here are the final moments of a pair of 300-foot-tall, reinforced concrete chimneys at the Grainger Generating Station in Conway, South Carolina. They met their end in February 2016.

And below is the deeply satisfying demise of a 250-foot-tall structure at APS Four Corners Power Plant in Fruitland, New Mexico. It took place in July 2016. (While, technically, this reinforced concrete tower is a windscreen, not a chimney, it is sufficiently cylindrical and visually impressive enough to include in this roundup.)

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.

Marie Duval, the Pioneering 19th-Century Cartoonist That History Forgot

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In the late 1800s, London was swept up in the new craze of visual, satirical journalism. When Judy magazine, a twopenny serio-comic, debuted a red-nosed, lanky schemer named Ally Sloper who represented the poor working class of 19th-century England, it was one of the first recurring characters in comic history.

But credit for that character has long gone to the wrong person. Two people were responsible for Ally Sloper—and one of the creators has only recently been rediscovered by academics and comic fans.

Wearing a shabby stovepipe hat and carrying a rickety umbrella, the iconic and popular cartoon is often credited to Charles H. Ross, a playwright, cartoonist, and eventual editor of Judy. However, Ally Sloper was actually illustrated and developed by two artists: Ross and his wife, actress-turned-cartoonist Marie Duval—who was responsible for the bulk of the Ally Sloper comics.

When Ally Sloper grew into a comic celebrity in the 1860s and late 1870s, she had become the sole artist behind the mischievous character’s world. Duval is among the earliest female comic artists, and has even been dubbed “Britain’s only 19th-century female caricaturist,” by art historian David Kunzle. In contrast to the refined artistry of both male and female cartoonists of the time, Duval’s drawing style was rugged and full of slapstick humor.

“Marie Duval leapt off the page and there are two reasons for that,” says graphic novelist and comic artist Simon Grennan, who studies and curates Duval’s work online as a research fellow at University of Chester. “One is because she was a woman drawing when not that many women were drawing, and also her drawings are very unusual for the period. There are quite a lot of things she does in her drawings that become common later on in comic history.”

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During the 1800s, women were just breaking into the business of literature, illustration, and visual journalism. There were even a handful of female artists that received formal training on the level of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, explains Grennan. Classically trained artists who drew upper-class subjects in magazines and comic series produced a more restricted and elegant style. On the other hand, researchers believe Duval had no training and relied upon her previous life as a stage actress to capture characters on paper.

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Marie Duval was born Isabelle Émilie de Tessier in Paris to French parents in 1847, but grew up in London. She assumed the stage name and pseudonym "Marie Duval" when she became an actress at 17, appearing on stage in several shows in London and in the south of England until 1874. She often starred as the leading man (which was not uncommon for female actresses at the time) in comedies and dramas, including the role of Jack Sheppard, a criminal and escape artist—a character with similar traits to Ally Sloper. During a tour of Jack Sheppard in 1874, Duval fell and injured her leg badly, halting her acting career. According to a fellow actor, she “bore the operation bravely, like Jack would have done,” reported Kunzle in History Workshop Journal.

Around 1869, Duval met and married Ross, who took over as editor of Judy the same year. Judy was a cheap rival to the likes of popular magazines Fun and Punch, catering towards a primarily lower and middle class and female audience. Ross assigned Duval as Judy’s new contributing artist, commissioning her to work on weekly comic fashion sketches and topics considered “typically female as well as theatrical,” wrote Kunzle.     

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Before becoming an editor, Ross had created and introduced Ally Sloper to the pages of Judy in "Some Mysteries of Loan and Discount," but discontinued the illustration to focus on longer novels. Sloper doesn’t reappear until 1869, and when he does he has a whole new look.

“They follow the series of drawings made by Ross, and they’re about the same character, Ally Sloper, but it’s very obvious that Ross is no longer drawing,” says Grennan.

While Ross conceived Ally Sloper, the character was developed and popularized by Duval “who did the overwhelming bulk of the drawings,” wrote Kunzle in The Oxford Art Journal. Forty-seven of the identified 78 Ally Sloper episodes published in Judy between 1869 and 1877 are signed by Marie Duval. Some had originally thought Ross was illustrating under the guise of the pen name "Marie Duval," but both Kunzle and Grennan agree that this wasn’t the case. “As you start to look chronologically in the archives, it becomes incredibly clear that it’s not Ross, it’s Marie Duval,” Grennan says. “They’re cut loose and very comic-y. They look much more like drawings from the 20th century than drawings from the 19th century.”

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Duval shapes the character of Ally Sloper into a figure that people in England were most familiar with: a stock urban antihero with a bulbous nose flushed with drink, who plots ways to earn money by doing as little work as possible. While scheming and unfaithful, Ally Sloper is still familiar and lovable.

The comic also embraces slapstick, physical comedy of the lower-class. Duval used her acting experience to create scenes akin to those on stage, having characters fall in and out of things and get doused in water. Her shadow lines showing movement and action are often seen in comics today.  

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If Ross is considered the creative owner of the Ally Sloper, then Duval should be given credit for visualizing the comic’s entire universe. She introduces new characters based off of common people you would see in central London in the late 1800s.

“There’s a kind of ‘Marie Duval world’ in which Sloper fits, not a ‘Sloper world’ in which Marie Duval fits,” says Grennan.

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By the 1870s, Ally Sloper was regularly featured in Judy and was under the sole responsibility of Duval. Despite refusing to get formal art training for 15 years, she became one of the main contributors to the magazine and even illustrated the children’s book Queens and Kings, and Other Things. Her work on the Sloper strips were praised as "extravagantly funny" by trade and press. Ally Sloper became so popular that it was sold around 1877 and commercialized. From the 1880s to the early 1900s, Sloper could be seen on stage, snuffboxes, and doorstops.  

“Marie Duval is important not only as perhaps Europe’s only popular female caricaturist, and not only as the chief author of the first Sloper,” wrote Kunzle. “She also deserves recognition for her graphic experimentation in an early period of the birth of modern art.”

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Due to the mass production of media in 19th century Britain, many comics and magazines were disregarded by critics in the 20th century. The cheap issues of Judy were newspapers that people often threw away, causing Marie Duval’s work to become lost over the years, explains Grennan. He and his colleagues have only come across two collections of Judy, and have collected about 1,400 of Marie Duval’s drawings online since 2014. Grennan estimates that there are another 300 still lurking around.

“Her lack of training was what made her drawings funny, so folks at the time commented about the fact that they were ‘delightfully rubbish,’” says Grennan. “Although Marie Duval might not take the world by storm, folks now still find the stories funny.”

Punxsutawney Phil's Greatest Hits

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A 1915 cartoon demonstrating how Phil's image has been co-opted for various rhetorical purposes. (Image: Jena Fuller/Flickr)

This morning, Punxsutawney Phil, America's most beloved forecasting groundhog, made his annual appearance in Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania. As a bevy of men in top hats egged him on, Phil spied his shadow, a sure sign that we will have a long, long winter.*

People do a lot of weird things, but the Groundhog Day behavior exhibited in the United States—which may have evolved from the European tradition of Candlemas—is pretty far out there. And for something so steadfastly traditional, the holiday has a funny way of reflecting the current moment. Here are six times when we looked for Phil's shadow and saw, instead, ourselves.

Pre-1900s: Phil's Predecessors

Phil is merely the latest creature to dupe us. According to Pennsylvania historian Christopher R. Davis, humans have looked for spring-related omens in "the position of a cat sitting by a fire, the size of the black markings on woolly-bear caterpillars, the measure of fur around a rabbit's feet ... crickets in chimneys, the height of anthills, and the elevation of hornets' nests," as well as early appearances of woodchucks, badgers, marmots, wolves, foxes, and bears. Davis also traces the strange fear of shadows to a need for cloudiness in the winter—without enough snow and rain through February, he explains, crops will be dry, and spring won't be worth looking forward to at all. 

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A passel of tasty groundhogs. (Photo: Susan Sam/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

1889: Phil On Toast

Before Groundhog Day meant placing faith in the shadow-based whims of groundhogs, it meant eating them. According to Davis, the Groundhog Club actually started as a group of people who liked to hunt and eat groundhogs, and tended to celebrate this trait on one particular day of the year. "Fellowship, oratory, skits, and rites of initiation were soon emphasized," Davis writes, and it was only a short hop from there to groundhog worship. No wonder the poor thing is scared of his shadow. 

1920: Phil Gets Sauced

According to the official Groundhog Day website, during Prohibition, "Phil threatened to impose 60 weeks of winter on the community if he wasn't allowed a drink." In soberer times, Phil's favorite foods are apparently dog chow and ice cream.

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The Groundhog Club in 2013. Remember, these nice-looking guys used to eat Phil. (Photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr)

1958: Phil In Space

In 1958, as the Soviet Union beat the United States into space, Phil came out with a conspiracy theory—that a "United States Chucknik," not Sputnik, was currently orbiting the earth, presumably collecting weather data.

2013: Phil Gets Sued
Despite a stellar show-up record (records show that since 1900, he has only skipped one year—1943—due to World War II), statistical analyses have found that Phil is pretty bad at his job. In 2013, Ohio prosecutor Mike Gmoser sued Phil for "misrepresentation of early spring, an Unclassified Felony." Gmoser sought the death penalty, but eased up after Phil's then-handler offered to take the blame.

2009-2017: Phil Goes Political

Phil's Big Apple stand-in, Staten Island Chuck, does not get along well with New York mayors. In 2009, he bit Michael Bloomberg on the hand after stealing an ear of corn from him. In 2014, Bill de Blasio dropped Staten Island Charlotte, who died a week later from injuries sustained in the fall. This year, Chuck disagreed with Phil, further dividing the nation. Maybe we need a Groundhog Debate.

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.

 *Update, 2/2/2017: The article has been updated since it was first published to reflect 2017 events.

A Portland Teen's Pet Snake Got Stuck in Her Earlobe

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Ah, teens and their snakes—always getting into mischief.

Last week, Portland, Oregon, resident Ashley Glawe was hanging out with her pet ball python, Bart, when he decided to try something new. Quick as a flash, he was stuck in her gauged earlobe. 

"It all happened SO fast that before I knew what was going on it was already too late," Glawe wrote on Facebook. She ended up at Portland Adventist Hospital, where, according to Patch, doctors numbed her earlobe, vaselined the snake, and pulled him out. 

She and Bart may have been physically separated, but they are now tied together by fame, having garnered coverage everywhere from Complex to Channel 8 News.

"BY FAR one of my #CRAZIEST life moments!" Glawe posted later.

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.


Found: Two Mysterious Signatures on the Wing of a WWII Plane

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AirCorps Aviation, in Bemidji, Minnesota, has a very particular business: they restore, maintain and rebuild vintage planes, from the World War II era. All sorts of amazing aircraft come through their shop, but recently a P-47 Thunderbolt brought with it a particular mystery.

On the inside of the wing, the names of two women were written in grease pen. It was impossible not to wonder: Who were Eva & Edith?

The first clue came from the plane’s identification number, P-47D-23RA. The RA at the end told the company where the plane was built—at Republic Aviation’s factory in Evanston Illinois. The factory produced thousands of planes for the war effort; this one was finished in 1944.

It made sense that Eva and Edith might have worked at the factory, which had about 5,000 workers, about half of whom were women, AirCorps Aviation found. Perhaps the two women scrawled their name on the wing while working to build it.

As the company looked into the mystery, though, they found another clue. The wing itself probably didn’t come from Illinois originally, but from the Curtiss-Wright Company in Buffalo, New York.Republic Aviation licensed the Buffalo company to build P-47G models. They were “pretty much identical” to the razorback models built at the Evanston factory, according to AirCorps Aviation’s Sara Zimmerman, and the body of the plane was produced in Evansville.

So far, the identity of Eva and Edith is still a mystery, but the company is digging in and looking for more clues. They’re trying to gather as much information as they can about the people who worked on the original aircraft, the identity of these two women, and the people who flew the plane in the past. (Its serial number is 42-27609.) “It would also be a huge accomplishment if we could turn up a picture of the actual P-47, so we could learn more about who flew it and any other pieces of its history,” Zimmerman writes in an email. Anyone with information can contact the company.

Watch a Massive Swirling Tornado of Tuna

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A couple of times a year in the waters of Mexico's Sea of Cortez, a colossal column of tuna churns slowly in an underwater fish vortex. The tunnel of over 100,000 Jack Tuna, or bigeye trevally, is large enough to cast looming shadows across the ocean floor.

The clip above gives us a rare glimpse of what it's like to be under this huge "tuna tornado." At the 19-second mark, the camera is swallowed by the swirling silver mass. Each tuna averages over three feet in length.   

This fantastic phenomenon is the result of the tuna's mating behavior. Many fish reproduce outside of their bodies. Here, the tuna secrete large volumes of eggs and sperm and contain it by slowly swimming around in a circle, thus creating the tornado. Because all their genes are swirling in one big mix, the ritual allows for genetic variability. Once fertilized, the eggs then float in the water for a couple days until the babies hatch. 

In 2012, Octavio Aburto, a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, published a photo of his friend David Castro next to the column of fish in Cabo Pulmo National Park marine reserve in the Sea of Cortez to show its impressive size. It took him almost three years to get that photo.

"I have been trying to capture this image ever since I saw the behavior of these fish and witnessed the incredible tornado that they form during courtship," Aburto told Mission Blue

Aburto has taken many other photos of underwater wonders to bring attention to the beauty of marine wildlife. He continues to work to protect and preserve marine species in South America.

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.

A Good Man Removed a Cereal Bowl From This Blinded Squirrel's Head

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Someday in life you will encounter a blinded squirrel with a single-serve cereal bowl stuck on its head and you will be confronted with a choice: Is today the day you will be a hero? Or is today the day you admit defeat, your life culminating in this moment, in which, definitively, you must come to terms with the fact that you are a zero?

On Tuesday, Joey Wolfe, a worker at a youth development center Omaha, made his choice. Joey Wolfe is a hero. 

In the video above, you can see Wolfe, after a few starts and stops, carefully pluck the cereal bowl from the squirrel's head, freeing it. He said afterward that he was merely trying to avoid tragedy.

"There were a couple of times he jumped out of the way of an oncoming car or truck," Wolfe told the Omaha World-Herald"It would have been really sad to come out later that day to see a squirrel with a cereal bowl on his head, dead in the street."

Indeed, it would have. Instead, Wolfe, who originally thought the squirrel might have been wearing a hat, says he's pleased to have done his part in an increasingly uncertain world. 

"The last two weeks haven't been the best for a lot of people," he told the World-Herald. "Even if this is the smallest thing I can do to make things better, maybe it will brighten up someone else's day a little bit."

Why the London of British Literature Barely Changed for 200 Years

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Erik Steiner is a geographer, and in his field people trying to understand how places worked in the past tend to look at census records and old maps. But in a recent project, Steiner, the creative director of Stanford University’s Spatial History Project, worked with colleagues from the school’s Literary Lab to mine an unusual source of geographical data: 4,862 works of British literature, published between 1700 and 1900.

"From a geographer’s standpoint, fictional geography is amazing," he says. Characters in novels are often moving about real places, recruited as settings because they’re recognizable to readers. Even in creating a fictional world, novelists are capturing data about the reality in which they live. Pull out that data, says Steiner, and "you can uncover some unexplored truth that’s somewhere in there."

In the case of London, one of the team's discoveries, published in a pamphlet this past fall, was that the physical London of the 19th century and the fictional London of the same time period occupied two different geographic spaces. Even as physical London expanded madly, fictional London stayed small, contained within the historic city center and the wealthy West End.

"From the perspective of literature, London’s urban development didn’t quite happen," says Ryan Heuser, a Stanford graduate student who led the Literary Lab's research on the project. 

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Literary geography is a relatively new field of study: the 1998 Atlas of the European Novel, written by Stanford’s Franco Moretti, a collaborator of Heuser and Steiner on the London project, is considered one of the discipline’s first modern works. The goal, as a group of European cartographers wrote in 2008, is to explore "what happens when the 'literary world' and the real world meet or intersect."

The London project drew on even newer strategies of "digital literary geography," using algorithms and other digital tools to explore place in British literature. It was developed under the umbrella of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, by a team that included several undergraduate research assistants, along with grant and project managers. They identified hundreds of historical locations in London, by matching proper names from their corpus of texts to historical maps and other sources. Altogether, those names appeared in about 15,000 passages over thousands of texts. 

With that data set in hand, the researchers worked to map literary London. Using historic maps and census records, Steiner created a series of images (above) showing the growing urban density in real-world 1682 London, when it was a small city huddled along the banks of the Thames, to 1896 London, when its population was heading toward 6.5 million people.

On top of those maps of urban growth, the team layered the places mentioned in their texts, to show how literary London developed alongside real-world London. Literary London, they found, changed hardly at all: even as real-world London grew, literature stayed put in the historic center of the city and in the wealthy West End.

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"The number of geographical references kept increasing, but they remain essentially localized in the City and in the West End," the researchers write in the pamphlet. "The rest of London—where most of the growth was actually taking place—never really mattered. In the course of the nineteenth century, real London radically changed—and fictional London hardly at all."

Literary London had, in Heuser’s words, a "historical stuckness" that restricted its growth. Even as the city grew, the places that authors used as touch points, to imbue their stories with meaning, stayed the same.

The Stanford researchers weren’t just interested in locating literary London, though. They wanted to map the emotions of the literary texts onto the city—the relationship between space and emotion and how that's reflected in literature. 

It’s not intuitive to think that emotions might have a location. Where is sadness? Where is happiness? Do emotions have, the researchers asked, "an intrinsic connection to a specific place"? Inspired by a passage about the "element of suddenness" in fear, the Stanford researchers saw a way to link emotion with place: the suddenness of emotion could tie it to geography. "What is sudden occurs at a specific moment in time and hence also at a specific point in space," they write.

To create a data set of place and emotion, the Stanford team clipped 200-word passages, centered around place names, and had 20 people read each passage. Half were asked to judge if the passage had an element of fear to it; the other half were asked to note if it had an element of happiness. The researchers also ran the passages through an algorithm that identified sentiment.

Their baseline finding was surprising: the majority of the passages—two-thirds, according to the human readers—were emotionally neutral. The passages that had an emotional valence, though, did have some relationship to place. With another group of colleagues, Heuser mapped the emotion data onto an 1899 map of London that included sociological data on class and poverty.

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In that context, he could see how passages with positive emotions were associated with the West End and other wealthy places, while passages with negative emotions tended to be embedded in neighborhoods the 1899 map coded as "struggling."

Emotions such as fear and happiness might seem subjective and individualistic, says Heuser. But find a way to map them onto real places, and you suddenly see how very constrained they could be by economic and class geography. To him, that’s one of the great advantages of digital literary geography. Computer analysis might obscure the details of individual passages, but in exchange it offers scale. "You can do this for 5,000 novels across 200 years and draw these very large historical conclusions," says Heuser. In fiction, at least, the places where stories take place and the places where people are allowed to feel happy are limited.

Were Colonial Men Obsessed With Their Calves?

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A couple of weeks ago, at an event in Manhattan, I found myself in conversation with a George Washington impersonator. Even as we chatted about our 21st-century lives, he had an enviable commitment to the aesthetics of his character—he stood straight as a tree, and the gravitas never left his face.

Posing with me and a friend for a photo, he instructed us to keep our left legs straight and turn the right ones outward. "In colonial times, the calf was the most attractive part of a man," he said. "Some even put calf enhancers in their socks, to look beefier." He struck the same position, effortlessly, and the camera flashed.

I found this bit of news delightful. Our Founding Fathers, signing the Declaration in calf falsies? Suddenly, everything made sense—the fact that breeches end at the knee, the phrase "put your best foot forward," the many portraits of colonial luminaries thrusting their calves at the viewer.

Online, history buffs seemed similarly tickled. After a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, one fan theorized about what he'd learned that day: "The exercises a successful male Colonist gets over his not-as-successful counterparts include activities like horseback riding (stirrups strengthen calf muscles), stairs (your home must be larger with upper floors), waltzing (try that with weak calves), etc."

In fact, many young men on trips to historic sites have apparently learned how to enhance their calves by posing: “Daniel learned that to woo ladies in colonial times you had to have nice calves and put your best foot forward," one teacher tweeted from Old Town Alexandria, with a photo of poor Daniel. Alexander Hamilton superfans love to repost this page from a children's book about the Founding Fathers, which asserts that Hamilton, unlike some of his peers, had no need to stuff sandbags in his stockings. "If you're bowing to a man, your calf projects your power," famed George Washington impersonator Dean Malissa told Esquire in 2010. "If you're bowing to a woman, your calf projects something else."

In a world where the current U.S. president has spent his life defending the size of his hands, it's both amusing and humbling to consider that giants of history might have had their own now-ridiculous sticking point. There's just one problem: it's probably not true. Or at least, not as true as people seem to want it to be.

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When I got in touch with experts at Colonial Williamsburg about this, I was met with the rhetorical equivalent of a heavy sigh. "The notions that people in the 18th century were obsessed with men's calves and that a well-developed calf was the sign of a gentleman appear to be myths," writes Cathy Hellier, a historian at Colonial Williamsburg, in an email. Mark Hutter, supervisor of the Tailor Shop in the Department of Historic Trades and Skills, backs her up: "It's not at all uncommon in historical interpretation for small grains of truth to grow into greater folklore," he says. "I think this is an instance of that."

Hellier, who studies deportment, has a few theories about how this idea got so much traction. First, there's the phrase "to make a handsome leg," a fairly common expression in the 18th century. In reality, though, this just means "to bow in a genteel way," something that involved a lot of minute movements, including a leg turn. She also points out that, although dancing and horseback riding certainly work the calves, so do activities associated with the less well-off, such as plowing and walking. 

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This isn't to say calves weren't considered sexy. "There certainly is preference for a good leg," says Hutter—and Washington, for example, is on record as having had exquisite ones. They just weren't the be-all end-all of attractiveness, or even close. In fact, Hellier points out, when you trawl through the many, massive etiquette books of the time, you hardly see legs mentioned. "Letters, diaries, and books generally ignore or downplay the appearance of gentlemen's legs—a singularly odd omission in an era supposedly obsessed with them," she writes.

All those turned-out legs on portraits and statues, Hellier says, reflect their subjects' substantial dance training, and the pose was actually meant to emphasize the hips, not the calves. According to The Young Gentleman and Lady's Private Tutor, a 1770 etiquette guide, turning the foot outwards makes "the Hips… appear firm, yet light and easy." If turned inwards instead, "they will appear heavy and misplaced, awkward and ungenteel." When "standing genteel," he suggests, "the whole Body should rest on the left Foot."

As for the falsies, those were actually real—but accounts of them appear to be pumped up as well. While my secondary-source research alluded to cork, parchment, pith, and sandbag calves, the only type that turns up in primary sources is the "downy calf," essentially a padded stocking. Even these were likely pretty uncommon. When padded calves show up in literature, Hutter says, they're almost always used to satirical ends, worn by dandies in cartoons or characters named Lord Foppington.

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He also points out that even these cartoons don't show up until the beginning of the 19th century—right when men's deportment changed, and people began keeping their legs straight beneath them while bowing. "I would say that, if anything, this argues against the idea that you're showing off a leg" when you bow, he says.

It's tricky to quash a historical rumor—especially one that was likely started by well-meaning experts, and has been perpetuated by enthusiasts. "I do think that, through the public interpretation in places like Colonial Williamsburg, and then probably spreading to other historic sites, these ideas have sort of entered the popular mind," says Hutter. But those who are invested in bringing the historical record to life also consider it their responsibility to correct it. "We are making an effort to root out these fallacies," writes Hellier.

"It's part of the nature of history," says Hutter. "Grains of truth grow into great beaches of myth." Or, in this instance, into great calves.

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