As we're all learning these days, if you want to help enact political change, it pays to agitate on a local level. Go meet up with your representatives and make them aware of your policy priorities! Arrange a meetup with your friends and send postcards to your Congressperson! Or, go a little further: call your mayor and request that he set up an exorcism to banish that new, pesky ghost from the town hall!
Such are the demands currently faced by Leandro Martín—the mayor of Vegas del Genil, a small town outside of Granada, Spain—after news leaked last week of a council member's spooky after-hours experience, The Local reports. The council member, who wishes to remain anonymous, first raised the alarm after he worked late one night in the town hall. "I heard a strange rustling sound in the hallway, like someone was dragging files across the floor," the council member recounted to Ideal.
Fearing a burglar, he crept into the hallway and took a cell phone picture of what initially seemed to be an empty hallway. Examining the photo in his office, the council member "saw what appeared to be a ghostly apparition of a child," The Local reports. He quickly locked himself in the room "in a state of panic" and WhatsApped the photo to his fellow council members, one of whom came to the office to escort him home.
The mayor was quick to dismiss these concerns—but the true believers aren't letting up. Council members insist that the hallway is colder than normal, even though a mechanic checked the heating and found everything working fine.
One brought in a Reiki practitioner, who reported feeling "a presence," The Local says. Citizens are also calling the mayor left and right, demanding an exorcism or, at the very least, an investigation.
Despite this constituent pressure, "earthly matters" remain the town's top concern, the mayor told El Mundo.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
In the small town of Cobough, Ontario, not far from Toronto, a child found a chicken in the bathroom at McDonald’s.
The boy, age 5, came running out of the restroom to report his discovery, the Northumberland News reports, while his mom was ordering him a Happy Meal.
After some initial skepticism from the adults, they found the kid was correct: there was a live, brown chicken in the bathroom.
No one knows where the chicken came from. (Perhaps a customer abandoned it there?) The McDonald’s staff called Municipal Animal Services, which took the chicken away before it could be turned into extra fresh chicken nuggets.
A week and a half ago, the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), a French agency tasked with investigating nuclear threats, issued a cryptic press release on its website.
A spike in iodine-131, an isotope that is a product of nuclear fission (like, for instance, after the explosion of a nuclear bomb), had been detected across Europe, IRSN said.
The isotope, which has medical uses but can also be very dangerous, had been detected "in tiny amounts in the ground-level atmosphere in Europe," the agency said, in countries from Norway to Spain.
They also produced a scary-looking map:
And then, four days later, The Aviationist reported that an American plane, the WC-135 Constant Phoenix, also known as a nuclear "sniffer" for its ability to detect and analyze fallout residue, had been deployed to Britain, possibly—officials didn't say—to aid in investigating the reported iodine-131 spike.
Yet, a few days after that report, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, or the CTBTO, an international organization established by the (still not ratified) Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, said, no, levels of iodine-131 were normal across Europe, or at least compared to what they have been historically.
The CTBTO also noted that had there been a secret nuclear test, perhaps by Russia, as many had been speculating, we would've seen higher levels of not just iodine-131, but a range of nuclear fission products.
Finally, yesterday, The Aviationist reported that the American nuclear sniffer had taken off, en route, apparently, for Norway, its mission still unknown. An Air Force spokesman told The Independent that the plane was merely in Europe for a "a preplanned rotational deployment scheduled far in advance."
So what's going on here?
Probably not a secret nuclear test, for one thing. As the CTBTO notes, if that were the case, a lot more than just higher levels of iodine-131 would show up.
An accidental leak from a pharmaceutical or medical facility, however, is one possibility, as is some kind of release from a nuclear submarine, Russian or otherwise.
But the strongest possibility remains: nothing. Ever since iodine-131 was discovered in 1938, we've used it for a wide range of things, like fighting thyroid cancer, which means that it's ever present in labs and hospitals and other places across the globe.
It's also, as the CTBTO says, detected at trace levels "across the world," meaning that this minor spike, if it even exists, wouldn't be much of a threat, since we are already coexisting with it, whether you realize it or not.
Soft with a slightly crunchy exterior, and stuffed with a sweet filling, these fish-shaped cakes called "taiyaki" are a traditional and popular street vendor snack in Japan.
Similar to a waffle or pancake, the adorable and delectable fishy treats are made in special iron molds. In the video above, a taiyaki baker expertly pours the batter, pipes out a sweet bean paste filling (but it can be anything from Nutella to cheese), and closes the mold. Out plops a row of fresh, hot golden taiyaki. The puffy, spongy texture will definitely make your mouth water.
Taiyaki means baked sea bream, a kind of fish that used to be an expensive delicacy only eaten on special occasions in the late 1800s to the early 1900s in Japan. People aren't sure exactly when and who started making the fish-shaped pastries, but the original circular molds were changed into to look like the sea bream—emanating a bit of that luxury of the precious fish.
Most street vendors stick to the traditional sea bream fish shape, however more recently, tayaki in the form of the flopping fish Pokémon Magikarp have been popping up for a limited time.
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.
Anyone that’s ever tripped and caught themselves, trying to play it off like nothing happened and hoping no one noticed, can relate to the feeling of relief when you know you got away with it. Unfortunately, here is one scooter-riding kid, who, this time, might not feel that way.
In a short Instagram video recently shared by user Paul Ahern, you can see a sheet of wet cement that appears to bare the cartoonish impression of handlebars, a pair of splayed hands, a faceplant, and even a deep divot where a front wheel embedded itself—the perfect picture of an unfortunate fall. The video ends by zooming in on the presumed victim, who's seen pushing away from the scene of the crime.
It's not clear where or when the video was shot, though Ahern has posted other pictures and videos that appear to have been taken on Australia's Gold Coast.
Wherever you are, small child who faceplanted, stay safe.
Australians weren’t supposed to have used magic. The first British settlement on the continent was founded in 1788, at a time when superstitious practices and beliefs were thought to be dying out, replaced by rational, enlightenment thought.
But, in the present day, after Ian Evans saw his first apotropaic marks—ritual signs meant to avert evil—in England, he started looking for them in Australia, too. “On a casual sort of visit,” he says, he found one in the stables of Shene, a historic estate about 30 minutes of Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.
“Wow,” he thought, “they’re here, too.”
Evans is aiming to more thoroughly document apotropaic marks, through a new Tasmanian Magic Project. Though they were once commonly used, these symbols have never been systematically recorded, in Australia or in England, where they are better known. For years they were overlooked or dismissed as marks made by craftsman in the assembly of a building.
But as scholars begin to better understand what they call the “material culture of building magic,” there are new efforts to collect and understand these evil-averting signs. In the U.K., Heritage England put out a call this past fall for examples of ritual marks and received more than 600 responses. Evans’ project will have its first field season this coming March, and if the project raises enough money, there will be two more later in the year. The goal of these projects is to better understand how and why these symbols were used and to tease out the ways English-speaking people used magic, long after they were thought to have given it up.
Apotropaic marks are sometimes called “witch’s marks,” although Evans prefers to call them “evil-averting marks” (since there’s no evidence that people in Tasmania believed in witches). One of the most commonly found is the hexafoil or “daisy wheel,” seen above. Created with a compass, the shape forms a continuous line. It was thought that evil would be attracted to these shapes and get caught in an endless maze.
Other marks are “Marian symbols,” associated with the Virgin Mary, and burn marks created purposefully with candles. They have been found in churches and houses, barns and caves, often by some sort of opening to the outside world, whether a window, doorway, or chimney.
These signs were meant to protect the people within from the evils that might sneak in. They were part of an artillery of tools that could be used to fight evil, which included witches’ bottles, pierced and baked hearts, written charms, and objects, usually shoes or clothes, concealed in the walls of a building.
Since he starting finding evidence of magical practices in Australia, around 2004, Evans has spent years collecting examples of these rituals; in 2010 he completed a dissertation on concealed objects that were hidden in the walls and hearths of houses to protect against evil.
Evans can't say for sure that this brand of British magic came to Australia with the First Fleet, as early as 1788. "But there's a good chance that it did," he says.
But he realized, he says, that concealed objects were only part of the story of the practice of magic in Australia. In his original research, he found apotropaic marks in a series of buildings, and he’s convinced there must be more. In his preliminary investigations in Tasmania, he’s found burn marks in three stables. “In the stables of one house, there are seven horse stalls, and we found 58 burn marks in there,” he says. “These weren’t the result of some stable hand leaving his candle in the wrong place. They were deliberate.”
Burn marks might have been used to inoculate a building against fire or lightning. These signs were meant to protect people against forces, of one sort of another, that they couldn’t control. Australia in the 19th century was a scary, uncertain place for colonizers, who feared convicts, bushrangers, and Aboriginal people. Making protective marks may have offered settlers some certainty and relief. “I think they were motivated by fear,” says Evans. In his dissertation, he writes, “Folk magic gave emigrants and exiles a sense of control at a time when their grip on this world seemed fragile indeed.”
Evans is focusing on Tasmania because it has one of the highest concentrations of heritage houses in Australia. Some of these houses have been in the same family for generations: at one property, the eighth generation of the same family is still living there. In this part of the country, houses remain relatively unchanged, and there are still traces of the past to be found, by those who look carefully.
Earlier this week, Reddit user vadermeer was at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet, when “I noticed the Apple logo on letterhead sticking out from a bin of books” and started digging through the box. Inside was a trove of papers from the early days of Apple history, from 1979 and 1980, three or four years after the company was founded.
The pile of papers included “inter-office memos, meeting notes and progress reports” detailing the development of software security for the company’s new products. They belong to Jack MacDonald, who managed software for the Apple II and III.
Vadermeer uploaded the whole pile for the internet to see; they’re also now saved to the Internet Archive. Gizmodo paged through the documents and discovered some good tidbits. The team was trying to develop anti-piracy measures, essentially. The ideal level of security was “very secure,” defined as “breakable by hardware hacks with a respectable amount of effort to the point of being able to examine programs.”
But at that time, Gizmodo discovered, Apple considered secure anything that Steve Wozniak couldn’t break into.
“Randy feels that if he has a version that Woz can’t copy then it is as protected as possible,” one memo said.
Smoking is bad for you. You probably shouldn't do it. You definitely shouldn't attempt to convince your friends to do it. And under absolutely zero circumstances should you ever, ever force a chicken to do it.
Revelers at Stellenbosch University in South Africa learned this the hard way last weekend, when photos of someone sticking a cigarette in a rooster's beak at a party made the rounds on social media. At least one (human) offender may face prosecution, News24 reports.
The party, which took place Saturday, February 18th, was put on by a school dorm called Helshoogte Residence. The hall's emblem is a proud rooster, so they throw an annual "hoenderdag," or "chicken day" celebration, Stellenbosch University spokesperson Martin Viljoen told News24.
According to Viljoen, hoenderdag does not generally feature actual chickens—it's more of a food-stalls-and-DJs type of thing—but this year, an outsider brought along an impressionable rooster, and things got out of hand. Besides the smoking, a video shows the rooster being thrown high into the air, to an EDM beat.
The residency has publicly condemned the incident. A local animal welfare society filed a complaint with police, who have begun investigating, News24 reports.
As for the rooster, the animal welfare society says he was rescued by a bystander and is now "safe, happy and among other chickens." They're probably really into his cool, newly-raspy cock-a-doodle-doo.
British Palestine. The USSR. The Free State of Fiume. History is rife with states that simply didn't make it: ones, thanks to the precariousness of politics, that eventually switched names, changed hands, or disappeared altogether.
Tom Topol has been collecting passports for 14 years, and runs the website passport-collector.com, a repository of travel documents through the ages. Topol first became fascinated by old passports after a chance encounter with some at a flea market in Kyoto, Japan. "Today our passports are uniform," he says, "but look at an old passport [from the] 19th century—at that time they were really some kind of art." He has spent last decade and a half learning everything he can about the politics and geography of historical passports, as well as digging into the stories of individual booklets and their bearers.
One of his specialties is passports from these has-been countries. "Such documents are historical treasures, reflecting the politics and geography of that time," he says. Plus, with their soft-focus photos, curly signatures, and colorful stamps, they tend to be a lot prettier than our own drab travel documents.
Defunct passports may be no help when you're trying to cross a border—but they're great tools for traveling back in time. Here are six from Topol's collection, with some hints at the history they illuminate.
Colony and Protectorate of Aden, 1956
Rifle through the collection of a passport completist, and you'll notice that a lot of the covers sport the same coat of arms: a lion and a unicorn flanking a shield. That's because—surprise!—they're all from British colonies. "The British Empire issued passports in almost all of their territories," says Topol. "Collectors [are] always searching for these treasures," some of which are rarer than others—North Borneo, for example, is a prize find.
This particular passport, whose cover sports the familiar lion-and-unicorn, is from the Colony and Protectorate of Aden, one former identity of what is now Yemen. Like Zanzibar and India, the Aden Protectorate was never formally annexed by Britain—instead, in the late 1800s, the Crown decided they wanted to control the Port of Aden, and began moving into the area. Tribes around the Port then granted the Crown control over their foreign affairs in exchange for military protection.
This agreement is reflected in the passport's interior, which promises its bearer "the protection of Her Majesty's Government," and reads from left to right. In contrast, although the current Yemeni passport also has English and Arabic titles, the inside reads from right to left—and the Yemeni seal is on the front.
US Seaman's Passport, 1942
Fred Albert Bauman—a narrow-faced American with mischievous eyebrows—received his special Seaman Passport on Halloween, 1942. Although not technically from a defunct country, the Seaman Passport nonetheless illuminates a bygone era—as Topol explains, it was only issued from February 1942, a few months after the United States entered World War II, to August 1945, when Japan's army surrendered.
In addition to the standard information, the sea-green passport contains extra details about Bauman, who apparently had a scar on his left palm. It also specifies that its bearer may only use it when "following the vocation of seaman." Although Topol has seen a number of these passports, he says not many of them have very many stamps, suggesting that the seamen did most of their traveling after the war.
Free State of Fiume, 1923
Fiume—once a tiny state of its own, now part of Croatia—first became autonomous in 1719. Subject to the whims of various emperors and kings, it lost and regained its freedom multiple times over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. By 1868, it was technically a part of the Kingdom of Hungary—but it was a diverse state where Italians, Hungarians, and Germans all rubbed elbows, and spoke a local dialect that was a fusion of its members' native languages.
In 1920, as the First World War raged, Fiume was declared an official Free State—again thanks to the international community, who thought it would be good to have a buffer between Italy and what would soon become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It responded to its new sovereignty by remaining an unabashed melting pot. "Nationality was defined mostly by the language a person spoke," and everyone felt more like a Fiume-ian than anything else, explains Topol. This unique loyalty was underlined by the Fiume passport, which had the country's name on the cover in bold capitals, topped by a small, solitary star. Stamps to get back into the country had the same star, shown above in purple ink.
Soviet Union, 1928
Citizens of the Soviet Union used a number of different passports. An internal one, with a green cover, was issued to urban workers, and used to prevent peasants from entering the towns. This one, which belonged to a woman named Lydia Graff, was a different document that allowed for travel abroad—except to Bulgaria, Romania, Africa, the USA, and Palestine, which required extra documentation.
Graff's passport lacks a cover, but has visas showing that she traveled to Mongolia and China. It also has a crazy bureaucratic Easter egg—the stamped signature of Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, who would later become the director of Stalin's intelligence service, and was eventually executed for alleged treason. The signature appears on the bottom left side of the page. That's one way to get an autograph.
British Palestine, 1944
It's all well and good to have a passport collection full of regular Joes. But to Topol, there's something special about finding a document that was once used to identify someone important. Such is the case with this passport from British Palestine, which once belonged to Captain Tuve T. Smolensk. Fifteen years after it was issued, the United States Coast Guard would congratulate Smolensk on his prowess in Atlantic search-and-rescue work, calling his efforts "in keeping with the highest tradition of the sea."
But—with no disrespect meant to Captain Smolensk—that's not even the best thing about this passport. That honor goes to a purple stamp on page 17, which reads "Haifa"— Israel's main port. "British Palestine turned into Israel in 1948," explains Topol. "To find nowadays a British Palestine passport with a stamp of Israel is pretty rare." For practical reasons, Captain Smolensk was likely allowed to keep his British Palestinian passport for a year or so after the switch, allowing for this strange convergence.
German Empire, 1916
The German Empire was comprised of various duchies, principalities, and free cities—including Duchy Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which issued this green passport to one of its citizens in 1916, four years before it was absorbed by Bavaria.
The German Empire wasn't a great place to be in 1916, but the government apparently attempted to make up for some of the war and hardship by allowing citizens to take passport photos with their dogs. Did this young woman travel exclusively with her pup? Where did they go? What did they see? We may never know—but thanks to this ordinary document, we now get to wonder about it.
A cryptid is a creature whose existence, diplomatically put, cannot be proved or disproved by science. Cryptid lore tends to be less fantastical than ghost stories or fairytales, but not altogether believable. For some though, an unusual rock, unexplained crop circles, a footprint, or some hair are all the evidence they need that there are creatures unknown to humanity, hiding in the woods.
In these places, tales of mysterious creatures have become so embroiled within local narrative that whether the beast actually exists or not doesn't matter anymore. Can you imagine Loch Ness without its monster?
HAIRY HUMANOIDS
The Sasquatch, or as it's colloquially known, Bigfoot, is America's best known cryptid. It is typically depicted as a giant ape, standing around seven feet tall. Sasquatch lore extends back to American Indian mythology, which describes hairy wild men living in the woods. Anomalous sightings continued into the 20th century, but Sasquatch mania reached its peak following the famed Patterson-Gimlin tape.
Bigfoot is generally associated with the Pacific Northwest, with most sightings reported in Washington. Ape Canyon was the site in which a group of miners came under attack by a gang of wild “apemen” in 1924. According to the five miners, all of whom survived the incident and seemed convinced of its facts, they were asleep in their cabin when the assault started, and the beasts seemed out for blood. The event was widely publicized and no logical explanation was ever found.
The Sasquatch mythos has caught many in its spell. Refusing to accept claims that Bigfoot sightings are actually black bears or intentional hoaxes, believers continue their search for the hidden primate. California, Oregon, Washington and Canada are dotted with Sasquatch museums and research institutions for those who want to see footprints, photos, and other evidence.
Bipedal hairy beasts aren't confined to the West Coast though. Illinois and Ohio have remarkably high rates of Bigfoot sightings, and Arkansas has its own permutation: the Boggy Creek monster.
Ever since sailors first traversed the ocean they have returned with stories of unbelievable creatures emerging from the murky depths. Perhaps it's because we didn't (and still don't) really know what lies beneath the ocean's surface, a whale or squid could be mistaken for the Leviathan or a Kraken.
That lore is celebrated in places like Skrímslasetrið, Iceland's sea monster museum. Maritime history is inextricable from Icelandic identity, which includes many tales of ocean beasts lurking just off the edge of the map.
Creature stories also provided a useful explanation for misunderstood natural phenomena. The geyser of Kauai's Spouting Horn blowhole was originally attributed to a giant lizard monster trapped beneath the rock.
Lakes have their fair share of mystery too. The Loch Ness Monster is the most widely known, but prehistoric serpentine beasts have been reported on almost every continent.
That said, not all sea monsters take the form of slithering water snakes. The Kelpies of Scottish lore are massive demonic horses found in rivers and streams.
Mermaids are another sea beast, albeit a significantly more alluring version. Much of our modern mythos surrounding mermaids comes from Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, but before the 19th century, mermaids were thought of as the deceptive, even evil sprites, no doubt based on the sirens in Homer's Odyssey.
The myth of Feejee mermaids was transported to the West from Japan. Travelers saw mummified "mermaids" in shrines like the 1,400-year-old one at the Tenshou-Kyousha Shrine. Allegedly, this mermaid was once a fisherman who trespassed in protected waters and was transformed into a hideous creature as punishment.
These weird hybrids, crafted from the upper half of a monkey and the bottom half of a fish, may have been inspired by the Japanese kappa, a mischievous water spirit.
Despite the fact that they were nothing like the lovely fishtailed maidens of fairytales, Feejee mermaids (as they came to be called—allegedly brought back from Fiji, not Japan) captured the Western imagination. They were quickly disproved as fakes, yet after P.T. Barnum had one in his famous sideshow, no cabinet of curiosity was complete without one.
The chimera, another creature of Greek mythology, was said to have the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and a snake for a tail, though today the term is applied to any creature with the body parts of various animals. Nobody does body horror like the Ancient Greeks, whose Minotaur myth (the half-man, half-bull trapped as the protector of the labyrinth) persists to this day.
Chimera made their way into American folklore. The Texas Woofus in Dallas is a longhorned pig-legged sheep-bird. Its critics call it pagan, and they may not be so far off the mark.
Another American chimera is the Piasa bird, a mysterious feathered beast painted on a rock in Alton, Illinois. The painting has been there since at least the 1670s, though no one knows its origin.
The chimera best known to Americans is the jackalope, a jackrabbit with the antlers of a buck. Mismatched animals like this abound around the world though, likely because hucksters could prove their existence through falsified taxidermy, or "gaffs." Still, reports of bunnies with massive horns proliferate in the Southwest and elsewhere.
Not all cryptids and chimera are leporine and sweet though. Some are more sinister, like the Pope Lick Monster, named after the Pope Lick Trestle Bridge it has been sighted beneath. It is said to be a monstrous man-goat hybrid that lures its victims onto the railway trestle.
The Jersey Devil was another cryptid seen throughout New Jersey in the 19th and early 20th century. In 1909 alone, hundreds of people reported seeing an unknown creature flying over the Pine Barrens, a forested area on the Jersey coast. They described it as something like a kangaroo with hooves and leathery bat wings that would let out a terrifying shriek before disappearing from the sky. The Jersey Devil hasn't been reported in recent years, though its memory is now thoroughly enveloped in New Jersey folklore.
One of America's more recent cryptids is the Mothman. In November of 1966, numerous people reported seeing a man-like figure with wings spanning upwards of ten feet. Those who saw the creature from their cars reported that its eyes shone red like bicycle reflectors when their headlights hit it. After a local bridge collapsed, killing dozens, Mothman sightings ceased. Conspiracies began to arise. The sightings had all been near the TNT area, a WWII munitions factory, leading some to surmise that the Mothman was a military experiment or an alien visitor.
The mystery was never solved, though skeptics claim it may have simply been an owl. Nevertheless, the story inspired a book and several films, and Point Pleasant commemorates its cryptid with a storefront museum as well as a downtown statue.
Cryptids come from all kinds of sources—misunderstandings of natural phenomena, tall tales, and sometimes, sheer human ingenuity, as with Karachi's very strange fortune-telling fox woman, Mumtaz Begum. They can become a mascot for the place that claims them, a weird source of pride for the people that live there.
Is there a cryptid lurking in your hometown we should know about? Have your own Feejee mermaid or creepy chimera? Add it to the Atlas!
Step into an onion laboratory in 1959, where researchers bustle about to create the perfect pickled onion. A group of scientists at the British Food Manufacturing Industries Research Association in Surrey, England peels tubfuls of the vegetable, carefully pours vinegar in jars, and tests the flavor of the brine.
"The reason for this research is on matter of national prestige, for nearly all the best pickling onions come from abroad, mainly Holland and Egypt," says the narrator of the video above, archived by British Pathé. "Why, pray, shouldn't the cold roast beef of old England be served with English pickled onions?"
The laboratory boasted an array of impressive machinery to study the small white bulbs, including a large revolving drum that peeled the onions without causing the researchers to turn into a crying mess. Researchers in tweed suits pasteurized the jars, evaluated samples under microscopes, and analyzed the 'onion liqueur' in the jars.
But even with all the sophisticated tests and data analysis, the true seal of approval on whether an onion was been properly pickled came down to a panel of taste judges.
"Although this research may not seem to be of world shaking importance," says the narrator, "it is as well to remember that the scientists engaged in it have a truly breathtaking responsibility to the public."
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.
Red squirrels, or sciurus vulgaris, live and breathe all across northern Europe and parts of Siberia. But on the British Isles, their numbers, in recent years, have taken a nose dive.
That's thanks to, decades ago, human introduction of the eastern gray squirrel, or sciurus carolinensis, which is the kind of squirrel people on the East Coast of the U.S. are more familiar with but which can carry squirrelpox fatal to their red counterparts, in addition to harming broadleaf trees.
The decline in reds—there are some 3.5 million gray squirrels in Britain, compared to fewer than 140,000 red squirrels—has led to broad concern in the country, including, and perhaps especially, from Prince Charles, who developed the UK Squirrel Accord three years ago to confront the problem.
Earlier this week, one possible solution finally publicly emerged: a plan to feed gray squirrels oral contraceptives hidden in Nutella, according to the Sun. That plan could reduce gray squirrel populations by over 90 percent, officials said.
Gray squirrels enjoy Nutella, as many living beings do, and Prince Charles is said to prefer the plan because no squirrels will be harmed.
Tests on captive squirrels may begin soon, according to the Sun, with the chairman of the Squirrel Accord telling the outlet that, with regard to reining in the gray squirrels' population, "It is the most exciting prospect I have seen."
Which means that gray squirrels might unwittingly be confronted with an impossible choice: whether to sacrifice their fertility for a fleeting taste of chocolate perfection.
Maybe you don’t have a lot of street performers where you live, but all over the world they represent a web of underrepresented artists dedicated to performing live, day after day. It's exactly that fleeting, often unremarked quality of street music that led Daniel Bacchieri, currently a Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellow at CUNY, to launch the Street Music Map project in 2014.
“I was traveling to Ukraine and I saw a musician playing in the streets of Kiev. He was playing bandura,” says Bacchieri. At the time, Instagram had just released a feature that lets users share 15-second videos, so instead of just snapping a picture of the musician, Bacchieri recorded video. As he continued his travels, he found himself taking yet more videos of street musicians, posting them to his personal account. Eventually an acquaintance suggested that he bring them all together in one place, and the idea for the map was formed.
Bacchieri, who's from Rio Grande, Brazil, began by personally curating a collection of videos sent to him from like-minded users of Instagram. If he's sent one he likes, he then goes to great pains to geolocate the exact spot the musician is standing on, and adds it to the map, where visitors can click on a pin and check out the video.
In a recent Medium post about the state of the project, Bacchieri writes that the map now holds clips of some 1,200 artists spread across 93 countries. The project’s Instagram account currently boasts over 42,000 followers who can send him videos from anywhere in the world where they encounter a memorable busker. “I consider the Street Music Map to be a global report on street music,” says Bacchieri.
The map continues to grow as Bacchieri and his followers discover more and more street performers wherever they go. “I believe it’s going to be endless, and that’s awesome,” he says. As the number of artists recorded on the map increases, the scope of the project has been growing as well. In addition to the map itself, Bacchieri has started what he believes to be the first Spotify channel dedicated to street musicians, allowing listeners anywhere to experience these fleeting artists, even if they can’t catch them in the wild. Check out the playlist embedded below to see Bacchieri’s top 55 picks from the map to date.
Bacchieri says he's increasingly interested in giving the artists more time than the length of an Instagram video, so he's started producing short documentaries on certain artists. He's also launched a podcast, which again, he believes to be the first and only one on the subject. In that format, he’s able to sit down with individual street musicians and learn their backstories, such as the focus of the first episode, Alice Tan Ridley, a former teacher who now performs full time in New York City subway stations.
As the Street Music Map continues to grow, Bacchieri’s ambitions expand as well. He says that in the future he’d like to organize a street music festival, either live or streaming artists online from every corner of the globe. “That’s one of the goals of the Street Music Map. To give voice to anonymous, amazing artists.”
Correction: Previously we stated Bacchieri as having been from Sao Paulo, which was incorrect. This has been changed to Rio Grande.
With drivers speeding through their quiet streets at upwards of 60 mph, the tiny Scottish village of Hopeman have taken the law into their own hands. With hairdryers.
As the BBC is reporting, villagers ranging from elderly men to little girls have begun donning reflective vests and standing along the street, holding a hair dryer that they hope speeding drivers will mistake for a speed gun. Their efforts don’t seem to have necessarily slowed traffic any, but the locals hope that it will send a message both to the dangerous motorists, and to the actual police who would normally handle such things.
For their part, Police Scotland say that they are aware of the speeding problem in the area, and are continually addressing the issue.
Surprisingly, this is far from the first time this goofy scheme has popped up. A version of the hair-dryer-speed-gun trick in 2000, in the Oxfordshire village of Stanton Harcourt; a man in Palm Harbour, Florida who pulled a similar stunt in 2012; and even, in 2016, in Moscice, Poland, where someone set up a fake cop puppet which held a hair dryer. Apparently drivers who speed through residential neighborhoods aren’t just dangerous, they’re stupid too.
In Denmark, archaeologists have found a series of ancient fences arranged in concentric rings, closing off a huge area about the size of two large sports fields, the New Historian reports.
The fences were found this past September and enclose an area of more than 21,500 square yards. There are five rows of fences, one inside the other, which date back to the Neolithic period, which ended around 2,000 B.C. The rings were made from poles about six and a half feet in length.
Most mysterious, though, is the way in which they were arranged. The openings in each ring of fence were offset from each other—from the outside, you wouldn’t have been able to see the interior of the fenced in area, or walk straight through. The openings were big enough, though, that the archaeologists who found the fence don’t think the fences were necessarily meant as a defensive measure. Rather, they’re more like a maze.
Nothing has yet been found in the interior area, though, that suggests what the purpose of the space was. It may have been used for a ritual purposes, but “to put it simply, we just don’t know,” archaeologist Pernille Rohde Sloth said.
Rhea Eisenmann of Boston, Massachusetts, probably has more sweaters than you do. At last count, she had 110 of them, including a bright turquoise pullover with an orange-bordered hood, a felt jumper, and a chunky-knit facsimile of a New England Patriots jersey. She models them almost daily on her Instagram, and has been featured sporting them everywhere from Buzzfeed to Fox News.
Rhea is not a cold-intolerant Beacon Hill socialite—she is a two-year-old lovebird who happens to be bald. Rhea has Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease, a condition that attacks bird follicles and causes total feather loss. Her human companion, Isabella Eisenmann, has been raising awareness about the disease through a suite of popular social media profiles, called Rhea the Naked Birdie, filled with nude bird glamour shots.
Last August, the owner of Sock Buddies—a company that makes protective garments for birds who pick out their feathers—sent Rhea a white turtleneck. After Rhea wore it for a photoshoot, "many people started sending me messages about wanting to make her sweaters," Eisenmann says. So she posted Rhea's measurements, and the formerly Naked Birdie now gets about a sweater a day.
Eisenmann was, and is, floored by people's generosity. But perhaps she shouldn't have been. Across the world, contemporary humans have at least one thing in common—we can't stop knitting sweaters for animals in need.
You can tell a lot about a society by what its animals are wearing. Although it's not clear exactly when people began clothing their furry companions, odds are good that the first instances were utilitarian: there's evidence that Mesopotamian soldiers forged armor for their horses as far back as 2600 B.C., a trend that eventually spread to Greece and Rome.
In Victorian times—as animals went from useful tools to beloved family members—socialites enjoyed dressing up their cats and dogs as ladies and gentlemen. And in the hedonistic 1960s, American media prankster Alan Abel got a lot of traction out of the "Society for Indecency to Naked Animals," a satirical movement that aimed to put clothes on every wild beast "in the name of morality."
The modern world features an unprecedented number of well-dressed beasts. Designer labels now put out dog clothes. Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Halloween costumes for pets of all sizes, from mice to pigs. A racehorse wearing a three-piece tweed suit and cap made it into GQ, and just this past Friday, two Snuggie-clad goats were found comfortably gallivanting around Idaho. But when future humans look back in time to take our measure, odds seem good they'll settle on the animal in the hand-knitted sweater.
For starters, relevant examples abound. Let's begin with the case of the tiny jumpered penguins. In the late 1990s, a series of oil spills off of Australia's Phillip Island threatened local animals, including the island's large population of little penguins. Oil is very bad for penguins—it clumps their feathers together, exposing their skin to the cold, and when they try to preen it off with their beaks, it makes them sick.
When rehabilitation teams set out to combat the spill, "[they] found they needed a way to stop penguins preening oil from their feathers while they waited to be washed," says Lauren Jones, an officer at Phillip Island's Penguin Foundation. They found knitted jumpers did the trick, and they began soliciting them from local volunteers, through a program they called Knits for Nature.
For years, the Penguin Foundation stockpiled sweaters—"we received a few parcels of jumpers a week," says Jones. When oil spills occurred, they dipped into the reserves; the rest of the time, the penguins went as God intended. But then, in 2014, a local newspaper profiled Merle Davenport, a long-term volunteer knitter for the Foundation, and the story quickly gained traction worldwide. "A well-meaning journalist took it upon themselves to put out an online call for more jumpers… from that point on we received thousands of jumpers per week," from every continent, she says. "It was truly incredible."
Knits for Nature quickly had enough sweaters. By the time the next wave of media attention came around, in 2015, the Pengin Foundation had a PR strategy in place, directing people to other organizations in need of knitted items. Today, if you go to their website, you'll find a loud disclaimer: "The Knits for Nature program is closed," it says, in bold italics. "Please note that we do not require any further penguin jumpers at this time." (If people would like to help the Penguin Foundation, Jones emphasizes, the best thing to do is donate.)
The Penguin Foundation is far from the only group to have unwittingly set off an avalanche of tiny animal clothes. On January 7, 2015, after a rash of bushfires injured dozens of koalas in South Australia, the International Fund for Animal Welfare put out a call for cotton mittens to help the animals' paws heal. Within two days, they were set for the entire season. One woman from the UK recently quit her job in order to make more jackets and hats for rescue greyhounds. Crafters are perennially knitting sweaters for retired battery hens, even when the need is not immediate.
Even when direct contributions aren't possible, knit-clad rescue animals get an outsized amount of attention. This past winter, the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center, in northern India, dressed their pachyderms in giant sweaters to get them through a cold snap. Rather than outsourcing their knitting to concerned fans, Wildlife SOS taught women from the local Kalandar community to make them, as part of an empowerment initiative.
For a few weeks, you couldn't surf the internet without running into a picture of an elephant traipsing around in a patterned sweater. "The story definitely garnered a large response [from] supporters and donors," wrote the organization's co-founder, Kartick Satyanaryan, in an email.
All of this is extremely understandable. "In this day and age, when so many terrible things are happening, people find comfort in doing things for others," says Eisenmann. Jones agrees: "There is something very rewarding about sitting down and creating, with your own hands, something that will help another." And animals in sweaters have a self-evident appeal: they're cute, they're ungainly, and—when they're wild—a snuggly outfit makes them seem suddenly accessible, as though they've chosen to be part of our world. And unlike dressing up your dog, clothing a cold bird doesn't bring down the wrath of the RSPCA, or PETA.
But there may be something more to it than that. A battery hen is naked because she's spent her life in a tiny cage, laying eggs. A burned koala is suffering the consequences of human-caused climate change. Many naked birds—though not those, like Rhea, with Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease—lose feathers due to stress. Even a besweatered chihuahua is chilly because he's been moved from his natural habitat, the Central American desert, to a cold New England suburb.
Knitting a sweater for one of these creatures—or an oily penguin, or a cold elephant—can be seen as a fuzzy way of saying "sorry." That it plays great on Instagram is just a bonus.
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.
Sometime around 1977, John Moore of Truro, Massachusetts came back from a long beach drive and parked his beloved white Jeep Wagoneer in the garage.
This past Friday—February 24th, 2017—the Jeep finally came out again. As an excavator yanked it from under the sand, it emerged in crumpled pieces, its once-white exterior coated with rust.
As the property's current owner, John Musnuff, explained to the Cape Cod Times, Moore stopped taking his Wagoneer out after he began having trouble with the fuel line. Soon enough, nature took over. Sand began blowing into and over the car, and a whole dune eventually collapsed on top of the shed. For decades, "the Jeep sat entombed in the garage," the Times writes.
But this year, the town decided to let the sand have its way. On Friday, workers hired by the Conservation Commission dragged out the mangled body of the Wagoneer, to make space for the dune to continue to move across the beach. Musnuff popped off the car's hubcaps, for memory's sake, and watched as it was trucked off to spend the rest of its life, presumably, in a more appropriate landfill.
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.
At last night's Oscars, three unexpected words sent spectators into a state of bewilderment. No, not "La La Land"—"animatronic horse puppet."
Over an hour before the Best Picture announcement was bungled, presenters Leslie Mann and John Cho made reference to a robotic horse created by Creature Effects, Inc. The makers of this all-synthetic, animatronic creature scored an Sci-Tech Oscar at a ceremony held on February 11, with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences praising them for providing "increased actor safety, close integration with live action, and improved realism for filmmakers."
So, what does an Oscar-winning animatronic horse look like? Thankfully, Creature Effects has a YouTube channel. Let's take a look.
The horse, developed by Mark Rappaport, Scott Oshita, Jeff Cruts, and Todd Minobe, was originally created for the 2003 horseracing film Seabiscuit. In the video above you can see its lifelike eye movements and chewing.
Test footage from the "Luck" horse model shows how convincing the puppet is in race mode. It's only when the camera pulls back to reveal a metal frame that you realize the creature has been created by humans.
A flipping test from behind the scenes of the movie 300 reveals how the artificial horse integrates with actual equines.
And finally, in the video above, shot on location during the filming of True Grit, you can see an eye-patched Jeff Bridges enthusiastically waving dual pistols while sitting astride a moving fake-horse rig. Now that's Oscar-worthy.
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.
For refined, upper-class ladies in 16th-century Europe, getting a tan, especially on your face, was not a good look.
The implication of such coloring was that one must work outside, and thus, quite possibly be poor (cue gasps and swooning faints). So to make sure they didn’t get burned, some 16th-century ladies wore face masks called visards (or vizards) that covered their delicate visages. Unfortunately, the masks also made it so they couldn’t speak. And, look as if they belonged to an evil cult.
The visard was a very simple mask that nonetheless made quite an impression. Only a handful of surviving visards have ever been found. Luckily, the most intact specimen, the “Daventry Mask,” gives a clear picture of a visard’s construction. Found tucked away in the wall of a 16th-century stone building near the town of Daventry in Northamptonshire, the mask consists of an outer layer of black velvet, followed by layers of pressed paper, with a lining of silk on the inside. The oval face covering extends out to accommodate the nose, and there are small holes for eyeholes and an opening for the mouth.
Along with the mask, a small glass bead was discovered that would have been attached to a string behind the visard’s mouth hole. This bead (sometimes a button) was how the visard was kept on the face. As opposed to unseemly head straps, a lady sporting a visard would hold the bead between her teeth to keep the mask in place. If she wanted to talk, she'd have to remove the mask. This had the side effect of essentially silencing the wearer. In the Elizabethan era, when visards were at their pinnacle of popularity, this silence was generally viewed as adding mystery to a lady’s character.
One of the earliest references to such masks comes from a 1575 text called Description of England in Shakespeare’s Youth. The author describes the wearing of masks coming to England from a trend that started in France. For a time after the trend caught on, the visard was a high fashion item among the rich and socially active. In fact, one of the only other surviving examples of a visard is an accessory for a doll, rather than a full-size mask. The visard had apparently become so popular that even children’s toys were incorporating them. But the inherent creepiness of a blank, black face mask was apparently not lost on everyone.
In 1583, the Christian polemicist Phillip Stubbes released a pamphlet called The Anatomy of Abuses. Among various other screeds (one chapter is titled “On the evils and punishment of whoredom”), Stubbes describes what he sees as the horrors of the visard, writing:
When they use to ride abrod they have invisories, or visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, hee would think hee met a monster or a devil, for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them.
Despite their unsettling and silencing influence, visards are believed to have remained in vogue until at least the 17th century before fading into historical obscurity. Similar masks can be seen in paintings as late the 18th century. Today's fashion trends will no doubt look strange or creepy in a few centuries, but even in that far future, visards will still be high on the list of history's most terrifying fashion moments.
Friday night in Calgary, Theresa and Richard Couch had just sat down to take in a hockey game, when, a few minutes later, Theresa told the CBC, they "heard an explosion."
"Then my husband went into the hallway," she added, "and there was ice all over the rug and debris, and all the way down the stairs into the basement and a big, huge hole in the ceiling."
The Couches home had been hit by a falling piece of ice, but not just any falling piece: one which originated from a Bombardier Q400, a small jet operated by WestJet, a Canadian airline. The jet, the airline said, was approaching Calgary after flying in from Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.
No one was hurt in the incident, but an investigation is now underway. Meanwhile, the airline said, they told the Couches that they would be paying for the damage.
Still, Theresa Couch said they remained a little spooked. They've lived in the same home for over four decades, though, in the past couple of years, airplanes flying overhead have become a much more consistent presence.
