The citizens of Hull, in northern England, have been treated to a scent-free, hypoallergenic springtime treat. Earlier this week, 1,700 Lego daffodils sprouted in King Edward Square, a park in the city center, the Hull Daily Mail reports.
Bright yellow, tall, and studded with those trademark knobbly bits, the proud flowers are popular with visitors and residents, who have been posting a heck of a lot of selfies with them.
The daffodils will be taken down on Tuesday, April 18th. Presumably, their parts will then be disassembled, and combined into something fresh and new—just as if they were real.
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.
Meet Bruce Rideout, a 79-year-old Air Force veteran and retiree who lives in Lynn, Massachusetts, about 20 miles northeast of Boston. Bruce draws a monthly pension from his years working at the Lynn Water and Sewer Commission, and, this year, also got a tax refund.
All of which, normally, would be the entirety of his income, except for the little extra he just received, courtesy the federal government: two additional cents, presented to Rideout in the form a check from the Treasury Department, according to The Daily Item. “It’s unique,” he said.
He has no idea why he got it and zero plans to try to find out. Instead, he will frame the check and hang it on the wall of his home. As The Daily Item notes, the frame cost $82.15, or more than 4,100 times the value of the check—which seems about right for a check that might not even be worth the paper it's printed on.
The quickest way to anger a traveler is to interfere with their plans; reroute, delay or cancel them. Deprive them of information, make them guess. But on March, 23, 1932, crowds descended upon Paddington Station, London after paying expressly for the privilege of being kept in the dark. They enthusiastically waited for a train with no known destination. Even the conductors had no idea where they would go. They were going to be passengers on London’s very first Hiker’s Mystery Train Express.
The train was a novel promotion dreamed up by the railroad that would transport hikers to a secret spot where they would then be set loose to tromp through the English countryside. The hikers looked anything but prepared for a wilderness excursion: the women wore long coats, skirts, stockings and heels. The men were more reasonably attired, as men’s fashions allowed, but they still had on shiny brogues and brimmed hats. A functional accessory that many carried was a walking cane; one grinning girl leaned out of the train as it left the station and waved hers triumphantly at a news photographer’s camera. The trip had whipped up such a frenzy of interest that several newspapers republished an account that described 1,000 “bare-legged, bareheaded” would-be hikers armed with knapsacks and walking sticks who had to be accommodated on a second “hastily provided” train, whose 14 carriages were packed to capacity.
The Hiker’s Mystery Train Express was not a one-time novelty. It was part of a craze for mystery hiking that swept the globe—particularly England, New Zealand and Australia—during the 1930s. “Rambling” gained popularity throughout the 19th century, and walking clubs and groups sprang up. In 1931 the Ramblers Association was founded to protect the rights of British walkers and advocate for open hiking spaces. Many people were also feeling the devastating effects of the Great Depression, and hiking provided free entertainment.
Mystery hikes were not free, of course, but they were relatively cheap. The cost of the trip from Paddington Station was 4 shillings. (There were 10 shillings in a half-pound note, the smallest denomination of paper money in England at that time.) The Paddington trip was typical of how a mystery train worked: passengers plunked down their money for a ticket and were then provided maps and information once they boarded the train. According to the promoters, even the train conductors did not know where they were going until they were presented with sealed instructions. Once the group arrived at their destination, they followed their maps along the prescribed route and were usually served a meal along the way. The Paddington passengers were eventually set loose to ramble through the verdant woods and fields of Oxfordshire and Berkshire.
An account of mystery hiking in the May, 1937 issue of the New Zealand Railways Magazine reported that crowds about 700 strong patronized the country’s mystery hikes, circumnavigating routes around 10 miles long. In Australia, where mystery hikes were especially popular, thousands routinely swarmed the trains. In 1932 a crowd of over 8,000 flâneurs amassed for a mystery train departing Sydney.
In the United States, mystery hikes were more humble. They were largely a pastime of Boy Scout troops in the 1920s and ‘30s, offered as entertainment or a test of the boys’ wilderness prowess. Troops hiked locally rather than hopping on a train. Still, they were popular enough to be regularly covered in local newspapers. In December 1922, The Burlington Gazette delivered the tale of an Iowa troop who stumbled upon an unfortunate scene. “Their report states that the dog was frozen to the ground and they had to chop him loose,” read the account. “They buried him in a hole already dug, and one of the boys breathed a prayer for the canine soul.” Even more curious? The scout leaders who had mapped their route beforehand “noticed the dog and wondered if any scouts would bury it.”
Dead dogs aside, such excursions offered fresh air, exercise and affordable entertainment: what’s not to like? Well, plenty, according to critics. Mystery hiking was weirdly controversial.
First of all, mystery hikers received the same jibes as today’s “glampers”—people who partake in a glossy kind of outdoorsmanship that encompasses everything from renting out airstream trailers decorated in mid-century modern style to hiring teams to set up luxurious tents complete with cozy beds. In her book The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia author Melissa J. Harper writes that “serious bushmen … dismissed the hikes as senseless stunts.”
Mystery hikers were often labeled as rowdy; they smoked and drank. They were coddled on trips with tea service and lunches and entertained by live bands. They tore up the countryside and left a trail of trash in their wake. The real mystery, harrumphed an Australian newspaper article from 1933 was whether “it will ever be possible to take hundreds of people along without a trail of paper bags and banana skins from here to Halifax?” The New Zealand Railways Magazine gently mocked the hikers’ outfits: “Some seem to vie with each other as to who can wear the oldest clothes and still induce them to keep on; some wear collars and ties, shirts of various hues—and alas on a warm day, some have no shirts at all!” Motorists decried the ambulatory hordes they claimed blocked the roads.
Church leaders also frowned on mystery hiking. Hikes often took place on Sundays, and religious officials protested the events, believing they were tempting people away from worship. Baptist Reverend W.D. Jackson preached to his Melbourne church that railroads “baited” hikers with free tea and coffee and that they did so for “the sake of paltry profit and at the expense of the Sabbath”.
And finally, sexism reared its head. Many reports recorded the outfits of female hikers with alarm or bemusement; they were either dressed too appropriately for physical activity or not enough. Harper relays the words of the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane who complained that “Men getting into women’s clothes is quite bad enough but the reverse is worse. I know that young girls dressed in men’s garments would go to places where they would never venture in their proper attire.”
Such gripes did not deter the crowds. Mystery hiking peaked in the 1930s, and never recovered from a decline prompted by World War II. Today, you can still go on mystery hikes organized by community groups and parks, but they are more akin to the scouting hikes of yesterday: meet at an appointed spot, get led on a surprising wander through the wilderness. And you can safely assume that attendance will be well under 8,000. But that doesn’t mean all mystery has been sucked out of travel. For those willing to put their plans in the hands of a stranger, companies like Magical Mystery and Pack Up + Go have only ramped things up a notch by offering mystery vacation packages complete with a flight.
Such a quest will certainly cost more than four shillings, but you probably won’t have to bury a frozen dog.
Efficient sewer systems have long been a touchstone of modernity, differentiating a primitive settlement from a planned and sophisticated town or city. When studying the remains of ancient civilizations that flourished centuries ago, we are regularly amazed by their innovative systems for disposing of human waste.
The earliest and easiest form of disposal was to channel waste into the nearest body of water. This process was improved by the first clay drainage pipe, used in Babylonia as early as 4000 BC. The Mesopotamians also had cesspools of various sizes, a few of which were connected to a central system. There is even evidence of complex toilets and drains in ancient archaeological sites all around the world, including in Scotland, Pakistan, Rome, and Egypt.
After this promising start, sewer design evolved across centuries to meet the needs of growing populations, and to battle health hazards that came about due to poor disposal practices. London, for instance, faced a huge, smelly problem in 1858 dubbed the “Great Stink,” which was the result of mounting levels of untreated waste in the Thames and on the river banks. The Stink was eventually solved by a civil engineer who suggested a pattern of interconnected tunnels with outfalls outside the city limits, a system the city still uses.
Taking the long view of the history of human civilization, consider the importance of six places below, where remarkable innovations led to the modern-day sewers and sanitation systems we enjoy today.
This small Neolithic settlement on the coast of Scotland is known for being one of the best-preserved in Europe. It was also likely an extremely clean village. Some of the earliest-known toilets and sewer systems have been found at this site, which was inhabited between 3100 and 2500 BC. Residents would have had lavatory-like plumbing systems fitted into the walls of their huts.
Deep tunnels, lined with tree bark to make them watertight, carried water from the roof and waste liquids from the connected huts to the ocean nearby. Given the depth of the tunnels, it's believed that they were constructed before the structures aboveground, making this a very well-planned settlement. Considerable time and resources must have been used to build something as modern as an individual lavatory for each dwelling, an indication of the importance of personal hygiene within this ancient tribe.
The people of the Indus Valley in southeast Asia were also sticklers for cleanliness, as evidenced in the ruins of cities such as Mohenjo-Daro. Built around 2500 BC, it was one of the biggest cities of a sprawling settlement that was concentrated in the northwest of India and parts of Pakistan. It is one of the world’s earliest urban settlements, and home to the iconic Great Bath, an ancient public pool.
Residents of Mohenjo-Daro who preferred a more private spot for their ablutions had the option of bathing in washrooms in their own houses, located next to latrines on the street side. Some houses even had a second-floor washroom, as indicated by the remains of terracotta pipes and vents.
Many dwellings were part of a centralized sewerage system, and in the ones isolated from this network, people made use of soak pits and jars to clean up after themselves. The water and waste gathered from both these individual homes and from public facilities ran through covered drains made of baked bricks, reaching the nearby river after passing through screens made of wood.
Centralized sewage systems were also found in Harappa and Lothal. The Indus Valley had the advantage of being located next to a number of rivers, making sewage disposal easier. The Romans, too, found this useful when they attempted to construct a drainage system.
In the 6th century BC, the Romans were so pleased with the new sewer system they'd built, they named it Cloaca Maxima, or “Greatest Sewer.” Originally used to drain the marshlands to make way for the building of the Roman Forum, it was later expanded to carry waste from public baths and latrines. Roughly 11 aqueducts were linked to this system, which carried material from the city center to an outfall near the Ponte Rotto bridge.
As it turns out, the Romans’ pride in their creation was justified. The philosopher Pliny the Elder, writing 700 years after the system’s construction, was amazed by the sturdiness of the sewers. “Sometimes water from the Tiber flows backwards and makes its way up the sewers. Then the powerful flood-waters clash head-on in the confined space, but the unyielding structure holds firm,” he wrote.
Though it's in a more fragile state today than during Pliny’s time, it is still in use, and a small stream can be seen trickling along the outfall.
One of the problems the residents of Rome faced as a result of the Cloaca Maxima was a foul odor wafting through the structures it connected, due to a lack of sufficient vents. Londoners living near the Thames in 1858 also knew a thing or two about odor issues. The "Great Stink" that attacked the city during a particularly hot summer that year was caused by dumping untreated waste in the river’s waters and on its banks. The civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette turned the situation around with his plan to revamp the city’s sanitation network.
Bazalgette came up with a new design wherein interconnected tunnels transferred the city’s sewage to outfalls outside city limits. He also ordered the construction of sewage pumping stations to aid in the process. One of these was the Crossness Station in Bexley.
Finished in 1865, the station used four massive steam pumps to flush non-solid waste into the river at specific times, to get it out to sea much more quickly. Solid waste was put on barges and floated straight out to sea. The interior of the station was decorated in massive amounts of elaborate ironwork, giving the otherwise vile industrial site a delicately Victorian feel and earning it the nickname, “The Cathedral on the Marsh.”
The pumps, named “Victoria,” “Prince Consort,” “Albert Edward,” and “Alexandra,” respectively, were upgraded a number of times over the decades, until the site was finally decommissioned and abandoned in the 1950s. Today the site is listed as a historic building.
For the denizens of London, the coastal town of Brighton was an easy getaway, and in the mid-19th century, when its waters were touted to have medicinal properties, its popularity spiked—along with the local sewage levels.
Brighton's coastal cottages were built on porous chalk, and eventually the raw sewage in crude sewage pits began to seep through the walls of houses during the rainy season. In the 1860s, public pressure to improve the inadequate systems mounted.
In 1874, Sir John Hawkshaw designed a seven-mile, brick-lined sewer to transport Brighton's sewage to Portobello on the Telscombe Cliffs. Relying solely on manual labour, they built a sewer system that still serves Brighton to this day, and is a fascinating example of Victorian ingenuity.
Across the ocean, in neighboring France, the Parisians too came up with an innovative solution to keep their sewers working efficiently. In the 1850s, the engineer Eugene Belgrand attempted to modernize and bring uniformity to Paris’s underground sewage network. But despite these efforts, complete uniformity was not achieved and blockages became a problem in some tunnels. The solution? Sewer balls.
Wooden and iron balls of sizes suitable for the specific tunnel were given a push and bowled through the sludge. This innovation was displayed at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, the third Paris World’s Fair, and received glowing reviews in the press at the time. Today, these balls are on display at the Paris Sewer Museum, along with various other aspects of the city’s subterranean waste disposal network. They are still used to tackle particularly stubborn sludge.
On Sunday, while Richard Bell was flying home to Calgary after a two-week vacation in Mexico, he felt something drop into his hair, apparently from the overhead bins above. It was, he told Global News, a scorpion. Bell initially dropped it, before picking it up again and—perhaps predictably—getting stung.
That's when another passenger intervened, stomped on the arachnid when it reached the ground, and disposed of it in the plane's toilet. This was unfortunate, Bell said, "because when we landed everyone wanted to see it."
Bell was treated by medical personnel after the plane landed, but the injury, which he compared to a wasp sting, was not serious. The story might not have gotten much play outside of Calgary if Bell had patronized a different airline. He was flying with United Airlines, which, you probably already know, has had a very bad week.
Iegor Reznikoff shows no self-consciousness as he imitates the sound of a prehistoric bison in the middle of a Parisian hybrid café and Chinese restaurant. And frankly, no one seems to pay him any mind.
Reznikoff, a tall man dressed all in black, has the look of a musician, which he is. He is also an early pioneer in a field that has become formally known as archaeoacoustics, or sound archaeology. He is explaining his process for exploring prehistoric painted caves, a mix of systematic measurement and vocal experimentation.
Archaeology aims to infer things about the behavior of people of the past, mainly working back from physical structures and objects. Archaeo-acousticians want a sense of how the past sounded. Their methods include the careful examination of sites, known to have been used by humans, for clues about rituals performed there that might have included sound. They may also generate sound on-site to then measure the resonance or the echoes in a space.
Some use scientific instruments and mechanically produced audio to do that. Reznikoff is more old-school. A classical pianist with a PhD in mathematics, his first passion was early Christian music and chant. An expert on the structure and acoustics of Romanesque and pre-Romanesque churches, he visited his first prehistoric cave in the winter of 1983 with Michel Dauvois, who studied prehistoric sites and artifacts. Dauvois had heard one of Reznikoff’s recordings from a 12th-century abbey and was interested in getting his take on a prehistoric site.
The two visited the Grotte de Portel, a painted cave in the south of France near the Spanish border. The site had been discovered in 1908 by French naturalist Rene Jeannel, who would go on to become director of France’s national museum of natural history. At the time Revue Prehistorique reported on his finding of 40-odd paintings in black or red, mostly of animals but also two human figures—an unusual inclusion, according to the journal.
Upon entering the cavern, Reznikoff recalled, “I started to hum.” With this, one of his favorite low-tech tools, he established that certain parts of the cave have richer sound than others. He also thought he noticed another pattern. The placement of the images on the walls, it seemed to him, clustered around the most resonant points in the cave. This marked for Reznikoff the beginning of what would become decades of research into the acoustic properties of prehistoric sites.
Studying something as ephemeral as sound in prehistoric environments comes with a great deal of uncertainty. It relies on inference and interpretation.
“If you come to a room with good resonance,” notes Reznikoff, it doesn’t necessarily “prove they historically used resonance.” His goal has been to find some kind of evidence that those sound properties were noted by prehistoric visitors.
Archaeologists, Reznikoff’s sometime-collaborator Paul Devereux likes to say, used to look at the past as a silent movie.
“The idea of soundtrack came later,” says Devereux, whose current main project involves prehistoric tombs in the UK. Research on sites’ acoustic properties was initially sporadic, often poorly coordinated and considered somewhat fringe. The term “archaeoacoustics,” with its accompanying air of respectability, only dates back to 2003, he notes.
While sound might leave traces—indentations where a ringing stalactite has been repeatedly struck, or even the remains of instruments—these are rare finds. For Reznikoff, his key method has been to look for correlation between resonance and man-made markings, which he has continued to document across multiple caves in France, Italy and Spain. His theories as to why this occurs include both ritual purpose and a type of navigation involving human echolocation. He’s also interested in niches which, he says, resonate in particular ways that seem to mimic animals painted nearby.
But even the facts open to interpretation come with major caveats. It’s difficult to confirm that a space still has the same acoustics as it did at the time it was used. Earthquakes or erosion may have shifted the landscape. Some caves have been modified to accommodate modern visitors. At his burial ground research site, Devereux has to worry about changes that might have occurred during its use as more bodies were interred.
Then there is the debate over the “modern performance,” as Devereux refers to it. Needing to “experience the way a site itself behaves acoustically,” some researchers generate this sound using machines: something emitting a tone at a steady frequency, or fluctuating predictably.
Reznikoff is openly dubious about the use of tools like sound pistols to measure things like echoes. While they may offer more consistency repeated time after time, Reznikoff maintains sites should be tested as they would have been experienced in prehistoric times, notably with the human voice and the human ear. (He does use audio editing software to study the recordings he makes.) Reznikoff defends his approach, considered unscientific by some, as “anthropological.” The connection between niches in the walls and nearby animal paintings, he presents as an example, depends on interpretation and intuition. A machine would not see the space in the same way.
However, his methods make his findings difficult to replicate and to defend to skeptically minded audiences. Much of the existing caution around archaeoacoustics is around the level of certainty that can be achieved about its findings.
Certain practitioners veer into the high speculative: there are hypotheses, for example, about universal frequencies recurring across widely dispersed sites because of some deeper physiological resonance. Another of Devereux’s long-time collaborators, Robert Jahn of Princeton, also founded the Princeton lab that conducted research on ESP until 2007.
“I don't want to sound like I'm denigrating people's approaches,” says Chris Scarre, diplomatically, but some of the work in the field is, “floating a bit far away from being able to be able to pinned down in secure evidence.”
Scarre, professor of archaeology at Durham University in the UK and co-editor of the 2003 volume Archaeoacoustics points out that more researchers than in other areas of archaeology may have come from other disciplines. Musicologists or ethnologists may approach their research in different ways.
“The trouble with archaeoacoustics is it's always suffered with not having enough critical mass to create a sort of methodological rigor,” he says.
The field has been developing over the last 15 years, he notes, including simply the development of better communication between practitioners. However, “it’s difficult to work from what we've got to what we'd like to have,” namely a secure and consistent basis for a challenging area of research.
Scarre is, unsurprisingly, an advocate for a common standard for sound production and recording. He has, incidentally, also done research using mechanically generated sound on painted caves in Spain. His team, he said found “not strong correlation but some correlation.”
He compares the field’s growing pains to that of archaeoastronomy, another relatively new subset of archaeology. Archaeoastronomy involves the study of how ancient peoples viewed and studied the skies. The most basic example is the alignment of Stonehenge and the rays of the sun at the summer solstice, which suggests that those who built it had an understanding of astronomical phenomena. Theories can get much more complex.
People have shown Scarre incredible correspondence on paper, he says, but it’s another thing to prove they were perceived at the time. Likewise with sound archaeology.
“I'm not negative. I'm cautious,” he says of the research to date. “Can we persuade a skeptic?”
In the canon of animal kingdom rivalries, horse vs. alligator isn’t one that comes up a whole lot, but that might just be because we haven't been capturing it on tape.
The fight in the video above was filmed Wednesday in Florida’s Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park by a group of friends who told Fox 13 that they just happened upon the incident in the middle of a hike.
The two animals clashed after the horse, witnesses said, appeared to be trying to protect its offspring.
Left unanswered by the video is the question of which animal is, in fact, dominant, since after a couple passes from the horse, the gator manages to crawl off the trail, while the horse saunters back towards his group.
Judging by the astonished gasps of witnesses, though, that might not matter, since the real winners might be the humans watching it.
In the history of warrior cultures around the world—from Spartans to Mongols to Japanese samurai (don’t sleep on the Scythians, by the way)—few have maintained their martial swagger in the modern world as well as the Vikings, who raided and traded their way across Europe between the 8th and 11th centuries. Years of archaeological discoveries have provided a richer picture of Viking culture and economics, which weren’t all mead and pillaging and horned helmets that never actually existed. A new study from scientists in Denmark shows that Viking weapons also might not have been what they initially appeared to be.
Vikings used a range of weapons, among them swords, which were costly to make and therefore highly coveted and passed down within families. Some 2,000 swords have been found, and the Danish researchers examined three in unprecedented detail. For the first time they used neutron diffraction, which is like an X-ray but penetrates deeper into materials, on the blades and found that they were probably unfit for battle.
"This is the first study which allowed us to virtually 'slice' Viking swords, showing how different materials have been combined together," Anna Fedrigo, a materials scientist at the Technical University of Denmark, told Live Science. They found from the scans that Vikings used a technique called pattern-welding to make their swords, and they appear to have been made more for looks than strength or durability. These swords came from later in the Viking Age, so by that time raiding may have declined in importance, and swords may have been considered symbols of power, rather than tools of it.
When it comes to geothermal features, Yellowstone National Park holds an embarrassment of riches. Located largely inside the massive caldera of an ancient volcano, the park is home to thousands of geysers and hot springs, including Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic Spring. But of course humans just can’t have nice things, and pretty much ever since Yellowstone’s one-of-a-kind geysers and pools were first discovered, people have been throwing shit into them.
Yellowstone does not keep a centralized inventory of the things they have found in their geysers and pools, but related stories go back to before the National Park Service even existed. Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872, and it was originally the Army’s responsibility to protect it. But as it turned out, the military wasn't overly concerned with making sure geysers were left alone. In the early days of the park, that mostly meant laundry.
Yes, one of the most famous tales from that era is that an early expedition party used Old Faithful as a washing machine. According to an account shared by Frank D. Carpenter in his record of a trip to Yellowstone in 1877, The Wonders of Geyser Land, he and his traveling companions came upon Old Faithful and decided to experiment with “boiling” their clothes clean. The group put their soiled clothes in a pillowcase and threw it into the geyser’s cone. When it erupted, the clothes were sent flying over a hundred feet into the air. When they collected them, the churning, heated water had indeed cleaned them.
Emboldened by the results of their laundry experiment, they then clogged the geyser with “at least a thousand pounds of stones, trees, and stumps.” The geyser expelled all the rubbish and debris they’d choked the feature with, and they seemed pretty happy. As Carpenter says, “[Old Faithful] furnishes entertainment of unusual magnitude and duration.”
While representatives from Yellowstone could not confirm Carpenter’s account, that wasn’t the end of the park’s laundry experiments. “Soap was one of the things that visitors in the early days put into the geysers,” says Yellowstone spokeswoman Linda Veress. In the 1880s, it became a popular practice to throw soap into the geothermal features, where it would create a sort of film on the surface. The sudsy activity eventually became so popular that hotels and gift shops couldn’t keep bars of soap in stock. One ill-fated entrepreneur even tried to start a little laundry service using one of the seemingly dormant hot springs as a wash basin. “According to the park historian Lee Whittlesey, he carelessly dropped a cake of soap into the tub and a short while later, up went the clothes and the tent,” says Veress.
As park oversight and protections evolved over the years, especially with the advent of the National Park Service in 1916, such large-scale “experiments” pretty much died away. But visitors, the number of which also increased dramatically over the years, have never stopped throwing things into Yellowstone’s colorful wonders. “By the '50s people had thrown so much trash, rocks, and coins into the Morning Glory Pool that it became informally known as the ‘Garbage Can,’” says Veress. The Morning Glory Pool is a vibrantly colored hot spring in the Upper Geyser Basin, which got its name from the original blueish hue of its waters. Today, the delicate chemical composition of the pool has been forever altered by the things that tourists have tossed into it. “Over the last 150 years, because of people throwing stuff in there, the orange and yellow bacteria that once lived only in the coolest periphery of the spring have spread toward the center as the internal plumbing was fouled,” says Veress.
Objects can also clog up the works, turning once-active geysers and spouters into still ponds. Take the case of Handkerchief Pool, once as famous as Old Faithful. “It stopped functioning some time in the 1920s or '30s,” says Veress. “It stopped because people threw coins, broken bottles, rocks, hairpins, and a small horseshoe into it about a hundred years ago.” In recent decades the pool has shown more activity, but still remains largely forgotten despite its location near Old Faithful, in one of the most heavily trafficked portions of the park.
Attempts have been made to clean debris from Yellowstone’s features, but the process is complicated due to the extreme temperatures of geothermal waters, the depth and intricacy of natural plumbing, and the simple fact that efforts to clean or “fix” the features run the risk of doing additional damage. Currently there are only around four specialists on the park’s staff who handle cleaning things out of the ponds and geysers when the need arises.
According to The Geysers of Yellowstone, in 1950, Morning Glory was artificially induced to erupt in an effort to clean the trashed pond. The result is said to have blown out all sorts of items including bottles, cans, underwear, 76 handkerchiefs, and $86.27 in pennies.
Even today, after the practice of tossing things into Yellowstone’s features has been made officially illegal (“Fines for intentionally throwing items in the features can be up to six months in jail and up to $5,000,” says Veress), people still continue to treat the geothermal wonders like trash cans and wishing wells. “Coins are a popular thing that people throw in. Food items, cigarette butts,” says Veress.
But it’s not all trash. Despite all the modern rules and regulations put in place to protect Yellowstone’s delicate natural wonders, people just can’t manage to stop throwing their junk into them. “In 2014, a visitor from the Netherlands crashed a drone into the Grand Prismatic Spring,” says Veress. “Drones are prohibited in all national parks. It was recovered but not returned.”
Today, it seems self-evident that we shouldn't be tossing junk into delicate natural wonders, but for anyone who might still think it's no big deal, Veress puts it pretty simply. "I would say don’t do it," she says. "I would say that along with the increased visitation, all it takes is one person throwing one thing in there to spur on others to do it too."
Last December, India’s Supreme Court banned alcohol sales within 500 meters (about a third of a mile) of national and state highways. Meant to reduce drunk driving, the law bothered many of the country’s hotel, restaurant, and bar owners, who saw only two choices: move their establishments, or lose vital revenue.
The employees of Aiswarya Bar—located 150 meters from Highway 17, in Kerala—saw a third option. A few days before the law went into effect, they began building a small maze out of prefabricated concrete walls, leading from the building’s entrance to the street. When they finished, the distance from barstool to road had stretched three times its original length.
“We have constructed an extended way to reach the bar,” Aiswarya’s manager, Shiju P., told the Times of India. “Now it is 520 meters from the highway.”
“A walk before and after a drink will actually be good for health,” a neighboring vendor, who is considering a similar strategy, added.
According to the Times, this solution was acceptable to excise enforcers. Once you’ve bent space and time, regular old state laws are easy.
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 Middle East, a region of made-up borders and increasingly meaningless flags, language is identity. If an Arab man walks into a bar and says Zayek!, he’s Egyptian. If his Arabic is light and sing-songy, almost French, he’s from the Levant. If he says Shaku maku!, he is definitely Iraqi.
But in Iraq, a country that delights in fooling the uninitiated, shaku maku isn’t just a greeting. It’s a paradox. Roughly translated, it means: “What is everything and nothing?” Said anywhere else, it would sound like a joke.
The riddle at the heart of shaku maku seems to sum up the contradictions of the modern Iraqi experience. Baghdad, once a capital of literature, learning and high society, is now a grim city of endless checkpoints. The institution of Arab hospitality, elemental to Iraqi society, has been deeply damaged by years of sectarian warfare. A country where literacy was once near-universal now struggles to educate its children.
When you’ve lived with this for longer than you can remember, perhaps it makes sense to greet someone with an existential shrug.
Iraqi is perhaps the heaviest and the harshest-sounding of the Arabic dialects. “People often sound like they’re arguing,” says Zena Agha, a London-raised Iraqi-Palestinian. What it lacks in music, she says, it makes up for in its sly wit: “Levantine Arabic is more delicate, softer, melodic. But it’s not as funny in the way Iraqi Arabic is.”
Little has been written on the origins of shaku maku (شكو ماكو in Arabic), and what little exists can’t seem to agree; Hussein Kadhim, an associate professor of Arabic at Dartmouth University, said its origins “remain obscure” and that while there’s plenty of speculation, “none of [it] is reliable, and I would not feel comfortable recommending any of it.”
While accounts lack consensus, all point to ancient origins. Akeel Abbas al-Khakani, assistant professor at the American University of Iraq Sulimaniyah, credits Akkadian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia: akoon means “there is, or exists” he wrote in an email. Assimilated into Arabic, it becomes aku; add sha, which means “what,” and the negating ma, and you have shaku maku: what exists, what does not exist? “So it is an entire survey of somebody’s life in one sentence,” al-Khakani said.
Crucially, the phrase respects the strict division between public and private life that runs through Middle Eastern cultures: when asked shaku maku, one can offer everything or nothing in response. The phrase tests a willingness to engage in a long conversation, al-Khakani writes, and the response, warm or restrained, sets the ground rules.
Maku shi (“There’s nothing”) or alhamdulilah (“Praise be to god,” functionally meaning “All good”) are the easy ways out. They get the conversation going. But if you ask—particularly if you ask someone who trusts you—you might get the full litany of joys and sorrows.
“In other words,” writes al-Khakani, “it condenses the interplay of opposing forces: desire and discipline, individuality and sociality, and interest and disinterest, all cast in a measured, respectful, but nonetheless ambitious, phrase.”
Which is a lot to fit in “what’s up?”
For Agha, who is studying the Palestinian Territories for her master’s thesis at Harvard University, the phrase immediately flags her as Iraqi. Arabic speakers of the Levant (Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians) have a similar phrase, she says—shufi shumafi—but it’s rarely used, and it doesn’t carry the same sense of humor.
“It’s kind of got a twinkle in the eye—tell me, I want to know,” even if you don’t really want to know, she says. “Even as it asks something profound of you, it’s very cheeky.” Another Iraqi signature, shlonik, is similarly playful: instead of simply asking how you are, it asks: “What is your color?”
During the two years I spent in Baghdad working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, I heard shaku maku every day. I answered casually with maku shi, as did many of my Iraqi colleagues. The question wasn’t always freighted with a sense of paradox, nor was their response. But it didn’t have to be: they spent hours in grueling checkpoint traffic just to get inside the Embassy walls, and now they were looking out at their city from the green tint of blast-proof windows. That’s paradox enough.
“I think it might show the confused and curious Iraqi personality,” says Iraqi expatriate and Chevy Chase, Maryland resident Ali Sada, of shaku maku. “It shows that we care about everything that happened with the other, but also it shows we don't know anything specific, so we come up with this weird question.”
Sada grew up in Nasiriyah, in Iraq’s predominantly Shi’a south. He was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, exiled to Jordan, and returned to Baghdad to help the “coalition of the willing” build democracy in Mesopotamia, spending years working on western-backed civil society projects.
“For me, I was born with shaku maku in my blood,” he says. “I see it perfectly normal. Nothing unusual about it.”
Maybe shaku maku is just a phrase. Or maybe it really does gather the Iraqi experience—the smirking humor, the fatalism—into two words. Maybe it’s everything. Maybe it’s nothing.
We've probably wondered if we're alone in the universe for as long as we've been self-aware and gazed into the night sky. There could be intelligent life, maybe, but also perhaps some lonely, tiny cells somewhere that have managed to survive in some livable oasis in the cold, dark expanse of space. NASA says that it might be closer than we thought.
The agency announced Thursday that they've found evidence of hydrogen gas pumping into an ocean beneath the surface of Enceladus, a moon orbiting Saturn. Combined with carbon dioxide, the hydrogen could provide the right conditions for life "as we know it," according to NASA.
“This is the closest we've come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment,” administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said. ”These results demonstrate the interconnected nature of NASA's science missions that are getting us closer to answering whether we are indeed alone or not.”
The gas was sniffed by Cassini, a spacecraft launched in 1997 that has been orbiting and studying the prominently ringed planet and its moons for years.
What might life there look like, should it exist? Probably nothing to get too excited about, and nothing you could see with the naked eye. We may know more in a decade or so, after the launch of the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft headed to Saturn with advanced detection instruments, slated to lift off in the 2020s.
For Groucho Marx, sharing a surname with the author of the Communist Manifesto wasn’t winning him any friends in Middle America at the height of the Red Scare, and his pathological inability to hold anything sacred wasn’t helping, either. But according to files released to Michael Best, where he finally crossed the line for one couple - leading to them calling on the FBI to investigate him immediately - was when he used the country’s name in vain.
If the Bureau had followed through on this tip, this would mean Marx would have beaten fellow comedian George Carlin to being investigated over a pun by a good nine years. But the FBI’s response, written by J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary was, shall we say, diplomatically noncommittal.
There was a pretty good reason for this, though not one our outraged couple could have known. The Bureau was already investigating Marx and had been doing so for years. The FBI had opened a file back in 1953, after an informant claimed that Marx was generous contributor to the Communist Party of Hollywood.
The next paragraph - as well as huge chunks of the file - is almost completely redacted, under the ominous “national security” b(1) exemption. Which for a sixty year old joke, is a hell of a punchline.
One day in early 2004, Armando Parra Sr. unlocked his Key West barbershop and found something menacing waiting for him: there, in the middle of the floor, was a sprung wire trap with a rotisserie chicken inside. The latest weapon in an ongoing battle to manage the island's feral fowl population, Parra had recently been named the city's official chicken-catcher, charged with capturing as many of the birds as he could and deporting them upstate. But not everyone wanted him to do his job.
Parra had been excited to get the gig, selling branded t-shirts and interviewing happily on CNN. "I didn't realize it was going to be like this," he later told the Miami Herald. He had learned the first lesson of island chicken management: it's almost always too soon to crow about success.
Over the past few decades, island destinations from Bermuda to Hawaii have had to contend with an influx of feral chickens. Like seagulls in cities or rabbits in public parks, these animals thrive in semi-natural environments, making themselves right at home and presenting a multitude of challenges to their human neighbors.
If you’re strutting around Key West, odds are you’re going to run into a feral chicken or three doing the same thing. They’re everywhere, waking honeymooners with their squawking early in the morning, scratching up local gardens in the afternoon, and stealing from snowbirds’ plates at dinnertime. Their ubiquity has led to a certain cultural cachet: “They are an iconic part of Key West,” says Tom Sweets, executive director of the island city's Wildlife Center. "You'll see them on signs, restaurants, businesses… the tourists love them."
As befits such a totemic animal, the Key West chicken's origin story is a blend of fact and legend. Some people say the birds came over with early settlers, who brought them as a source of eggs and meat. The advent of supermarkets made these birds less necessary, and their former owners set them free. Others maintain that they're descendants of fighting cocks, imported by cigar workers from Cuba starting in the 1860s, and liberated after the sport was outlawed in Florida in 1986. (The truth, Sweets says, is probably a little of both.)
Since throwing off the bonds of domesticity, these chickens have developed new skills, social structures, and lifestyles. Some of these habits are closer to that of the red junglefowl—the wild ancestor of all domestic chickens, which still roams free in the forests of India and southern China—while others are novel adaptations, inspired by their new situation.
Like red junglefowl, Key West's feral chickens will fly into trees to escape danger, and tend to form small rooster-led social groups. "The feral population is pretty disease-resistant, and they're pretty tough and hardy" compared to domestic chickens, says Sweets. "They have the skill to live on the street."
This skill, combined with the island's lack of large predators and a law against killing chickens on public property, has made for a steady supply of the birds. This can get a bit stressful. Key West's human population is also a mix of seasoned locals and relative newcomers—and, excited tourists aside, the average person's level of chicken tolerance tends to match the length of time they've been around. "Half the island loves them and half the island hates them," says Sweets.
There are reasons for either stance. On the one hand, the chickens are colorful, funny, and great at pest control. On the other hand, the chickens poop in convertibles and pools, and ruin landscaping while scratching for worms. Snowbirds who've flown down for a restful winter find themselves woken up at dawn.
Chickens also cause neighborly disputes: if someone starts feeding a flock, they’re perfectly willing to go against their wide-ranging foraging instincts and hang around that person’s house every day, bothering the people next door. (Feeding chickens is technically illegal—but, Sweets says, "half the island does it anyway.")
Currently, the Key West Code Compliance Department adjudicates individual chicken-centric conflicts between people. But over the years, the city has tried different strategies to manage the population on a wider scale. The government tried rounding them up themselves, and shipping them away, but this was resource-intensive and garnered a lot of public backlash. Parra, the chicken-catcher, tried his best to do the same thing, but after chicken rights activists sabotaged his traps and further vandalized his barbershop, he quit.
So in 2011, the city tried something new: they asked the Key West Wildlife Center to help them by taking care of those birds that can't take care of themselves. In a typical year, Sweets says, the Center takes in about 1400 sick, injured, orphaned, or unwanted chickens, rehabilitates them, and places them somewhere off the island.
"We do it alongside our wildlife rescue operations—I guess you could say it's a chicken rescue," Sweets says. "We find them homes in a better area for them." Sometimes this means a 12,000-acre free-range ranch in Okeechobee County. Other times it means a mom-and-pop egg operation, or a family who wants an unusual pet. In that last case, the chicken comes with a certificate signed by Key West's Mayor.
On the spectrum of possible chicken crackdown strategies, Key West falls solidly in the middle—not completely lenient, but not too harsh either. Other islands handle things very differently. In Bermuda, which has been covered in feral fowl since a hurricane knocked down hundreds of coops in 1987, the government hopes to straight-up eradicate the population, which they say destroys about $100,000 worth of crops per year.
Their plan involves a combination of brute force and public whistleblowing. "If you find chicken eggs, destroy them," the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) advises on their website, which also features a giant button that says "Report a Feral Bird Problem." There is a $3,000 penalty for letting a chicken loose in Bermuda, and the DENR uses traps, nets, and poison bait to cull the birds.
Government employees are also allowed to shoot the birds on sight—an unusual provision in a place where guns are largely forbidden, and one that, according to resident Les Center, often backfires. "Most of the employees hired to do this job are really lousy shots," he writes. Last October, DENR took heat after what was essentially a chicken-focused drive-by shooting: employees in a van opened fire at a small flock that was strutting along a public beach. (DENR did not respond to a request for comment.)
In Kauai—which legend has it also inherited its chicken problem from a coop-destroying hurricane—the government has taken the opposite tack. "They pretty much just leave them alone," says Eben Gering, a biologist who studies feral chicken genetics on the island. Like in Key West, the island's thousands of chickens enjoy legal protection on public property, but not private.
Kauians generally don't mind them, though—"they're like pigeons here," Gering says—and state-sponsored efforts to manage them, including a free trap rental program, have been discontinued. For the most part, chickens on Kauai just go about their lives, eating bugs and seeds and, according to one local blogger, the occasional slice of Costco pizza.
Despite this blissful life, it's possible that some have farther-reaching plans. "Feral chickens are increasing in number on some of the other islands," says Gering, including the Big Island, Maui, and Oahu. While it's unclear where they're coming from—Kauai may or may not be the culprit—the trend doesn't show any sign of stopping.
This last scenario is Key West's nightmare. Sweets refuses to send rehabilitated chickens anywhere that resembles where they came from—no little islands, no predator-free ecosystems. Recently, "there was a guy on an island up in the Carolinas," he says. "He wanted to adopt them, but we refused."
"If you release some feral chickens on an island like that, it's going to end up just like it is in Key West," says Sweets—a situation that, no matter how much you like it, you wouldn't wish on someplace else.
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.
A group of engineers and students at the University of Michigan have created the world’s largest hand-solvable Rubik’s cube, and it only took years of their lives.
Installed on the second floor of the college’s GG Brown building, the giant cube was created by a group of seven students who have come to be known as the “Sublime Seven.” According to ABC 7, the giant toy replica was created with over 1,500 pounds of aluminium and steel.
Creating the large scale plaything turned out to be much more difficult than they’d anticipated, and the four students who originally started the project actually graduated before it was finished, requiring three more students to come on and assist. The original idea came from the lead engineer, Samuelina Wright who had played with a Rubik’s cube as a child. Wright, who teared up during the unveiling of the piece, even delayed a confirmed post-graduation job with Boeing to finish the cube.
Plans are in the works to build a gazebo or similar structure where the cube can be permanently displayed outdoors, for all to see and, maybe, solve.
Thanks to a series of typhoons that hit northern Japan last year, the potato crop was poor, which has led to a very big problem this year: potato chip scarcity.
Look at these empty shelves, which normally would have held a full complement of flavors from Calbee (try the spiced cod roe variety), Japan's leading potato-chip maker:
Potato chips, Bloomberg reports, are a "big deal" in Japan, meaning that the secondary market for tasty snacks is pretty hot right now, with some bags of chips on sale for up to 1,250 yen, or around $12. That's six times the normal price.
The worst news might be that there's no telling when the "Potato Crisis" will end. Calbee has said they are considering importing more American potatoes, or possibly harvesting some potatoes in the country early. For now, chip fans in Japan will just have to wait—and social media, it turns out, has been a good place to post one's laments.
A group of engineers and students at the University of Michigan have created the world’s largest freestanding, hand-solvable Rubik’s cube,* and it only took years of their lives.
Installed on the second floor of the college’s GG Brown building, the giant cube was created by a group of seven students who have come to be known as the “Sublime Seven.” According to ABC 7, the giant toy replica was created with over 1,500 pounds of aluminium and steel.
Creating the large scale plaything turned out to be much more difficult than they’d anticipated, and the four students who originally started the project actually graduated before it was finished, requiring three more students to come on and assist. The original idea came from the lead engineer, Samuelina Wright who had played with a Rubik’s cube as a child. Wright, who teared up during the unveiling of the piece, even delayed a confirmed post-graduation job with Boeing to finish the cube.
Plans are in the works to build a gazebo or similar structure where the cube can be permanently displayed outdoors, for all to see and, maybe, solve.
*Correction: The Rubik's cube is not, as the article previously stated, the world's largest hand-solvable Rubik's cube, which you can look at here. The headline has also been updated.
The early 1970s were a boom time for postage stamps. The U.S. Postal Service, which had reorganized itself at the beginning of the decade, cranked up production and was releasing ever more—and ever more interesting—designs. "Larger stamps, with more color, and many varieties of novelty, seem to be the order of the day," wrote Boys Life in 1972. Where collectors once had to choose largely between different versions of the same great men, they could now get women, animals, buildings, and more.
Despite all these riches, there was still one topic you couldn't collect a stamp about: stamp collecting. To a certain segment of enthusiasts, this was a disappointment. According to R.R. Higgins—author of the column "The Stamp Man," which ran in the TheRepublic newspaper of Columbus, Indiana—philatelists frequently wrote in to the USPS specifically to request a stamp-collecting stamp.
So in October of 1972, the Postal Service announced that they would soon throw a bone to this particular species of loyal customer. The next month—on the 125th anniversary of the very first official U.S. postage stamp—they would release a commemorative stamp to honor stamp collecting. They hired one Frank E. Livia to design it, and it would cost eight cents. They even invented a new size for it: "semi-jumbo," a compromise between the normal commemorative size and the "jumbo" size, which had recently been invented for a wildlife-themed set.
This news pleased collectors. "Stamp collecting, the hobby of millions in this country, gets its due recognition," opined the Associated Press. "The thought occurs to me that it is also being issued during Thanksgiving season," wrote Higgins. "No doubt the USPS is… issuing up prayers of Thanksgiving for the money we have poured into their coffers." His and other columns printed news of the upcoming design, complete with somewhat tautological ordering instructions: "Collectors may send self-addressed envelopes with remittance… to 'Stamp Collecting Stamp, Postmaster, New York, NY 10001.'"
Livia took his assignment quite literally. He based his design around the first ever U.S. postage stamp, which was released in 1847 and featured a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Over the course of his career, Franklin served as postmaster general several times—first for Philadelphia, then for the British-helmed American colonies, and finally, after the Second Continental Congress, for the newly declared independent colonies.
Although stamps did not exist during Franklin’s lifetime, when the U.S. did start issuing them, in March of 1847, they chose to honor their first postmaster by using his portrait.
Livia placed an entire, exact replica of the 5-cent Franklin Stamp smack in the middle of his 8-cent Stamp Collecting Stamp. A large black magnifying glass juts into the frame, completely encircling the Franklin stamp (which, despite the instrument's presence, seems to maintain its original size). On the right side, a white serif font declares the theme: "Stamp Collecting." The "8" in “8c.” is huge—it looks, fittingly, like a vertical infinity sign. The background color is a swingin' '70s turquoise.
When the stamp was finally released, it was greeted with both confusion and derision. In the Asbury Park Press, a stamp columnist called it a “postal horror.” “Hopefully, postal officials will learn some day that there is a difference between poster art and stampic art,” he wrote, derisively. “The new issue looks more like a label issued by the West Burlap Stamp Club.” To make matters worse (the stamp is bad—and such small portions!) production was delayed for weeks, because the government’s go-to adhesive makers went on strike. (This was probably a coincidence.)
Compared to the era’s hits—such as June 1972’s four-in-one Cape Hatteras stamp collage, which got rave reviews—this was a certifiable dud. Today, you can find one for sale for just 60 cents, which, with inflation, is barely more than the 8 cents it cost when it came out.
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth a try. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.” Of the many stamps he appeared on before and since, Franklin might like this one the best.
Stamp of Approval is an occasional column that explores the designs and backstories of the world’s strangest stamps. Have a stamp you want investigated? Stick it in an email to cara@atlasobscura.com.
In 1822, a resident of Bothmer Estate near Mecklenburg, Germany shot a stork out of the sky. When he ran to gather up the body, he was shocked to find that the stork had already been shot, with a long spear somewhere in or above Central Africa. Not only did this "pfeilstorch," or "arrow-stork," prove itself to be extremely badass—it also let scientists know once and for all that birds migrate over Africa.
Okay, now fast forward to 2017. Our new pfeilstorch is a Canada goose with a massive arrow stuck in her neck, waddling around Amherst, New York and throwing people into a frenzy.
"Everyone's been looking for [her]," local resident Christine Hausrath told WKBW. While everyone wants to help the goose, no one can catch her, and representatives from the SPCA and the Department of Environmental Conservation have been following up calls from citizens only to find the animal long gone. "The SPCA and others are literally on a wild goose chase," summed up Nalina Shapiro of WIVB-TV.
The arrow goose is, generally, behaving as though nothing's wrong. In a Snapchat video sent by a viewer, she swags around with other geese, dabbing at the grass with her beak. (The videographer has captioned the video, simply, "How do.")
So the new plan is this: if you see the goose and it's nesting or otherwise sitting still—or appears to be in distress—give the police a call. "Maybe we can get out there, the goose won't leave the nest, won't leave its eggs, and hopefully we can work to get that arrow out," says Gina Browning of the SPCA.
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.
While renovating a landmark Macy's department store in downtown Spokane, Washington, an old wallet recently dropped out of a disassembled drainpipe. There was no money inside, but what workers found, and shared with reporters and editors at The Spokesman-Review, was valuable in its own right: impressively preserved receipts and identification documents belonging to one Isolde Zitzewitz.
Zitzewitz's wallet revealed that she had served in the Women's Army Corps, and a nephew confirmed to The Spokesman-Review that she had a long military career. She graduated high school in Oregon in 1941 before moving to Spokane and then San Diego, where she died in 2009.
Her nephew said that she never mentioned losing the wallet, which also contained a photograph of Zitzewitz's niece. The receipts date to as late as 1958, suggesting that was the year Zitzewitz lost it. It remains a mystery how it ended up in the pipe. “The best we can tell, that was an old roof drain,” Justin Overton, who's overseeing the Macy's renovation, told The Spokesman-Review. “It could have just as easily stayed wedged in there, and went out in the trash. We’d have never seen it.”
The wallet will now be sent to Zitzewitz's nephew for posterity.
