Trace the history of American laws allowing the impeachment of elected leaders, and the trail leads back to a very different place and time—14th-century England, under the House of Plantagenet. What did it take to get impeached in the 1370s and ‘80s? Offenses included: selling a castle, accepting bribes to release captured ships, and failing to properly guard the sea.
This was well after Richard the Lionheart but well before all the most famous Henrys, the medieval period that was the setting of Shakespeare’s earliest English histories. King Edward II, whose reign began in 1327, when he was 14, led England through a series of military victories. But toward the end of his life, his court had become so riddled with corruption that the parliament of 1376, which tried to address the problems, became known as the Good Parliament. It was responsible for the first impeachment in English history.
The impeached man, Baron William Latimer, the fourth Baron Latimer, was part of a shady gang of political figures close to the King’s third surviving son, John of Gaunt. Latimer had a long career of military and public service, including acting as governor of Brittany and fighting in the Hundred Years' War. But by the 1370s, he was spending his time with John, a merchant named Richard Lyons, and the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, who was said to be so unscrupulous that she took the rings from the king’s hand when he died. The Good Parliament wanted to beat back their control over the court, so they used a never-before-exercised power that allowed them to strip him of his various offices.
What exactly did Baron Latimer do to justify impeachment? The list of his misdeeds, according the 1892 Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sir Leslie Stephen, included:
Oppression in Brittany
The sale of the castle of St. Saveur to the enemy
Releasing enemy ships after taking a bribe
Keeping fines that were meant to be paid to the king
Having the Crown repay loans that never existed in the first place.
Essentially, self-interest, self-enrichment, bending the rules for personal gain—being a jerk. Baron Latimer was impeached, and he lost his seat on the Royal Council and went to prison, where he languished for just a year before the king died and John of Gaunt used his influence to secure Latimer’s release.
Latimer’s impeachment set off a string of impeachments in the 14th- and 15th-century courts of England. Between 1376 and 1450, there were at least ten documented, according to a 1990 article published in the Justice Systems Journal. Most of those incidents did not have written articles of impeachment or, at least, not any that survive. But in another high profile impeachment, by the Wonderful Parliament of 1386 (presumably even better at life and morality than the Good Parliament), the subject of the controversy, Michael de la Pole, demanded that the articles of impeachment be formally written out. In that case, they included:
Purchasing lands of the king for cheap
Spending tax money for a different purpose than it was originally intended
Failing to guard the sea as it was supposed to be guarded (or, in one formulation, "neglect of keeping of the sea")
Granting pardons for murders when he wasn’t supposed to
Not paying 1,000 marks to save the city of Ghent from its enemies, and therefore losing the city of Ghent.
The king at the time, Richard II, was reportedly upset to hear about de la Pole’s offenses: “Alas, alas, Michael see what thou hast done!" he’s supposed to have said. De la Pole was eventually accused of treason and fled to France where he lived out his days. Sad!
The USS Oriskany, a 888-foot aircraft carrier launched just after World War II, led an eventful life. It saw combat in Korea and Vietnam, and suffered a massive mercury fire. It made cameos in several films about the Korean War, and even hosted a ballet performance while docked in Manhattan in 1952.
It also had an eventful death. On May 17, 2006, after a few decades of retirement, Oriskany was towed 24 miles south of Pensacola. A Navy team filled it with 500 pounds of strategically-placed explosives, and detonated them in a series of bursts. Thirty-seven minutes later—much more quickly than anyone expected—the ship had sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it began its afterlife as the world's largest recycled artificial reef. (Although a larger one has since been built in the Mexican Caribbean, that one is made out of thousands of concrete pyramids that were constructed for the purpose.)
Back when it floated, the Oriskany was prized for its size and speed—it could tote whole planes across the ocean, after all. Now that it's underwater, though, its immobility is its strong suit. When ocean currents hit the massive structure, they form stationary waves, trapping tiny plankton that would otherwise be swept along.
Small, hungry fish follow behind, as do their own predators, such as red snapper and scamp groupers, and their predators, such as tiger sharks and hammerheads. Meanwhile, crawlier creatures take refuge in its many crevasses. Just a week after it was sunk, one early diver reported, it had been almost completely colonized by tiny newborn crabs.
Artificial reefs are considered economically beneficial—a steady supply of congregating seafood means more money for fishermen, and those enthusiastic schools of scuba divers don't hurt, either. Making reefs out of Navy ships also saves the government the cost of either scrapping retired ships or keeping them afloat.
The Oriskany will never pass for natural, though, and its environmental impact is still up in the air. Although the Navy removed most blatantly hazardous materials from the ship before sinking it, they ended up leaving in some insulation, paint, and fiberglass that contains polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, a harmful chemical that was banned in the U.S. in 1979. Scientists are currently on the lookout for PCB traces inside of fish.
In the meantime, for eleven years now, the Oriskany has been slowly remaking itself as a wildlife habitat. (Fans now call it the "Great Carrier Reef.") Divers describe a ship's tower colonized by sea urchins and barnacles, with barracuda patrolling the empty windows, and rays dipping in and out of holes eroded in the flight deck. SCUBA diehards flock to what is essentially an ideal diving scenario, a sunken ship.
Occasionally, the carrier will host a visitor from its old life, either temporarily, as a diver, or permanently—the ship's veterans occasionally ask to have their ashes interred there.
Although the Oriskany is the largest ship to become an artificial reef, it's only one of dozens that have been granted this type of rebirth. Former US Navy vessels are currently housing crabs, fish, sharks, and divers everywhere from Hawaii (a minesweeper, the USS Scrimmage, sunk way back in 1982) to New Jersey (the latest recruit, a tugboat called the Tamaroa, famous for rescuing near-victims of 1991's "Perfect Storm," and sunk earlier this month).
Together, they form a curious ecosystem—war machines that, after their death, have been called upon to support life.
Hidden off the beaten path on the slopes of Mauna Kea, the dormant Hawaiian volcano, there's a rough stone spire that marks the spot where the famed botanist David Douglas is said to have died. But what this monument to the namesake of the Douglas-fir doesn't allude to is the story of the strange events surrounding Douglas's death. There is no mention, for example, of the former convict who will likely always be implicated.
“One lives through hell, while the other does what British people love most, which is finding things for gardens," says Peter Mills, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. "These two [men] meet up for breakfast on the other side of the world, and from that moment on, one is dead and the other’s life is forever changed." Mills has studied the details of Douglas’s death, and to his mind, what happened is less of a mystery than it is a classic case of 19th-century classism.
First, some background. Douglas was born in the Scottish village of Scone, and grew up gardening in a nearby palace before attending a series of prestigious schools to learn botany and horticulture. During the mid-1800s, he traveled to America a number of times to research, collect, and catalogue the flora of the country. On his second trip, in 1824, he set out to explore the Pacific Northwest on a plant-gathering mission for the Royal Horticultural Society. It was after this excursion that he became forever associated with Pseudotsuga menziesii, now called the Douglas-fir (even though technically it is not a fir, since it does not belong to the genus Abies, but who’s counting).
Douglas returned to England in 1827, bringing the Douglas-fir and a large number of other plant species along with him. All told, the botanist ended up importing some 240 different species of plant life to Britain, but his adventures didn’t end there. He would make one final voyage to the Americas in 1832. For two years, he explored the Columbia River and the area around San Francisco, before finally arriving on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1834.
Not long after he arrived, Douglas learned that he would have to stay in Hawaii for several months before he could secure passage back to Britain. In the meantime, he decided to hike the area on and around Mauna Kea, staying with some locals on his way. On the morning of July 12, he stopped by the hut of one Edward "Ned" Gurney to ask for directions, and ended up staying for breakfast.
Gurney was an Englishman from Middlesex, about the same age as Douglas, but the two couldn’t have been more different. “Gurney is raised just above street urchin,” says Mills. Where Douglas had come up surrounded by education and palace finery, Gurney had run afoul of the law at an early age and had been paying for it ever since. According to Mills, Gurney had been caught stealing around three shillings worth of lead fixtures off a house, and as punishment, he was sent to the infamous Botany Bay penal colony in Australia. At the time there were only three sentences for those sent to the Australian penal settlements: 7 years, 15 years, and life. Gurney got the lightest sentence.
Eventually Gurney was sent to work on a ship, and by simply disembarking in Hawaii, he was able to start a new life. He became a cattle hunter, establishing himself in a hut on the slopes of Mauna Kea. Gurney had been on the island for years by the time Douglas stopped by for breakfast that fateful morning.
It’s unclear what the two men talked about during their meeting. What we do know is that once Douglas left Gurney’s hut, Gurney followed him for a bit, warning him to look out for some pit traps he had dug to catch wild cattle. Later that day, Douglas was found dead in a cattle pit, having been trampled by a wild bull that had fallen into the pit on top of him.
Gurney was informed of Douglas’s death by a pair of locals, and rushed to the scene. “What Gurney does is, he shoots the bull, he gets the body out, he pays these guys to take the body about seven miles down the hill. [And this is] after sewing it up in a leather hide, so that the body can be brought to Hilo, the main town there where missionaries are hanging out,” says Mills. “Which isn’t, to my mind, the actions of a guy who just killed him.”
Gurney accompanied Douglas’s body to Hilo, bringing Douglas's terrier, Billy, and the dead man's remaining possessions with him. He gave his version of the events surrounding Douglas’s death to the local missionaries, and everything seemed to be in order. Yet almost immediately, suspicions began to swirl about Gurney’s role in Douglas’s death. Rumors spread that Douglas had been careless in flashing his money in front of Gurney. “One of the reasons he was suspected was that he was a Botany Bay convict. You say it and immediately you have this sense of a blood-thirsty kind of guy,” says Mills.
Rumors that Gurney killed Douglas continued to dog the cattle hunter for the rest of his known life. Mills says that a thorough investigation into Douglas’s death did take place, and the botanist’s wounds were deemed consistent with being trampled by a bull. But each time the story of Douglas’s death was revisited, mention of Gurney’s possible role just kept coming back up. Even today, Gurney is almost exclusively remembered as the man who may have killed David Douglas, even though he was never convicted of the crime.
Douglas was eventually buried in a common grave at Honolulu's Kawaiaha'o Church. In 1856, a grave marker was installed at the church, but not on his exact burial spot, as that remains unknown. In 1934, on the centennial anniversary of Douglas’s death, the Hilo Burns Club, a Scottish heritage organization named after the famous poet Robert Burns, erected a stone obelisk and brass plaque on the spot where Douglas’s body was found, along with 200 Douglas firs. The site is now known as “Kaluakauka” or “The Doctor’s Pit.”
What exactly happened to Douglas that morning may never be fully known, but whether his death was the result of a simple hiking accident or something more sinister, the lives of both he and Gurney effectively ended that day. “It’s rather tragic I think, on both sides,” says Mills.
Lisa Ohrmundt isn’t afraid of bees, she told CBS News. She works in landscaping, and bees are part of her life. But when the beekeeper opened up her ceiling to reveal a six-foot long hive above her living, she was shocked.
She hadn’t even heard them in that room.
Ohrmundt first suspected she had a bee infestation when she heard the bees “around the side of her house,” CBS reports. The beekeeper, though, used a heat sensor to locate the expansive hive in her ceiling. The bees, he estimated, had been living there for about two years. When he opened the ceiling “Bees instantly started "falling out" of the ceiling, and globs of thick, sweet honey followed,” CBS News reports.
The beekeeper vacuumed up the bees to transport them to a more appropriate location. Ohrmundt didn’t collect any of the dripping honey at the time, but the beekeeper said he would save her some. Since he extracted about 60 pounds of honey, there’s plenty to share.
One day in 2012, when I was visiting the Osage Nation Museum, in Oklahoma, I saw a panoramic photograph on the wall.
Taken in 1924, the picture showed a seemingly innocent pageant of members of the tribe alongside white settlers, but a section had been cut out. When I asked the museum director why, she said it contained the image of a figure so frightening that she’d decided to remove it. She then pointed to the missing panel and said, “The devil was standing right there.”
My new book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, grew out of trying to understand who that figure was, and the investigation led me to one the most sinister crimes in American history. In the early 20th century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off.
In 1923, after the death toll reached more than two dozen, the case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was among the F.B.I.’s first major homicide investigations.
During my research, I collected an extensive archive of photographs. They provide another essential means of documenting a crime largely forgotten by history. What follows is a collection of some of the most revealing photographs, as well as a clip of related film footage.
In the early 1870s, the Osage were driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in what was then Indian Territory, and would later became part of Oklahoma. This photograph shows an Osage camp on their new reservation:
Around the turn of the century, oil deposits were discovered under this land. To extract that oil, prospectors had to pay the 2,000 or so registered members of the tribe for leases and royalties. In 1923, these Osage received collectively what would be worth today more than $400 million. At the time, it was said that whereas a typical American might own a car, each Osage owned eleven of them.
The footage below—recorded by an Osage in the 1920s and shared with me by a descendant, Meg Standingbear Jennings—provides a glimpse of what the region looked like during the oil boom.
Demand for access to the vast oil deposits under the reservation was so great that there were regular auctions for leases held in Pawhuska, a city in Osage County. Oilmen, such as J.P. Getty and Frank Phillips, would bid in the shade of a stately tree, which became known as the Million Dollar Elm.
As the Osage’s prosperity increased, members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. The family of one Osage in particular, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target of the conspiracy.
In many ways, Mollie, who was born in 1886, straddled not only two centuries but two civilizations. She grew up in a lodge, speaking Osage; within a few decades, she lived in a mansion and was a married to white settler.
One night in May of 1921, Mollie’s older sister, Anna Brown, disappeared.
Anna's body was subsequently found in this ravine on the reservation.
Within two months, Mollie’s mother died of suspected poisoning. At the Osage Nation Museum, I discovered this picture of Mollie with her mother and her sister Anna:
Mollie had a third sister named Rita Smith.
She lived with her husband Bill and a maid in this house, not far from Mollie:
Early one morning in 1923, Mollie heard a loud explosion. Someone had planted a bomb under her sister’s house that killed everyone inside, including Rita.
And it wasn’t just Mollie’s family that was being systematically eliminated. Another Osage, Henry Roan, was shot in the back of the head.
Several of those who tried to catch the killers were also killed, including a lawyer, W.W. Vaughan, who was thrown off a speeding train. He left behind a widow and ten children.
When the FBI took up the case, in 1923, agents badly bungled the probe. They released Blackie Thompson, a notorious outlaw, from prison, hoping to use him as an informant; instead, he robbed a bank and killed a police officer. Thompson would later be gunned down by lawmen, as shown in the photograph below:
J. Edgar Hoover, who was appointed director of the Bureau in 1924, feared that a potential scandal could end his dreams of building a bureaucratic empire.
In desperation, he turned to Tom White, a former Texas Ranger, to take over the case.
Like Mollie Burkhart, White reflected the transformation of the country. He was born in a log cabin on the frontier in Texas and began his career as a lawman when justice was often meted out by the barrel of a gun. By the time of the Osage murder case, he wore a suit and filed paperwork and had adopted the modern techniques of investigation, such as fingerprinting and handwriting analysis. Here’s a later photograph of White with Hoover:
To unravel the mystery, White assembled a team of undercover operatives, including an American Indian agent. Some of them posed as cattlemen, another as an insurance salesman. Eventually they were able to capture one of the masterminds of the murderous plot. But, as I discovered from my research, the extent of the killings was far greater than the Bureau ever exposed, and there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of murders that went unsolved.
Much of the Osage’s oil money was swindled, and over time the oil deposits on their land have also diminished. Many of the old boomtowns of this era now resemble ghost towns. This photograph shows a boarded-up bar in a town where Mollie’s sister, Anna Brown, was seen before vanishing:
This is what the prairie looks like today:
I interviewed many of the descendants of the victims, including Margie Burkhart, who is a granddaughter of Mollie Burkhart.
She took me to a cemetery in Grayhorse, in Osage County, where many of her relatives who were killed are buried.
When I visited the Osage Nation Museum, the director had retrieved, from the basement, an image of the missing panel. It showed the killer whom the FBI had arrested—he was the so-called devil. The Osage had removed the panel not to forget what happened, as so many Americans had, but because they can’t forget.
The first thing you’ll notice upon entering the anatomical theatre at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Medicine is the lone pickled head, up on a shelf next to a diaphonized hand.
It’s yellow, peaceful-looking, and somewhat akin to a potato.
The various physicians and anatomy technicians in the preceding hallway all address it with a mix of familiarity and indifference. It’s just there, really. Just the head of Diogo Alves, whose claims to fame include being both Portugal’s first serial killer and the last man to be hanged.
At least one half of each claim is true.
Diogo Alves was born in Galicia in 1810 and travelled to Lisbon early in his life, to serve in the houses of the well-to-do of the Portuguese capital. This southwards migration was common to plenty of Galicians looking for work, but Alves soon realized a life of crime would be more profitable. (History often blames an opportunistic barmaid for this shift in morality, because what’s a story without a temptress?) From 1836 to 1839, he transferred his workplace to the Aqueduto das Águas Livres (Aqueduct of the Free Waters). Nearly one kilometer (0.62 miles) long, the Aqueduto spanned the Alcântara valley, allowing both water and suburbanites to make their way into the city, 213 feet above the rural landscape.
Many of these commuters were humble farmers traveling to the city to sell their produce, a fact Alves was privy to. He would await them on their return by nightfall, divest them of their gains by whatever means possible, and unceremoniously push them to their deaths. He repeated this sequence 70 times in the three years he was active in the Aqueduto, and it’s unclear why he stopped. Police intervention was hardly a factor, as the deaths were dismissed as a wave of suicides—it’s not like anyone in power would have feared a murderer who targeted only the poor.
Having retired from the Aqueduto, Alves set his sights on flightier targets, formed a gang, and started targeting private residences. Eventually, after breaking into a physician’s house and murdering the people inside, he was caught by the authorities and sentenced to hang in February 1841.
This is where the facts of Alves’ story often go astray. He was not the last man to be executed—at least six more followed him to the gallows between 1842 and 1845. Portugal would eventually rule out capital punishment in 1867. And there is yet more to debunk. Alves was a serial killer, indeed, but not the first. The title falls to Luísa de Jesus, a Coimbra resident who confessed to the murder of 28 newborns taken from the local foundling wheel. She was hanged in 1772, the last ever woman to be executed in the country. As someone whose criminal career began and ended with a national milestone, Luísa de Jesus is the person Diogo Alves would have been, had his claims to fame held out. So why is his head the one on display?
Timing, most likely.
Alves was executed in 1841, as phrenology was just beginning to rear its ugly head in Portugal. We recognize phrenology, the discipline developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall in the 1700s, as a pseudoscience today, but back then its premises were simple and its conclusions downright revolutionary: the brain housed all aspects of an individual’s personality in physically distinct areas, and the shape of the skull reflected this internal organization. Personality traits, criminal propensity included, could be felt, palpated and measured right on the individual’s skull. It is no surprise, then, that a notoriously wicked corpse would draw the attention of Portugal’s budding band of phrenologists—who requested Alves’ head be severed and preserved for posterity, so the source of his criminal urges could be studied in depth.
There is little evidence that such a study of Alves’ personality ever took place in the University, though similar ones did. The skull of Francisco Mattos Lobo, a contemporary of his who butchered a family of four and defenestrated their dog, was examined by phrenologists in April 1842 and rests just two doors down the hallway, in a glass case of patinaed skulls, that, it seems, do not get nearly as many visits as Alves himself.
He is the celebrity, after all. Along with the rest of the body, his head has even inspired a comic book, a fictionalized biography and novel, and the 1911 silent film Os Crimes de Diogo Alves (“The Crimes of Diogo Alves”)—a serious contender for yet another national title, that of Portugal’s first fictional film.
You might want to take a leaf out of this town's book. Kampung Pelangi, a small village in Randusari, Indonesia, recently painted itself rainbow, and is reaping the rewards.
A post shared by Fajar Dwi Saputra (@fajardsssss) on
As the Jakarta Post reports, the local council had been seeking ways to spruce up the area, and had some money—about $22,500—set aside. The community has already hued up hundreds of houses, striping shingled roofs and fenceposts, adding murals to the walls, hanging multicolored flags, and even dousing stairs with paint.
Junior high school principle Slamet Widodo, who came up with this particular idea, was inspired by other rainbow villages, including Kampung Warna-warni, about a hundred miles north, and Kampung Trini, about 20 miles east.
It's paying off—the town now has a substantial Instagram presence, and tourism has increased. One wide-eyed visiting ninth grader promised to up the ante: "I'll tell all my friends to come here," she told the Post.
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.
There are few things in life more satisfying than a fresh baguette and some really good cheese. But all baguettes are not the same. Some are chewier and others are crispier. They can be light or dense. Texture and aroma vary as much as flavor. A new report from researchers in (where else?) France lays out just what makes a baguette truly great.
The perception of food is complex. When you chew, you're not only tasting the food with your tongue and feeling its texture in your mouth, but you're also smelling it through your nose. That smell comes from volatile compounds, and the researchers, from AgroParisTech, an agricultural university, wanted to know how the texture of a baguette affects the release of those molecules.
The team bought or baked loaves for some lucky taste testers and measured the volatile compounds in their noses while they chewed different samples. The volunteers had to wear glasses fitted with metal tubes that went into their noses and were attached to a big machine, and cheese would have messed up the test, but hopefully le pain était très bon?
"Crumb firmness, and, in all likelihood, crust brittleness are important factors" that affect the release of volatile compounds, the researchers write in the report. That's probably because "firm breads induced more intense chewing activity." A crustier baguette requires more jaw power, but that chewing releases more of the smells that augment taste and make the experience of the bread so amazing.
The research was funded by Lesaffre, a French yeast manufacturer, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. But then you can add some flour and water to that yeast and salt ... just make sure it ends up crispy.
In the 1930s, Bessie Stringfield practically disappeared in a cloud of smoke, bolting across the walls of a wooden, bowl-shaped arena: the Wall of Death. She was on her way across the country, traveling completely alone—again—on a Harley. Bessie Stringfield, an African-American Bostonian originally from Jamaica, had already earned a title that would be given to her years later: “The Motorcycle Queen.” From 1929 until her death in 1993, she rode her motorcycle around the Americas, defying several stereotypes about what black women could do.
At first, riding a motorcycle across the country might seem on the low end of remarkable acts, but in the 1930s, especially for a black woman, that was not so. Stringfield rode across the country on a motorcycle only 10 years after women gained the right to vote. And the roads were not the smooth, friendly lifelines that snake across the country today; Stringfield traveled before many roads were paved—the American interstate highway system wouldn’t even be proposed until 1956. If she was traveling through Arkansas in the middle of the day and broke down? Stringfield had to be her own mechanic.
As Springfield told her protege and biographer Ann Ferrar, no matter where she traveled, ''the people were overwhelmed to see a Negro woman riding a motorcycle.'' African Americans were not welcome in almost any motel across the country, so she often stayed with black families she met along the way, or slept on her bike at gas stations under the night sky.
Bessie Stringfield began traveling young; she was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1911 as Betsy Ellis, and her family immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts when she was a young child. From the start Stringfield was faced with difficulties in life, though the exact details of her parents and some of her upbringing are muddy. Some sources say her mother was a domestic servant named Maria Ellis, her father was Maria’s employer, James Ferguson, and both died of smallpox soon after arriving to the United States. Other sources, such as an interview with Stringfield by Bea Hines in the Miami Herald in 1981, say her mother died in childbirth—this detail is added to by Ann Ferrar, who interviewed Stringfield for years, saying that after her “white Dutch” birth mother died, her father, “a biracial West Indian, took her to New England but then abandoned her at age five.”
In any case, Stringfield, then named Betsy Ellis, grew up in Boston, and when she was orphaned at age five she was adopted by a wealthy Irish woman who was never named in interviews. Eventually, her name changed to Bessie. According to the 1981 interview in the Miami Herald, her mother was protective, and didn’t buy her a motorcycle straight away; the first bike she learned to ride was that of a neighbor who lived upstairs. (And, because she’s amazing, she taught herself how—not a user-friendly experience in the 1920s.) “My mama had a fit. Nice girls didn’t go around riding motorcycles in those days,” Stringfield said to the MiamiHerald. But, on her 16th birthday, her adoptive mother’s worries lost out. Springfield said her mother "gave me whatever I wanted,” according to Ferrar’s book Hear Me Roar, and she wanted a motorcycle.
Stringfield immediately took good care of a serious case of wanderlust; after flipping a coin onto a map of the U.S., she would pick the random location as a destination and make the trip. From 1925 through 1929, she made several trips in and out of Boston, getting a taste for the road. Over the next few years she became the first black woman to ride a motorcycle in every one of the lower 48 states, and made motorcycle trips to Brazil, Haiti and parts of Europe. While her first bike was an Indian Scout model, Springfield soon discovered that she loved Harleys, which became her bike of choice; she owned 27 in her lifetime.
Stringfield didn’t stop after the first trip; she rode alone eight times through the 1940s. To earn a living as she traveled, Stringfield wowed crowds at fairs and carnival sideshows with Wall of Death stunt acts, in which motorcyclists zoom sideways along the walls of a wooden bowl-shaped arena and glide nearly (or actually) upside-down in spherical cages. Springfield also competed for coveted monetary prizes in flat-track races, where motorcyclists race over dirt oval tracks; though she entered races disguised as a man, she was often denied the prize money after it was revealed that a woman beat the men.
Shelly Connor writes in First-Wave Feminist Struggles in Black Motorcycle Clubs that Stringfield was one of few but visible women who were motorcyclists before the reactionary 1950s version of femininity took hold. Connor writes that some early black motorcycle clubs included both male and female members in the 1930s, but it was still unusual for women to gain notoriety. Black female motorcyclists in particular “knowingly enter a space that brings with it (in many cases) the continuance of racialized, sexualized, patriarchal hegemony that they face at work and home,” Connor adds, and Stringfield was at the nexus of it all.
Racism was a danger that followed Stringfield everywhere, often landing her in precarious situations. As Stringfield said to the Herald in 1981, “Colored people couldn’t stop at hotels or motels back then. But it never bothered me”—a remarkable attitude considering that lynching was still common and legal in most towns in 1930s America, and desegregation laws were decades away. Riding alone on uncertain roads across the segregated United States was dangerous. Stringfield was knocked off her motorcycle by a white man in a pickup truck, but attributed the violence in interviews to mere “ups and downs,” often citing her Catholic faith and upbringing as a source of both her luck and her skill, according to Ferrar.
Stringfield became an asset to the United States government during World War II, as a motorcycle dispatcher, despite being a civilian woman. Amid her travels, Stringfield made it through the deaths of three children and six marriages, which all ended in divorce (she taught two of her husbands, by the way, how to ride; Stringfield was the name of her third husband, who asked her to keep his name because he was sure she’d become famous). Stringfield was keenly aware of what she defied in the eyes of others, prided herself in doing her hair and makeup everyday, seemingly stealing men’s hearts by the dozen with her powerful personality. Bea Hines’ piece in the Miami Herald shows this best, when Springfield, then 70 years old, says “with a mischievous look in her eyes” that: “all my husbands, except one, was from 22 to 24 years my junior. Wouldn't have a man over 35, even now." She laughs at her own remarks. “Shucks, you're not writing that, are you honey?”
After her mother in Boston passed away in 1939, Stringfield moved to Miami permanently, where she eventually bought a house and became a registered nurse. In Florida she faced discrimination from police for continuing to ride her motorcycle, she told Hines, but thwarted some of the officers by impressing the motorcycle police captain with her skills, performing figure eights and various tricks. “From that day on, I didn’t have any trouble from the police, and I got my license too,” Stringfield said. By then people close to her called her BB, but publicly she was known as the “The Motorcycle Queen of Miami” and formed the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club, which no longer exists today.
Stringfield passed away at age 82 in 1993 from complications related to an “enlarged heart,” but in October of 1981, Stringfield was still “Going Strong,” and working as a nurse, according to the Miami Herald. At age 70, she was still riding around Miami and riding her motorcycle to church, impressing every person in her path. In the year 2000, the American Motorcycle Association honored her by creating the Bessie Stringfield Award, and Stringfield was added to the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002. Stringfield also inspired a series of graphic novels in 2016, aimed at children, spreading the inspiration of her life to a new generation.
Looking back on her life, Stringfield said to the MiamiHerald, during another 1981 interview with Hines, with a twinkle in her eye: “Yep. I never was like anybody else.” But Stringfield did more than just go against the grain—she unapologetically and publicly shocked her observers out of their comfort zones, blowing stereotypes off the road for the many generations of women to come.
In 1982, former CIA Director Richard Helms was approached by Dragnet creator Jack Webb about a possible TV show regarding the Agency. Like Dragnet, it would focus on realism, and would be at least inspired by, if not based on, events that had happened. While the show was never made, it’s unclear if this was because CIA Director Casey decided to pass on it or if Webb’s death cut off any progress.
Writing on letterhead for his new consulting company, Helms informed Casey that he had “cheerfully agreed” to help raise the matter with the Agency. (As an historical curiosity, the consulting company was called Safeer Company. Safeer is a transliteration of the Farsi word for “Ambassador”; the next year Helms was confirmed as the Ambassador to Iran.) Helms’ agreement was either so cheerful or so superficial that all but three sentences in his letter are simply quoting someone else - presumably Webb or one of his associates writing in the third person.
As an actor and producer in Hollywood, Webb had inevitably become friends with then-President Ronald Reagan. In the Reagan age of nepotism, this was considered significant enough to be the second sentence in the quoted section and the first thing the reader is informed about Webb other than his involvement. Not only was Webb “an old and trusted friend of the President,” he was “well known” in the industry “for his patriotic motives in his support law enforcement institutions and the armed forces.” Webb wanted to bring this patriotic sense of duty to television with the Agency by “emphasizing the patriotic role” of CIA and the “high moral standards that apply to the work of the CIA and its personnel.”
While Webb had been “extremely successful” with his previous presentations which had sought to blend realism with propaganda and PR efforts, he wanted to accommodate the Agency’s needs. To this end, he sought to not only work in “close cooperation” with the Agency and seek its advice, but to give it “veto power over all matters of content.”
Webb’s desire to be transparent may not have appealed to the Agency as much as he’d thought it would - one can virtually feel CIA cringing at the thought of being given “credit” for producing a show about itself.
The letter then went on to make explicit what it had previously just implied—the show would not only show the Agency in a positive light, it would aim to “reverse some of the negative attitudes that have been created by attacks from the media and certain political quarters.” The Agency had an opportunity, the letter argued, to work with “important people in the media” to “support the Agency.”
Helms ended his letter by neither endorsing nor discouraging the project. In his third and final self-written sentence, he simply offered to put the CIA Director in touch with Jack Webb if he so desired.
Whatever Casey’s response was, it was delivered to Helms directly over the phone. No additional memos on the subject seem to have been released in the CREST database. In December of that year, Webb died of natural causes. If the project had progressed at all beyond Casey’s phone call to Helms, then it died with Webb.
The subject must have been frustratingly tempting for the Agency. J. Edgar Hoover had used projects like these and careful rebranding of the FBI to improve its image with remarkable results. It wasn’t until the revelations of COINTELPRO and other Bureau wrongdoings the Bureau’s reputation began to publicly suffer.
You can read the full letter here, or you can take a look at this Dragnet clip to get an idea of the flavor that Webb might’ve brought to a show about CIA.
A male peacock is hopelessly in love with a female turkey and has been for five years, according to the turkey's owner. He recently told CTV News all about this sad situation:
The peacock in question is named Fred, and the turkey Fred's in love with is named Gertie. They live on a farm in Metchosin, British Columbia. Actually, it's Gertie's place. Fred just showed up one day uninvited five years ago and has stayed there since, like some kind of pathetic stalker. All that time, he's been trying to get Gertie to consummate Fred's love, only to be foiled at each turn by Gertie's son Tom.
"I was concerned about Fred's well-being," Gertie's owner, Mark Hogeweide, told CTV News. "He had the wrong ideas about turkeys, so I thought maybe I should get him a peahen."
Which is what Hogeweide did. Fred will soon get to meet the peahen, which is named Freddie. Hogeweide hopes they fall in love and maybe Gertie, finally, can get some peace.
In what would have no doubt become the grossest spill of all time after a few hours under the hot sun, 160 gallons of milk spilled out of a truck Wednesday, closing down a New Jersey road.
According to NorthJersey.com, the spill occurred in Bergenfield, forcing authorities to shut down the stretch of road for clean up. The spill occurred when the truck’s side-door came open during transit, loosing a hail of milk bombs onto the pavement. All said and done, almost $500 worth of milk was lost.
The spill occurred around 8:00 in the morning, and fire trucks and a clean-up crew had the road back in working, non-milk-covered order. In a perfect world, this incident would have coincided with an overturned cereal truck, creating a magical breakfast moment. But for now it’s just nice to know that the roads of New Jersey are milk free.
Fakes. Cheats. Snake oil salesmen. Quacks. From time immemorial, people have been trying to sell poorly researched or just plain made-up remedies and medicines. Luckily, organizations like Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij (VtdK), translated as The Society Against Quackery, possibly the world’s oldest skeptic society, have been exposing hucksters and helping to defend their marks since 1881.
“Quackery is the practicing of treatments and/or diagnostic methods of which the value has not been scientifically proven,” says Dr. Cees Renckens, former president of the VtdK, serving as head of the organization for 23 years. "This is usually accompanied by loudly praising its results.” While the rise of modern medicine standards and protections has eliminated some of the more blatant flim-flam that was once passed off as medical science, Renckens says that quackery is still as much of a problem as it's ever been, and is in some ways worse. “[Today's] quacks hide behind appeasing terms such as alternative medicine, additive medicine, holistic medicine, complementary medicine, naturopathy, integrative medicine,” he says.
The VtdK formed around the same time that modern medicine began to be professionalized in the late 1800s. According to a history on the Society’s website, the Dutch Society for the Advancement of Medicine, which was founded in 1849, was having trouble policing the unlicensed and unqualified medical practitioners of the day. In an effort to raise awareness of the growing number of quacks operating in the Netherlands, they published a pamphlet in 1878 detailing how to identify a quack, and what to do about them. From this initial bit of literature, the Society Against Quackery was born.
In the beginning, the group was mainly focused on rooting out fraudulent doctors and suspicious medicines (nostrums). Members of the association, mostly doctors and other educated men, would chemically test suspect cures and remedies, and if they were found to be placebos or otherwise ineffective, the Society would publish their findings in their journal, Nederlands Tijdschrift tegen de Kwakzalverij (Dutch Magazine Against Quackery). They developed a reputation for fearlessly calling out spurious practitioners just as vehemently as their bogus cures, using hard science to disprove and discredit their claims. According to Renckens, the first president of the VtdK, G.W. Bruinsma, once said, “It is useless to curse the cards and not mention the names of the cheat players.”
The Society continued to publish their magazine into the 20th century, but as laws around medicine became stricter and more robust, their focus shifted toward the world of the paranormal around the 1960s. “In the 1960s about 1 percent of the adult citizens in the Netherlands consulted a quack (mainly paranormal healers, manual therapists and phytotherapists), among which there were hardly any doctors,” writes Renckens in an email. It was during this time that belief in psychic abilities, mesmerism, crystal healing, and the like began to enter the cultural consciousness, and the VtdK was there to try and protect people from getting scammed by shining a light on self-proclaimed alternative healers and their unprovable methods.
From the 1980s on, the VtdK has shifted most of its focus back to the alternative quackery that they see as infecting attitudes toward modern medicine. In the early 1990s, they fiercely lobbied against homeopathic remedies, and in 2000 they released their list of the 20 greatest quacks of the 20th century. Included on the list were individuals whom the VtdK had tangled with over the years, including A.J. Houtsmuller, who claimed he could cure cancer with a diet, and the Dutch spiritual guru Jomanda, who claimed she could bless water and give it healing properties.
The VtdK may have been in the skeptic business for over a century, but it isn’t exactly getting any easier. “In the olden days we enjoyed the support of the recognized medical societies, which is unfortunately no longer the case,” says Renckens. “Nowadays they frequently maintain a more friendly attitude towards colleagues practicing what they call CAM (complementary and alternative medicine), which in our view is a sCAM.” Renckens says that as of 2015, some 35 percent of Dutch citizens believe in some form of alternative medicine, some of which are even covered under medical insurance. The VtdK finds this unacceptable. “We are trying hard to undermine this undeserved trust of quacks,” he says.
The Society is regularly sued for defamation and libel by the people they have labeled as quacks. But according to Renckens, they've won all but one case, and ended up with more members and support as a result of the exposure.
Today the VtdK has a membership of around 1,700, around half of which Rencken says are involved in the medical profession, although most of the work is done by the core group of about 16 chairpeople. The Dutch Magazine Against Quackery is still published four times a year, and they've also introduced a tongue-in-cheek annual award, the Meester Kackadoris Prize, which they bestow on people who support quackery. “[It] is awarded not to quacks, but to persons or organizations that support quackery, who seem to be reasonable and correctable, like broadcasters, journalists, politicians, leaders of medical colleges, insurance companies, etc.”
And it’s not just about raising awareness of quacks. The VtdK is still involved in more hands-on cases. “We are frequently called by victims of quackery or by people who are considering to consult an alternative practitioner but have their doubts,” says Renckens.
The VtdK only look at quackery in their native Netherlands, but spurious alternative medicines and their peddlers can be found all over the globe, so Renckens suggests a common sense approach to protecting yourself from shady remedies. If you think you need medical treatment, then only consult practitioners with good training, registered medical diplomas, and who stick to regular medical practice, he says. “Avoid in all cases quacks without diplomas or registration, and the same applies to MDs who have deviated from the right track and have forgotten how medical science distinguishes good medicine from quackery.”
Correction: Previously Dr. Renckens was listed as the current president of the VtdK, this has been corrected to reflect his leaving.
For 152 years, the San Francisco Chronicle has reported on—and photographed—every aspect of the city, including, of course, the evolution of Silicon Valley into the center of the world’s tech industry.
This area, south of San Francisco, earned its moniker in the early 1970s, after silicon chip manufacturers proliferated there. It’s since become synonymous with breakneck economic growth and youthful billionaires, and has some of the most expensive housing in the country. The technology it created or helped create often generated eye-catching photo-ops and headlines: a giant Macintosh at the 1985 MacWorld Expo, or the front page of the January 1, 2000, issue: "Y2-OK: New Year Rolls In Smoothly."
From semiconductors to microprocessors, personal computers to phones, garages to sleek campuses‚ the industry has always been driven by ideas and long hours. Today, it is easy to forget just how quickly these changes have become part of daily life—but old photos from the Chronicle seem to put it all in perspective. The newspaper also captured the standout personalities and products of these times of innovation and invention: Steve Wozniak, beaming at the “Apple II Forever” conference in 1984, San Francisco’s first coin-operated library computer, and April Fool’s gags at Sun Microsystems.
The images, captured on film, often in black and white, are also being brought into the digital age, alongside the millions of others that comprise the Chronicle's photo archive. Negatives and prints are gradually being scanned, and some of the best are being featured in the Instagram account SF Chronicle Vault. Atlas Obscura spoke with Timothy O’Rourke, Assistant Managing Editor of the Chronicle and Executive Producer of SFChronicle.com, about organizing millions of images, sharing San Francisco’s history, and stumbling across the perfect image.
What makes up the Chronicle's image archive and how is it organized?
The physical photo archive resides in the basement of the historic Chronicle Building at Fifth and Mission streets in the heart of San Francisco. We have about 3 million negatives, 1 million hard-copy photos, and 1.5 million digital photos. The old photos and negatives have been organized over the decades by subject and year, and in other ways by our archivists, including our current head librarian, Bill Van Niekerken.
What period does it span?
The archive is as old as the Chronicle: 152 years. The use of photos, however, wasn't common until after the turn of the 20th century. We have a smattering of shots from the 1920s and '30s, but the collection really ramps up starting in the mid-1940s. Our collection of photos that ran in print is about 95 percent complete.
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When did you start to digitize the collection, and how much has been completed?
We’ve been digitizing the archive in chunks for years. Fully digitizing the hard-copy photos and negatives carries a great cost, in both dollars and time, so we selectively scan and save classic photos, pages, and articles each week. Our recent archive features—Peter Hartlaub's "Our S.F." series, Bill's "From the Archive" blog, and my "Chronicle Covers" project—all served the dual purpose of being strong online content and an excuse to find and digitize classic snapshots of historic moments. Bill, himself, has digitized 15,000 negatives the past few years just for "From the Archive."
Why create an Instagram account?
The Chronicle has been such a vital part of the city’s rich, quirky history, and it’s been an interest of mine since I was a kid wondering about Alcatraz, or the bridges, or Fort Point. Once I started working here in 2013 I couldn’t believe the depth and quality of the archive, and I wanted to share some of the best pieces of history with as many people as possible. To me, the goal isn’t to reach a certain follower count or to drive traffic, it’s to create a mini-community for folks who love San Francisco and its history, and make them happy that we’re sharing our work from the past.
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The archive is so deep, how do you choose what to post?
Peter and Bill have driven the coverage, and I’ve been lucky enough to read their stuff and get a heads-up when they uncover something awesome. I do my own hunting, for specific events, both local and national, and I try to track down shots of the city itself that haven’t been seen for years. Some of the best stuff comes when I dig deep into the archives of particular photographers, such as Joe Rosenthal and Duke Downey of the 1950s. They shot so many great photos. It’s stunning.
So far you have only posted images in black and white. Is that a conscious choice?
I love old color photos. We’ve kept the Instagram channel mostly black and white, but we’ll have color. Most of the classic images were shot in black and white because that’s how they were printed.
We’ve chosen a selection on archival images of Silicon Valley. What value do you think the archive has in understanding the development of that industry?
Looking back, what strikes me is how fast technological innovation has accelerated, even since the 1980s. It wasn’t that long ago that Macs debuted and folks were using cellphones the size of suitcases.
Do you have any favorites among these? Or the archive as a whole?
It’s impossible to pick a favorite from an archive so varied and vast, but the images from the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937 are about as iconic as it gets. It’s pretty cool to see the progression of the Transamerica building from stump to pyramid. I’m a Giants fan who works at the Chronicle, so the shots we have of Willie Mays reading the Chronicle’s "Sporting Green" will always be special. From the Silicon Valley shots, Steve Ringman’s portrait of a young Steve Jobs is about as good as it gets. And, of course, who doesn’t like 1980s robots?
The pioneering designer William Addison Dwiggins had a famously good sense of humor. In the mid-1920s, though, he went through a period when he couldn't pick up a newspaper without getting at least a little frustrated. Not necessarily at the news—although some of that was bad, too—but at the typeface it was printed in. "Gothic—the newspaper standby—in its various manifestations has little to commend it," he wrote in one of his many treatises, 1928's Layout in Advertising. "It is not overly legible. It has no grace. Gothic capitals are indispensable, but there are no good Gothic capitals."
Fighting words—especially considering that words can't fight back. A few months later, Dwiggins got a letter from Harry Gage, the assistant director of typography at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, asking him to put his pen where his mouth was. Gage was hoping to broaden the number of new fonts his company offered to its clients. He'd read Dwiggins' Gothic takedown, and found himself agreeing. Could Dwiggins make a typeface for Linotype—one like Gothic, but better?
He could. "Tell me how fast you have to move," Dwiggins responded. "I shall be busy as a bootlegger all Summer, but a type face is a job that you have to dream over anyhow."
For the next 28 years—up until his death, in 1956—Dwiggins dreamed over typefaces. He did more than that, though: he designed dozens of them. He made typefaces for books, magazines, newspaper articles, newspaper headlines, and typewriters, including an early IBM creation. ("Letter forms just naturally came to flow from his fingers," his peer, Rudolph Ruzicka, once wrote.) All but a few have since lapsed into obscurity, left behind by bad luck or circumstance.
This is all despite Dwiggins's robust legacy in other areas. By the time he started designing typefaces, the forward-thinking book designer, calligrapher and illustrator had already made several indelible stamps on the American visual landscape. He may have been the first person to use the word "graphic designer," in 1922, and the way he worked within and across disciplines is now a defining aspect of that field.
"There was kind of a clarity of vision that he had in all these different things that he worked on that I think is really inspiring and unusual," says Bruce Dennett, a book designer himself, and the author of an upcoming biography of the artist, W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design. "He was always thinking about the end user." Today's end users, able to view the whole of Dwiggins' career, may find it worth taking another look at these lost typefaces, to see what we can learn.
After he received Gage's letter, Dwiggins threw himself into one-upping Gothic. He drew patterns ten times the size of a 12-point font, and cut them into stencils so that he could rearrange letters at will. By the end of 1929, he had come up with Metroblack, a robust sans serif that combined Gothic's simplicity with a sense of warmth and hints of flair: curly loops for the g's, jaunty tails for the Q's. Linotype made some spin-offs in other weights—Metrolite, Metrothin, and Metromedium—and began to sell it.
Sadly, there are a number of things that can kill a typeface. One is public opinion: While Linotype was a fan of the Metro family, advertising it as suggestive of "inscriptions on old Greek and Roman coins," audiences were skeptical. "The public was hungry for all things modern," writes Kennett, and they preferred their designs to look ahead, not backwards. Sleek, efficient types like Futura were all the rage.
When customers complained about several of Metro's lowercase characters, calling them awkward, Dwiggins and Linotype redesigned them, and released them as Metro 2. Although the company kept it on the docket, by the 1940s, the type was effectively retired, eclipsed by sleeker, more efficient faces such as Futura, and Linotype's similar Spartan, designed in-house.
More of Dwiggins' type designs suffered similar fates, some before they were even baptized. Experimental No. 63, an unabashedly humanist typeface with thick stems and asymmetric bars that Dwiggins worked on for several years, was ultimately dismissed by Linotype as a "stunt font," and shelved.
Bad timing can also take down a typeface. In the early 1930s, Dwiggins worked with the Underwood typewriter company to develop a bubbly cursive, which he wrote was meant to be "aimed at social letters—home use—Junior League correspondence and such-like." It was never produced, "the result of the poor business climate of the Great Depression," writes Kennett.
During that same period, Dwiggins wrote to his boss at Linotype detailing some ideas for remaking a Scotch Roman face. "This is for the years to come, after the war," he added, at the end. He then he realized his mistake, crossed out "war," and wrote "depression."
He might have written the same letter a decade later, without the correction. "During [World War II], metal was scarce," says Kennett. Many companies, including print shops, dedicated some or all of their facilities to the war effort—Linotype made bombsights, among other equipment—which left much less floorspace for experimentation.
The war happened to coincide with Dwiggins' most productive years. He dreamed up a whole suite of forms for the company, which he wrote were meant to "expand the Lino equipment in days to come, when we stop slaughtering and go back to reasonable human activities."
Linotype had Dwiggins on a retainer, which meant both great creative freedom and no guarantees. "He could blue-sky to his heart's content, and then they would pick which ones to carry into real metal," says Kennett. "Several of those types were developed to the point that entire books were typeset in them, but Linotype never brought them to a full commercial release."
Some of these were designed with a specific purpose in mind. One was Charter, a completely upright script face. "For reasons known only to Dwiggins, he was convinced that Charter would have a long career in the setting of legal documents," writes Kennett. Instead, it had no career at all: it never made it past the pilot stage.
Others were born from Dwiggins' vast and multidisciplinary knowledge of design history. "Often, he would see something from the history of printing design and want to improve it," says Kennett. "He sees a typeface from the early 1600s in Spain and he says 'Oh, I want to do something with that.'"
Thus was born Eldorado, which Dwiggins described as "something brisk and colorful to set a tale like Treasure Island in." (While Eldorado was eventually set in metal and used in book production, it perished at another dangerous crossroads—it was not popular enough to make the transition to film typesetting.)
A 1942 effort, Tippecanoe, was meant to smooth out the stiffness of the types made by the 19th-century Italian designer Giambattista Bodoni, which Dwiggins described as having "all the fawn-like grace of a galloping cow." Linotype brought Tippecanoe all the way through the pilot stage, but no further. And the paintings of Frans Hals, a 17th century Dutch portrait painter, inspired Stuyvesant, to which Dwiggins gave "a certain well-fed robustness"—and which was also never made.
There was Arcadia, which Dwiggins described as "round and crisp—like the new moon one day out—a trimming of Diana's toe-nail." There was Winchester, designed for easy reading. Neither of these made it past the pilot stage. By the time the war was over, Dwiggins' health was beginning to fail. He never revisited many of these ideas.
On a few, bright occasions, though, everything did work out. Dwiggins created several fonts that have stood the test of time, and successfully made the transition from metal typesetting to film, and then to digital. One, Caledonia, was the result of those years of working to remake Scotch Roman—it was snuck into production in between the Depression and the war, and has stuck around since, usually in books. Another book typeface, Electra, was released in 1935. Dwiggins meant for it to combine precision with "a warm, human, personal quality—full of warm animal blood."
Perhaps the most interesting survivor of all is a set of what Kennett calls "modular decorative units," the Caravan Ornaments. These don't form words at all; instead, they are strictly decorative, meant to be used for individual flourishes or, taken together, as a wide field of pattern. Although they can't be read, they are recognizably related to letters, like cousins that majored in theater and dance. "He saw these as a very magical extension of the alphabet," says Kennett.
Electra, Caledonia, and the Caravan Ornaments have consistently been available to any printer who wants to use them. Metro also stuck around. This isn't a bad batting average—all artists end up with hits and misses. Considering the length and density of Dwiggins' typeface-making career, though, his legacy could have been much larger. "By my count, there are over 30 ideas for types," says Kennett. "In the end, six of them were commercially released. All the others are just hidden under the radar."
A still greater cost, Kennett says, is uncountable: "I think he was ready [to design typefaces] 20 years before he was given the chance," he says. "I think he was champing at the bit to start earlier."
This sense of loss is borne out by the fact that in the decades since his death, Dwiggins' influence has regularly reappeared, sometimes in disguise. In 1952, Hermann Zapf, another famous typeface designer, released his own masterwork, Optima. (You may recognize it from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, or the end credits of The Exorcist.) Over a decade later, he was shocked to find during an archival trip that he had basically remade Dwiggins' Experimental No. 63—the so-called "stunt font." Other designs, including Eldorado and Winchester, have been resuscitated for the digital age by modern typographers.
There is hope yet for more such revivals. Although Dwiggins is no longer the central figure he once was, "he is still revered by many," Kennett writes. Ultimately, Kennett's aim is that, with his book's help, that number will grow.
It's a big book—480 pages—but anyone who so much as flips through it will glimpse a tiny part of Dwiggins' legacy: the whole thing is printed in typefaces that he designed. Excerpts of Dwiggins' writing are set in Metro, Eldorado, Caledonia, and others, while the rest of the text appears in a new revival of Electra that Kennett commissioned for this project from the designer Jim Parkinson.
"All the [digital] versions of Electra before this have been scrawny and emaciated and tiring to read," Kennett says. "This one has all the warmth and robustness it always had in the letterpress version." The kind of robustness, perhaps, that comes from being one of the last types standing—containing a man's dreams, legacy, and "warm animal blood" in a set of precise lines.
Like a lot of children of the ‘80s, Cicely Daniher loved unicorns. She had ceramic unicorns and stuffed unicorns. She wrote stories about unicorns and—inspired by an artist uncle—resolved to become “the best unicorn artist”.
Like lots of childhood obsessions, the fixation waned. Daniher still pursued the arts; she’s now a tattoo artist living in Richmond, California, and sells totes and t-shirts with her illustrations printed on them. But the unicorns weren’t done with her.
Starting in the early 2000s, Daniher started noticing them again—in highly unlikely places.
She can’t remember when she first spotted one, but pretty soon she was seeing them all the time—in smudges of butter, in beer foam and even spit. Think Jesus in a piece of toast, but unicorns, and everywhere.
“I was cleaning my house yesterday, and it’s like, ‘Oh, of course, the smooshed strawberry on the floor looks like a unicorn,” she says.
So she started snapping a picture nearly every time one reared its horn.
“Tattooing and being an artist, I follow this path of symbols,” she says. “And I feel that’s a big part of what I do—the language of symbols.”
Typically they appear as the horned head and neck, not full-bodied animals, although sometimes she finds more complete examples. If she’s in a rush, she’ll pass some up, but often pauses what she’s doing to capture a new creature. Eventually she realized she had a treasure trove of unicorns and assembled 50 of her favorites into a book, I See Unicorns, which can be ordered off the self-publishing platform Blurb. She says she has about 140 more examples.
Sometimes, she says, it feels like the project is “driving me now.” Daniher is literally driving her obsession, because she pilots a van dubbed the “Vanicorn” with a unicorn airbrushed on the side. She also has a tattoo of a unicorn with a crossed paintbrush and pen, and used to give people free unicorn tattoos until she started getting too many requests.
Tongue firmly in cheek she says she thinks of the unicorns as “interdimensional beings” that peek through into our world via soft cheese spreads and other mediums.
One of her all time favorites is a unicorn she spotted in a blob of lotion in a friend’s bathroom, another appeared in the crumpled up foil of a wine bottle. She is fully aware that some people simply don’t see what she’s seeing. Her boyfriend, who is less prone to seeing unicorns in everything, has been helpful in refining her collection and shooting down more esoteric examples.
Daniher would like to work with a publisher on a book at some point. In the meantime, she is still taking her unlikely unicorn portraits.
“It just makes me smile,” she says. “I’ll be trudging to work, taking [the train] once again and be like, ‘Oh, look at that! There’s bird shit in the shape of a unicorn.”
Fifty thousand years ago, Barrow Island, one of the largest islands in Western Australia, wasn’t an island at all. Back then, when this part of Australia was connected to the mainland by a stretch of earth that’s now underwater, hunter-gatherers found a remote cave on the coast and used it as a hunting shelter, a team of archeologists report.
In Boodie cave, the team discovered charcoal, animal remains, and artifacts that date back 50,000 years, they report in Quaternary Science Reviews. That date pushes back human occupation of this coastal three thousands years further into past and makes this some of the oldest evidence for human habitation in Australia.
About 10,000 years ago, the team found, humans moved into the cave more permanently. But after a few thousands years, as sea levels rose, the island was cut off from the mainland and the cave abandoned.
Yosemite National Park is one of America’s most beautiful natural landscapes but years of drought have seen many of its rivers and waterfalls lose some of their majestic power. But thanks to heavy snowmelt, many of them are back with a vengeance, and so are the visitors.
According to NBC Bay Area, the waters in the park haven’t been this powerful since 2010. The added water has not only reinvigorated some of the more famous falls like Yosemite Falls, it has also burst out and created countless other small, new waterfalls along the cliffs.
The raging waters of the park’s famous waterfalls are also calling to nature-lovers who have been swarming the park to catch a glimpse of the restored falls. On an off year, the park sees around five million visitors, but now that nature is getting even showier, officials expect an even larger turnout.
To accommodate the expected rush of visitors, parking lots are being expanded and officials are asking that visitors to consider coming during the weekdays to avoid the weekend rush. Ultimately, they just caution people to be patient.
But it’s not all natural beauty and tourism. Along with the spectacle of the falls, the water is increasing the flood danger in the area, with two people having already drowned this year in a nearby park. And this is just the beginning. There is still some 20 feet of snow in the park’s higher elevations which is expected to melt later in the season, increasing the water levels even further.
In November 2011 someone called "stepscloser" wrote a comment on the website Penny Arcade that, apparently, revealed some inside information about the sorority Phi Sigma Sigma—including their secret handshake.
The sorority was upset, and lawyers representing it demanded in letters that the comment be taken down. Penny Arcade, a popular webcomic focused on video game culture, refused. So the sorority, which has 108 chapters nationwide, sued the commenter, whose identity has never been revealed, and, according to Techdirt, recently won by default, after no one showed up to defend the anonymous post.
The sorority now is using that win to pressure other websites that have reposted the details of the secret handshake to take them down, Techdirt reports.
Why are you reading this? It's because you want to know what the secret handshake is. But it's Friday and my life is complicated enough as it is and I don't want to invite undue scrutiny from the legal team of a sorority to this good website and I'm going on vacation very soon so I will not be sharing the secret in this post. What I will say is that Phi Sigma Sigma has not been entirely successful in getting it scrubbed from the internet. It's still out there, though it might take a little poking around to find.
When residents of Poynton, Cheshire went outside the other day, they suspected something strange had happened overnight. The street was covered in manure. Grass was missing from a few of the local lawns.
So they turned to that peerless tool of late-night mystery-solving: CCTV footage. They saw this:
In the footage, a herd of cows meanders across the street and gathers on a lawn. They then munch and mill about for a bit before moseying back across again.
“There are a few farms nearby but there’s never been a herd of cows on the street like this,” one resident told ITV News.
And they probably won’t again if you keep spying on them!!
