Fred Gwynne, who stretched an imposing 6 foot 5 when fully grown, was never destined to be normal. Born in New York City in 1926, Gwynne had one early, consuming ambition.
“The thing I always wanted to be, ever since I can remember, is a portrait painter,” he told a New York Times reporter in 1978. And while Gwynne would—eventually—become a successful artist, it was not what he would be famous for. With a long face, a jaw like a backhoe shovel, broad mouth and expressive eyebrows, his distinctive mug and deep voice secured him a place on the Broadway stage and in Hollywood—most notably as the Frankenstein-ish patriarch, Herman Munster, of The Munsters, the CBS sitcom that chronicled the misadventures of a family of friendly ghouls from 1964 to 1966.
But while Gwynne racked up reviews of his eclectic stage and screen credits over a decades-long career, he was also getting notices of another, less buzzy, nature. He was writing and illustrating children’s books—really good ones. His two best-known titles, The King Who Rained and A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, attested to his love for puns and homonyms. They are those rare children's tomes that are both goofy and sly, respecting the intelligence of children befuddled by the inanities of language. Well-loved by critics, they were also wildly popular, scoring positions on the bestsellers list when published and still in print today.
Gwynne’s path to acting was circuitous. After high school he joined the Navy and served during World War II as a radioman on a submarine chaser. When his service ended, he enrolled in art school but left to attend Harvard, where he drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon, sang in an a capella group and acted with the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a student troupe. He graduated from Harvard in 1951 and landed his first Broadway role a year later, in a comedy called “Mrs. McThing”. (His own alma-mater’s paper, The Harvard Crimson, declared that, while “amusing” the “plot isn’t much to speak of”.) It wasn’t exactly a speedy ascent.
After that, offers were infrequent and he became an advertising copywriter, acting when roles came along. (One of those was a supporting part in On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando.) Persistence paid off; his stage appearances led to a television offer. He became the star of Car 54, Where Are You? in which he played one half of a pair of mismatched New York City cops in the Bronx. After that show ended in 1963, Gwynne landed the role that would define him for the rest of his life: Herman Munster on The Munsters. A review in the New York Times declared that “there is not the slightest question that Mr. Gwynne superbly made up as Frankenstein, is the whole show. His shy and modest demeanor as one who yearns only to be a good neighbor sets the tone for all the other doings…”
That superb makeup included a face of paint, neck bolts, and garish forehead scar. According to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, “It takes him 2.5 hours to put on that monstrous make-up which he does three or four days a week. He’s too exhausted after that to make many guest appearances on other shows.” A buddy told the Crimson he suspected it was the extensive costuming that in later years made it difficult for Gwynne to turn his head.
As his acting career took off, Gwynne continued to make art, sculpting and painting. He published his first children’s book, Best in Show, (about a girl who enters her dog in a contest where all the dogs look like their owners) in 1958. It would be republished several years later as Easy to See Why, the title by which it is most commonly known. Gwynne’s career as an author and illustrator began in earnest in the 1970s, during which he published several books included The King Who Rained and A Chocolate Moose for Dinner. Their pages offered up statements such as “Daddy says there are forks in the road.”, and an illustration of rolling hills overlaid with massive forks upon which the traffic drives. Gwynne’s illustrations are richly detailed and saturated in color.
“I love making puns,” Gwynne told a reporter for the Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service in 1989. He supported this statement by showing her a brass sculpture of a banana he had made, which rang like a bell when he shook it. “Banana Peal,” he said “laughing his great, deep laugh.” During the same visit he showed the writer another object of his—a clear, lucite Sherman tank with a model of a fish inside; a “Fish Tank”. The article was written on occasion of his first art show, “Drawn and Quartered: Wordplays in Oils, Bronze and Others” at a gallery in New York.
More pun books followed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and even a fairy tale-ish story about a frog who was seeking a princess to kiss. It was called Pondlarker, and Publishers Weekly effused that its “sumptuously detailed watercolors are imbued with a stateliness appropriate to the grandeur of Gwynne's tongue-in-cheek gravity.”
Children’s books by celebrities have become de rigueur over the decades. A modest list of stars who have penned titles for kids includes Bridget Bardot, Dolly Parton, Whoopi Goldberg, LeAnn Rimes, Will Smith, John Travolta, the Duchess of York (aka “Fergie”), LL Cool J, Jerry Seinfeld and Jamie Lee Curtis. The results are mixed bag; some titles have been praised, others seem to be nothing more than a bid for parents’ dollars. Gwynne’s books are the real deal.
“For a lot of years now, they are among our bestselling children’s books,” John Sargent, former publisher of Simon & Schuster’s children’s division, told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990, explaining that they routinely sold 20,000-25,000 copies a year. Another publisher agreed that they didn’t think the appeal of the books “has anything to with him as an actor”. Some education experts have evenrecommended Gwynne’s books as a tool for helping students to better comprehend the English language.
Gwynne continued to act on stage and in films long after his role as Herman Munster ended. Among his notable credits are Jud Crandall in Pet Semetary, who makes the unfortunate choice to introduce his grieving neighbor to the cursed eponymous location, and as the droll judge in My Cousin Vinny who inquires of Joe Pesci's Vinny Gambini, “What is a ‘yute’?”
Gwynne died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 66 in 1993. The illness doesn’t seem to have thwarted his creative endeavors—he managed to patent a new kind of swim flipper that year, that “reduces effort by a scuba diver, thus enabling increased bottom time”.
Gwynne had a complicated relationship with Herman Munster. He felt typecast after the show ended, and indeed, when it came time to pen obituaries, most publications lingered on his TV career, with his children’s books garnering a few lines. But ultimately, he didn’t regret the job. In the same article in which he told the New York Times he always longed to be an artist, he also reflected on his most famous role and concluded, “...it was great fun to be as much of a household product as something like Rinso. I almost wish I could do it all over again.”
Five hundred years ago, Great Britain was full of beavers. They thrived in the country's forested, riverine landscape—by chewing down trees and building dams, they even helped to shape it.
Unluckily for them, though, they had warm fur and musky scent glands, two things that humans were willing to kill for. By the 1600s, there were none left in the entire country—no beavers in London, no beavers in , and definitely no beavers in Cornwall, a moorland county that makes up the country's southwest tip.
That is, until today. After meticulous planning (and a successful crowdfunding campaign), a pair of Eurasian beavers was just reintroduced in Ladock, thanks to a local Wildlife Trust initiative called the Cornwall Beaver Project.
Egged on silently by an enthused crowd, the two beavers, which were bred in captivity, left their transport containers at 4 PM local time. They immediately began to explore their new habitat, a six-acre glade that belongs to an organic farm. One sniffed at the vegetation, while the other made a confident beeline for the nearby shore, and slid into the pond.
Over the past few years, various UK counties, including Kent, Gloucestershire, and Lancashire, have brought back beavers. While most of these reintroductions were the result of careful planning, at least one was accidental—after a beaver family "of unknown origin" showed up in Devon in 2010, authorities agreed to keep them around, and to monitor their effects on the landscape.
Cornwall is being similarly careful: The beavers' new home is bordered by a wire and timber fence. "While technically captive, [the beavers] will be living lives as if they were wild," Peter Cooper wrote yesterday on the project blog. "There will be little interference from people, and they will become part of the local ecology in its own right."
— C'wallWildlifeTrust (@CornwallNature) June 6, 2017
Scientists will be watching to see how the beavers restructure their territory—they expect the enclosed stream to get much larger, and now-sparse species to return. They'll be tracking how the beavers affect the fish population—a big local concern—and whether their engineering reduces the impact of local floods.
That's a lot of pressure for a couple of beavers (and eventually, the organizers hope, a litter of kits). For today, though, observers were content to just watch them paddle around, bringing a splash of the past back to Cornwall.
Earlier this month, a piece of a saint’s brain was recently stolen from the Basilica of St. John Bosco in Asti, Italy. But, miracle of miracles, it has been recovered after being found in the thief’s stove kettle.
According to The Telegraph, pieces of St. John Bosco’s brain held in a glass jar, stored in an ornate golden reliquary, was stolen from its display on June 3. Using fingerprints and shoeprints left behind at the scene, detectives eventually found a 42-year-old suspect with a history of priors, living in a town north of nearby Turin. Police then raided his apartment and found the holy grey matter hidden in a copper kettle.
St. Bosco, often known as Don Bosco, was a 19th century priest who was known for his work with urchins and delinquents. He was also known for his performative personality, and he was also declared the patron saint of stage magicians over a century after his 1888 death. The pieces of his brain were on display at the hometown church that still bears his name.
The unidentified thief told police the robbery was less about the brains than about money he thought he could make from reliquary. The seal on the brain jar, in fact, was never breached.
“This had a huge resonance with people that we did not expect," Enrico Stasi, a Catholic official, told The Telegraph, "with prayer vigils, letters and requests for information pouring in from around the world."
In late 2015, the head was stolen from a baby Jesus statue at a Catholic church in Sudbury, Ontario, around 250 miles northwest of Toronto. Last October, a local artist offered to fashion a replacement. It's safe to say it didn't go so well:
But just days after that story broke, the head was returned, the church's priest announced, a return prompted in part because the story had become something of an internet sensation. The head had been stolen, the CBC reported then, by an unidentified person "suffering from some personal problems." Finally, on Friday, the head was reattached:
Looking pretty good! The reattachment was paid for by a private benefactor, the CBC said, and will, hopefully, remain in place for a long, long time. But even though it disintegrated in the rain, the terracotta replacement will always have a place in our hearts.
A week ago, we asked you to tell us about the obscure books you read as a kid that have stuck with you, but that hardly anyone else seems to remember. As it turned out, Atlas Obscura readers have a lot to say on this subject. All together, we received more than 900 responses. Below, the editors have compiled our favorites. Please accept our apologies if we weren't able to include yours—there were simply too many to share them all. Enjoy!
I submit for your consideration, The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars. It is the sad tale of a purveyor of small cars whose neighbor is, to his misfortune, an elephant so predisposed. With his entire inventory smashed, the man rethinks his business model.
"I'm going to sell big cars," said the car salesman. "They are very good for smashing elephants."
Then, he proceeds to pound the pachyderm.
I have fond memories of my dad singing the accompanying ditty with each smash. Oh, yes. There is a ditty. In fact, there is musical notation provided for the ditty. I think it's one of the first tunes I picked out on the piano when I learned to read treble clef.
The best thing about this book, however, was probably years of incredulity on the part of pretty much anyone I told about it. It was reissued in 2015, but I found an original a few years before that, for which I paid a moderately unreasonable sum. No regrets! —Melissa Puius, 41, Ardsley, New York
No one else has ever read Deathtrap and Dinosaur by Jane McFann, which is ideal, because if I were to be honest, most of my best jokes are cribbed from this book. I borrowed it from the library and thoroughly enjoyed its humor, although I didn't identify with either of the two main characters—white people who attended a big high school in a small town (one a military brat), drove their own cars, and generally enjoyed lives defying authority with little parental supervision. —Liz Kay, 38, Providence, Rhode Island
The Summer Birds, by Penelope Farmer, is a bittersweet magical story of a group of kids in rural England who learn to fly one summer. It's as much about the fragility of childhood magic as anything, which when you're 8 or 9 is a strange thing to read about. The end of the book, the return to "reality" that maybe isn't so real after all, has stuck with me for decades. It turns out to have been her first book, written in her early 20s. This to me makes it even more remarkable. —Nat Case, 51, Minneapolis, Minnesota
M. M. Kaye’s The Ordinary Princess. Kaye turned the standard fairy tale on its head with this one. The seventh princess is given the gift of being Ordinary, so unlike her six beautiful sisters who have long golden hair, lithe bodies and perfect posture, alabaster complexions and no curiosity about the world beyond, Amy (which is an ordinary nickname for Amethyst) is gawky and freckled and speaks her mind and longs to know what there is outside her castle walls. Her parents are having a terrible time marrying her off because she doesn’t fit anyone’s ideal of what a princess should be, so they threaten to lock her up and hire a dragon to lay waste the countryside, and the brave prince who slays the dragon gets the honor of marrying Amy sight-unseen. Amy thinks this is a terrible idea and runs away to live in the forest and get along as best she can. I just loved Amy as a protagonist. She thinks her sisters’ lives are very boring and doesn’t understand why anyone would want to be perfect. She’s the ideal protagonist for every little girl who loves mud puddles and has strong opinions and wants to explore the world. —Sarah Walsh, 34, Washington State
The Little Grey Men by Denys Watkins-Pitchford waited for me on the shelves of the Coos Bay, Oregon, public library when I was 11 years old or thereabouts. It's about wizened old gnomes Dodder, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort, who go in search through the English countryside for their lost companion Cloudberry. Along the way they fish for minnows, talk with woodland beasts and birds, and find a child's large toy boat that is suitable to their size. The author was a seasoned lover of rural England and his agenda is to impart such a love to children. I have no doubt that he helped me to be more attentive to, and fond of, the ferny nooks and tiny streams of wooded areas in this hilly lumber shipping town. The Little Grey Men contains scratchboard illustrations by the author. They contribute a great deal to the atmosphere of this book, a book I shared with my own children. —Dale Nelson, 61, North Dakota
I still adore the Circle of Light series by Neil Hancock. They were published in the late 1970s I think. They told the story of two wizards and their interactions with a talking bear, a talking otter and a dwarf. Since I was a huge fan of the Chronicles of Narnia, these books really fit my wheelhouse as an adolescent reader. Who doesn’t love talking animals and wizards? Sadly, I have never met another single person who has even heard of this series. —Lynda Cook, 50, Milano, Texas
The book I most regretted giving up from my tween years was a book called Time Windows by Kathryn Reiss. I spent several years intermittently searching Amazon for a copy of this book, but I couldn't remember the title! I finally found it a couple of years ago and immediately bought it. It is one of my favorite ghost stories from my childhood. The main character becomes obsessed with visions of a previous time which she watches through the windows of a doll house in the attic of her new home. She has to help save the spirit of the little girl from enduring a tortuous cycle of re-experiencing her tragic death. —Kate Watkins, 32, Orange County, California
Matthew Looney's Voyage to the Earth by Jerome Beatty Jr. I checked this book out of our school library when I was in third or fourth grade and I loved everything about it. This was in the mid-1960s; the Space Age was in full swing and everything was about the moon, stars, and rockets. Beatty's Matthew Looney books (there are six others and this was the first in the series) are fun satirical science fiction, illustrated with wonderfully odd drawings by the great Gahan Wilson. Thirty years later I was given an original hard cover copy as a gift and it has remained one of my most cherished literary possessions. —Rusty Moore, 57, Plymouth, Massachusetts
One Kitten for Kim. I probably initially was drawn to this book because the protagonist is named Kim, like me, although he is a boy. A cute story with a great plot twist and great drawings. I sought it out again as an adult to share with my own kids.
Kim’s cat has kittens and his parents allow him to keep one kitten and he must find homes for all the other kittens. He takes the kittens around the neighborhood and succeeds in finding homes for all of the other kittens, but by trading them for other pets from the neighbors. —Kim, 51, Houston, Texas
An obscure book that stuck with me is The Blue Man by Kin Platt. Fairly recently I tracked it down online to find that it was originally published in 1961, though I read it as a boy in the 1970s. I think what fascinated me about The Blue Man—which really imprinted on me, for years—was two specific things, one an incident in the book, and the other its ambiguous ending.
First, there as a beautifully written scene in the book where the main character jumps over a fence in order to escape from being chased, only to discover that behind the fence is a tall cliff! He ends up falling down the cliff and getting all bruised up, and then being nursed back to health by some nice people who find it.
But even more fascinating maybe, is the way it ended. Throughout the book, the boy is chasing a mysterious Blue Man, who apparently has strange electrical powers, and might be an alien. By the end of the book we never find out if it's actually an alien, stuck on earth, or just some crazy person who paints himself blue, or what. I loved the way that the book ended in that kind of suspense. It made me walk around (probably for years) wondering if everyone around me was an alien. —Steven Zani, 46, Texas
One of my favorite books growing up was The Shades by Betty Brock. Published in 1973 (just over a decade before I was born), I believe this book found its way to me in a box of discarded books picked up for $1 at a yard sale my mother went to. It was a beat up, ex-library edition that had obviously been well-read by its previous owner. I decided to give it a chance and fell in love immediately. It's the best sort of fantasy fiction for any imaginative child. That book inspired many hours of play with my own versions of the characters. The idea that there could be things in the world that not everyone might see or understand really started my life-long love of fantasy in all forms—especially seeing the magical in the everyday.
The book sadly fell out of print, and it is now near impossible to get a good copy for any reasonable price. But I still have my old, worn copy. I'm so glad I hung on to it, and I'm certainly not giving it up now. I still re-read it from time to time, and if I ever have children, I will most definitely be reading it to them, passing it down. —Krystal Larsen, 31, Humboldt, Iowa
A book I read as a child and was sure I hallucinated because it was so bizarre is The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel. The story follows a group of students at a school that is hell-bent on turning out perfect kids and the kids' eventual rebellion. I was able to track down a copy many years later to reread it and cannot even imagine this book being published in a post-Columbine world. —Beth Moran, 44, Chesterton, Indiana
The Adventures of Jimmy Microbe. I don't recall the details of it but I can remember reading it under the covers when I was seven, some 52 years ago. It was the first book I ever chose for myself and read all the way thorough. —John Freeman, 59, San Diego, California
The Lampfish of Twill, a book about a boy in a small fishing town who was doing his best to save a rare species of giant glowing fish. I read this in 6th grade, I believe I checked it out from the school library. I thoroughly enjoyed it back then and still remember it to this day. —Jesse, 31, Ypsilanti, Michigan
The Trixie Belden books hooked me again and again in a way no other YA mystery series of the time did. Even though they started decades before I came along and continued long after I'd graduated to more complex fare, they remain among my all-time favorites. I'm sure being able to check in with characters who became old friends is a big part of why I prefer series to this day. I've only met one person outside my family who's heard of them. I just read that some volumes were reissued in 2003. I love the idea of having reading material in common with a younger generation. —Maggie Thill, 47, Omaha, Nebraska
The Tapestry Room. I was 7 years-old. The plot is pretty foggy now but I remember the characters being so important to me. I was deeply concerned for the two children and the bird. I was enchanted by a carriage pulled by guinea pigs. I remember waking up every day excited to read more and being devastated when I finished the book. I wanted it to go on forever. —Kerra Quinn, 42, Ravenna, Michigan
Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease. Great adventure story, and my first introduction to political conspiracy and the joys of Shakespeare. —Mark Attisha, 55, Vancouver, British Columbia
Jerry Spinelli's Picklemania. As a YA living in Serbia I would read this book over and over and imagined that it showed what life was "really like" in the U.S.: middle schoolers commuting together to school on a long skateboard called the "Picklebus," the scrawny kid Eddie getting bullied for trying to bulk up by drinking "moocho malt" and throwing it up all over the bully's legs as he was upside down so that only the tips of the shoelaces were visible. Grouchy Bobo the bus driver, calling everyone "nosepickers" and the infamous insult hurled "may a squirrel the size of an elephant land on your birthday cake!" A flashback to a different and more careless time, a window into a fictional world of the "Pickle Posse" which for me, living worlds away, just seemed like heaven! —Ana Pantelic, 32, Belgrade, Serbia
Beno was a prototype for the current U.S. President. He posted a sign as one entered Riverburg that said, "Drive fast and see our semitery; drive slow and see our ceminary." Didn't bother him the words were misspelled. He got his name, "Beno," because his typical statement, in a loud voice at town council meetings was, "There'll be no (whatever he was protesting)!" It was one of my favorite books when I was young. Have never seen it since my Mom gave it a charity book sale after I left home. —Thom Moon, Cincinnati, Ohio
One of my very favorite books growing up was titled A Special Trade; it was the sweetest book. It's a story about an elderly gentleman, his little neighbor, and their friendship over the years. It was memorable for several reasons: their names were lovely (Bartholomew and Nelly?? I could be remembering that entirely wrong though!), and when either of them were sad, the other would say '...don't be sadish, have a radish'—which was a saying my family used and I still use! Also, I remember liking it because, as a little one, I loved visiting our family's elderly friends and knew how special those friendships could be. Age didn't matter, only friendship did. —Melody, 36, Georgia
The Ghosts of Departure Point. Looking back it seems like a PSA for safe driving, but as a teen who hadn't learned to drive yet, it was an eerie tale of people who had caused the death of others at an unsafe curve in the road and were destined to haunt the spot. There was a revenge storyline and a romance angle, believe it or not. I read it so many times! Evidently haunting plus doomed romance was what teenage me longed for. —Kristen, 43, Portland, Oregon
It was called The Dragon in the Clock Box. The illustrations were feathery line work in white on blue background, which gave them a dreamlike feel. The story was ethereal and dreamlike too, in which a young child finds a minuscule baby Dragon. He gives it a home and feeds it by moonlight. The boy can tell the Dragon longs to fly. He waits until the full moon and watches the Dragon glide into the moonlit sky. It was an unusual ending to the book with a mix of melancholy and happiness. I still have the book. I keep it to preserve my memory. How I felt when I read it as a child, in the same way the boy in the story keeps the clockbox to always remember the Dragon. —Simon Breese, 46, Australia
I'm currently working as an academic librarian at UNC Greensboro. Today, I was thinking about the series The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, before I happened to catch word of your call for submissions. I loved this series as a young preteen, specifically the first book, Dealing With Dragons. They were unlike anything I had read, full of adventure, about a young princess, Cimorene, who yearns to escape from her boring life in a kingdom. When she decides to take matters into her own hands, after realizing she is to be married off to a most boring prince from a nearby kingdom, she runs away in search of an escape from her royal life. When she happens upon a group of dragons in the middle of the forest, she actually volunteers to become one dragon's "captive" princess. She befriends Kazul, cooking and cleaning for her, and even organizing the dragon's library.
This is a fantastic and extremely underrated series that intrigued me, because it was about a tough female as the main character, and heroine of her own story. Wrede wonderfully parodies other cliched storybook tales full of princesses, princes, dragons, wizards, and medieval kingdoms and creates her own fantasy world where the princess is the hero and the dragon is her best friend.
After so many wonderful memories of this series, nearly 18 years later, I think more people should hear of these books, and I hope you do share in the follow up post. —Jenay Solomon, 28, originally from Lincoln, Nebraska
The one I most want to share with you is a book that I wish would be reprinted. It's a very obscure 1970s picture book. The cover is unassuming—it would have been easy to overlook back in the day.
The book is titled Blast Off by Linda C. Caine and Susan Rosenbaum, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. It's the story of an African-American school girl who decides she wants to become an astronaut, but gets teased for her dreams. So she decides to build herself a rocket and blast off into space. The text is adequate, but it's the subject that makes it worth highlighting. For a science fiction reader like myself, it's been astonishing to realize that this is still among a small handful of science fiction stories featuring a black girl as the protagonist.
If that isn't enough, what makes this a book worth wondering over is Leo and Diane Dillon's art. The images soar into your heart and mind, lifting it above the ordinary, making it the kind of picture book that doesn't deserve to be so unknown. I'm doing my small part to bring it back to being known again. It think it's an important book, a beautiful book and a book worth sharing with new generations. —Stephanie Whelan, New York City
Lionel Davidson's Under Plum Lake had been out of print about 30 years until recently, and I spent much of that time thinking I had made it up. I read it when I was about nine years old, and all I could remember was that reading it made me feel ecstatic, but sad, because I knew something and no one would believe me. It was science fiction about pleasure and love, and I knew it was part of why I felt so strange and haunted and different from other kids.
I am an English literature professor now, and every so often I teach courses in children's literature. After having taught the course several times in graduate school, I happened to run across the new reprint of Under Plum Lake, and I threw it on my syllabus without having had a copy in my hands since I was a kid. I thought when it came around, I'd be mildly embarrassed by the intensity of my feelings about it as a child. I was wrong.
This is a book that leaves students and grown-up friends of mine unable to stop crying. Some people find it so upsetting they say it should be banned. By far, it is the book my students say they would never allow a child to read, even though--unlike all the other books we read in that class—there isn't a whisper of violence or prejudice or hatred in it.
Davidson imagines a world inside of ours called Egon in which all of our social ills and fears have been quieted, health care and education have been vastly improved, and energy and other resources have been better managed. The youth (who are about 100 years old) spend much of their time enjoying extreme sports, taking in intense immersive films, and studying to make their world a better place. Barry, a boy from the surface who finds his way in, is getting a tour from a boy named Dido who at first treats Barry like a dog—why can't he just relax and enjoy things?—but later begins to understand Barry's fear of pain and death.
Like Barry, the reader is ultimately left with a vision of what our lives could be if we didn't spend all our time terrified of poverty, pain, and lost chances. It's a powerful statement in favor of pleasure, intimacy, and risk-taking, and one that encouraged me—a fearful, miserable kid at nine—to decide what kind of life I wanted, and to try to make a life for myself in which pleasure and love could be possible.
I'm glad it is back in print now so I can assign it and give copies to friends, but most of them tell me it is too late for them at 20, or at 45; fear and envy are already baked into their personalities. I suppose this should come with a warning that most adults seem to think children should not read it. I disagree, and feel that we could do a lot worse than to work to create a world in which we have more time for joy. —Carrie D. Shanafelt, 37, New York City
The Girl With the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts was one of my childhood favorites: brilliant outcast turns out to have unusual powers and embarks on a mission to discover other kids like her. I really identified with Katie Welker, especially because my elementary-school self bore a striking resemblance to the character on the 90's edition paperback cover: winged bangs and giant Sally Jesse Raphael glasses.
I work in a children's library, and the best part of my job is helping patrons track down those half-remembered books! If you're feeling stuck, ask your librarian! —Megan Butterfield, 33, Vermont
In a peat bog in Poland, not far from the border with Ukraine, a knight’s sword has been found preserved in a peat bog, International Business Times reports.
The sword dates back to the 14th century, and though the organic material that would have wrapped the hilt did not survive, the sword itself is remarkably intact. It would have been very light. Engraved on the sword is the sign of a cross, which would have been a trademark of sorts from the manufacturer.
After being cleaned, the sword will go to a local museum, Stanisław Staszic Museum in Hrubieszów. Local experts believe that a knight may have dropped the sword in the bog—or that he may have been sucked in himself. They’re planning on conducting a more extensive excavation to see if there’s anything else to discover in the spot.
"The MOAHW (mother of all heat waves) starts tomorrow," Tucson-based meteorologist Eric Holthaus tweeted last night. The message was tinged with an understandable weariness—he was tweeting after 10PM, and the temperature had just dropped below 100°F for the first time all day.
For much of the southwestern United States, what has already been a long stretch of sizzling days is about to get even worse. "Predictions are for as many as 10 very hot days, with numerous high temperature records likely to be broken as the heat sets in," Al Jazeera reported this morning.
It's always hot in the desert in June—in early summer, "temperatures in Arizona, New Mexico, southern Nevada and Southern California typically climb to the highest they’ll be all year," the Washington Post writes.
Will we close in on the all-time high temperature in Tucson next week? Have plans for you, your family and pets to stay cool and safe. #azwxpic.twitter.com/Q7EFhKf1wE
But the experts—and the numbers—agree that this is something else entirely. "[We're] starting to sound like a broken record,” the National Weather Service in Phoenix wrote Friday morning, “but that’s because we will be breaking records next week.”
Phoenix, Arizona is likely to see the worst of it—temperatures in the city may reach 120°F on Tuesday or Wednesday. Relief (hopefully) comes Friday, as a cold front moves in. In the meantime, if you're in the hotspots, hydrate, stay inside, and keep an eye on your friends and neighbors!
Thirty miles off the southern coast of Cuba lies La Isla de la Juventud, the “Isle of Youth.” It is covered in lush vegetation and pine forests, and about half of the island falls under a “special municipality” designation, which prevents access except for those who have the proper permit from the Cuban government. The island is also home to the great ruin of an unusual and historic prison.
Most of the island’s residents are concentrated in Nueva Gerona, a port town on the north coast, which is only reachable by small, infrequent flights and a sometimes-unreliable ferry service. It is a sleepy existence today, but the island has a long and notorious history. It was popular with pirates, and was once known as Treasure Island—made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson. J.M. Barrie is also said to have drawn on accounts of the island when writing Peter Pan.
The island was given its name in 1978 by Fidel Castro (before that it was known as the Isle of the Pines), who had more than a passing acquaintance with it. In 1952, he spent two years there, along with his brother Raul, imprisoned by the regime of Fulgencio Batista after a leading a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks. After the revolution the same prison hosted enemies of the new regime and developed a reputation for overcrowding and harsh treatment.
The prison is called Presidio Modelo, and was modeled after the Stateville Correctional Center, a "panopticon" prison in Crest Hill, Illinois. The panopticon design originated from English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century, based around the idea that inmates are under constant surveillance, or at least are never able to know when they are being watched. In this case, in each building, the cells built in a five-story ring around a single, elevated watchtower. Panopticon prisons were built—but are no longer in use—in Cuba, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States. Other correctional facilities inspired by the design have been used all over the world.
Presidio Modelo has been closed for 50 years, following riots and hunger strikes. It is now a national monument and hosts a museum in its old hospital wing. It’s not difficult to visit—once one reaches Nueva Gerona, that is. Four cylindrical prison buildings surround a fifth, which appears to have hosted a mess hall on its top floor. (There are conflicting opinions on whether visitors are allowed to enter the panopticon buildings, but only one is physically closed off.)
From the entrance to the prison complex, long pathways lead to derelict colonial buildings, with the prison structures beyond. A hot wind seems to dampen surrounding sounds, except for the sharp creaks of metal roof panels peeling away from the structure high above. Small plants spring from cracks in the concrete and the edges of a few sun-drenched ledges. On rare occasions, a local person passes through the prison grounds—without ever looking up or acknowledging the looming, abandoned buildings.
In 1866, Spencer M. Clark, then Superintendent of the National Currency Bureau, made a daring decision: to print his own face on U.S. currency.
Clark, who served as Superintendent from 1862 to 1868, had no authorization from his superiors to do this. But U.S. paper bills were in flux because of the recent introduction of fractional money, and as the supervisor of the new bills, he was in a unique position to influence the design.
From 1862 to 1876, the U.S. Treasury issued fractional money to combat a growing coin shortage. “At the beginning of the Civil War,” according to the website Antique Money, “people started hoarding coins for their precious metal content.” To avoid a crisis, the Treasury introduced paper money to represent a cent amount rather than a dollar amount. These fractional bills were physically smaller than dollars and consisted of three-cent, five-cent, 10-cent, 25-cent, and 50-cent notes.
It was the third issue of that five-cent note that caught Clark’s attention. Congress had asked for the note to honor William Clark of the Lewis and Clark explorations. But allegedly, the document that reached the Treasury specified only that the new bill should honor "Clark," without clarifying which one—and Spencer M. Clark, despite surely knowing Congress’s true intention, seized the opportunity to print his own face on the bill.
The move infuriated Congress. Clark was already roundly disliked because of the scandals he had brought the federal government. Two years earlier, in 1864, the House of Representatives investigated his department after Representative James H. Brooks claimed the Treasury had become a "house for orgies and bacchanals." Clark was accused of "hiring women based on their looks rather than their ability"; female employees described how he “plied [them] with oysters and ale and made ‘improper’ overtures to them." In fact, one woman told Congress that he had "offered her first $100, then 10 times that amount, for a tryst with her." (An investigating body, however, concluded that these claims had no basis and that Clark was the victim of a "conspiracy.") By the time he printed his own face on U.S. money, Congress had little patience remaining.
One Congressman in particular—Pennsylvania Congressman Russell Thayer—"took immediate exception" to Clark's five-cent note when he learned of it in February 1866. That March, he amended an appropriations bill to say "hereafter no portrait or likeness of any living person shall be engraved or placed upon any of the bonds, securities, notes, or postal currency of the United States."
In advocating for his amendment in Congress, Thayer said:
I hold in my hand a five-cent note of this fractional currency of the United States. If you ask me, whose image and superscription is this? I am obliged to answer, not that of George Washington, which used to adorn it, but the likeness of the person who superintends the printing of these notes … I would like any man to tell me why his face should be on the money of the United States.
Thayer's feelings on the subject of living people adorning bank notes were hardly ambiguous. "It is derogatory to the dignity and the self-respect of the nation," he said in Congress. "I trust the House will support me in the cry which I raise of Off With Their Heads!"
After some debate, on April 7, 1866, Congress passed the Thayer amendment—enshrining into law for the first time the rule that U.S. money can only feature deceased individuals.
Thomas Edison might be best known for the electric lightbulb, but he was also a connoisseur of strange short films. After inventing the kinetoscope, an early version of the video camera, he began to test the technology by recording a series of bizarre videos—including one of a disrobing trapeze artist and another featuring an elephant electrocution. In 1894, the first motion picture ever copyrighted was "Fred Ott's Sneeze," which, as the title suggests, is just a clip of one of Edison's employees sneezing.
Among Edison's cinematic oddities was "Boxing Cats," filmed in his Black Maria Studio in New Jersey. The main attraction of Henry Welton’s “cat circus," which also featured wonders like cats riding bicycles, these fighting felines were apparently quite popular in the U.S. at the time.
The footage—one of Edison's firsts—is considered to be the first cat video ever recorded. Even in 1894, Edison knew how to give the people what they wanted.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
A few weeks ago, a floating man appeared in the sky during a storm in Rainham, in southeast England. Mark Taylor, a local, snapped some photos of the man and posted them to Facebook, sparking a mystery that would endure for days.
"Went out to my garden today to watch the thunderstorm and saw a man floating across the sky with nothing attached to him, did anyone else see it ???" Taylor wrote then.
Soon, the story was picked up by local media, which reported June 9 that the authorities had not been alerted to the matter.
Internet commenters, meanwhile, had their own theories, ranging from aliens to the possibility that Taylor had been using substances to the possibility that the whole thing was a weird hoax.
But then, on Friday, KentOnlinesaid they'd cracked the mystery. A reader wrote to the media outlet saying that the floating man photos emerged around the same time an inflatable stormtrooper balloon she'd purchased for her son escaped.
“I am sorry to disappoint everyone but there is no alien," the reader told KentOnline. Her son was in possession of the stormtrooper for only a few days. Here is what it looked like:
And while it was somewhat of a surprise to find out that the floating man was not a man at all, at least one commenter had predicted that might be the case, as Taylor's daughter told KentOnline.
Commenting just nine hours after Taylor's post, Malcolm Millward called it, and probably deserves some kind of prize.
"It was probably one of those storm trooper balloons lol," Millward wrote.
After 20 years in captivity inside of a New York clam bar, a 132-year old lobster has been given an official pardon, and released into the wild to live out the rest of its days in the open ocean.
According to the New York Post, Louie the Lobster had lived at Peter’s Clam Bar in Hempstead, New York for the past two decades, and narrowly avoided being eaten just before he was released into the Atlantic. That's because as recently as Father's Day, someone offered $1,000 to buy the 22-pound lobster. Luckily for Louie, the owner declined.
Louie was presented last week with a pardon from the Town of Hempstead in a ceremony at the restaurant before being loaded onto a speedboat and delivered out to sea. A lobster expert quoted by the Post said that Louie should do just fine in his new found freedom since there are not many predators in that area looking to snack on such a large lobster, despite the price he might fetch on land.
This is not the first aged lobster that the restaurant has set free either. Just last year, the restaurant granted a similar reprieve to a 130-year-old lobster named Larry. Maybe the former cellmates can reconnect as oceanic civilians.
Sports teams and political movements alike know: if you want a disparate group to come together, it helps to pick a good mascot. Nearly half a millennium ago, the nation that would one day become the Netherlands went all in on a powerful uniting animal: a geographic lion called the Leo Belgicus.
Halfway through the 16th century, the northern coast of Western Europe—the land we now know as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—was in the midst of an identity crisis. The people living there were ready to get out from under the thumb of their ruler, Philip II of Spain, who collected heavy taxes without providing much of anything in return.
But the area went by a number of different names, most of which ("the Low Countries;" "the Seventeen Provinces") brought to mind vagueness and division, rather than any common purpose. The crown's overlords, who didn't mince words, usually just called the area "De landen van herwaarts over"—"those lands around there."
In the 1560s, "those lands" began rebelling. In 1581, they renamed themselves the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. But this was still not quite enough. So in 1583, the cartographer Michaël Eytzinger, sensing the need for an even clearer national identity, took it upon himself to draw a unified map of this place that had just declared itself.
Inspired by the many local coats of arms that featured the creature, he imagined the land in the form of a lion: the city of Groningen on its nose, Luxembourg in its front paw, and the northwest coast all down its back.
As the war waged on, Eytzinger's design—which he called "Leo Belgicus," or "Netherlandic Lion”—grew in popularity. "The image was soon taken up by other artists who composed an intriguing set of variations," writes the literary historian Ton Hoenselaars in Borders and Territories.
Many of these variations saw the Leo Belgicus evolving along with the political situation. To mark the Twelve Year's Truce, which began in 1609, the Dutch mapmaker Claes Janszoon Visscher drew a version in which the lion sits peacefully, its sword facing downwards. Two years later, an even less bellicose lion came out, drawn by Jocodus Hondius. This one shows the lion standing on all fours, its tail wrapped around its back legs, wielding no sword at all.
After the truce ended, Visscher's son, Nicolao Iohannis, came out with a brand new version, the Leo Hollandicus, which contains only the province of Holland—at the time the most politically powerful area of the Republic. This time, the lion rears up completely, a sword in its paw, its territories contained safely in its torso and back legs.
In all cases, though, it was a lion through and through, sometimes at the expense of the land's actual shape. "The Leo Belgicus that emerges demonstrably represents not the nation, but an image of the nation," Hoenselaars writes. It was more important to be leonine than accurate.
This set of priorities worked just fine. In 1648, the Low Countries—which by this point was known as the Dutch Republic—won the war, and achieved independence. The lion had proven "an important element in building a common sense of national belonging, [and] in the birth… of a Dutch identity," writes the historian Alessandro Ricci.
In the centuries since, other rhetorically minded mapmakers have borrowed this trick, portraying their own countries as, say, pigs or eagles (or their enemies as octopuses) in order to prove a point. The most famous example may be Benjamin Franklin's "Join or Die"—a snake-themed political cartoon about the Thirteen Colonies that, according to some experts, also doubles as a map.
Many of these symbols have lost favor over time, but the Netherlands has held fast to their Leo. Today, nearly half a millennium later, there are not one, not two, but three lions clawing the air on the country's coat of arms: a fitting tribute to an animal that once stood in for the whole nation.
Hatha Jodi is a root that, if you use your imagination, can look like two people holding hands, perhaps in prayer. In part because of this appearance, in some tantric traditions it is believed to bring the bearer great luck. But the root is also very rare, only found in remote areas of Nepal and India.
Which brings us to lizard penises.
According to World Animal Protection, poachers have been selling the penises of monitor lizards in place of Hatha Jodi in a massive fraud that has led to numerous recent raids across India. In one bust, officials seized 210 dried lizard penises.
The penises had made their way onto online retailers as varied as Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, and Etsy, the organization said.
Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in England confirmed that some of the Hatha Jodi they found online was in fact "derived" from monitor lizards. Other items were plastic moldings of lizard penises.
The organization said that the (unwitting) penis donors frequently came to gruesome ends.
"Some will have their throats slit or their skulls smashed in before their genitals are removed for use as ‘Hatha Jodi’ and others will still be alive when this process begins," the organization said in a statement.
How much could a fake Hatha Jodi fetch on the open market? More than £200, or around $250. Poaching the monitor lizards is illegal under Indian law, and authorities said they were trying to put an end to the problem.
"If left unchecked," Aniruddha Mookerjee, the lead investigator in the case, said in a statement, "this demand could grow to the extent that it pushes some wild populations over the edge."
The song of the hermit thrush sounds a bit like an orchestra warming up: the experimental trill of a flautist, a violinist testing his vibrato on a few high notes, all just beginning to suggest a larger melody. This undulating song can be heard throughout North America in the summer. But moving east to west, a keen listener might notice that the bird’s repertoire changes: lower notes introduce each song, like a viola has been added to the mix, and the trills that follow are shorter.
For biologists, this change is the anthem of evolution.
One million years ago, the hermit thrush population was separated, likely by a large glacier that cleaved North America in half. A recent study shows that this separation has had an audible effect: today, the eastern and western hermit thrush populations sing their songs differently.
As in many songbirds, male hermit thrush are the singers of the species, learning their songs as chicks from other adult males—fathers, uncles, brothers—around their nest. But that learning is imperfect, and every new singer introduces small differences to the song, the way changes appear in a passed phrase during a game of Telephone.
With the eastern and western populations separated, those differences couldn’t be shared, explains lead author Sean Roach. The hermit thrush songs that we hear today have diverged—as though they have passed through two concurrent and very long games of Telephone.
“If there are sufficiently large song differences between populations, it can get to the point where they don't recognize what they're hearing as being from the same species,” Roach says.
Above is the song of an eastern-type hermit thrush, recorded in New Hampshire. Listen for the wide range of introductory note frequencies used.
Above, the song of a western-type hermit thrush, recorded in Baja California. Listen for longer introductory notes in a more limited frequency, with shorter phrases post-introduction.
Over time, the accumulation of differences can create a feedback loop: as two groups of a species begin to sound more and more unlike, they are less likely to recognize each other as potential mates. This makes the groups less likely to share both genes and songs, pushing their songs to become even more dissimilar.
In this way, sounds can be both a signal and a driver of evolution, making vocalizations rich territory for biologists looking to spot evolution in action.
On the islands of Hawaii, roughly four new species appear in the cricket genus Laupala every million years—an explosion, by evolutionary standards, and the highest documented for arthropods, which usually see new species more on the order of 0.16 per million years. The driving force behind this evolutionary outbreak? Males in different species sing their pulsing courtship song at a different rate, so researchers theorize that the songs have something to do with it—that over time, female preference for different songs has pushed the group to continually diverge.
Differences in sounds can also help species to share without out-competing each other. Like many family members, five bat species from the European genus Myotis share a lot—they look physically similar, live in the same areas, and have similar strategies for hunting. Yet each species of bat has a slightly different echolocation signal, allowing each species to target a slightly different prey.
Below are the differing echolocation calls of three species of the Myotis bat genus, time-expanded to be audible to human ears. These sounds were recorded by Dr. Stuart Parsons at the University of Bristol.
In studying the hermit thrush, Roach saw that the division in song structure matched with genetic and physical differences between the two groups. Geologic data, as well as evidence of similar splits in other birds, then made it possible for him to point to the glacial event as the cause of this split and the resulting vocal differences. Yet in Hawaii’s crickets, Europe’s bats, and many other vocal species, it can be extremely difficult to tell what came first—whether vocalizations are a cause or a symptom of speciation.
This issue is especially apparent in studies of another well-known animal singer: whales.
“It’s kind of like the chicken and egg: is the song separating [whales] into discrete units, or is it a symptom of being discrete, a thing that evolved after they became separate?” says Erin Oleson, lead scientist in the Cetacean Research Program at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
For many species, we still can’t say. Acoustic data from whales can be highly variable, changing even over the course of a season as animals learn new songs from each other.
In humpback whales, songs—sung by males to attract mates—are exchanged seasonally, with new trends migrating slowly between populations. The song below was recorded by Dr. Ellen Garland and other researchers off of Eastern Australia in 2009. Because they change constantly, humpback songs don’t give the same ancient evolutionary cues as other animals’—but they do hint at a complex and rich social structure that spans ocean basins.
Below is a humpback song from the next year, recorded by the same researchers off New Caledonia (an island roughly 1000 miles east of Australia). Note the theme between 0:22 and 0:40, which can be found in the 2009 Australian song between 0:20 and 0:40. One theory is that these songs might be shared at their feeding grounds in Antarctica.
Additionally, you need genetic data to show a change in tune has an evolutionary basis, which can be difficult to come by—though that doesn’t mean some aren’t trying. Amy Van Cise, a PhD candidate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been analyzing archived genetic data, specimens, and call recordings for short-finned pilot whales living on opposite sides of the Pacific ocean.
“I was really interested in how things like social structure and acoustic structure can be linked with genetic structure, and how those things might affect evolution on a longer term scale,” Van Cise says.
Her work shows that the two groups, known as the Shiho (eastern) and Naisa (western) type, are genetically, physically and acoustically distinct, to the point that they could be classified as separate sub-species. With more study, Van Cise hopes to pin down exactly when the two groups split, in order to learn if their differing songs came before or after the division.
The “canary-like” song of the short-finned pilot whale. The differences between the eastern and western sub-species can’t be caught by a human ear; Van Cise used an audio processing program in order to analyze them. (Courtesy of Amy Van Cise)
Perhaps one of the most exciting results of analyzing animal sounds is catching this division in action.
“Genetics is the common way of IDing species, but it’s a very long-term process,” says Oleson. “Acoustics is much more plastic. We can detect changes on a much shorter time scale than you could with genetics or morphology, which could take centuries to propagate.”
Using audio analysis programs on hundreds of recordings, Roach may have observed this process within a sub-group of hermit thrush in western Canada. Birds at higher altitudes in the Canadian rockies had songs distinct from those at lower altitudes. This could be a reaction to their environment: low-altitude birds need to sing at lower frequencies to be heard through dense trees, but with less forest around them, high-altitude birds can sing much higher.
For Roach, these fine-grained differences have much larger implications than birding wonkery. In a time where habitat and biodiversity is dwindling worldwide, he sees it as vital to understand the diversity between species in order to maintain it. But another big reason he continues this work is a personal one.
“Most birdsong research involves getting up at four, four-thirty in the morning, which is a time most people hear and cringe and look disturbed,” he says. “But it’s wonderful to be out there. There’s nobody else out there. It’s just me and the birds singing.”
In the study, there was a large bookshelf—so large that it attracted the attention of the international investigators who were searching the property. They had followed the collector home; they had a judicial order to search his house in a suburb of Buenos Aires. They were right to examine the bookshelf. It opened into a secret passage, and at the end was the room that housed the collection—75 astonishing artifacts from Germany’s Third Reich.
The collection of Nazi memorabilia included a bust of Hitler, a statue of the Imperial Eagle, and a medical device to measure the size of a human head, which was used in service of theories about race and head size. There were objects decorated with swastikas, including an hourglass, a knife, a box that held harmonicas meant for children, and another box containing a magnifying glass. One of the most important parts of the discovery is an image of Hitler holding a similar magnifying glass. (The photo has not been released to the public.)
This is a huge find, the largest collection of Nazi artifacts ever discovered in Argentina. It began after “illicit artwork” appeared in a gallery in Buenos Aires, the Associated Press reports. The name of the collector has not been released, but he is under investigation. Authorities believe that the objects may have originally belonged to high-ranking members of the Nazi party, who fled to Argentina after the fall of the Nazi regime.
Etienne Tempier had a problem. In 1277, he was bishop of Paris, and there was talk that, at the Sorbonne, members of the arts faculty—the professors on the non-theological side of the school—were teaching heretical ideas, mostly derived from Aristotle’s writings. The pope himself, a former Sorbonne theology professor, had written to ask Tempier to look into these rumors.
The bishop responded with a list: 219 propositions that he condemned as heretical. Any arts faculty who taught them would be excommunicated from the church and would lose their livelihoods as professors.
To the modern mind, this doesn’t look great: a religious thinker overruling one of the Western canon’s heavy-hitting philosophers. In the 21st century, it’s common to think of Europe’s medieval era as an occluded one in terms of intellectual history, a time when religion ruled and artistic and scientific progress stalled out. But this 13th century disagreement between two university departments, arts and theology, would prompt medieval thinkers to consider ideas that might seem surprisingly modern. By rejecting a key Aristotelian principle, Tempier inspired later medieval scholars to develop a multiverse theory and to consider the possibilities of faraway planets and alien beings.
“You can think it’s luck or insight, but from knocking out of scientific dogma, new ideas began to grow and enliven the whole thing,” says Christopher Clemens, an astronomy professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who's been studying “medieval ideas of the multiverse,” as he titled a recent talk.
Clemens, a stellar astrophysicist, officially studies white dwarf stars, but about a decade ago he started reading about medieval scientific thought as part of a university effort to create classes that crossed disciplines. His gateway to this world was Pierre Duhem, a scientist and historian who fascinated him. In the 19th century, Duhem re-examined the history of medieval scientific thought and came up with a controversial thesis: there was, essentially, no “scientific revolution” during the Renaissance, only a continuation of work that was already happening in the “dark ages” of medieval thought. In particular, Duhem thought that Tempier’s 1277 condemnations liberated Europe’s Christian thinkers from Aristotle and opened up the way to the development of modern science.
Conventional historians sometimes take a skeptical view of Duhem, but Clemens thinks he was onto something. In the case of medieval multiverses, at least, it’s possible to follow a trail from one of Tempier’s condemnations to ideas that emerged more than a century later about infinite worlds, full of alien creatures.
Among the ideas that Tempier condemned was a principle of Aristotelian thought that held that the “first cause” (or, as medieval scholars would have said, God) could not have made more than one world. The logic went something like this: Earth was among the world's four key elements, and one of its principles was that it moved towards the center of the world. If there were a neighboring world to ours, though, with earth at its center, that earth wouldn’t be moving towards the center of our world. Since that violated the rules of how earth behaved, there could only be one world.
To Tempier, though, this idea went against a key theological principle: God was all-powerful and could accomplish whatever he willed. Since there couldn’t be limits on God’s power, there could be multiple worlds, if he wanted to make them.
Some medieval thinkers took this as a challenge. “Immediately they started to say, ‘Let’s look harder at what Aristotle said,’” says Clemens. They started to look more closely, for instance, at previous Aramaic comments on Aristotle and considered what else might be possible. “They found new ideas that were outside the bounds of the Aristotelian physics of the day,” Clemens says.
Richard of Middleton, for instance, who lived in the second half of the 13th century, responded to Tempier by affirming that it could be possible to have more than one universe: “God could have and could still now create another universe.” He tried to reconcile this with Aristotelian thought by arguing that the matter of a second world would stay in its own separate universe, and earth elements would gather at the center of each.
A later scholar, William of Ware, developed this idea further. What did it mean to talk about another world, he wondered? He didn't think it was possible to have two neighboring universes: by definition, the universe should include all the creatures ever made. So how could there be more than one? He argued instead that multiple worlds would have to be entirely separate, with no way of interacting—what today we might think of as parallel universes.
“That’s the way we think of multiverses today,” Clemens says in his talk. “We think, in the modern parlance, that they’re causally disconnected spaces that cannot interact.”
By the 15th century, medieval ideas about the universe had spun far from Aristotle’s idea of a single world, with earth concentrating at the center. The theologian and astronomer Nicholas of Cusa, who lived from 1401 to 1464, believed that if you were able to leave the earth, you would find multiple luminous bodies existing alongside our own world—far-off stars, planets, and moons. He even went so far as to imagine that these planets might be inhabited: he thought the sun might have bright, intellectual inhabitants, whereas the moon might have a “lunatic” population. This was still about a century before Galileo would famously reject the idea of a geocentric world and put the sun in the middle of the universe.
These medieval thinkers were working from a religious idea about divine power. But this line of inquiry prompted a scientific openness, too, to different ideas about the physical world and how it might work. Following Tempier's prompt led medieval scholars to some surprisingly modern ideas about parallel universes and exoplanets that Aristotle, at least, would have scoffed at.
All the gin joints in all the towns in the world have got nothing on the the Sourdough Saloon, located inside the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City, Yukon. There, you can drink a "Sourtoe Cocktail”—a shot of whiskey (or whatever else you'd like) with a preserved human toe floating inside. As the cocktail's official site explains, "you can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips have gotta touch the toe."
This past weekend, though, all this fun was interrupted: Someone stole the toe.
As the CBC reports, the suspected thief, who came to the Downtown Hotel from Quebec, "had earlier boasted about wanting to steal the toe." He managed to convince a new staff member to serve him a Sourtoe Cocktail outside of the designated toe-drinking time, which normally spans from 9 to 11 p.m. He then absconded with the appendage.
"Salted human toe" might not sound like a particularly appealing garnish. But since its invention by local riverboat captain Dick Stevenson in 1973, the cocktail has proven mysteriously and enduringly popular. Over 100,000 people from all around the world are now certificate-carrying members of the "Sourtoe Cocktail Club," drawn to Dawson City by the chance to try to drink. "Stunts like this adversely affect the whole community, not just the Downtown Hotel," 'Toe Captain' Terry Lee wrote in a news release about the theft.
This is not the first time the hotel has lost a toe. The first ever Sourtoe—which Stevenson found in the cabin of a deceased miner, who had amputated it in the 1920s after a bad case of frostbite and stored it in a jar of alcohol for decades—was accidentally gulped down by a guest in July 1980.
In the years since, a number of locals have stepped in to fill the void, donating toes that they have lost to accidents and amputations. But plenty of these have also been stolen or swallowed—as many as three feet's worth—and the hotel eventually instituted a $500 fine for toe theft or ingestion. Even that wasn't enough to stop one 2013 guest, who chugged the toe on purpose and then slapped $500 on the table. (He was an American.) The fine has since been raised to $2,500.
This latest toe was donated last summer, and spent six months curing in salt before it took its spot behind the bar. "This was our new toe, and it was a really good one," hotel manager Geri Coulbourne told the CBC. "We just started using it this weekend."
They feel confident that they will find the thief. Besides his pre-drink boasting, he left his Sourtoe Cocktail certificate—with his name on it—behind. If the toe is not returned, they plan to press charges—which seems like a better deal for the thief than a more Biblical retaliation would be.
In the meantime, the hotel assures guests, the cocktails will keep flowing. "We fortunately have a couple of backup toes," Lee writes.
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.
British comedian Harry Hemsley had a shtick. He had practiced since the age of eight when his father, a scenic artist, pushed him to act in a series of plays. But he didn’t perfect it until nearly 20 years later, in 1905, after a brief stint in a musical stage show called The Follies.
Hemsley could imitate children’s voices—really well.
In fact, he soon made a career of out of it, performing as a variety of fictional children—who were almost always under the age of eight—for the stage. But this was no ventriloquist production; Hemsley didn’t have puppets. When he spoke in the voice of a child, he simply covered his mouth with a book or a newspaper to signal a transition. On the radio, which soon became his preferred medium, there could be no distinguishing his voice from an actual child’s.
Hemsley developed several kid voices, out of which distinct characters sprung to life. By 1935, when he landed a weekly slot on the famous radio show Ovaltiney’s Concert Party, these characters became collectively known as the Fortune Family. There was six-year-old Johnny, five-year-old Elsie, four-year-old Winnie, and six-month-old Horace. Winnie was the star of the show, the most clever member of the Fortune Family, and it was she who would interpret Horace’s gargling for the rest of the children. The line “What did Horace say, Winnie?” quickly became iconic.
The reach of Ovaltiney's Concert Party—a children's show named after the malted drink company that sponsored it—was so great that Hemsley’s weekly serial catapulted him to national fame. He soon published a series of picture books, most of which he illustrated himself, beginning with Harry Hemsley’s Stories For Children in 1938. The Fortune Family were also awarded their own spinoff books, including the successful All About Horace, Not Forgetting Winnie, Elsie and Johnny.
Over the decades, British Pathé asked Hemsley to record a series of exclusive clips for them, others of which can be viewed here. But for a truly bizarre experience, try listening to Hemsley's show without an attached video, and see how believable his voices are.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Architecture students end their semesters sleep-deprived and often half-mad with caffeine, standing before juries of professors and peers. They try to sound coherent while explaining their final projects’ renderings and models and their visions of improving cityscapes. Once the course grades come in, the drawings and 3D constructions typically get stashed away in dorm rooms or university cupboards, never to be seen again, or perhaps to be pulled out occasionally with cringes or misty-eyed pangs by architects who changed their styles again and again during long careers.
At a few architectural institutions, however, there will be no forgetting of youthful submissions anymore. Librarians and archivists are creating searchable databases of classroom projects and competition entries produced in the last century. The digitized images reveal what students have imagined building without real-world limitations of budget or even rules of gravity—why not, before you actually have to earn a living, think about adding islands full of obelisks to the Manhattan shoreline or hanging urban observation pods from streetlights?
“It’s the impossible dreams” that turn up in the classwork records, explains Steven Hillyer, the director of the architecture school archive at the Cooper Union in Manhattan.
The Van Alen Institute in New York is posting over a century’s worth of student proposals, starting with rather elitist ideas for yacht harbors and riding schools. The Cooper Union has excavated classroom work dating back to curvaceous hot dog stand concepts suggested for the 1939 World’s Fair, and a comprehensive database of the material—even including transcripts of students’ presentations and teachers’ remarks—is scheduled to go live in the next year or so.
In the early 1900s, as the databases in progress show, ethnically diverse students from humble backgrounds made inroads in the WASP-dominated architecture profession and went on to fame. The Van Alen boxes contain ideas for neoclassical and Art Deco compounds from the 1920s and ‘30s by the future influential modernists Percival Goodman, Max Abramowitz and George Nelson. In the institute’s late 1930s entries, Minoru Yamasaki, the future designer of the World Trade Center, sketched prophetic pairs of blocky towers.
Every 20th-century shift in architectural tastes is recorded in the archives, as teachers encouraged students to experiment with forms and materials. By the 1960s, the Cooper Union’s future starchitect Daniel Libeskind was penciling in zigzag building footprints that soon became his professional trademark on landmarks like the Jewish Museum Berlin. In the 1970s, the school’s future starchitect Liz Diller, known for collaborations at Lincoln Center and the High Line, handed her professors some enigmatic renderings of masonry walls spiraling around corrals made of picket fencing and barbed wire.
In the 1980s, another future starchitect, Laurie Hawkinson, imagined traveling around in a Cinetrain, with rail cars full of cameras, projectors, film editing equipment, and screening rooms. As the train would roll across the landscape, Hawkinson told her teachers, “Spectator becomes both actor and audience.”
Hawkinson says her Cinetrain ideas have stayed with her; they have influenced, for instance, one of her public art installations, a giant red outdoor megaphone called the Freedom of Expression National Monument. She fondly remembers her Cooper Union days of time to think: “It was such a luxury and a gift,” she says.
The prominent architect and educator Karen Bausman likewise is a little nostalgic for her formative years at the Cooper Union in the 1980s, when she proposed cantilevering a “One-Way Bridge.” Its walkway to nowhere, she wrote at the time, “cannot distinguish the difference of footsteps offered with trepidation or with an imperious gate.” The drawings, she says now, “look as fresh as the day I stopped working on them.”
The Van Alen database contains proposals as loopy as Antarctic homes that look like overlapping Spirographs and a conversion of the Brooklyn Bridge into food stalls and apartments tucked beneath archways.
At the Cooper Union, among the most lovably impractical suggestions is Dominic Kozerski’s 1990s inhabitable metal pod that urban observers could hang from lampposts. It was meant to be used, he told his teachers, to study how “the illegible text of the inhabited city inscribes itself on the clear text of the planned legible city.” The classroom transcript shows that his professors praised him for introducing “a way, yes, a new way, another way of seeing our city.”
The database, Hillyer says, can be expanded as alumni and their loved ones come forth with memories and uncover documentation of schooldays squirreled away in storage: “I think we’re going to get a lot of blank-filling-in.”
