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Meet the Belfast 'Fatberg,' the Grossest Thing You'll See All Day

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At some point over the past couple of months, a fry cook in Belfast poured some extra grease down the drain. Then another cook, pressed for time, emptied her own tray into the sink. Around the same time, a harried parent disobeyed a bathroom sign and flushed some baby wipes.

Unseen, below the streets, these small decisions built up. Hot grease cooled in the pipes and congealed. Baby wipes and tampons stuck to the growing mass. And a gross, smelly villain slowly took shape: a fatberg, the scourge of sewers everywhere.

The term "fatberg"—a portmanteau of "fat" and "iceberg"—is used by Thames Water authorities to describe the big globs of refuse that build up inside sewers when people flush things they shouldn't.

They have the potential to get very big and very gross. In August of 2013, a record-setting fatberg wrestled out of a sewer in London ended up being the size of a bus. A year later, that record was broken by another London 'berg, this one the size of a Boeing 747.

As the BBC reports, this particular fatberg has made its home in a sewer beneath Dublin Road, and had nearly broken free onto the street by the time it was discovered. Crews from Northern Ireland Water have worked to remove it for six straight Sundays, and have already pried out "a couple of hundred tonnes" of grease, the outlet says.

The discovery inspired NI Water to release a kind of sewer-system audit: a list of everything weird they've found down there in the past. It's a good read, and reveals that at least one fatberg was providing food for "a family of frogs."

It will likely take a few more weeks to get the fatberg out completely. And then—if people don't change their habits—the slow drip of grease and sanitary products may start the entire process over again.

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.


The Body of Salvador Dalí Will Soon Be Exhumed

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Salvador Dalí had a very complicated sex life. Some believe he may never have had sex at all, preferring masturbation partially because, as he wrote of his diminutive genitals in his memoirs, he had convinced himself at an early age that he would "never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon."

Perhaps because of this, Dalí also never fathered a child, or at least not one that anyone knows about. But, in 2015, a Spanish tarot card reader filed a paternity suit against the Spanish government, claiming to be Dalí's daughter.

On Monday, a judge in the case ordered Dalí's body to be exhumed, a step made necessary, the court said, because there are no other items from which Dalí's DNA can be extracted, according to the BBC.

The exhumation could happen as early as July.

Maria Pilar Abel Martínez has said that her mother had an affair with Dalí in 1955, while he was in the midst of a 48-year marriage to his muse Gala. Two previous paternity tests were inconclusive, she told The New York Times in 2015, which is in part why she filed the suit, to force the exhumation of Dalí's body.

What does she want? The right to use Dalí's name, presumably, and at least part of his estate, which is owned by the Kingdom of Spain and worth over $325 million.

Dalí is buried at the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, his hometown, where his body rests in a crypt beneath the stage.

These Hoods Made of Spider Webs Have Long Been Misunderstood

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Set in a clutter of artifacts and ornaments at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, the mask from Malakula, Vanuatu is easily missed. At first, it’s hard to know why, amid so many other treasures, you’d look twice at it at all.

Shift your gaze from the swooping tusk extending from its forehead and look down to the scrubby brown cloth beneath it. Though it may look like a piece of old felt, the clue is in the caption: “Mask of clay and fibre on a sheet of matted spider’s web.

The tiny island of Malakula has a lot of “onlys” for a place of barely 25,000 people: the only place where, until recently, infants’ heads were bound so they grew into cone shapes. The only place where the names of its tribes, Big Nambas and Small Nambas, come from the size of their banana-leaf penis sheaths. And the only place in the world where the webs of the golden orb spider, Nephila, are traditionally felted together—into a strong, silky, waterproof cloth that lasts for decades.

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Malakulan spider-web cloth can be found in museums across the Western world—in Germany, France and the UK. It has often been used to make ceremonial caps, sometimes up to a meter in length, with strings at their peaks. But for almost every museum where these are found, there’s a spurious, even harmful, explanation for their original use.

Because some South Pacific Islands did have practices in which widows were killed at their husbands’ funerals, many puzzled early curators or collectors took one look at these caps, with their arachnid origins, and spun their own particular yarn. At London’s Science Museum, the cap is described as a “smothering hood”; the Pitt Rivers calls it a “cap of death,” “drawn over widows’ eyes when they were strangled at the husbands’ funeral,” like a snuffer over a candle flame.

Other museums have been more circumspect: the British Museum calls it a “night cap,” while another hesitantly describes it as “a (smoking?) cap.”

But artist and researcher Eleanor Morgan, author of Gossamer Days: Spiders, Humans and Their Threads, says there’s no evidence to suggest that these caps were ever used for anything so sinister.

To begin with, the silky spider-web fabric certainly wouldn’t be effective in suffocating anyone, she says. “It isn’t going to stop you breathing. Just practically, that’s not going to make sense.” Instead, she believes these caps were used by male secret societies as a symbol of seniority. “The longer the tail at the back of the cap, the more senior you are.”

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Male seniority rituals in Malakula, in which these caps played a part, are clandestine and complicated. They might involve sacrificing as many as hundreds of pigs over one’s lifetime. Important members of the community are seen as being already partly dead, spending part of their time among the spirits, who in turn convey messages to the living. The length of their spider-web hood helps communicate that seniority.

But how are they made? In Gossamer Days, Morgan describes a morning’s work. Armed with a bamboo cane frame, shaped like a cross between a rake and a funnel, the men “use a winding twisting motion [to] collect the spiders webs they pass until a thick felt-like fabric has been formed.” The strands are wrapped around the cane like cotton candy fibers around a stick. The golden orb spider is barely the size of a bean, but its web is vast, stretching out for meters in diameter, with more strands extending back behind it. As more webs are collected, they stick to one another, meshing together into a thick piece of cloth.

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Eventually, the fabric is knotted together and removed from the frame. It’s now in the shape of a tapered bag, which can easily be turned into a conical headdress. To make larger pieces of fabric, either for backing masks or making larger items of clothing like tunics, these are beaten together with other webs.

Though Morgan wore gloves to handle the caps, she couldn’t resist brushing the fabric against her wrist, to feel it against her skin. “It feels incredibly soft,” she says. “But because it’s layered spider webs, it’s obviously got the bits of stuff, whatever the spider caught in its web that night, so it also has little scratchy bits of wood and dust and beetle-wing and fly.”

That slight tackiness doesn’t go away: over time, the fabric thickens as hair or dust adheres to it, even within its museum glass cases. In the men’s huts, campfire soot blackens the caps over time, as they are handed on from generation to generation until they fall apart.

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The potential for weaving with golden threads of the Nephila spider has fascinated humans across the Pacific and the centuries—the French colonial government in Madagascar apparently had a full-blown silk spinning operation, while artist Simon Peers used the silk of over a million spiders to create a dazzling gold cape, exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2012.

Eight spiders at a time were loaded into a guillotine-like trap, while their silk was pulled from their bodies onto bobbins, like silk from a spool.

The golden orb spider lives barely a year—each evening, it weaves a new web, which it takes down again at dawn. Peers’ cape, like the Malakulan spider web caps, makes those evanescent threads and makes them permanent. This, he told the Financial Times in 2012, “is the antithesis of the brief, ephemeral life of a web.”

Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing

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In theory, book clubs are supposed to be about reading and discussing books. In practice, they are often more about hanging out with a group of people, drinking, gossiping, and generally having a nice evening. Depending on the percentage of the group that has actually read the book, it may be discussed, or it may not. The book is the excuse, not necessarily the point.

It turns out it’s always been this way.

Ever since the advent of book clubs in 18th-century England, when books were scarce and expensive, these organizations have been about more than reading. Book clubs were organized to help members gain access to reading material and to provide a forum for discussion of books the club held. But they were also about gossip and drinking. As the University of St. Andrews’ David Allan writes in A Nation of Readers, “In most cases, food and alcohol in copious quantities, accompanied we may suspect by a considerable element of boisterous good humour, played an important part in the life of the book clubs.”

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In 18th-century England, book culture was blooming as ever more volumes were printed. As more books appeared, people invented new ways of accessing them. Libraries began to open, many of which were commercial circulating libraries that required a fee to join. As Abigail Williams reports in The Social Life of Books, published this month, these libraries had become fixtures by the 1740s. As urban literary culture spread through England’s more provincial places, there may have been two hundred of them—or a thousand. (Estimates vary.)

These libraries weren’t just places to find books, but social institutions as well. One famous library also had a billiard room, a public exhibition room, and a music library. “They were not the hushed environments that we now associated with libraries, but, at their best, elegant spaces full of people to converse with,” Williams writes. Libraries even had a touch of controversy, as they gave people of different social classes access to books and offered women a place to congregate outside the home.

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Book clubs were part of this literary culture. In book clubs today every member might buy his or her own copy of a book, but in the 18th century, part of the point of the clubs was to pool resources in order to buy more books. Belonging to a book club meant having a larger personal library than you might otherwise have access to—you just had to share. There are few records of the activities of these early book clubs, but those that survive indicate that, as with today’s book clubs, members intended to get together and talk about books, but social aspects were key selling points. As Williams writes, “Members often met in inns or public houses or coffeehouses, and the clubs were clearly perceived to offer more than merely access to texts, because even readers with substantial book collections joined them.”

In fact, in some cases, the social side may have been the primary attraction. In the 1960s, Paul Kaufman, a retired professor who became a bibliography consultant for the University of Washington, made an extensive study of 18th-century English libraries and book clubs, and found that, in at least a few cases, monthly dinners were a key feature and a factor that distinguished them from other libraries or subscription societies.

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One club, for instance, had 22 members (including Branwell Brontë, the sole brother of the literary siblings) and met for monthly dinners. “A broad hint of conviviality is given in the rules,” writes Kaufman, “which imposed fines for swearing, for being drunk ‘so that a member be offensive to the company,’ and for unseemly scrambling for books to borrow!” Another society, founded in 1742, lasted for decades, and the dinners were a key feature for it as well. “Article XV of the Regulations emphasizes in detail the monthly dinners, specifying—with elaborate exceptions—the Tuesday before the full moon,” Kaufman reports. A member who missed the dinner had to pay a shilling. For other misdemeanors, which included letting a dog into the club room or revealing his vote for or against a potential new member, members had to contribute a bottle of wine.

The reputation of these clubs was such that, in 1788, Charles Shillito wrote a satirical poem depicting “The Country-Book Club” where members gathered to “taste the sweets of lit’rature—and wine.” Shillito took a dim view of the country doctor, squire, and vicar who gathered to drink and gossip at a meeting “that leaves no vacant time to think, or read.” The meeting of the fictional club gets more and more rowdy, until finally:

Thus, meeting to dispute, to fight, to plead,
To smoke, to drink—do anything but read—
The club—with stagg’ring steps, yet light of heart,
Their taste for learning shown, and punch—depart.

There is a certain snobbery to this poem—what’s so great about you and your literary friends, Charles Shillito?—and it shouldn’t be taken as an accurate report on 18th-century book clubs. But it does have a ring of truth: Even today, as The New York Times once reported, this is the “great divide” in book club culture. Are these meetings meant for discussion of literature, or are they social events? It is, apparently, a distinction as old as book clubs themselves.

Uranus's Strange Magnetic Field Cartwheels Around All Willy-Nilly

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Every planet in our solar system has quirks, but Uranus seems to have more than its fair share. For one thing, it rotates on its side because its axis is 98 degrees from vertical. It basically rolls drunkenly around the sun, and this unusual configuration means that its poles go through 42-year periods of light and darkness. The planet's magnetic field is another oddity.

Compasses work on Earth because our magnetic field more or less lines up with our axis of rotation—geomagnetic north happens to be fairly close to the physical north pole (most of the time it's only off by about 10 degrees). But trying to navigate by compass on Uranus would be a lost cause, because the magnetic field there is offset from its axis of rotation by about 60 degrees. As a result, its magnetic field "tumbles very fast, like a child cartwheeling down a hill head over heels," said Carol Paty, coauthor of a new study, in a press release. "Uranus is a geometric nightmare."

Most of the time Earth's magnetic field is "closed," meaning it deflects the solar wind of charged particles that flows through the solar system. Uranus, again, is perfectly different—it's magnetic field flips open and closed like a giant cosmic strobe light. Paty, along with Xin Cao, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology, used data from Voyager 2 (the only satellite to visit Uranus, back in 1986) to simulate the icy planet's magnetic field. Thanks to its strange rotational behavior, the field "goes from open to closed to open on a daily basis," said Paty—regularly allowing the solar wind to sweep in to the surface, causing auroras far away from the poles.

We've spotted similar ice giants outside our solar system, so understanding how Uranus's magnetic field works could help us understand these other planets. It may turn out that Uranus isn't that weird after all.

The Dormouse-Fattening Jars of Ancient Rome

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The ancient Romans consumed some strange foods, ranging from sow’s womb to dormice, which were known as glires in Latin. Astute Italians got their rodents mouth-ready by sticking them in a special container called a glirarium or vivarium in doliis (enclosed animal habitats in jars); it was designed to be a temporary home—a rodent Airbnb—where the animal could pig out. Humans would then cook up the dormouse once they judged it to be at prime plumpness.

Just a note: Romans didn’t eat the kind of mice that gnaw your wires. Instead, they chowed down on “edible dormice,” which were a lot bigger and substantive than their modern house-mouse counterparts. These were long considered extravagances; in 115 BC, consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus passed a law that prohibited serving exotic avians, mollusks, and dormice, according to Pliny the Elder. But it’s likely that nobody listened to Scaurus’ legislation—the rodents were too tasty.

On their country estates, prominent Romans reared some animals just for consumption. In his On Agriculture, Roman scholar Varro noted that country gentlemen raised tiny critters like snails to eat, bees for honey, and dormice inside their villas. Ancient gourmand Fluvius Hirpinus (whose name was probably a misspelling) popularized eating snails and started the practice of fattening dormice for the table in the mid-first century BC.

Dormice became a food of the upper classes. Varro cites the example of a rich guy named Titus Pompeius, who had a vast domain in Transalpine Gaul (modern France/Belgium), probably sometime in the first century BC. On his private hunting preserve, Pompeius bred captive critters in a four-square-mile enclosure, in which there were “usually kept places for snails and beehives, and also casks in which dormice are kept confined.” This was an ancient version of farm-to-table eating, in which you bred, raised, and slaughtered your own food. Archaeological evidence indicates that Average Joe farmers might have raised dormice on their own properties, then sold them to rich people as a side-hustle.

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In On Agriculture, Varro describes the unusual quirks of a glirarium. It looked like a regular, short storage vessel on the outside and resembled an artificial burrow on the inside. When building clay containers for dormice, potters used a different plan than when making regular ones; for one, the dolium, or jar, was ventilated. In addition, there were “channels along the sides” and “a hollow for holding the food.” These food trays could be refilled from the outside, with light and air holes to keep the dormice alive.

The channels allowed the dormice to scurry along the sides of their new home (as classicist Mary Beard quipped, they created an ancient version of a hamster’s wheel). To fatten the dormice, “in such a jar acorns, walnuts, or chestnuts are placed; and when a cover is placed over the jars they grow fat in the dark.” That made sense, since all the dormice could really do in that restricted habitat was eat, jog a bit, and sleep.

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Once the dormice were deemed sufficiently chubby, they were killed and cooked up for banquets. Ammianus Marcellinus reported that, at dinner parties, hosts would order their fish, dormice, and other meats to be weighed on scales and the results recorded. As many as 30 scribes would jot down and drone on and on about the animal weights at any given feast. Heavy meats were points of pride for rich Romans; the fatter your dormice, the more money you were able to spend on idle pursuits, and the wealthier you were.

A number of ancient Roman recipes and dormice dish descriptors still survive. In a famous banquet scene the Satyricon, one of ancient Rome’s first novels, hosted by the nouveau riche Trimalchio, “dormice seasoned with honey and poppy-seed” were served as hors d’oeuvres. De Re Coquinaria, one of the world’s oldest surviving cookbooks—attributed to ancient foodie Apicius—lists some tasty dormouse recipes. There’s dormouse stuffed with pork and its own trimmings, then pounded out with pepper, laser (the juice of a giant fennel plant), broth, and nuts; after, this concoction is put in a casserole dish, roasted, or boiled. Not a bad way to chow down—especially considering the mice were extra-succulent after hanging out in their own special jar.

Vandals Have Destroyed Norway's Most Phallic Rock

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Trollpikken, which Google translates as "Troll the cock," was a rock formation in Eigersund, Norway, about 200 miles southwest of Oslo. The rock, you'll notice, resembled a penis.

But on Saturday a jogger discovered that Trollpikken was no more, having been felled by an apparent vandal. The video below shows grooves in the rock that appear to be from a drill, as Trollpikken rests sadly on the ground.

Who could've done such a thing? Police don't have any suspects, but are looking for tips from the public, according to The Guardian.

Locals, meanwhile, have been busy raising money to have the rock repaired, getting the equivalent of $20,000 already, according to HuffPost, or about two-thirds of what they requested.

Which means that, soon enough, Trollpikken will probably be back, with the aid of some helicopters, bolts, and mortar.

And while the vandal may never be caught and their intentions remain unknown, they've assured that Trollpikken is now more famous than it's ever been, meaning that Eigersund's plan to use the rock to attract tourists just got a huge boost.

Roman Subway Dig Reveals Remains of an 1,800-Year-Old Dog

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Another victim of the fires of ancient Rome has finally been unearthed, and this time it was a just a poor little doggie.

While work continues on Rome’s new subway extension, workers continue to find a wealth of archaeological wonders, including the remains of a canine that seems to have perished in a fire around 1,800 years ago. According to the Associated Press, the remains of the dog were actually discovered in May, but the findings were just released.

The dog’s bones were found in a crouching position in a scene that the officials compared to Pompeii, which was famously destroyed after Mount Vesuvius erupted. The pup perished within a structure that is thought to have been either a wealthy citizen’s home, or a barracks that was found during digging in 2016. The remains of the dog were found near a doorway.

Authorities also found a table leg, a small table, and a wall covered in frescos, all of which are well-preserved, having been hardened by fire. Together, the scene provides researchers with a good look at the domestic layout of the time. Even if the tale it is telling is a bit sad.


The Enduring Legacy of the Worcester Whirlwind

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Every year near the end of July, a high-spirited group of cyclists gathers at the bottom of George Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. One at a time, each athlete eases up to the starting line, cranes his or her neck up at the steep incline ahead, waits for the honk of an air horn—and then pedals like mad, straight uphill. "We've had a unicycle, tandem bikes, a three-seater bike," recalls Lynne Tolman of the Major Taylor Association, who runs the event. "BMX bikes, road bikes, mountain bikes." No one is turned away.

The George Street Challenge—an uphill sprint that tends to take anywhere from thirty to sixty seconds, Tolman says—is a far cry from most bike events, which usually go at least a few miles. But it's a fitting tribute to the athlete it honors: Marshall W. "Major" Taylor, an African-American speed cyclist who was, for the first decade of the 20th century, the fastest man in the world. A longtime Worcester resident, Taylor himself biked up George Street as part of his training.

More than that, the requirements of the race—all alone, straight uphill, as fast as you can—aptly parallel what Taylor had to do to achieve success, in a time of Jim Crow laws and violent discrimination. "Some people call him the Jackie Robinson of cycling, but this was fifty years before Jackie Robinson," says Tolman. "We say it should be the other way around—Jackie Robinson was the Major Taylor of baseball."

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Taylor was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1878, and from an early age he found that cycling opened doors. He got his first bike at eight years old, a gift from his father's wealthy employers so that he could keep up with his best friend—their son Dan—and the rest of a gaggle of local kids. After Dan and his family moved to Chicago, the newly lonely Taylor began working as a delivery boy and teaching himself a variety of bike tricks in his spare time. By the time he was a preteen, he had landed a job at a local repair shop—sweeping the store in the morning, and performing a stunt show on the sidewalk every afternoon. (His employer dressed him in a military uniform for these shows, which is how he earned the nickname "Major.")

Some doors, though, remained firmly shut. Despite his dedication to athletics, he was barred entrance from the local Y.M.C.A. "It was there that I was first introduced to that dreadful monster prejudice, which became my biggest foe," Taylor wrote in his 1928 autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World. "How my poor little heart would ache to think that I was denied an opportunity to exercise and develop my muscles in the same manner as [my friends], and for really no reason that I was responsible for."

The inability to train like the others made the young biker less-than-confident in his racing abilities. Soon afterward, though, those abilities were tested—by accident. When Taylor's boss saw him among the crowd of spectators at the city's annual ten-mile road race, he gestured the young athlete to the starting line. "Just ride up a little way, it will please the crowd, and you can come back as soon as you get tired," Taylor remembered his boss saying. He got tired—but he kept going. Despite his youth, he beat the field by six seconds, and went home with the first of what became scores of gold medals.

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Taylor never looked back. Throughout the next few years, he entered any race he could find, winning at distances ranging from to one to 75 miles. He soon found a mentor in Louis D. "Birdie" Munger, an accomplished racer who had recently retired to start a bicycle-building company. Munger built the young speedster a state-of-the-art racing bike, and brought him to work out with local high school teams.

But the more his star rose, the more some people tried to cloud it over. Taylor was barred from certain competitions, and all local bicycle clubs, due to his race. "He was killing it in all the black races, but he didn't want to be only the black champion," says Tolman. "He wanted to be the fastest of all." So in the fall of 1895, when Taylor was 17, he and Munger moved to Worcester. There, Taylor joined the all-black Albion Cycle Club, began piling up wins in local races, and worked out at the Y.M.C.A. with no problems. "I shall always be grateful to Worcester, as I am firmly convinced that I would shortly have dropped riding … were it not for the cordial manner in which the people received me," he later wrote.

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The next year, at age 18, Taylor went pro. The life of a star cyclist was exciting: Taylor raced for huge crowds at Madison Square Garden, and gained a number of famous fans, including Teddy Roosevelt. It was lucrative: by 1900, he was earning $30,000 a year, far more than most athletes of the day.

But it was also a dangerous life—far more so for Taylor than for his white competitors. Besides sports-related threats—such as the hallucinatory fatigue that set in during a six-day endurance race—Taylor faced discrimination from cycling groups and violence from fellow riders. Members of one major racing association, the League of American Wheelmen, tried to ban him from all tracks under their jurisdiction. While they did not succeed, individual arenas from Philadelphia to Indiana refused to let him race.

Other cyclists elbowed or shoved him during races. After one Bostonian rival, W.E. Becker, lost to him, he threw Taylor from his bike and choked him "into a state of insensibility." Persistent threats meant that Taylor was sometimes reluctant to ride at all. Once, a training stint in Georgia was cut short after he received an intimidating letter, illustrated with a skull and crossbones, from an anonymous group of "White Riders." Hotels and restaurants also regularly barred him entry, which meant that while his competitors were relaxing and refueling, he would be searching a city for a bed and a meal. "It would be difficult for me ... to call to mind all the vicious attempts that were made in vain to eliminate me from bicycle racing," Taylor wrote.

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Despite this adversity, Taylor continued to tear up the track and earning his sobriquet, the Worcester Whirlwind. He racked up world record after world record—at one point, he held seven of them, in events ranging from the quarter-mile to the two-mile. In 1899, he won the one-mile sprint at the ICA Cycling World Championships in Montreal, making him the first ever African-American world champion athlete. In 1902, he set off on a tour of Europe and Australia, leaving a string of fans in his wake. At the time—before automobile and airplane races replaced bicycling as the speedy spectacle of choice—watching him was an unmatchable thrill. "He was really the fastest human on the planet," says Tolman.

By the time he retired—in 1910, at the age of 32—he had married and had a daughter. He had saved a lot of money. He was ready to prop up his legs (which had been sore pretty much continuously since that first race, when he was 13) and relax at his home in Worcester. But it was not to be. Lacking a high school degree, he was denied admittance to Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out most of his savings, and his marriage broke up. He spent six years writing his autobiography, and many more selling it out of the back of his truck, before he died at 53 in a Chicago hospital. He was buried nearby at Mount Glenwood Cemetery, in an unmarked grave.

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A few years later, some of his former competitors got together and had a proper marker put at the site. "Still, he remained forgotten for much of the 20th century," says Tolman. It's only in recent decades that his contributions to the sport of cycling—and to American history—have begun to gain wide recognition. In 1982, Indianapolis unveiled the Major Taylor Velodrome, an open-air bicycle track that hosts races every summer. Fans across the country, from Pittsburgh to San Diego, have started Major Taylor Cycling Clubs—"not only remembering Taylor and his story, but also working towards diversity and equity in cycling," says Tolman.

Thanks to the efforts of the Major Taylor Association, Worcester is now home to a bronze statue of Taylor (the first statue of an individual African American in the entire city) as well as a Major Taylor Road. And then there's the George Street Challenge—a fitting way to pay tribute to a great man, by putting oneself ever-so-briefly in his cycling shoes.

The annual George Street Challenge starts at 10:00 a.m. on July 23, 2017, at the intersection of Main and George streets in Worcester, Massachusetts. Tickets are available here.

I Can't Believe It's Butter That Was Buried in a Bog!

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Seventeen months ago, Brian Kaller made a little more than three pounds of butter, wrapped it in cheesecloth and a kitchen towel, tied the package together with bright blue rope, and buried it in the bog behind his house in the Irish countryside. This summer, as the bog became lush, he dug the butter up.

The package was almost black with muck, but when Kaller pulled back the coverings, the butter smelled fine—not even a little rancid. It appeared to have darkened slightly, to a deeper yellow, but otherwise looked about as it had when he had buried it more than a year before.

The only thing left to do was taste it.

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For thousands of years people have been burying butter under the spongy surface of boglands, where organic matter doesn’t rot as it does elsewhere. There’s little oxygen in the bog's depths to feed mold and other decomposers, and the decaying peat that makes up the bogs creates compounds that help preserve anything buried in them. Ireland’s bogs have produced millennia-old “bog bodies” (startlingly well preserved human remains), and ancient bog butter is discovered with some regularity. These large chunks of butter or beef tallow might be 2,000, 3,000, even 5,000 years old, and they are usually still (technically) edible, though they’re said to have a sharp, cheese-like smell.

Why would Ireland’s ancient people bury giant chunks of butter? As a calorie-rich food, butter was valuable, and it’s possible that these troves of fat were meant to help stave off famine. Some students of the Irish past, though, believe that bog butter was sometimes meant as an offering to a now-forgotten god.

Kaller’s family is Irish, but he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He has an interest in self-sufficient living, and when he moved back to Ireland, to his wife’s family land, he started studying and writing about older ways to make and preserve food. His family lives on about an acre of land, along one of the canals that was once used to transport dried turf, used for heat, to Dublin, and they keep chickens, bees, and a garden in which they grow some of their own food. His elderly neighbors and local craftsmen, he says, still have “incredible amounts of lore” to share. (For instance, they say, you should plant potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day and harvest them on Halloween.)

Modernity came late to Ireland, he says. “People growing up here in the 1960s or ‘70s often didn’t have cars, electricity, or plumbing." Making bog butter is just one of a series of experiments Kaller has tried, along with experiments with traditional ways of making jam, preserving eggs, and creating an old-fashioned slow-cooker in a box insulated with hay. "I like to test these things," he says, "and find out if there’s something to it."

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Before burying the butter in the bog, Kaller had something of a bog butter dress rehearsal. He buried a jar of butter in the Bog of Allen—behind his house, past a neighbor’s pastures—and left it there for about seven months. When he and his daughter dug up the jarred butter, he says, “it was perfectly fine."

For the next experiment, the pair started by making butter using a simple method: put milk in a jar and shake it. Since butter made this way is heavy in milk solids, they clarified it before proceeding, in order to reduce the risk that the butter would go bad and grow dangerous bacteria that might give someone botulism. Once they had about 3 pounds of solid, clarified butter, they wrapped it up, and took it to the edge of the pasture.

“Once we were in proper boglands, I took 100 paces forward and 100 paces to the right and buried it,” says Kaller. He tied the bright blue rope around the package to a nearby tree so it would possible to relocate the bundle. The first time he went searching, though, the spot was so overgrown that he couldn’t find the rope again. It was only on a second trip that he was able to dig up the golden treasure. (This may be another reason why ancient bog butter was left behind: The people who buried it could not find it again.)

The bog’s top layer of moss forms a sort of cap on the muck below. So Kaller began by digging a circle and popping off the vegetation. He dug down about a meter and half through the black, wet muck to where he had buried the butter, beyond the reach of oxygen.

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Back at home, Kaller tried a tiny bit of the bog butter.

“It’s quite edible,” he says. “It has a distinctive flavor. I describe it as a kind of parmesan flavor.” (That might sound nice, but he points out the chemical that gives parmesan its smell is a chemical found in vomit.) “A friend of the family was a good sport and was willing to try it,” he says. “It’s still recognizably butter. It tastes a little different. My friend described it as 'earthy.'”

Since then, Kaller has used the butter mostly for frying eggs and drizzling over popcorn. “It’s not something I think most people would eat regularly,” he says, “but if you were hungry, I think you’d happily eat it.” He warns anyone who's thinking of trying to make their own to be wary of botulism. As for his hunk, he has plenty left to enjoy: About two-thirds of the original portion remain.

Found: A Giant, 20-Pound Lobster on a Journey

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Over the weekend, Transportation Security Administration officials screened an unusual traveler: a 20-pound lobster.

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The lobster came to the attention of the TSA after it set off the alert for additional security screening, either because of the size of its box or because of the image it created on the X-ray machine.

Lobsters are allowed to fly on planes, if they're correctly packed: The TSA recommends a clear, plastic, spill-proof container. There's no limit on lobster size, although a TSA spokesperson allowed that this is likely the largest one the TSA has ever screened. (In any context, a 20-pound lobster is a very large lobster.)

The lobster passed the security check and continued on its journey.

Local Condor Embraces the Argentinian Farmer Who Rescued It

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In March, when Loncopué farmer Edgardo found a condor with an injured leg alone in his yard, he decided to take care of it. According to the Argentinian publication LMNeuquén, he contacted specialists to ensure the bird's well-being—his desire is for the bird to live on its own rather than be tamed.

It is not known how the condor, which is believed to have been born in October, separated from its family, but Edgardo hopes it will return to them soon. The bird recently learned to fly (though it still could not at the time this video was filmed).

In this video, a possible sequel to the epic, 25-year friendship between a Japanese diver and a local fish, Edgardo and the condor—who he named Condorito—have become quite close. According to 9News, Condorito comes when Edgardo calls.

In the video, Edgardo can be heard remarking (in Spanish) that it has been a while—before he and his friend embrace.

Vermont Institute of Nature Science educator Anna Autilio told NPR that imprinting may explain Condorito's unique relationship with Edgardo. She added: "Gratitude is not a word I would use — it implies the condor knows Edgardo was responsible for its healing. But does the condor feel extreme affection for Edgardo? Yes!"

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

For Sale: A Button That Helped Change World War II

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Every day, we press dozens of buttons—to turn on our phones, to make a smoothie, to choose an elevator floor. Some buttons, though, have lives less quotidian.

Such is the case with the Lancaster Bomber release buttons, the thumb-sized bits of metal and Bakelite that, as the literal final push of the Dambuster bombing raids, helped to change the course of World War II. One of these buttons will be sold at auction later this week.

In 1943, Allied forces wanted badly to destroy the hydroelectric dams in Germany's Ruhr Valley, which provided water and power to the country's manufacturing plants, as well as nearby villages.

To do so, they developed so-called "bouncing bombs:" explosives that would hop over the torpedo nets that guarded the dams, sink underwater, and then explode. Releasing the bombs required a pilot to zoom in close, a navigator to keep track of where they were—and a bomb aimer to push the button at the exact right time.

As Lincolnshire Live reports, this particular button was pressed by an aimer named John Fort on May 17th, 1943. After the two-day raid—called Operation Chastise—the Möhne and Edersee Dams were successfully destroyed, interrupting power production and providing a hefty jolt of morale to British troops. (Nearby villages were also flooded, killing hundreds of civilians.)

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After the war, the airplane's pilot gave the button to Hydneye House school, which put it on display. When the school closed in the 1960s, a former pupil got ahold of it. After keeping it in his private collection for half a century, he's decided to sell it.

The auction, by JP Humbert Auctioneers, will take place on July 1st in Whittlebury, Northamptonshire. Experts forecast that the button will sell for about $50,000—an impressive price for something pressed only once.

A Rare, 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Hit the Netherlands

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Meteorites in the Netherlands, like in a lot of places throughout the world, can be very hard to find. That's because they're small and hard to distinguish from other rocks and can land anywhere. We frequently don't even know they exist unless they make us notice, like when they hit someone's car or someone's hip.

Which is what happened in January in the Netherlands, when a one-pound meteorite hit a shed and was discovered by residents who were picking through the damage, according to Agence France-Presse. The meteorite is only the sixth found in the country in the last 200 years, which means it was cause for celebration by scientists there, some of whom released a video Sunday to unveil the rock and explain how excited they were.

Scientists at the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in Leiden have been studying the rock for months since its discovery to be sure of what they had. They eventually identified it as an L6 chrondite, a type of meteorite that is among the most ordinary found on Earth. It probably came from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and is, the scientists said, 4.5 billion years old, or around the same age as the Earth itself.

"We can learn from it what happened in the very beginning of the solar system when you had a stellar cloud that collapsed and minerals started to form, when planetoids started to form for the very first time," Leo Kriegsman, a geologist, told AFP.

You can also learn, Kriegsman said, what kinds of rocks existed around the time the Earth was formed, since this meteorite is older than any rock currently existing on Earth.

Kriegsman said he and a student will now try to figure where the rock might have existed inside of an earlier planet, now likely long gone and forgotten.

The Politics of Pie Cutting at West Point's Mess Hall

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Until the mid-1990s, squared-away plebes (what they call “freshmen who have their s**t together” at the United States Military Academy—better known as West Point—located some 60 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan) carried a circular piece of paper in two small Zip-Lock plastic bags under their hats whenever the mess hall was serving pie. They always knew when pie would be on the menu because they always knew when everything was on the menu; part of their job as the punching bags of the United States’s finest military academy was to know what was for lunch.

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The monthly menu at Washington Mess Hall, West Point’s dining facility, was part of “plebe knowledge,” the truckload of information plebes had to rattle off from memory at the request of any upper-class cadet. This was known as the “fourth-class system,” and in their first year of the four-year program, plebes were its fourth-class citizens. Along with menus, plebes also had to memorize West Point history, news headlines, and interesting trivia questions. Failure to produce any of the required knowledge on the spot exposed these greenest of West Pointers to the wrath of their older classmates, and to any number of physical or verbal humiliations. So plebes pored over paper printouts of each month’s meals, posted the menus to their doors as ever-present reminders, and quizzed each other on what they would eat next Tuesday lunch, or for dinner the following Thursday.

And each month, plebes would take particular note of what nights there would be pie. Those evenings, they’d stash their double Zip-Lock-covered piece of paper in their hat, cross their fingers hard, and hope they wouldn’t have cause to retrieve it.

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The food at West Point has, traditionally, not been very good. A Senate inquiry in 1860 concluded that the fare served to the corps of United States Army officers-in-training “was neither nutritious nor wholesome, neither sufficient nor nicely dressed.” “Sometimes the meat is almost rotten,” cadets told the Senate investigators. “Bugs will be found in the sugar, and cockroaches in the soup.”

For these early generations of cadets, at least there was pie. Whether served in the cadet mess hall or by officers’ by their professors’ sympathetic wives, pie provided much-needed calories. In addition to their academic courses, cadets took (and still take) physically demanding classes such as boxing, gymnastics, and swimming, and are expected to complete long marches, obstacle courses, and regular fitness tests. (Despite these physical demands, cadets throughout the 19th century reported that bread was the only other reliably edible food), a reminder of home, and a balm to soothe the life of hard training and even harder hazing they endured.

More recently, though, pie at West Point lost its innocence. For cadets who passed through the Academy in the later decades of the 20th century, a favorite form of hazing centered on pie. At dinner in the mess hall, plebes were made to cut the dessert into a mathematically impossible number of exactly equal slices: seven, nine, or 11. Upperclassmen looked on, taunting. The Zip-Locks under plebes’ hats? They held pie-cutting templates—literal pie charts—that helped plebes cut perfect slices and, most importantly, avoid their elders’ wrath.

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In those days, plebes had much to fear from Washington Mess Hall, the cavernous stone building where cadets ate, and still eat, their meals. For the unaffiliated, the “cadet mess” looks like a Hollywood set: one part Game of Thrones imposing, one part Harry Potter magical. The hall’s six wings stretch out from the central stone pedestal known as the poop deck (“poop” being the military’s appetizing word for information). Battle-torn flags adorn the two-story stone walls, and chandeliers in the shape of ornate candelabras hang from the cathedral ceilings. But for plebes, the mess hall has traditionally been less throne room, more prison cafeteria.

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Since the late 1960s, when the mess hall was expanded to its current size, the corps of more than 4,000 cadets have filtered into the hall at mealtimes to find their seats at 10-person, mixed class tables. Then, for 20 excruciating, uninterrupted minutes, plebes were at the mercy of their older classmates.

Food at West Point has always been served family-style, and the plebes at each table are responsible for announcing its arrival (“Sir, the Brussels sprouts are on the table!”) and serving it. They rotate through roles like the “Cold Beverage Corporal” and “Hot Beverage Corporal,” whose roles are more or less self-explanatory, to the less aptly titled “Gunner.” Until the mid-1990s, the Gunner was the unlucky soul in charge of cutting the pie.

The squared-away plebe had a procedure when it was his turn as Gunner: remove the outside baggie (which presumably had touched his hair), place a sugar packet or piece of bread in the center of the pie to act as a riser, center the template on the packet so that it didn't touch the pie, and score the pastry's edges for the desired number of pieces. Then, remove the template and slice. Voila, perfectly cut pie.

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It didn’t always go that well. A West Point urban legend involves a Gunner who announced, “Sir, the dessert for this meal is cherry pie,” and then took a knife to the pastry. After struggling for several minutes to cut the prescribed seven slices, he grabbed his spoon, stirred the pie vigorously, and amended his announcement. “Sir, the dessert for this meal is cherry cobbler!"

Creativity apparently kept that plebe out of trouble, but for most others, failure to achieve geometric perfection resulted in being yelled at or ordered to run laps around the poop deck. Sometimes, especially if it was bad weather, the offending plebe would be ordered to stand outside, freezing until the conclusion of the meal. The pie scars remain: West Point grads from that era, now 20 or more years from graduation, have been known to feign terror at being asked to cut a dessert.

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Pie is still served in West Point's cadet mess hall, though less often than it used to be. In recent years, budget cuts reduced the baking staff from 22 down to four, and they no longer have enough hands to roll out individual circles of dough for the 400 to 500 pies they need to serve the corps of cadets. Instead, they make cakes and bars, which are easier to mix in large batches. But the kitchen still bakes them in pie tins—they still look like pies.

These days, pie-shaped desserts come without the trauma. Hazing has been punishable by courts martial since 1874, but a Department of Defense report in 1992 found that “hazing-type behavior” was still prominent at West Point—and cited pie-cutting rituals as an example. In 1999, the institution officially banned hazing with pie or anything else. This was widely hailed as a good thing outside the Academy, and it definitely means plebes enjoy dessert more.

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But for some “old grads” (the ones afraid of pastry), abandoning pie cutting rituals means that today’s cadets are missing out on something valuable. Being yelled at while cutting pie into an odd number of slices, they say, or the myriad other indignities of the fourth-class system, taught cadets how to complete a detail oriented, exacting task while stressed out and under pressure. For a member of West Point’s class of ’83, pie cutting “provided me with a priceless gift”: the ability to “sort through the mess, bring some order to it, and continue functioning.”

To be sure, there’s a lot more than pastry in West Point’s pies.


They Bought a Pub, Then Turned It Into a Zoo

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The Fenn Bell Inn has all the usual trappings of a modern British pub: proper ales, fish and chips, Sunday roasts, curry nights, karaoke. But its backyard is something a little less conventional. There, a miniature railway winds around four acres of land that is home to meerkats, monkeys, and more. Earlier this month, the Kent establishment became the first pub in the United Kingdom to be granted a zoo license.

The menagerie was started in 2011, when co-owner Andy Cowell adopted two kunekune pigs named Ginger and Spice. "We took in pets people didn’t want and we got visitors coming around to see them all," Cowell told the Mirror. "My wife Kelly said you should turn it into a zoo, so we bought the pub and we have finally done it." The unusual combination opened in 2014, and is now home to geese, South American coatis, lemurs, parrots, and a raccoon, among other exotic rescues.

The Cowells now plan to expand their zoo and open more of the existing enclosures to the public. "Going forward we are hoping to get more lemurs, otters, some wolves and big cats," said Cowell. The pub also plans to offer tours to school groups, and partner with other zoos on conservation projects. The official license makes all the difference, Cowell wrote on the pub's Facebook page. "We're not a boozer with animals, we're now a zoo!"

When You Have to Move an 800,000-Pound Sequoia

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In the dead of night on Sunday, workers in Boise, Idaho moved the state’s largest giant sequoia quarter-of-a-mile across town this weekend. The video of the move, as you might imagine, is good:

According to KTVB, the 98-foot-tall tree was relocated from its original roadside home on the grounds of St. Luke’s Hospital to a new location in nearby Fort Boise Park. The move took place after months of preparation that readied the 105-year-old, 800,000-pound giant for its little trip. The giant sequoia was originally planted in 1912 from a seed said to have come from naturalist and forest advocate John Muir, growing to its current height over the course of more than a century, according to ABC7.

To move the tree, workers used a complex system of conveyors, support balloons, and wires to lift the plant upright, along with a good portion of its root system, and placed it on a truck, which brought it to its new home. Hopefully now, in the safety of the park, the tree might grow for another hundred years, no further nighttime maneuvers required.

Inside the Muddy Wrestling Rings of Varanasi

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It is just after 7 in the morning, but Tulsi Akhada, deep in the heart of Varanasi in north India, has been open for over an hour already. The 20 or so young men there are training under the experienced master Pehlwan Siyaramji, who is closely watching the proceedings. Siyaramji is in his sixties but looks fitter than any of his pupils, having followed a strict exercise routine since he was a boy.

An akhada, also known as akhara, is a traditional Indian gymnasium-meets-wrestling-ring. These spaces are part of the cultural canvas of Varanasi, the city described by Mark Twain in 1897—when it was known as Benares—as “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” This particular akhada, one of the oldest and most popular in Varanasi, is believed to have been established by the writer-poet Goswami Tulsidas, best known for his version of the beloved epic Ramayana, sometime in the mid-16th century. Some say that Tulsidas himself exercised at here every day.

At akhadas across India, particularly in the north and west, men of all ages practice a traditional form of wrestling known as kushti or pehlwani. The modern form of this practice draws from later day Mughal and Persian wrestling cultures, when these dynasties ruled over India, as well as malla yuddha, a form of wrestling mentioned in ancient Indian texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Some of the heroes of those texts, including Hanuman and Bhima, were great wrestlers themselves.

Although it is a Sunday morning when I visit Tulsi Akhada, most of the young men present are college students or have a day job to attend after their daily morning practice. They are not here in the hope of becoming professional wrestlers or pehlwans; for them, kushti is an earthy way of staying fit. In fact, these akhadas are patronized by those who subscribe to the idea that physical exercise is almost a form of worship; all sessions begin with a prayer and incense stick ritual dedicated to Lord Rama.

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The young men are working out on their own or in pairs. They jump up and down, lift two-foot-long, cylindrical indigenous clubs as well as dumbbells made of wood and stone, hang upside down from parallel bars, or stretch on horizontal benches. Occasionally, they walk with heavy wooden rings around their necks, or while carrying their partner on their shoulders, pushing the limits of weight-training techniques.

Those who have adequately warmed up head on to the mud ring in the center of the akhada to begin their wrestling sessions. In kushti, there is a lot of pushing and heaving, maneuvering of opponents, and rolling in the mud for the next few hours. But there are no clumsy movements or overt suggestions of violence—it seems instead like a graceful tableau.

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All the men are clad in what is locally known as a langot, or a loincloth, as they go about their wrestling bouts. The akhada has become a tourist attraction, so they’ve learned to ignore curious visitors. Before the exercise routine commences, they have also oiled their bodies thoroughly, to make sure there are no creaky bones or joints. In between matches, they also apply mud on their bodies to provide some much-needed friction.

To my inexperienced eyes, the exercise routine of these young men at Tulsi Akhada seems rigorous, but training to become a professional pehlwan is a different game altogether, involving a strenuous exercise and diet regimen. The day of a fledgling wrestler can begin as early as 3 a.m., with thousands of squats and stretches, miles of running and swimming, and several rounds of wrestling practice under the supervision of the teacher.

Trainee wrestlers are also regularly given oil massages to keep their bodies supple and to remove any residual aches. Along with a protein-rich diet, there is also a huge emphasis on the doodh-badam (milk and almonds) combination as part of their food.

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Modern India has seen a lot of popular wrestling champions, the first of them being Ghulam Muhammad, in the early 20th century. Legend has it that the training regimen of Great Gama, as he was known, was 5,000 knee squats, 3,000 push-ups, and a mile-long run with a 120-pound stone ring around his neck. His diet included 20 liters (5.3 gallons) of milk, four kilograms (nearly nine pounds) of fruit, and half a liter (two cups) of ghee.

Other illustrious wrestlers include Dara Singh, born in 1928, a superstar who became a movie actor in his later years, and Sakshi Malik, born in 1992, who was India’s first female wrestler to win a medal at the Olympics.

Despite the successes of these and other prominent athletes, akhadas are slowly losing popularity among young people in Varanasi and elsewhere in the country. Kushti is being replaced by more contemporary forms of wrestling and modern gymnasiums. From over 50 akhadas a few decades ago, there are now barely a dozen scattered across the city. However, with recent wins at the Olympics and Commonwealth Games by Indian wrestlers, combined with the popularity of movies like Dangal that have paid tribute to this traditional sport, there's hope yet that a revival is in the air.

Why a River in France Turned Very, Very Red

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Last year, rivers across France were dyed green to raise awareness about pollution in the country—an environmentalist stunt. Now we have another unnaturally colored river to add to the collective French memory, but this time it was for actual science.

The Gardon, which runs for 83 miles across southern France, was recently turned red, courtesy of 33 pounds of nontoxic powdered dye, according to The Local, the work of scientists studying the local karstic landscape.

Karst is formed when flowing water breaks down the bedrock (often limestone) underlying an area, creating cracks, caves, sinkholes, ridges, and other formations, as well as an underground drainage system for local waterways and runoff. The red dye will be used to track the (perhaps surprising) places where the Gardon's water ends up.

The experiment began Monday, June 26, near Dions, about 50 miles northwest of Marseille, and is set to last for up to 72 hours, which means there may be time to have a look if you find yourself nearby. But if you miss it, The Local said, next month a similar experiment will turn the river green. Once again, there's nothing to be alarmed about.

Just a Rat Stealing Food From a Turtle, Which Is Trying to Steal It From Some Fish

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In a scene reminiscent of the famous Battle at Kruger, a new multi-species skirmish has appeared online, although this time the conflict is slightly less brutal.

Like many things that appear online, the video's origin story is pretty much unknown. Imgur user iwasdoingfinelurkinguploaded a copy of it Monday, almost immediately scoring a viral hit, with over 1.5 million views and counting, and it's now popping up elsewhere. From the looks of iwasdoingfinelurking's other posts, it's unlikely he shot it himself, meaning that it's hard to know where it exactly came from, a mystery that you probably don't want to know the answer to anyway. (Iwasdoingfinelurking, for their part, offers no clues.)

Still, it doesn't seem staged (though it might be!), so we should enjoy it for what it is: a piece of food (possibly bread) picked at by some fish, which are then challenged for the food by a turtle, which is then defeated by a rapidly swimming rat.

New Pizza Rat? Perhaps. Call it “Bread Rat,” “Thief Rat,” or “Yoink Rat." Just never say it didn’t work for its snacks.

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