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Your Guide to the Perfect Eclipse-Themed Karaoke Night

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There are many songs dedicated to the Moon. "Blue Moon." "Black Moon." "Moondance." "Can’t Fight the Moonlight." And there are plenty of songs that feature the Sun, too. But when it comes to eclipse-themed songs, there’s probably just one that comes to mind first.

It has to be “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Now, say, just say, you imagined celebrating the upcoming eclipse with a little karaoke. Do you go with “Total Eclipse”? Are there traps lurking in the song, waiting to throw you off your game? Is “Total Eclipse” a solid pick or a guaranteed flop? Is it a little too on the nose?

After consulting with karaoke experts, Atlas Obscura has a clear recommendation: Go for it.

“Everyone knows that song, and everyone can belt out the lyrics,” says Elsaida Alerta, the 2015 Karaoke World Champion. “It’s a crowd pleaser.”

Chris Goldteeth, of Karaoke Killed the Cat (“the infamous karaoke dance party for people who never thought they'd like karaoke”), agrees. “It is a good song to choose—it crosses over into the universal appeal category in karaoke,” he says. “The emotional level goes up and down quite a bit, which people always respond to.”

But how hard of a song is it to pull off? Bonnie Tyler, who topped the charts with the song in 1983, once told Dick Clark that “Total Eclipse” (written and produced by Jim Steinman) is a challenge. “I don’t like songs that anybody can sing,” she said. “I like songs that need a lot of energy. It’s such a passionate song, and it builds all the time, ’til it finally comes to a real climax. It’s incredible.”

Pulling this off is a question of confidence. There are some long notes to hold, but you can probably count on having the entire audience belting out backup vocals with you. But if you can navigate the emotional ups and downs, you should be fine.

“The challenge is the belting out,” says Alerta. “It’s pretty high. Going to a neutral place for 'Once upon a time … ' and then it goes BOOM. It’s all about the delivery.”

One important choice to make is which version of the song to perform. Bonnie Tyler's album version is close to seven minutes long, which is not recommended. The music video version is about five and a half minutes, and the single is a tighter four and half. But there’s also the Nicki French dance cover from the '90s—a popular choice in karaoke venues. Her take comes in two varieties, both faster and beat-heavier than the original. One starts slow, then speeds up. The other starts fast and stays fast.

Then there is the Dan Band version, made popular by the 2003 comedy film Old School. It is shorter than all the other versions, and includes a few of well-placed curses.

Think carefully before choosing this version; what are those off-color flourishes adding? Maybe you want to add your own, original flourishes, instead of copying someone else's? But it can work, says Goldteeth. “I would watch people perform it, and watch the audience respond to it. And the audience was into it. If they get the reference, they’re doing it themselves. Enough people get the reference that it crosses over. It’s not the same universal appeal, but enough people get it that it works.”

No matter what version of the song you choose, this is one where you better know how it goes. “There’s nothing worse than picking one of these songs that everyone knows and not knowing it,” says Goldteeth. “If you dip into 'Total Eclipse' territory, you should know the song. It’s a bummer when you don’t.”

Of course, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is far from the only song that would make sense in an eclipse-themed karaoke jam. Here are some additional ideas, collected from the Atlas Obscura staff. In fact, why wait for the eclipse? Trust us, forever's gonna start tonight.

The Official Atlas Obscura Eclipse Karaoke Playlist


Found: A Praying Mantis Older Than Tyrannosaurus Rex

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An extremely well-preserved mantis fossil, dating to around 110 million years ago, may shed new light on how the large, spiky insects developed their specialized forelegs. Praying mantises today have a set of large spiky, "raptorial" forelegs that they hold in the "praying" position. When stalking flies, crickets, or moths, the predators wait motionless. When an unfortunate bug strays too close, the spiny forelegs shoot out to seize the prey.

This fossil, found in northeastern Brazil, represents Santanmantis axelrodi, a predecessor of the modern mantids. Insect fossils are extremely rare—they're so fragile—so finding one so well preserved is unexpected.

The insect's head and the top of its thorax are clearly visible, as are two pairs of legs. Both sets of legs have spines on them—unlike modern mantids, which only have spines on the top forelegs. This detail hasn't been clear on other fossils of the species and suggests, the scientists write in an article in the open-access journal PeerJ, that both sets of "these appendages were involved in the prey-catching process." The fossil should help scientists understand how the modern mantids evolved, and clear up earlier misconceptions about the prehistoric invertebrate.

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Praying mantises of one sort or another have been around since the Jurassic, between 199.6 and 145.5 million years ago, but they started to diversify during the Cretaceous—145.5 to 65.5 million years ago. This mantid preceded dinosaur fan favorites, such as stegosaurus or tyrannosaurus rex, by millions of years, but may have shared the region with early scorpions, predatory fish, and even this mushroom.

These Australian Spiders Crossed an Ocean on a Land Raft

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If the idea of spiders sailing across the ocean gives you a fright, then there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that this actually happened, according to a new report. The good news is that it happened millions of years ago, and now these spiders prefer to stay close to home—they spend their entire lives within just a few yards of their burrows.

Today, a small trapdoor spider, Moggridgea rainbowi, is only found on Kangaroo Island, off the southern coast of Australia. They make silk cocoons in underground burrows, where they wait for food to wander by. But the trapdoor spider's nearest relatives live more than 6,000 miles away, across the Indian Ocean in South Africa. Scientists have long thought the species must have split off from the family tree when Africa separated from the supercontinent Gondwana, about 95 million years ago. But after analyzing specific gene sequences, researchers from the University of Adelaide determined that the split actually happened between 2 and 16 million years ago. But that was before humans were around to ferry species across open water. This leaves just one other option.

The last theory standing posits that the spiders were stowaways on a land raft—a chunk of land or vegetation that washed out to sea, a little drifting island ecosystem that, eventually, ended up on the other side of the Indian Ocean. "The burrows they live in are quite stable and they would have been quite secure in their silk-lined tubes with their trapdoors closed—it was probably quite a safe way to travel," said Sophie Harrison, the lead author of the report, in a press release. It's not so far-fetched; other related species live on islands a couple hundred miles from the coast of Africa. Fortunately for arachnophobes, they're no longer globe-trotters.

This Unusual 1948 PSA Depicts a World Without Paper

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Paper recycling has existed since at least the 11th century, when numerous Japanese shops began exclusively selling re-used paper products. But recycling as an institution did not come fully into vogue until World War II—in an economic and resource crunch, governments implored their citizens to conserve materials for the war effort.

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In 1939, as a part of its larger National Salvage Campaign, Britain launched the Paper Salvage movement, which, through a series of posters and video PSAs, urged citizens to sort their trash. Following the war, as the British economy stumbled, the government issued further crackdowns on the overuse of resources like coal and paper.

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The video above represents one of Britain's more offbeat attempts to cut down on paper consumption. It depicts a dystopia in which there is not enough paper for food cartoons, and shopkeepers have to innovate other ways to carry food.

In the PSA, a shop assistant pours rice into a customer's pocket, wraps sausages around her neck, and stuffs an egg into her mouth.

Then the shop assistant—played by comedian Terry-Thomas—turns to the camera. “This kind of thing will really happen if you don’t save paper,” he declares.

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New York State Gives the National Comedy Center $500,000

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America’s forthcoming major comedy museum, the National Comedy Center, in Jamestown, New York has just gotten one step closer to their closer, after governor Mario Cuomo announced Thursday that the center would be receiving $500,000 in state funds.

Cuomo stopped by the project’s construction site during the city’s annual Lucille Ball Comedy Festival to announce that the new money, according to NBC2.

The funds will go to realizing the center’s goal of becoming the premiere repository of the ever-growing history of comedy. Among the attractions planned for the site are displays of historic comedy memorabilia such as the joke notebooks of George Carlin, and holographic experience where guests can see historic stand up acts.

The center is scheduled to open in 2018.

Demolition Has Been Stopped at This Vacant NYC Building Because It's Filled With Cats

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Seven-seventy-eight Onderdonk Avenue, an eight-unit apartment building in Ridgewood Queens, was all set for demolition. The tenants had been bought out. The bulldozers were rolling in.

There was just one problem: the building wasn't totally abandoned. A few dozen cats were still living at 778 Onderdonk, slinking up and down the stairs, climbing through the rafters, and hiding in various nooks and crannies.

Construction workers discovered the fluffy squatters the hard way in late July, when they began gutting a third-floor apartment and "discovered it was filled with cats," the New York Times reports.

"When they opened the walls, they jumped out—cats, baby cats big ones, you can't imagine," the building's owner, Isaac Silberstein, told the Times.

Animal rescue groups and watchful neighbors say they've seen the cats—which likely belonged to a former tenant—coming in and out of the building since early July. They told the Times that many of the cats are injured, and that on occasion, they've found feline bones.

On other platforms, people have made more dire accusations. Some rescuers accused the construction company of beginning the demolishment even though they knew cats were in there. Another told DNAInfo that they saw a cat "leap out of a dumpster where workers were unloading debris."

"A building owner has been paying crackheads 100$ per cat they gas to death," another rescuer wrote on Instagram, captioning a picture of an empty Clorox bottle. (Silberstein told the Times that he had hired "a private company" to remove the cats, and that they had sprayed bleach in hopes that the smell would drive the cats away.)

This cadre of concerned citizens initially mobilized to get the cats out of the building and into safer situations. Various animal shelters' Facebook pages are full of updatesabout them (some have taken to calling them the "Onderdonk Orphans"). Recently, the city's animal control agency, Animal Care Centers of NYC, took over the rescue effort. "The manager... has promised us that no more work will be done until all the cats are out,” an ACC spokesperson told the Times.

No one is quite sure how many cats remain in the building. But so far, they don't seem to be budging, preferring the strange, private world they've created within the building to the one waiting for them without.

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 Weird, Vain History of Who's Who Books

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A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

On an average day floating through the press release service PR Newswire, it’s inevitable that you run into a list of people who are designated as new members of a who’s who list.

The list always varies but the intent is usually the same: To give a person notice for their life and career, no matter how seemingly mediocre. And while today they might just be a function of lazy p.r., there was a time, not too long ago, when who's who lists were a more curated experience. In the United Kingdom, that amounted to a 250-page reference book that debuted in 1849 and is still published today, aspiring to be a compendium "of living noteworthy and influential individuals, from all walks of life, worldwide." In the U.S., the first who's who book was a little less expansive, the business-savvy project of an eccentric self-made publisher named Albert Nelson Marquis, who, in 1899, published a reference book for people who did notable enough things to get in a reference book for people who did notable things (though his choices tended reflect a conservative point of view.)

That book’s list of notables, already topping 8,000 in the first edition, included every member of Congress along with nearly every other politician during the era. But, as the Chicago Tribune reported in 1986, Marquis was noted for his odd standards of who actually got in. Traditional celebrities from film or sport were often looked over, for one, in favor of educators, clergymen, or other notables that reflected Marquis’s own personal interests. He also tended to make moral judgments, excluding Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, because of his turbulent personal life.

The fact that Marquis wanted to write the book at all was a bit of a surprise. An orphan, he was raised by his maternal grandparents in Ohio before moving to Chicago. Which is where, eventually, he launched his big idea.

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Marquis's grandparents ensured he received both a proper education and job experience in the family’s general store, but, as an adult, Marquis soon moved into publishing, launching his own firm in the 1870s at the age of 21. The company started in Cincinnati, but eventually moved to Chicago, where Marquis realized his dream: a first edition of Who's Who in America, that made clear its intent in a prologue.

“Without claiming infallibility or inerrancy, it is believed that this publication will be a welcome addition to the list of handy helps that make up the library of indispensable books,” the prologue states. “Certainly nothing has been omitted that painstaking care, persistent effort, or expenditure of money could supply toward making the volume fully fill the purposes of its compilation.“

But, in the ensuing decades (the book endured long after Marquis died in 1943), the book was notoriously inconsistent—it wouldn’t take known criminals, for example—though Richard Nixon kept making the cut.

And the inconsistencies and gradually weakening standards of Who’s Who in America did not help the standing of the genre as a whole.

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Take Donald Ray Grubbs, for example, an employee of a firm that analyzed the structural integrity of industrial sites, who was cited in a 1999 Forbes article as someone who had shown up in a wide variety of who's who publications over the years, likely purchasing many of those items. (As it happens, the article was written by a reasonably big who: Tucker Carlson.)

“I have nothing but praise to say about them because I think they’re [doing] a good job,” the Texas man said then, perhaps with a wink.

Grubbs, though, was illustrative of publications that had fully moved from a watermark of notability to a way to self-submit autobiographies—which were rarely, if ever fact-checked.

The sheer number of who's who books didn't help, spawned by the fact that the phrase "who's who" is not copyrighted, meaning that anyone who wanted to could launch their own.

All of which led to some books of a certain value, like 1967's Who’s Who Among American High School Students, which publisher Paul Krouse released to combat the hippie image of American youth—and making some pretty broad assumptions in the process.

But Krouse's book was one of hundreds, vastly cheapening the brand as whole—and leading to a lot of mockery, like a book called Who’s Nobody in America, a late-1970s attempt by a group of satirists to take on the ubiquity of the who's who format.

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“There’s something like 286 books beginning with the title, ‘Who’s Who in …’ Being in a ‘Who’s Who’ is only slightly more prestigious than being in the telephone directory,” co-author Derek Evans explained then.

Evans and his co-conspirator Dave Fulwiler later released a book that listed anyone who requested to be listed. Titled Who’s Nobody, the book went to print in 1981, a 111-page listing of nobodies. (It's subtitle was, "Are You a Nobody? Can You Prove it?")

A 1987 saga involving the humorist Joe Queenan might have solidified the declining reputation of who's who for good. Queenan submitted a fictional person named R.C. Webster to Who’s Who in America; Webster, of course, got in, while Queenan got an essay about the matter for The New Republic. A sample:

Did anyone from “Who’s Who” ever contact Mr. Webster to check for authenticity? Yes, once he got a letter asking what year he’d gotten his master’s degree. At this point, I changed F&M T&A to Houston Polytechnical Institute, to see if anyone was paying attention. Nobody was.

Things only got worse after that, with who’s who gaining an eventual association with scammy offerings not unlike the Nigerian scam emails of the late 2000s.

“Most of the who’s who organizations are in it for the money with zero concern for to so-called honorees,” reporter Ben Rothke wrote in 2009 for the trade publication CSO.

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Which brings us to 2017, and the question of who, exactly, who's who is for these days, because, of course, you don’t need to show up in a vanity book to get exposure anymore. Social media accomplishes the same task for you just fine.

Still, it marches on. When I was wandering around the internet for this story, for example, I stumbled upon someone selling a .WhosWho top-level domain to suckers willing to pay for the privilege. According to 101Domain, it would cost me $4,125 to buy ernie.whoswho, though other domains on the service are a bit cheaper.

“Words have meanings, and .WhosWho not only conveys the message that you’re no Yahoo, but also very much the opposite,” the registrar states.

I might disagree.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

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How Far Do Roller-Grill Hot Dogs Travel?

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Gas station hot dogs don't take breaks. You may pull into a rest stop, refill your car's tank, empty your own, grab some snacks, and peel out again. The whole time, the dogs will have been rotating, slowly, on their shiny metal rollers. When you finally turn in for the night, they may be turning still.

Once it has begun its treadmill journey, how far does your average hot dog go before it's sent to the Great Bun in the Sky? And if, for some reason, it kept going—spinning slowly, hour after hour and year after year—how far could it eventually get?


Some Background

Hot dogs haven't always been a food in constant motion. Although the earliest patent for a roller-grill machine was submitted way back in August of 1939, a successful commercial version wasn't developed until the 1950s, when a prolific engineer named Calvin Dodd MacCracken decided to apply his temperature-regulation know-how to the problem of lukewarm frankfurters.

Over his lifetime, MacCracken would file over 90 patents, for everything from aluminized ceilings for hockey arenas to cooling systems for spacesuits. But the Roll-A-Grill, as MacCracken dubbed it, may be his most lasting legacy.

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The machine quickly became a mainstay in snack bars and sports stadiums. Marketers emphasized how it could "stop traffic with its fascinating slow rotary motion." In this way, an old dog was taught new tricks.

Over the intervening decades, various companies have created customized hot dog rollers for gas stations, convenience stores, and even home use. These days, hot dogs across the world spend their lives slowly traveling nowhere. But how far does the average hot dog go in treadmill miles?


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Kickoff Experiment

Summer is a time for taking idle thoughts too far, so I decided to investigate the hot dog-distance question. To start off—and to set some experimental parameters—I spent a July afternoon hanging around my own local hot dog roller, which takes up much of the front area of a 7-Eleven in Somerville, Massachusetts. I was looking to gather three pieces of data: the circumference of an average dog, the speed of the hot dog roller, and the maximum length of time a hot dog could spend spinning before it was discarded.

The first data point—girth—was easy. I purchased three regular-sized "Big Bite" hot dogs, a bag of gummy worms, and a child's ruler. I then de-bunned each dog, wrapped a gummy worm once around the middle of a hot dog, marked the spot where the worm intersected itself, bit down, and measured it.

As I suspected, 7-Eleven hot dogs—which, like all hot dogs, are made by extruding puréed beef trimmings into solid cellulose tubes—exhibit stunning uniformity in size. For the purpose of this experiment, I averaged the measurements, and set the circumference of a 7-Eleven Big Bite at 7.9 cm.

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The second data point—roller speed—was tougher. Different 7-Eleven locations use different makes and models of rollers, chosen from a list approved by the franchise. This particular roller had no identifying marks or branding, and the store attendant did not know what kind it was.

But my local 7-Eleven had positioned a clock with a second hand right behind the roller grill, presumably for this express purpose. My companion and I chose a hot dog with a distinctive divot mark and timed ten full revolutions. We then used the "lap" timer on my phone to get a more precise measurement. After several trials, we compared notes, and came up with an average Big Bite treadmill speed of 7.53 rotations/minute.

The third data point—maximum roller time—was the slipperiest of all. A dive into the 7-Eleven franchise agreement revealed that hot food served at every location must exhibit "compliance with all applicable laws, regulations and codes, including the U.S. Food & Drug Administration Model Food Code."

The relevant section of said Food Code, 3-403.11, reads as follows:

"Reheating for hot holding … shall be done rapidly and the time the FOOD is between 5°C (41°F) and the temperatures specified under (A-C) of this section may not exceed 2 hours."

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Legally, hot dogs are limited to a two-hour workout limit. But convenience store foods do not always conform to laws, of man or nature. Further investigation seemed necessary. When I asked the (very patient) attendant how long the hot dogs stayed on the grill, he clocked it for me at "about an hour." (As of press time, 7-Eleven had not responded to a request for comment.)

Although I didn't doubt my local attendant, these numbers gave me pause. They simply didn't match the prevailing cultural conception of gas station hot dogs. I have seen other writers fondly refer to these snacks rolling "for indeterminable amounts of time," "for hours on end," and "from dawn until dusk, and then a little bit after dusk."

They also didn't match my own experience. In anticipation of this study, I had gotten in the habit of ducking into the 7-Eleven, taking a look at the hot dogs, noting any distinguishing characteristics, marking down their positions in a small notebook, and returning later to see if they had moved.

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Through these maneuvers, I observed, on several occasions, hot dogs that appeared to have stayed on the treadmill for three or four hours. Whether or not they would later be sold and consumed, these hot dogs traveled further than the legal limits would have one believe.

In order to give credit where credit is due, I decided to set my maximum roller time at 3 hours and 22 minutes—the longest that I can vouch for an individual hot dog having been on the roller grill. This one had a dent on its left side, and was spotted on a Monday night on my way to and from a long movie.


The Result

Taking the official Hot Dog Distance Calculation, with MRT standing for maximum roller time:

(hot dog circumference) * (roller speed) * (MRT) = distance traveled

And plugging in the relevant data:

7.9 cm / rot * 7.53 rot / min * 202 min = 12016.37 cm = .074 miles

The longest-traveled hot dog yet recorded in Massachusetts has gone .074 miles. If it were moving down a track rather than in place, its lifespan would have taken it from the starting line to a little past the first curve.


But What If...?

Now that we have some numbers in place, I see no harm in engaging in a little speculation. After all, when hot dogs spin in place, they're probably dreaming.

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Your Turn

One hot dog does not a definitive account make. It's quite possible that your local hot dogs are larger, faster, or stronger. They may stay cycling on their grills for days, or even weeks.

So help us figure out: from whence the best-traveled hot dog? Is it from New York or Chicago? A highway rest stop or a baseball stadium? Wawa or Scheetz?

Or if you'd rather: What hot dog adventures can you imagine? If a dog took a journey of your choosing, how long would it take?

Send these musings to us, along with any procedural comments, at cara@atlasobscura.com. May the best hot dog win.


Revisiting World-Record Holders After They've Been Eclipsed

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In small towns and on roadsides around the world, you can find the bittersweet remnants of the quest to be the best: objects that clinched the world record as the longest, largest, or tallest thing of its kind. And then lost it.

These eclipsed record holders don’t disappear after something greater replaces their title. They linger, pride a little marred, but continuing to shine nonetheless. Because it's more than the physical item that’s being displayed; it's the gumption of a town that wanted to create the world's largest cherry pie and succeeded. A larger pie elsewhere can't erase the glory of having once been the best.

These overshadowed has-beens might have lost a piece of their identity along with their record, but the monuments erected to these claims to fame were never only about being the biggest or the longest. They were about a moment in time, when forces combined to build something great, something that was the best, for a while at least.


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Former World's Largest Cherry Pie Pan

Charlevoix, Michigan

In 1976, a town in Michigan made a 17,420-pound cherry pie, the world’s largest at the time. And it kept the record for just over 10 years, until 1987, when the citizens of a nearby city made a cherry pie that weighed in at 28,350 pounds. A few years later, a Canadian bakery made an even larger cherry pie—but they didn’t save the pie pan. So as of today, the world’s second biggest cherry pie pan sits in Charlevoix, Michigan, just about 50 miles from the world’s biggest.

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Louie Mattar’s Fabulous Car

San Diego, California

It took Louie Mattar about seven years and $75,000 to custom build his dream car and trailer. The 1947 Cadillac weighs 8,500 pounds and has special axles drilled to allow the tires to inflate, if low on air, while they’re turning. The trailer holds 230 gallons of gas for automatic refueling, too, which is how the car made a 6,320-mile trip from San Diego to New York and back in a record-setting seven days without stopping the car.

The record has been broken several times since. Recently, the car enthusiast Ed Bolian’s 29-hour drive from New York City to Los Angeles in 2013 entered into the Guinness Book. But cars require considerably less maintenance now, and regardless, none have had the ingenuity or style of Mattar’s fabulous car.

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Former World’s Largest Jackalope

Douglas, Wyoming

There’s a lot of love for the mythical jackalope in Douglas, Wyoming, the unofficial birthplace of the big-eared, antlered creature from North American folklore. In tribute, the town built an eight-foot jackalope statue in 1965 on a traffic island in town—the largest in the world, at the time.

When a car took it out in the 1990s, a similar 8-foot-tall concrete beast was erected in Jackalope Square, and it remained the largest until a 13-foot tall jackalope showed up on a hill overlooking the town. That animal’s glory was short-lived too though. In 2007, two years after the jackalope was made Wyoming’s official mythical creature, the city bought a larger jackalope from a man in the northwest. It is almost double the size of its nearby cousin.

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Gnome Chomsky

Accord, New York

One of the most striking features of Kelder’s Farm, a roadside attraction in Accord, New York, is the towering jolly giant, Gnome Chomsky. He stands invitingly on the hill facing the highway, and at 13.5 feet, he was the world’s tallest concrete gnome at the time he was built in 2006. But he no longer holds the World Record: Reiman Gardens in Iowa is now home to a gnome that stands 15 feet tall. There is also a gnome in Poland who towers at 18 feet, but unlike Chomsky and the Reiman Gardens’ gnome, it’s made of fiberglass.

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Formerly the World’s Biggest Truck

Sparwood, Canada

The 1974 Terex Titan was built to haul raw material around open-pit mines. Only one was ever made, and due to a drop in the coal market and high fuel costs, the intended market of open-pit mine operators never materialized, leaving the behemoth a unique example.

In 1991 it was retired and gifted to Sparwood as a tourist attraction (the town maintains a live web cam of the behemoth truck). Despite not being in service, it remained the largest truck for a few years. As of 2016, the Belaz 75710, about 5 feet taller than the 22-foot Titan, holds the record. But the Terex Titan is still huge, and still on display in the mountains of western Canada.

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Former World’s Tallest Lego Tower

São Paulo, Brazil

In 2011, São Paulo snatched the title of the world's tallest Lego tower. The first tower of its kind was built in London in 1988 and Toronto, Tokyo, Munich, Moscow, and Sydney had all held the title in the past. When completed, the tower, which had to be assembled using a crane, was composed of 500,000 individual Lego pieces. It stood just over 102 feet and took four days to build. When the final pieces were put into place, wires had to be attached to the tower to keep it from falling down in the wind. The record changes hands quite a bit, but the current tallest, in Milan, only had 50,000 more legos than Sâo Paulo’s 2011 structure.

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Former World’s Largest Rocking Chair

Cuba, Missouri

Created in 2008, the World’s Largest Rocking Chair (as it is still called) was built for the express purpose of breaking the Guinness World Record for large rocking chairs. The nearby Route 66 Fanning Outpost commissioned the massive piece of furniture as a roadside attraction in the grand American tradition. The chair stands over 42 feet tall and is crafted out of welded steel, emblazoned with the logo for the Outpost across the chair back. But a chair in Casey, Illinois, erected in 2015, eclipsed the record, topping off at 56 feet, 6 inches tall. Missouri’s rocker only got to enjoy the limelight for about seven years.

So Much Depends Upon the Return of a Stolen Wheelbarrow

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Andrew Killawee is a television producer who lives in Nova Scotia and recently had his wheelbarrow stolen. He announced this with a sign outside of his home: "BRING BACK MY WHEELBARROW."

By a few days later, the sign had changed: "THANK YOU FOR BRINGING BACK MY WHEELBARROW." Apparently tersely worded demands for stolen property, in rural Canada, lead to results. And results lead to politely worded replies.

All of this might have gone forgotten—a brief, humorous tale of small-town crime, one among many brief, humorous tales of small-town crime that happen in small towns across the world—if it hadn't been for something called Twitter, where an acquaintance of Killawee's, Anna Scott, combined the hand-painted signs into a single tweet.

Scott's tweet went viral, and Killawee later noted his regret at not being more fluent with the service. "Well it took a lot of hard work, but I think I can now retire," he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday, "thanks to Anna for really making the big push here ... I'll learn Twitter one of these days."

Peer Into the Horror That Is Kirk Hammett’s Movie Poster Collection

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Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was six years old when he first sawFrankenstein, in the late 1960s. When it was released in 1931, the film was so successful that it spawned multiple sequels, including The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein—and earned it a place as one of The New York Times’ 10 best films of the year. It also made an impression on young Hammett. It started his lifetime obsession with horror movies.

For three decades Hammett has fueled this interest—and his own creativity—with a collection of classic horror posters and memorabilia. “My collection takes me to a place where I need to be,” he says. “Among the monsters, where I’m most comfortable and most creative”.

Classic film posters are big business, particularly those related to horror. In 2012, it was reported that six of the 10 most expensive film posters sold at auction feature Boris Karloff—Frankenstein himself. Many of these set auction records: An original 1932 poster for The Mummy sold for $453,000 in 1997, at the time the most ever paid for a American movie poster. (That honor has since gone to a poster for Frtiz Lang's 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis, which sold for $690,000 in 2005).

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The Mummy was released in December 1932, just over a year after Frankenstein. Karloff’s face once again adorned the posters, despite the fact he was barely recognizable under all that make-up. Karloff’s his ravaged head takes up nearly a third of the poster, designed by Universal Studios’ art director Karoly Grosz, and now famously adorns one of Hammett’s custom guitars.

For the Metallica guitarist, part of the reason he collects horror memorabilia is to share it—in his 2012 book Too Much Horror Business and his Fear FestEvil conventions, for example. Now, a selection of his prized posters and other memorabilia are on display at the Peabody-Essex Museum in (appropriately?) Salem, Massachusetts. Atlas Obscura has a selection of his posters, which are on view from August 12 through November 26, 2017.

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Found: The Best-Preserved Armored Dinosaur Ever Discovered

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Borealopelta markmitchelli was discovered in a oil sands mine in Alberta, and before anyone realized what they had found, the dinosaur’s tail and rear had been destroyed. Its head and body were still intact, though. The mine workers, along with a team from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, carved out a 15,000-pound block containing the remaining dinosaurs. But when they lifted it, as The Atlantic reports, the block broke. The fossil had broken into big chunks, though. It made it to the museum, where one man spent 7,000 hours working the clear the rock away from the fossil.

Even after all that, this nodosaur, which lived 110 million years ago, is one of the most incredible fossils ever found.

A type of armored dinosaur, this nodosaur would have been close to 20 feet long and weighed 2,800 pounds. Paleontologists think that as or after it died, it was swept by a river into the sea, where it was covered in sediment and preserved for millions of years. It still has patches of fossilized scales and skin on it, and it’s possible to see almost exactly what it would have looked like in life.

The team that has studied the fossil reports in the journal Current Biology that they also found evidence that the dinosaur would have been a reddish-brown color, which could have helped it evade predators. But as National Geographic reports, there’s some skepticism from other scientists about this particular claim. Regardless, B. markmitchelli, named after the technician who spent all those hours freeing it from the rock, is a marvel to behold.

Some Basketball Courts in Brooklyn Just Got Named for the Notorious B.I.G.

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Christopher Wallace—known to most as Biggie, Biggie Smalls, or The Notorious B.I.G.—made an indelible mark on hip hop's history. Widely considered one of the best rappers of all time, he put out two classic albums before his untimely death at 24, and a few after that as well.

Even earlier, though—as a kid growing up in Clinton Hill—he made his mark on the local park, Crispus Attucks Playground. As his friend, DJ Fly Ty, recently told CBS New York, "this park was Biggie's park." Now, after years of trying, his friends and relatives have made that official, by naming the park's basketball courts after him.

Christopher "Biggie" Wallace Courts, is located at 1030 Fulton Street in Brooklyn. As NY1 reported in June, the name change fulfills a promise that City Councilman Robert Cornegy made years ago to his neighbor, Biggie's mother Voletta Wallace, to honor her son.

At a ceremony on August 2, Cornegy, Wallace, and a few of Biggie's other relatives and friends snipped a ribbon with golden scissors as a DJ played "Juicy."

"If you were to tell Biggie that he was getting basketball courts named after him he would have laughed," one of his friends and earliest promoters, Mister Cee, told XXL. "He was just a funny dude, always laughing."

The courts join a few other Biggie memorials in the area, including a huge mural at Bedford Avenue and Quincy Street, a jersey hanging in the Barclays Center, and the annual Christopher Wallace Memorial Basketball Tournament, which will take place on the courts this weekend.

The Hip Hop Hall of Fame Museum is also raising money for a six-foot-tall Biggie statue made of bronze, which they hope to put up in public soon.

Cornegey hopes that officially remembering Biggie will help Clinton Hill keep its identity in the face of rising rents and chain stores. “This community is under siege, as it relates to gentrification,” he wrote in a statement. “I don’t care who lives here, you come in this park, you’re gonna have to know who Biggie Smalls was.”

And if you don't know? Now you know.

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 Ancient Glass-Blowing Technique That Was Kept Secret for Centuries

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For centuries, Venetian glassblowing was world famous. By the 13th century, glass had become a primary export for Venice. Everyone wanted it—and everyone wanted to know how it was made.

But Venice was intent to keep the process secret.

In 1271, a law banned foreign workers from participating in the glass industry, ostensibly so that only Venetian citizens would know the technique. Even that was not enough. Twenty years later, Venice required that all glass production move to the more isolated islands of Murano. Though the reason given was that glassblowing furnaces presented a fire hazard, the law was almost certainly about protecting Venetian trade secrets, as a subsequent ordinance demonstrates: in 1295, Venetian glassblowers were entirely banned from traveling abroad. Disobeying came with the risk of death.

The video above depicts William Gudenrath, a glassblower and scholar who, after years of research, has demonstrated how Venetians made their beloved glass.

Why Americans Are Cursing More Than Ever

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Americans are swearing more than ever before. They’re cussing on television, profaning in movies, blaspheming on the streets, and, it turns out, execrating in the written word, too. Those famous "seven words you can never say on television," as identified by comedian George Carlin in 1972, are being said more and more. But what does this all mean? (And by that, we mean the trend, not the swears themselves.)

A new study by San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge suggests that this increasing coarseness is not necessarily due to a decline in morals or manners, but rather to the growth of individualism. Her team searched the Google Ngram database to see how the use of Carlin's "seven words" changed between 1950 and 2008. The result, Twenge said in a release, “is part of a larger cultural trend toward individualism and free expression."

The seven words are fairly unambiguously off-color. Five have four letters. Three refer to bodily functions. Two describe parts of the female anatomy. One a person who has sex with someone’s mother. Another is a person who gives oral sex to a person with a penis. And one is "tits."

Of course, there are other curses that didn’t make it onto the list. The researchers picked these seven specifically as a “short yet reasonably comprehensive list of swear words considered taboo in polite society” (at least in 1972). Other lists of taboo words might include "Jesus Christ" or "hell," which might be appropriate in certain contexts—in a way that a certain four-letter word that rhymes with a ring-shaped German cake would not. In fact, that word, along with two others (for those fluent in advanced "leet speak": |=(_)(|< and (0(|<5(_)(|<3|2) have been repeatedly identified as the most taboo, including in a recent study of college students.

The results suggest that all seven of these words have become more common in American books since 1950—though among those there are some whose usage has grown more rapidly. In the early 1950s, seeing the word described by Slate as an "Oedipal polysyllable" would have been extremely unusual. But, by the mid-2000s, the word, which is also known as "mammy-jammer" or, more bafflingly, "motorcycle," appears some 678 times more often. That might be in part because its specificity resists euphemism—Jonathan Green, the author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, identifies just 65 possible less-offensive replacements for the word he calls the "least permissible." #*@%, as in "to copulate," has around 1,750 euphemistic replacements—and it appears just 168 times more often now than in the 1950s. Finally, the dirtiest word on that list (literally)—a float, trout, turd, or poop—emerges 69 times more often. That number isn’t a joke, by the way. Get your mind out of the gutter.

These findings, the researchers say, suggest a notable decline in social taboos, which they equate with increasing individualism. As American culture values individual self-expression more and more, the taboo factor of particular words seems to be diminishing. There’s other evidence to suggest rising individualism in America, too. People are giving their babies more "unique" names, using first-person singular and second-person pronouns more, and using "individualistic" language in conversation, books, and pop songs. All of this, Twenge said, seems characteristic of today’s young people. "Millennials have a 'come as you are' philosophy, and this study shows one of the ways they got it: The culture has shifted toward more free self-expression,” she said.

If these words continue to be used—and normalized—they may lose some of their profane impact. If we're not careful, we might overuse profanity and wear out these words, forcing us to come up with new ones. Worse still, we might have to stop swearing altogether. $#*%!


The Eclipse of 1878 Almost Killed the Father of the National Weather Service

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Millions of North Americans are expected to (carefully!) turn their eyes to the sky on August 21 to witness a total eclipse of the sun that will cross the U.S. from shore to shore. Eclipse madness has taken hold. But while such anticipation can be thrilling, it can also be dangerous. In fact, during a solar eclipse in 1878, the fervor to witness the event almost cost the nation arguably its most influential meteorologist.

In 1878, crowds from all across the country gathered in a path of totality that spanned from Montana to Texas. In addition to the tourists who traveled specifically to experience the celestial event, many of the scientific luminaries of the day also made the journey. Thomas Edison headed to the Wyoming Territory to test out his new tasimeter, an early attempt at detecting infrared radiation. Other groups of scientists headed to locations nearer the ends of the path in Texas or Montana. But the lion’s share of astronomers and scientists traveled to Colorado.

One group of researchers made their way to the summit of Colorado's Pike’s Peak. This group included Cleveland Abbe, who is today known as the father of the National Weather Service. “He was trained as an astronomer, but he became a meteorologist, and he became the first weather forecaster for the U.S. government,” says David Baron, author of American Eclipse: A Nation’s Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. “He climbed Pike’s Peak in 1878 to witness the eclipse and nearly died.”

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Abbe began his professional career as an astronomer, becoming director of the Cincinnati Observatory in 1868. But he soon became better known for his daily weather forecasts, the first such private predictions in the nation, which he would create based on climate information telegraphed in from outside observation stations. As he provided them to Cincinnati newspapers and other subscribers, they earned him the terrific nickname “Old Probabilities,” or “Old Probs.”

When the cash-strapped Cincinnati Observatory could not afford to maintain Abbe’s meteorological soothsaying, he moved his operation to Washington, under the auspices of the brand new United States Weather Bureau, of which he was made the first chief meteorologist. The bureau was part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was the official body in charge of monitoring the country’s weather. Under this new meteorological body, Abbe gave his first official weather report in 1871, and quickly became the leading meteorologist in the country.

So when the 1878 eclipse appeared on the horizon, excited astronomers turned to the Weather Bureau to locate the ideal place to witness the event, where weather conditions would be least likely to block their observations. Using historical weather data about the regions in the path of the coming eclipse, Abbe had the Signal Corps send out a circular that outlined some possible viewing sites. But as Baron describes him in his book, Abbe was still a “frustrated astronomer,” and he didn’t want to miss such an amazing celestial sight. Neither did his boss, General Albert Myer, who had witnessed an eclipse in Virginia in 1869.

Myer had viewed that earlier eclipse from a height of around 5,000 feet, and so decided he wanted to witness the 1878 eclipse from somewhere even higher. He chose Colorado’s Pike’s Peak, an ultra-prominence with a summit at over 14,000 feet above sea level, which not only sat right in the middle of the eclipse’s path, but already had a hard-scrabble meteorological station on top. When Abbe if he could go West to view the eclipse, Myer agreed.

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“The scientists who got up there about a week in advance had just a hell of a time,” says Baron. Abbe got to Colorado Springs, at the base of the peak, on July 20, and was joined by fellow astronomer Samuel Pierpont Langley, plus Langley's brother, and over a thousand pounds of equipment. The men of the Signal Corps were reportedly nonplussed by all of the surprise science work, but the crew made their way some 18 miles up the mountain to the observation station with the help of some burros.

Over the next week or so, Abbe and his colleagues were battered with wind, cold, and extreme weather as they tried to observe the skies in preparation for the eclipse. But that wasn’t the worst of it. “They were battling snowstorms in July that threatened to rust out their telescopes. They also suffered significant altitude sickness,” says Baron. Due to the extreme difference in air pressure and lack of oxygen at such a high altitude, the astronomers experienced headaches, dizziness, and disorientation. Many people can adjust to altitude sickness, but that was not the case for Cleveland Abbe.

The day before the eclipse, Abbe woke to pain so extreme he could not stand. The Langleys tried to convince Abbe to go down the mountain, but he refused, holing up in his tent, insisting that he could recover. Later that evening, General Myers finally made his way to the peak, where he ordered Abbe taken off the peak on a stretcher.

And it’s a good thing he did. “I ran [the story] by an expert in altitude medicine here in Colorado, and he agreed, it’s pretty clear that Cleveland Abbe had high altitude cerebral edema,” says Baron. “His brain was swelling and pressing on the inside of his skull. It’s the sort of thing where, had he spent another night up on the top of Pike’s Peak, he could very well have died.”

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Abbe was carried down the mountain to a lodge that sat just below the tree line. A doctor arrived at the lodge and forbade Abbe from returning to the peak for the eclipse, but all was not lost for the pioneering weatherman. The next day, the skies over the mountain had miraculously cleared, and Abbe was able to convince his caretakers to carry him out and lay him on a slope where he could witness the totality with his own eyes. There, presented on the slope like a sacrifice to celestial mechanics, Abbe was able to see the moon pass in front of the sun, shooting vivid daggers of light off the ring of the corona.

Up at the summit, Myer and the Langleys got their own show. “First of all, they got to see the eclipse itself with amazing clarity, because there was less atmosphere to look through,” says Baron. “The outer atmosphere was just dazzling. But from that altitude, not only were they able to look up and see the eclipse, they were able to look out and look down, and actually see the moon’s shadow coming toward them.”

Abbe, Myer, and the Langleys all made it off the mountain, each going on to notable careers in their fields. Abbe returned to the Weather Bureau and worked to keep it at the forefront of meteorological advances during his tenure, before returning to academia in his later years.

The National Weather Bureau continued to evolve after Abbe’s passing in 1916, eventually becoming the National Weather Service that sends us texts about flash floods and studies our shifting climate today. But it could all have been sidelined by the Colorado eclipse.

The Woman Who Collected More Than 25,000 Menus

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Frank E. Buttolph liked to say that she started collecting restaurant menus on January 1, 1900. At the Columbia Restaurant in New York, she said, she received a menu that was dated to the new century. Struck by the sight, she saved it. But that probably isn't true, since her vast collection appears to have begun several years earlier. The New York Public Library, which now archives many of Buttolph’s menus, even states that she first contacted them about her collection a year prior, in 1899.

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Frank E. Buttolph also didn’t always use that name. Born in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, in 1844, she was first known as Frances Editha Buttles. She changed her last name to “Buttolph” in 1900 after discovering that “Buttles” was a recent corruption of her ancestral name. Why she switched to "Frank" is less clear. What is clear is Buttolph’s great contribution to restaurant history.

In 1887, after working as a teacher in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware, Buttolph settled in Manhattan. She began swiping menus and, in 1900, the New York Public Library agreed to accept her collection. Her desire to amass as many menus as possible only grew from there. She began volunteering at the Astor Library, where she spent much of her time over the next 20 years. She sent out hundreds of letters to restaurants, transportation companies, chambers of commerce, government agencies, and newspaper editors to solicit donations. The letters went out to establishments across the United States and Europe. (Buttolph was fluent in multiple languages.)

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To attract ever more contributions, she took out ads in magazines such as Hotel Gazette, did numerous newspaper interviews, and enlisted aides to collect on her behalf—some of whom continued sending her menus for decades. According to Thirteen.org, she “frequently barged into private banquets at the city’s fanciest dining establishments and demanded a copy of their printed menu.” Once, in 1902, she sent the British Museum a copy of a menu card from a millenary dinner commemorating Alfred the Great, with the hope that the donation would encourage the museum to send her menus from the forthcoming coronation King Edward VII, though it doesn't appear that they did.

Buttolph’s commitment to collecting menus came, she said, from her desire to preserve early 1900s culinary history for future scholars. Confirming this, The New York Times once wrote that “she does not care two pins for the food lists on her menus, but their historic interest means everything.”

She was a meticulous collector—not only in transcribing, dating, and organizing her menus with a detailed card catalog, but also about how they should be stored. When the director of the Astor Library tried to rubber-band menus together, she pushed back out of worry that it would leave marks.

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In the press, this attention to detail often resulted in sexist caricatures. The New York Times called her an “unostentatious, literary-looking lady whose bugaboo is a possible spot upon one of her precious menus.” In a March 1905 article, The Literary Collector noted that the public initially regarded her as “a rather tiresome freak” who was wasting “a vast amount of energy … that might have been expended better.”

Buttolph was unfazed. By 1921, she had amassed more than 25,000 menus in several languages. She had menus from the debut of the Suez Canal, from royal courts, from birthday celebrations for famous historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson. Each menu bore her blue oval "Buttolph Collection" stamp, sometimes in multiple places.

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In the early 1920s, she was dismissed from her volunteer position, reportedly because of her complaints about the whistling and untidy desks of her coworkers (and maybe because of accusations that she was stealing books). Her last written record before her death in 1924 is a letter to the Astor Library:

For many years my library work has been the only thing I had to live for. It was my heart, my soul, my life. Always before me was the vision of students of history who would say "thank you" to my name and memory.

Her dream of preserving a culinary record of the early 20th century has come true. Today, the Buttolph Collection of Menus at the New York Public Library offers more than 40,000 menus to scholars interested in food, restaurant, and cultural history. You can view many of the menus Buttolph collected here.

Wichita State's Brief Water Tower Spelling Disaster

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On June 30, Wichita State University announced that it would be repainting a massive water tower near campus. For the job, they secured 800 gallons of paint to cover the tower, as well as between 100 and 125 gallons to paint the university's new logo—all specifically designed to last up to 50 years. When the new paint job was finished, it was clear something had gone wrong with their plan. Well, two things had gone wrong.

Almost just as quickly as "WICHITA STATY UNIVERSITE" was discovered (setting certain parts of Twitter on fire), it was fixed, according to The Wichita Eagle.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. After all, as the June release said, "City crews have been working hard to make the Wichita State water tank a source of pride for the WSU community." Quickly correcting one's errors? That can be a source of pride, too.

A Boeing Test Flight Drew an Airplane In the Sky

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Boeing has taken selfies to new heights after getting one of its planes to fly a test path that formed a giant outline of the plane itself on the GPS.

According to Boeing, the plane crossed over 22 states to draw the design. From wingtip to metaphorical wingtip, the plane stretches from nearly the bottom tip of Texas up to the Great Lakes, and the flight path even included such small details as the curvature of the engines and the tilted fins on the ends of the wings. The design was specifically the outline of a 787-8.

Uncoincidentally, the flight path was covered by a 787 Dreamliner that was running an 18 hour endurance test on the craft, eventually flying 9,896 miles. Even in the world of aeronautics, you’ve gotta have some fun.

Found: The Oldest Known Family of Asteroids in the Solar System

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Our solar system contains a very large main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, an orbiting mass of tens of thousands of rocky fragments that have orbited the Sun for billions of years. Within the belt there are some larger objects—such as Ceres, 580 miles in diameter—but also plenty of much, much smaller ones, fragmented over many millennia by collisions. When an asteroid breaks up this way, its fragments tend to hang around together as a family of smaller asteroids that orbits together. As time goes by, like members of some human families, these asteroids tend to drift apart. The oldest asteroid families, then, are the ones that have drifted the farthest apart. Astronomers have understood this for awhile, but it is a difficult phenomenon to study.

This week, an international team of astronomers reported that they have identified a very early, primordial asteroid family by correlating the size of its members and how far apart they are. That family is nearly as old as the solar system itself—over four billion years. The scientists now plan to use the same approach on other parts of the asteroid belt to dig even deeper into the early stages of our solar system.

“By identifying all the families in the main belt, we can figure out which asteroids have been formed by collisions and which might be some of the original members of the asteroid belt,” said Kevin Walsh, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute and a coauthor of the paper, published in Science. “We identified all known families and their members and discovered a gigantic void in the main belt, populated by only a handful of asteroids. These relics must be part of the original asteroid belt. That is the real prize, to know what the main belt looked like just after it formed.”

Reaching that far back will take just a little more time.

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