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Waterbuck-Scented Cologne Can Protect Cows From Tsetse Fly Bites

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Sleeping sickness can be a devastating disease for humans throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and animals can also be infected by the protozoan parasites. In cows, the disease is known as nagana. Scientists around the world have been working on ways to thwart tsetse flies, which spread the disease when they bite animals and people. Now, a report in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases describes a new way for cattle to avoid these potentially deadly fly bites, by tricking tsetse flies into thinking cows aren't cows at all.

Waterbucks are a species of antelope found in the same regions where tsetse flies transmit nagana. While they're susceptible to a range of other diseases and parasites, waterbucks simply aren't of much interest to tsetse flies. Researchers from Kenya, the United Kingdom, and Germany identified five compounds that give waterbucks their characteristic scent—and found that they can help repel the flies. To turn cattle into "cows in waterbuck clothing," as the researchers call them, they developed a special collar that releases a steady supply of the waterbuck scent compounds.

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To test the new repellant system, the team outfitted 1,100 cows in coastal Kenya with the collars, and tracked them for two years as they encountered tsetse flies naturally. The collars were effective at preventing infections, which in turn allowed the cows' owners to plow more land and improve their food security. Now, the researchers write, the farmers are enthusiastic adopters.


Found: A Stolen Soldier's Jacket From World War II

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In Forest Lake, Minnesota, just outside Minneapolis, Matt Stone was looking through the racks at a local Goodwill, on the hunt for relics of World War II. On a rack of hats, he spotted the golden button of a solider’s cap. Later, he found another clue—the woolen sleeve of a soldier’s jacket.

There was something unusual about the jacket, though, as KARE reports. It was still decorated with ribbons and insignia, which made Stone wonder if it was supposed to be at the thrift store, on sale for $4.99, at all.

There was one more clue to follow—a name, Martin Makkyla, written on the inside of the jacket.

Stone’s great-grandfather served in World War II, and hearing those war stories inspired him to become a collector of World War II memorabilia. It’s not so uncommon for old uniforms to show up in thrift shops, although often they’re in bad shape. But occasionally these uniforms are in good condition and of interest to the soldiers' families. Earlier this summer, for instance, a military historian found a colonel’s uniform in a Washington State thrift store and traced it back to a man in Baltimore, whose granddaughter had been researching his life. In 2015, a uniform found in Arizona made it back to the original owner’s family.

With the help of KARE, his local news station, Stone was able to find Makkyla’s family. Makkyla never had children of his own, but his nieces remembered the uniform. Stone’s instincts were correct. The uniform was never meant to be in a Goodwill. According to Makkyla’s family, it had been stolen many years ago, and they had given it up for lost. Now, Stone plans to return the uniform to where it should have been all along.

South Texas Man’s $1.2 Million Fajita Heist Foiled After 9 Years

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Some people find ways to cheat the system, and others own it altogether. Gilberto Escamilla, a government employee in South Texas, recently found himself behind bars for stealing $1.2 million worth of fajitas over nine years. Escamilla might have kept it up for longer, too, had his coworker not picked up the phone one day.

Escamilla took a day off from his job at the Cameron County Juvenile Justice Department in San Benito, Texas, to go to a doctor’s appointment on August 7. That day, his replacement received a phone call from a Labatt Food Service driver to confirm an 800-pound fajita delivery.

The only problem? The Juvenile Justice Department doesn’t serve fajitas. Yet the driver insisted that Labatt had indeed supplied them with fajitas for the past nine years. The next day, when Escamilla’s supervisor confronted him, he fessed up to stealing fajitas for nearly a decade.

Initially, investigators believed that Escamilla stole between $2,500 and $30,000 worth of fajitas. In August, after finding fajita packets at Escamilla’s house, authorities booked him. Escamilla made bail, but he was arrested again earlier this week, this time on first-degree theft felony charges. As The Brownsville Heraldreports, his fajita haul clocked in closer to $1,251,578. "If it wasn't so serious, you'd think it was a Saturday Night Live skit," Luis V. Saenz, the Cameron County District Attorney, told the paper.

By poring over invoices, purchase orders, and vouchers, investigators also found that Escamilla had a streamlined system: He delivered fajitas to buyers the very same day he ordered them.

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The practice of reselling stolen meat has ticked up in recent years, and is thought to be partially due to rising beef prices. It even prompted a 2011 sting operation from the Austin Police Department entitled Operation Meat Locker, aimed at combatting the “growing crime” of people stealing grocery store meat and reselling it to restaurants. According to KUT, several officers went undercover as meat thieves and attempted to sell stolen meat to Austin-area restaurants. They found that over $5,000 worth of stolen meat was re-sold to three restaurants, all of which had their licenses revoked.

While Escamilla’s meat heist is particularly large, how he masterminded a fajita black market (right under the government’s nose) for almost a decade remains a mystery. Saenz conceded that the lack of oversight constituted a “total failure” on the juvenile department’s part. Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Rose Gomez, of the Cameron County Juvenile Justice Department, said in a statement that they are now formally reviewing the department’s policies―presumably before anyone starts, or in this case, takes, any more beef.

We’re launching a food section! Gastro Obscura will cover the world’s most wondrous food and drink. Sign up for our weekly email to get an early look.

Watch Ophelia's Winds Send a Cumbrian Waterfall Into the Sky

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If it weren't for modern meteorology, people across Europe might well have assumed that the end was nigh. Birds have been wheeling madly overhead. Skies have gone red with Saharan dust. Wildfires have raged across the Iberian Peninsula. And a town in Lancashire, England, was covered with blobby white sea-foam. All of these odd phenomena were caused or impacted by Ophelia, the storm that started as a hurricane—the eastern-most on record—and evolved into a post-tropical cyclone as it swept across the British Isles and into the North Sea. In Cumbria, in northwest England, Ophelia had a curiously surreal effect. Its winds made a waterfall in the Mallerstang Valley reverse course, shooting spray into the sky as if gravity had gone topsy-turvy.

It's so unusual for a storm such as Ophelia to hit the United Kingdom and Ireland that tracking it actually transcended the boundaries of the U.S. National Hurricane Center's map graphics. But upended waterfalls aren't quite so rare—any particularly strong gust on a modest waterfall could do it. On the cliffside those winds must have been terrifying—but the video itself is quite soothing to watch. Sometimes, the end of things can look surprisingly wonderful.

The Most Beautiful Space Images on Earth

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In February 1984, high above the Earth’s atmosphere, astronaut Bruce McCandless exited the Challenger space shuttle. He wore only a spacesuit and a Manned Maneuvering Unit—a propulsion device that enabled him to move away from the spacecraft unencumbered by any lines. Over the course of six hours and 45 minutes, he moved as far as 320 feet away from the shuttle. Fellow astronaut Robert L. Gibson captured the moment with an image that has since become iconic. It shows McCandless adrift over a blue-and-white Earth, small against the infinite blackness of space.

Images like that one are historical documents, but also reminders of our place in the universe, which is one of the themes explored in the new book Universe: Exploring the Astronomical World. It features more than 300 depictions of the universe from throughout history, all with one common thread: how we as humans respond and relate to space. "Although the images come from a wide range of sources, they are all in their own way records of the same quest: that of understanding the heavens and what they tell us about ourselves," writes Paul Murdin, of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, in the introduction.

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For much of history, humans have viewed the skies above as a mystical realm, a place where eclipses and comets are portents, or as a home to divine beings. In addition to NASA images and artistic renderings, the book also includes a 12th-century mosiac from Monreale Cathedral in Italy, in which God places the sun into the heavens; "The Angel Ruh Holding the Celestial Spheres," from the 16th-century Persian manuscript The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence; and a zodiac chart from 19th-century Mongolia.

In 2017, a set of extraordinary new images of space has appeared: the view from Saturn’s rings, the orbit of newly discovered binary asteroids, a close-up of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. And yet, even as revelations from far beyond Earth pour in, Gibson's photograph of the untethered spacewalk continues to amaze. Commenting years later on the photograph, McCandless said he is glad that his face was obscured by his reflective visor, and added, “my anonymity means people can imagine themselves doing the same thing.”

For those dreaming of space, Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book.

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Rescuing a Fancy Chicken on the Appalachian Trail

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Heather Bolint has been thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail since late June. She's about halfway done, and she figured she had a pretty good handle on things. But on Tuesday, October 10, around 10:30 in the morning, about half a mile north of the Maryland border, she ran into a surprise.

"I was going along listening to an audiobook, in the zone," she says. "And I just see this crazy-looking rooster on the trail."

Although neither knew it at that moment, this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, forged during an adventure that would span 48 hours, 42 miles, and two state parks.

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The rooster—later named Mason, since he was discovered so near the Mason-Dixon line—is indeed crazy-looking. He is a "fancy chicken," with orange coloration, an impressive tail, and a feather-duster head.

At first, Bolint filed the bird away as one of the trail's many curiosities. "I immediately took out my phone and filmed him, thinking I'd show my friends," she says. "He just kind of stuck around nearby, scratching at the ground and doing his little rooster thing."

But Bolint is a caring person and a bird lover—her friend gave her the trail name "Mama Duck"—and after a few minutes, those instincts kicked in. "We were out in the middle of the woods," she says. "There weren't any houses or fields around. It dawned on me that he probably wasn't where he was supposed to be."

At that moment, she says, "I decided I would take him with me."

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Bolint carried Mason under her arm, his feet dangling down. When it was hot, she sweated all over him. When it rained, she tucked him into her coat. Throughout, he proved a calm traveling companion, sitting quietly during bathroom breaks, sleeping in the tent, and updating her on his mood with the occasional soft cluck. "He was a trooper for sure," she says.

She was, too: in order to get Mason to safety, she says, she covered about twice as many miles as she's used to. The two hiked until sunset, camped for a few hours, and took off again at midnight, hiking through dawn and into the late morning. Bolint's boyfriend met them in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and drove them to Poplar Spring, a farm animal sanctuary in Western Maryland.

Along the way, they made a lot of friends: a fellow hiker who gave Mason some kibble; a woman on a park bench who held him while Bolint re-upped on water. "I loved talking with people about chickens," she says. "When I got to Harpers Ferry, literally every single person stopped to talk with me and pet him."

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News of the traveling rooster also spread up and down the trail. Hostel owners recognize Bolint, and she has been rechristened "Mama Cluck." Other hikers have told her they also spotted Mason in that area, starting about a week before she found him. (No one has yet explained how he got there, though.)

Bolint is confident he'll be well taken care of at Poplar Spring. "He's got a little section of the barn put aside for him," she says, and he's already been to the vet. (He was a little underweight.) She plans to keep checking in on him via text as she completes her own journey, and maybe someday—when her life is in one place—she'll adopt him. They could even go hiking together. "I feel like he could be a little adventure chicken," she says.

Below are more pictures of Bolint and Mason, for obvious reasons.

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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.

One Artist's Lifelong Quest to Create a Hidden Kingdom Called Rocaterrania

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Renaldo Kuhler lived on his own terms. He loved bathtubs, he eschewed cars and computers, he played a plywood violin, and he sometimes wore a uniform of his own design, which showed off his long, strong legs. “Renaldo drank a lot, smoked a lot, talked a lot—to me, to himself, and to anyone within earshot,” writes Brett Ingram, author of The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler. The one thing Kuhler did not talk about, not for decades, not to anyone, was Rocaterrania, the hidden kingdom he had created as a young man.

Over the course of his life, Kuhler made thousands of drawings—maps, portraits, landscapes, propaganda—illustrating the history of Rocaterrania. After Ingram started filming him for a documentary, Kuhler started to reveal the story of his secret land, a place of intrigues and revolutions, heroes and villains. The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler, to be published this October, might be thought of as the first history of Rocaterrania. It collects Kuhler’s fascinating art and tells, for the first time in print, the full, epic story of the world he created.

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Rocaterrania was founded in 1931, when two wealthy American immigrants bought an expanse of land north of the Adirondacks, extending up to the Canadian border. Rocaterrania's first leaders were monarchs, Phillippe and Catherine, who had little use for democracy. Their new country resembled old Europe, with streets that resembled Paris, an opera house in the capital, and a hard-working lower class of immigrant farmers and miners. As Rocaterrania’s population grew, the country developed its own culture, with its own language, based on Spanish, Yiddish, German, and English, and its own religion, Ojallaism, which drew from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The people of Rocaterrania, though, were unhappy with monarchical rule, and the country’s history was marked with revolts. The monarchy was forced to recognize an autonomous region, New Serbia, and was eventually overthrown by socialist rebels, who held democratic elections.

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Under this new political order, innovation and culture flourished in Rocaterrania. The environmentally minded government created systems to recycle waste into fertilizer and created a Rocaterranian Conservation Corps that helped build up the country’s infrastructure. Rocaterranians started their own version of the Olympics, and a film industry blossomed.

The history concludes: “It took many hard years of struggle, dark days and night, for Rocaterrania to become the nice place it is today but, no question about it, they made it.”

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Kuhler dreamed up Rocaterrania as a young man, discontented with the rule of his parents. He was born Ronald L. Kuhler in 1931, to European immigrants in New Jersey. He spent his childhood in New York’s Rockland County before his father moved the family to a cattle ranch in Colorado. Isolated, uninterested in becoming a cowboy, intrigued by art, music, language, and history, Kuhler escaped into an imaginary world.

Even after leaving home, he continued to spool out the story of Rocaterreania while working as a historian in Washington State and a scientific illustrator in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Ingram met him. Rocaterrenia wasn’t just a made-up world; it became a metaphorical history of his life. “Rocaterrania is not a utopia,” he told Ingram. “It is not a fairyland or dreamland. What it is, it indirectly tells the story of my life and my struggle to become what I am today. I am Rocaterrania, and my troubles within me and everything else, the events of my life.”

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Read the history with that understanding and the undercurrents of Kuhler’s personal story start to emerge. When Phillippe, the first emperor, is described as a “benevolent, if somewhat inscrutable, monarch” and Catherine, the first empress, as “rather domineering,” Kuhler’s feelings about his parents come into focus. When an early rebellion gives one part of the country “substantial autonomy to govern their own affairs,” it maps onto the moment when Kuhler’s parents let him live in his own cabin on the ranch, granting him a partial freedom.

Kuhler’s tastes map onto Rocaterrania, too. Ingram writes that Kuhler donated generously to environmental causes; Rocaterranians are avid environmentalists. He played the violin; Rocaterranians revere the opera. Like Kuhler, the early monarchs loved trains, and they built a lasting system of urban transit and long-distance rail, so the country never developed a car culture. It’s even possible to read certain characters as aspects of Kuhler himself, too, and eventually a Ronald L. Kuhler and his twin sister, Renalda Kuhler, immigrate to Rocaterrania. Ronald quickly falls in love with one of the daughters of a well-regarded Rocaterranian family, and Renalda purses a career as an enterprising journalist.

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As Rocaterrania matures as a country, its people find greater creativity and freedom. By the time Ingram met Kuhler, in the 1990s, he had found some of that same freedom. Kuhler “was unabashedly, unapologetically, incorrigibly himself as a moral imperative,” Ingram writes. The project of creating Rocaterrania and recording its history helped him realize a more fully expressive life for himself. Kuhler passed away in 2013, five years after Ingram completed his documentary, Rocaterrania. “The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive,” he told the filmmaker. Rocaterrania made that possible for Renaldo Kuhler.

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We Now Have Evidence That Birds Preened Their Plumage 48 Million Years Ago

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Most birds have a small gland on the top of their tails, hidden under their feathers. The uropygial gland, it's called, secretes a waxy, fatty substance called preen oil that birds slather all over themselves using their beaks and sometimes their feet. Preen oil offers critical protection against water and microbes, and even has cosmetic benefits—flamingos use their carotenoid-laden preen oil like make-up to make their feathers even more pink. Despite how common the gland is in birds, and how important it can be to their health and survival, we actually don't know whether their ancestors—the dinosaurs—had such glands too. Fossilized soft tissue is extremely rare, so that question remains unanswered. But new research has uncovered the oldest example of a uropygial gland yet, and demonstrates that we may be able to identify one if we ever find the right dinosaur fossil.

A former lake in Germany, the Messel Pit Fossil Site, contains an exceptional number of fossils that preserve some imprint or remnant of soft tissue. An international team of researchers took a closer look at a bird specimen excavated from the site that appears to hold evidence of a uropygial gland. It's not the first specimen found with the gland, but it could be the oldest—at 48 million years old. To confirm that what they saw in the fossil really was the gland (and not some other structure), the team looked for evidence of preen oil at the molecular level.

They compared samples of the fossilized gland, the surrounding rock, fossilized feathers, and preen oil from modern birds. The fossilized gland was distinctly different from the rocks and fossilized feathers around it, and the scientists found molecules in the gland that are very similar to ones from modern preen oil. "The lipids have kept their original chemical composition, at least in part," said George Mayr, one of the coauthors of the report, in a statement. Mayr and his colleagues aren't sure why the lipids survived for so long, but they think preen oil's antimicrobial properties may have protected the uropygial gland's soft tissue from breaking down too quickly to be preserved.

"If we find more of these lipids, we will be able to better reconstruct the lifestyle of these animals," said coauthor Jakob Vinther in a statement. "For example, it would be interesting to find out whether feathered dinosaurs, as the ancestors of birds, already possessed uropygial glands and preened their plumages."


The Battle Between Baseball and Cricket for American Sporting Supremacy

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In early summer 1859, St. George’s Cricket Club found itself at an existential crossroads. Established in 1838, the Manhattan-based organization had for decades worked assiduously to, in the words of an 1859 club pamphlet, “see Cricket more generally established, better understood, and more regularly practiced” in America. In this quest, the club had initially benefited from its sport’s old-world cachet. Cricket offered American sportsmen a uniform and replicable product. Conversely, its chief competitor—“Base Ball”—had until recently remained provincial and largely underdeveloped.

This advantage had long kept cricket competitive in a battle for supremacy in New York, which was far more hotly contested than modern sports fans might think. “In the mid-1850s baseball and cricket were reasonable contenders for the title,” says John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball. “The press often referred to them [in the plural] as America’s ‘national pastimes.’”

In those years, however, baseball had taken significant strides. In 1854, New York’s most prominent clubs, led by a team known as the Knickerbockers, had begun to codify basic rules. The sport’s popularity grew exponentially after an 1857 conference established many of the standards that remain in place today. With new clubs sprouting monthly across the northeast United States, St. George’s and other cricket organizations now searched for something, anything, to stave baseball’s momentum.

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On June 9, 1859, they found it. For years, St. George’s, along with a peer club in Montreal, had tried to lure the All-England Eleven—a world-renowned all-star team of British cricketers—to North America. On this day, the club received word that their efforts had finally paid off. The team, spearheaded by George Parr, “the great Leviathan of Batters,” had committed to October fixtures against clubs at Montreal, New York City, Philadelphia, and Hamilton.

Founded by William Clarke in 1840, the All-England Eleven included several of the era’s most famous players. In addition to Parr, the Eleven included such notable personalities as James Grundy, who in July 1857 had famously scored 108 runs in six straight hours; Robert Carpenter, a fielding wizard “as active and playful as a young colt turned loose in his pasture”; and John Jackson, a man “notorious for the terrific celebrity of his bowling.”

Intrigued to see their countrymen take on such storied talent, Americans went suddenly mad for cricket. Newspapers as far away as Louisiana and Wisconsin promoted the matches, alongside basic rules, terms, and strategies for the sport. As one member of St. George’s later recalled: “No arrival in this country from England could have produced greater excitement than these celebrated Cricketers have done, except a visit from Queen Victoria herself.”

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Of the four fixtures, the New York match stood out as the main event. Dominated by members of St. George’s, the squad there brimmed with experienced players—most notably Harry Wright, whose father, Samuel, had been a professional cricketer in Sheffield, England. Wright, who would later manage America’s first fully professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, already boasted enough of a reputation in New York to inspire hope for a legendary upset.

By October 3, game day, anticipation reached a fever pitch. According to St. George’s account of the match, attendees filled all 5,000 seats set up at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields, and “a large number were standing about in every eligible position from which a view of the ground could be obtained.” By the time the match commenced, “young men and maidens, old men and children” watched on with bated breath.

In a two-inning match, the umpires allowed the American side 22 batters. The English side batted the traditional 11. In their first inning, the Americans managed 38 runs before their final batter was out. The first two English batters alone put up 59. By inning’s end, the Eleven had scored 156 runs. The Americans did better in the second, notching 54 runs the next day. Still, they fell far short of the 118 needed to prolong the match.

Despite the thrashing, St. George’s spun the fixture as a success. Noting that the event had drawn“the largest array of spectators that had ever previously been congregated for such an object in this country,” the group later wrote that the young American players needed “only the right practice to equal ere long in expertness, any men or set of men from the parent country.”

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To the club’s dismay, however, control of the post-match narrative soon slipped out of its fingers. Shortly after the Eleven defeated another opponent in Philadelphia, rumors proliferated that American clubs had challenged the cricketers to a game of baseball. The New York Herald reported on Oct. 13 that the Eleven had declined for the present, but had “obtained books of instruction and a specimen bat, and during the winter and spring [would] practice the game.” The following year, the paper continued, the club would “change position with their American friends, and become students instead of professors.”

The match never came to fruition. Still, the ensuing media blitz marked an important stage in the development of organized sports in America. For perhaps the first time in its young history, organized baseball found itself on the front page of a major American newspaper.

On October 16, 1859, the Herald ran a lengthy essay entitled, “Cricket and Base Ball: The English Cricketers and the Proposed Base Ball Match—the Two Games Described and Compared.” Intended for the uninitiated, it described both sports in the simplest of terms.

“Baseball,” the paper reported, “is so called from the game being played by a ball struck with a bat, whereupon the striker runs to points called ‘bases,’ of which there are four, at the four corners of a square, placed diagonally or diamond wise.”

After describing baseball’s basic rules, the article detailed recent innovations, including the expansion of foul territory, the requisite 90 feet between bases, and, notably, force outs: “Formerly it was sufficient to strike the adversary with the ball by throwing it at him. This practice is now abolished, as it was dangerous and unnecessary to the game.”

Unfortunately for St. George’s, the Herald didn’t stop there. The paper went on to choose sides in a debate then raging about whether cricket or baseball had the most potential to draw paying crowds. “In the points on which it differs from cricket, [baseball] is more suited to the genius of the people,” it argued. “Even if there were no base ball in existence cricket could never become a national sport in America—it is too slow, intricate and plodding a game for our go-ahead people.”

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Declaring baseball much livelier than its competition and admiring how the sport could be played in a single afternoon rather than cricket’s two to five days, the paper then delivered an incisive line, which spelled doom for cricket in a post-Jacksonian America. “Cricket seems very tame and dull after looking at a game of base ball,” the paper declared. “It is suited to the aristocracy, who have leisure and love ease; base ball is suited to the people.”

Despite such coverage, St. George’s patrons remained hopeful. The tour of the All-England Eleven had proven a resounding financial success. Assuming, perhaps correctly, that the Eleven would never risk embarrassing itself in a baseball match, St. George’s wrote off reports of an exhibition match as unfounded rumors. The club hoped to lure Parr and his all-stars back across the pond as soon as possible. Should American squads make a better showing during a rematch, the club might restoke the excitement that had preceded the Eleven’s arrival.

Unfortunately, such plans soon fell victim to the whims of history. Initially, St. George’s had eyed dates in 1861 as reasonable options for a return visit. “The Civil War made this impossible,” Thorn says, “not only for logistical reasons, but also because it enflamed anti-England sentiment.” New Yorkers, like many northerners, resented Great Britain for continuing to buy Southern cotton during the war.

By the end of the conflict, interest in cricket had waned. While the sport remained respectable, it was too foreign, too British, to appeal to a divided populace desperately searching for a new national identity. As the reunited states pieced themselves back together in subsequent years, it became clear there was only one game perfectly suited for American sensibilities.

“What cricket is to an Englishman so base ball is to an American,” the Herald wrote in its preview of the 1867 season. “Each look upon their national game as the very perfection of a sport; and nothing would be better adapted to the peculiar characteristics of the two nationalities than these very games.”

Can Fake Coyotes Scare Off Sea Lions?

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Newport Beach, California, has a sea lion problem. The sleek beasts have an annoying habit of climbing aboard the docks and private boats in the harbor and sunning themselves, creating a dangerous situation (for human and sea lion) when the boats’ owners come to take their vessels out. So in an effort to combat this plague of sea lions, Newport Beach has turned to an unlikely ally: fake coyotes.

According to Mary Locey, a representative of the City of Newport Beach who spoke to local news station ABC 7, they got the idea from the harbor yacht club, who have had some success with the concept.

The city installed eight plastic coyote statues on parts of the harbor where the animals have been known to gather. Each coyote is depicted in a fearsome crouch, as if it might be ready to attack.

Locey also suggested that people fill the empty spaces on the boats and docks with potted plants or lawn chairs to make them less inviting. The NOAA’s official guide to acceptable sea lion deterrents also lists a number of potential options including using balloons or pinwheels as visual deterrents, loud noises such as firecrackers or banging pots together, or even spraying them with squirt guns.

The use of fake coyotes is not listed as an officially approved method of deterrent, but then again they don’t say not to either.

In China, Ghosts Demand the Finer Things in Life

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There’s a pretty clear, well-defined set of traits that make up a ghost in the Western world—from the mushy green slimers of Ghostbusters to translucent, pudgy Casper to the myriad diaphanous denizens of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. They’re immaterial, legless floaters that often care little for the material concerns of the living. It’s mostly a reflection of the Western conception of the afterlife, as place above (or below) the living world. But ghosts in other parts of the world can be rather different. In China, for example, ghosts experience the same desires and, quite literally, appetites of the living. And it's in our best interests to give them what they want.

“The traditional view of death in China is different from the traditional view of death in the West,” says Nick Tackett, an historian from University of California, Berkeley, who studies traditional Chinese death rituals, especially those from Song and Liao periods. The spirit of the deceased separates into two parts, which one might call two souls. One of which resides—and ideally remains—in the tomb, and one of which resides in the ancestral tablet,” a plaque kept in shrines in homes or temples. After burial, souls need to be fed constantly, Tackett explains. “Regular offerings at the ancestral altar and periodic offerings at the grave helped satiate the souls of the deceased.”

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But if something goes awry—forgetful relatives who neglect their feeding duties, an improper burial, or some unfinished business on Earth—a dead person’s soul can wander out of the tomb, hungry. These ghosts rarely meddle in the affairs of the living, but starting on the 15th day of the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar—roughly sometime in July/August—the gates of the underworld unlock, allowing flocks of hungry ghosts to roam freely for a month, the appropriately titled Ghost Month (鬼月), also known as the Yulan or Zhongyuan Festival.

The origins of this belief are thought to go back to a third-century tale about a Buddhist monk, Mulian, whose deceased mother came back to haunt him as a thin-throated, huge-stomached, ravenous apparition. Mulian desperately wanted to satisfy her, but he was unable. The more he fed her, the hungrier she became. It turns out she had been too greedy during her lifetime, leaving her insatiable in death. So the monk turned to Buddha for advice and learned that, on a particular auspicious day, he could visit the temple with food, money, and all sort of goodies to fill the ghost’s appetite. It worked, and the “Hungry Ghost” tradition was born.

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Of course, the true origins of the ghost rituals are a little more complex. They developed out of a centuries-long process of mixing and matching of local folk traditions, Taoism, and Buddhism, dating to well before the third century. “Although the Ghost Festival is found only in East Asia in medieval times, many of its rituals and mythological components derive from lands to the West of China, not only India but the many kingdoms and trading centers of central Asia so crucial in the dissemination of Indic and Aryan culture to the east,” writes Stephen S. Teiser, a scholar of Buddhism and religion at Princeton University, in The Ghost Festival in Medieval China.

But Mulian’s tale is a significant part of the practice today. “Hungry ghosts are the spirits of people who always wanted more than they had, were never grateful for what they were given, and cannot find peace in the afterlife any more than they could when they lived,” according to writer Emily Mark in the Ancient History Encyclopedia. “They are often depicted as people with enormous stomachs but tiny mouths and necks which no amount of food could ever fill.”

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On top of being rather hangry, these ghosts have some particular preferences during their month-long wandering on Earth. There is a long list of things that the living should avoid during Ghost Month. Whistling attracts ghosts. Leaving clothes out to dry tempts ghosts to try them on. Staying up late courts possession. Getting married or starting a relationship is a bad idea, as it is not likely to end well. And whatever you do, don’t buy a home or apartment during Ghost Month. It will be haunted forever. These beliefs actually have real life repercussions, as shown in a 2015 study by Agarwal Sumit and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore. During Ghost Month, they found, demand for housing goes down, which opens up good real estate deals for nonbelievers.

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Now that you know what not to do, here’s what you should do to avoid the ire of hungry ghosts. Just like Buddha’s recommendations to Mulian, most of these rituals revolve around the provision of material goods. “There were numerous ways in which the dead seem to have benefited from a sort of ‘virtual reality,’" says Tackett. “Within the tomb, the soul of the deceased could enjoy an afterlife banquet represented in tomb murals. Similarly, fake paper money was as useful as real money.”

Archeological evidence suggests that paper offerings, known as zhizha, or “hell money,” date as far back as 1000 B.C. The idea is that through the act of burning, this fake money is transported to the underworld, where ghosts can squander it as they see fit. “It is implicitly agreed that if a person received proper burial and sacrifice, the ghost of this person will not come back to harm people,” writes Mu-chou Poo, a historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions. During the Song Dynasty (960–1279) other goods started to be made into a form of zhizha for ghost rituals. Paper effigies of clothes, houses, horses, and even servants were burned to send these items to the underworld’s lavish economy.

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The desires of hungry ghosts have evolved with the times. “The festival, and the wider act of burning items to send to one’s ancestors in the underworld, reveals the cultural flows of globalization, and the consumption habits of individuals,” says Terence Hang, a sociologist at Singapore Institute of Technology who studies the festival’s visual culture. “Individuals now purchase and burn whatever is fashionable to consume in a contemporary, globalized society. One can get hold of paper iPads, paper credit cards, paper Rolls Royces, and more.”

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“The idea is that you try to update their lifestyle to match your modern comfort,” says Xiaoxia Zhou from China Institute in America, a nonprofit organization that promotes Chinese culture. “Your ancestors should have the same things you have, read the same things you read. So people now burn paper TVs, paper fridges, [and] in some cases—taking female objectification to its extreme—even a beautiful mistress or a secretary.”

There was a moment when this centuries-long tradition seemed to be on its way out. It has long been tied the Chinese concept of filial piety (孝, xiao), which asserts that sons and daughters should take care of their parents the best they can. The 1911 revolution sought to do away with such ideas and practices. "Ghost Festival rituals or other manifestations of xiao were seens as backward folklore that was preventing China from modernizing,” says Zhou. Decades later, Mao Zedong, then a librarian, integrated this sentiment into his Cultural Revolution.

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But the Ghost Festival was entrenched in Chinese culture. Not only has it survived, but now the Chinese government considers it part of the country’s intangible cultural heritage. Zhou explains that the tradition is strong in rural areas and southern provinces, but less so in China’s burgeoning urban centers. Some urban communities are now trying to make the centuries-old festival more relevant to young, Western-influenced city dwellers. In 2015 a community in Hong Kong launched the first Ghost Festival costume contest. "It can be just like Halloween," Anven Wu Yim-chung, director at the Federation of Hong Kong Chiu Chow Community Organizations, told the South China Morning Post. The competition welcomed both traditional Chinese ghost options and anime characters. The 2016 edition added a ghost grappling competition and ghost opera.

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And as the Hungry Ghost Festival loses some ground among the young, so does the centuries-long craft of making traditional zhizha paper effigies, which have been replaced by cheap, mass-produced versions available online rather than in traditional shops. But the ancient craft does endure. After graduating from design school in the early 1990s, Au Yeung Ping-chi decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and learn how to twist and turn thin sheets of bamboo paper to make evocative ghost effigies.

Ping-chi, who runs his workshop in Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po district, made a name of himself as an “unconventional” effigy maker after he crafted a ghost guitar for the spirit of Koma Wong Ka-kui of renowned Hong-Kong rock band Beyond, who died after falling from a stage in Japan in 1993.

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Since then he’s taken on a variety of commissions for unusual effigies, according to Zolima magazine: an Xbox, a skateboard, a nail clipper, a tamagotchi. Ghost food is another popular option. Ping-chi makes great ghost chicken wings and ghost dumplings. And the largest effigy he ever made was a full-scale fishing pole.

His father Wai-kin worries a bit about the direction the practice has taken. “The appearance of our effigies ... have to be equivalent to what the living used, so the underworld can experience progress too,” he told the South China Post. “But some popular products now deviate from that principle.” One has to wonder what a hungry ghost would need an iPhone for anyway.

Every Apple You Eat Took Years and Years to Make

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During apple season, Susan Brown can bite into hundreds of apples a day. She walks through her orchards, along rows containing hundreds of trees, biting and spitting, biting and spitting. Each year, she and her technician, Kevin Maloney, plant thousands upon thousands of apple seeds, and never know exactly what the fruit of the grown trees will taste like.

Browsing through this experimental orchard, Brown likes to say, is like digging through a bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, the magical Harry Potter jelly beans that can taste of anything from blueberry and banana to vomit and earwax. In a similar way, her apples might taste of cinnamon, green pepper, or diesel fuel. And there's no way to know until she bites into one. There's an apple, for instance, that tastes rather strongly of anise, which can be a delightful or nasty surprise, depending on your tastes.

As the head of the apple-breeding program at Cornell University’s New York State Agriculture Experiment Station, one of the largest apple-breeding programs in the world, Brown is searching for fruit that no one has ever seen or tasted before—beautiful apples that can withstand the dangers of the field, that grow uniform and large, that store well, that can be shipped easily to grocery stores, that have deep and satisfying flavors, and that are, above all, crisp and juicy, the two qualities consumers most desire. By harnessing the criss-cross power of genetic variation, she can create new apples, better than any already for sale.

But that means corralling the tremendous genetic diversity that apple seeds hold. “Apples just want to be different,” she says. Breeding them means working at a large scale—decades of growing thousands of trees and tasting thousands of apples—just to find and capture that one better variety of fruit.

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I meet Brown on a fall morning at the experimental station in Geneva, New York, on the northern end of Seneca Lake. This is farm, wine, and gorge country, where rolling hills lead from one Finger Lake to the next, and shoreline vineyards and cider mills look out over the water. The station, with its brightly lit greenhouses and lecture halls, is on the edge of town, with easy access to the fields beyond. Brown has 33 acres of seedlings out here, and she has promised me a taste—many tastes, so many that by the end of the morning my stomach would feel a bit queasy—of what it takes to discover an apple variety good enough to get a name of its own.

“We always tease—you go back in because your stomach can only take so much,” she says. “We’ll break for lunch—not that we’re hungry, but just to give a base.” There are real digestive dangers to apple tasting of this intensity. When tasting cider apples that are small, tart, and tannic, “after while you’re think, ‘I’m going to puke.’” Some varieties ferment on the tree. “You can get loopy,” she adds.

She takes me past phalanxes of young trees, with fallen apples in red and yellow pools beneath them, to what she describes as a “good row.” Each tree here has the same two parent trees, which were crossbred in the hope that one of their offspring will combine the best of both. It’s the same hope that any parent has for a child, except in this case, instead of a few human babies, the parent trees can produce thousands of seedlings. This row has one parent that produces deep red apples dotted with tiny white starbursts. The other parent makes what Brown calls “the ugly apple,” a variety that gets scarf skin, a cosmetic problem, and turns almost brown by harvest time. “The ugly apple, most people consider the best apple they’ve ever eaten,” says Brown. The goal of this cross is to pretty it up so that people might want to buy it, without losing its stunning flavor.

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She starts walking the row, reaching into the leaves to retrieve apples and handing one from each tree to me to taste. “Feel free to spit,” she says, her mouth full.

“Do you like the little dots or not?” she asks while handing over a smaller, very red apple with little white speckles. (I think they’re kind of cute.) “I like ‘em,” she says. But when she took pictures and showed them around, someone asked her, "What’s wrong with those apples?”

She then offers me an apple that’s russet-colored from frost. “Not bad.” Normally, she wouldn’t even taste it because of the appearance.

One apple is a little early, with texture and plenty of flavor. The next is small and bumpy, susceptible to insects. Another, perfectly shaped, nice and red. Many of them are small, since the sneaky genes for small fruit size always seem to come through. “We are getting pretty good appearance,” she says. “But then we’re getting russet.” One tree is notably productive, full of big, red apples. “The sad thing is, it has sugar but no flavor.”

“That’s what kills you,” Brown says. “The pretty one always do that.”

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More apples. “Now that’s attractive.” “Can you taste the metallic, like a metallic taste?” “Again, not a lot of flavor.” “That’s the ugly offspring.” “Wow. Nothing much.” Brown had told me earlier that her job makes her a bit of an apple snob, and I start to understand. These aren’t bad apples—they’re right off the tree, and every one produces a satisfying crunch. But any flaw, in shape, taste, or color, immediately disqualifies it for her. She has to be so picky because apple eaters notice these subtleties, too. One consumer told her he tasted garlic in one of her apples.

“The chance of me selecting something in this progeny is about 1 percent,” she says. “But this,” she laughs, “is a good cross. You have good size. There are some really bad crosses. We have some that they’re all spitters. You don’t want to try them.”

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After Brown and her colleagues breed these trees by scraping the pollen out of one parent's flowers and tweezing the antlers from another, it takes four years before the progeny bear fruit. In the first year, they might only produce one or two apples. Even if Brown and Maloney, the technician, taste one of those apples and decide it’s amazing, they have to wait until the next year to see if it’ll fruit again and in enough abundance.

Once they have selected a tree they like, they harvest bud sticks and start making copies. Apples don’t grow true to seed, meaning that if Brown and Maloney plant the seeds of that favored tree they're unlikely to match the magic of the chosen apple. The apples that show up in stores—Red Delicious, Granny Smith, McIntosh, Macoun, Cortland, Honeycrisp, Empire, Gala—are all produced by clones of the first tree that produced each variety.

“If you get a McIntosh apple, it derives from the apple in the 1700s,” says Brown. “That’s what's neat. Clonal propagation freezes it in time.”

If an apple is a candidate for commercialization, those budding clones are grafted onto different roots, to see how they grow and produce, and then are sent into grower trials, to see how they fare in other conditions. In one field we pass, Brown points out her “advanced selections"—trees laden with big apples, like overdecorated Christmas trees. They've been bred to stand straight, with branches starting lower to ground, which makes harvest easier. In between the clusters there are large gaps, where underperforming trees once stood.

“Somebody said, ‘Your apples are your children,’” says Brown. “I must be a tough mother then, because if it doesn’t perform, it’s gone.”

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Growing up, Brown "got a little plants and a little genetics,” she says. Her mom had a garden that people traveled from miles around to see, and her dad bred racing pigeons. When she took her first plant-breeding course, in college, she was entranced by the idea that she could create something no one had ever seen. She was the first woman hired in her department, and she was the only one for years after she started. “I didn’t think I could have kids and have a career,” she says. “It wasn’t easy, but I did.” In her office, there's a framed family tree that her daughter crafted from paper and photos, where the members of the family are represented, naturally, by apples. Hanging on the lower branches, just below the human family members, are apples representing Snapdragon and Ruby Frost, two of the greatest triumphs of Brown’s many years of labor.

When Brown and Maloney first bit into Snapdragon, it was the first tree in a row. One of its parents was Honeycrisp, the new and popular variety produced in Minnesota. On the other side of its family, it had ancestors including Monroe, Melrose, and Golden Delicious. As soon as Brown and Maloney tried it, they loved it. But the tree had so few fruit; they had to wait until the next year to see if it would grow more apples of the same quality. It did, and soon they started making trees for commercial grower trials, on an unusually speedy schedule.

“We knew it was good,” Brown says. “When people came to look at it, they would taste it and smile, and they would taste it again.” Still, it took 11 years from cross that produced Snapdragon to commercialization, and that is one of fastest tracks in apple-breeding history. “Some perennial breeders never get to this stage,” says Brown. “You can retire before you know your variety is a success.”

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Later in the morning, Brown takes me to a bad row, one where she is aiming to breed better flavor into a variety that's resistant to apple scab, a fungal disease. Here the apples, particularly the yellow ones, are brown with rot and other problems. “No juice, and a thick skin,” she says, biting into one. We walk the row. “Not very good.” “Oh ... weird.” “That’s a taste we don’t like ... it’s not bad at first, but then it lingers.” “That’s the floral—almost like perfume-y. The skins are bad. You can always tell when the skins are bad when you spit and it’s just skin.”

She catches me trying, with only partial success, to eject a not-so-good bit of apple from my mouth. “Sometimes one spit is not enough,” she says. “You go through progeny like this, and you’re ready to cry.” The whole row will be bulldozed.

Not long before we leave, though, she takes me to taste one of her favorites. When I bite into it, the satisfying crunch gives way to a flush of nectar and a pear-like flavor. It’s like eating an apple dipped in honey. I take a second bite, without even noticing, one of the only times I’ve taken more than one bite of a single apple all morning. “You can always tell if it’s good when you start walking to the next tree, and you’re still eating,” Brown says.

I take another bite. This apple may never make it to market. The tree it came from may be bulldozed into the ground. That particular combination of crunch and nectar may never exist again. It is a very, very good apple. But if it's not good enough to make it big, to convince people to turn from their tried-and-true favorites to an upstart newcomer, only a few people will ever have tasted it.

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Seattle's Last Umbrella Shop Is Closing

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There's a popular joke in the Pacific Northwest that goes something like this: "What do you call someone in Seattle with an umbrella?" "A tourist."

It just got a little more true. For years, Jodell Egbert—the owner of Bella Umbrella, the city's only brick-and-mortar umbrella store—gamely stocked scores of the rainy-day tools, and even ran an umbrella repair service out of the shop. But those days are ending: Bella Umbrella is closing up.

"Every day somebody would come in and tell me it was stupid to have an umbrella store in Seattle because Seattleites don't use umbrellas," Egbert told the SeattleTimes. "It made me feel bad."

Why does anti-umbrella sentiment pervade Seattle—and indeed, much of the Pacific Northwest? As meteorologist Scott Sistek explains in this 2016 article, it likely has something to do with the area's tiny raindrops. Raindrop size depends on the strength of updrafts: winds that blow vertically, and keep the water up in the clouds. The harder the updrafts blow, the more time each raindrop has to grow before it falls.

Due to the moderate marine climate, Sistek writes, "updrafts around the Puget Sound region are typically very weak." In other words, raindrops don't have time to get huge, and so they fall early, forming a kind of light mist. "When it rains, it doesn't really pour," he writes, "and we go about our walks knowing we'll dry out pretty quickly once we get inside."

Those Seattleites who proudly eschew umbrellas are less likely to cite raindrop size than other concerns. This Reddit thread has a good sampling, which includes "you take up the whole sidewalk," traumatic tales of dripping and eye-gouging, and advice to "embrace the rain... be molded by it."

It wasn't just the haters that made Egbert decide to shut the store. In the Times story, she also cites competition from online retailers, as well as shrinking parking options in the area. (Plus, her lease was up.)

She's moving the whole operation to New Orleans, where Bella Umbrellas already has one outpost, and where people love umbrellas so much, they use them even when it's not raining at all.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

There's More to the 46 'High Peaks' of the Adirondacks Than Hiking

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My sons and I were on the trail that day because of a quest. This wasn’t about exercise or stress relief or forest bathing. We were on a mission, to summit Wright and Algonquin. Two more peaks to add to our list.

The main trunkline out of Heart Lake, a north-south highway through the center of the High Peaks of the Adirondacks, is like Roman road: trod by so many booted feet that it is sunken, beaten into the earth, the banks of the trail often waist and shoulder high. It was a brilliant late summer day, and at the lower elevations the purple-tipped maples matched the purple granite of the mountains in a brief moment of cohesion. But as we climbed, the hardwoods retreated, and only the spruce and pine remained, until even they were driven out by the cold and the wind, leaving nothing but trampled rock and pockets of moss and wildflowers.

A few hikers passed us on the way up, including one woman in heavy-duty boots accompanied by her tongue-lolling dog and clearly miserable boyfriend. The happy calico mutt was wearing a harness covered in patches indicating peaks and their elevations.

“Well, she is a Forty-Sixer,” the young woman said, as explanation.

“All of you are?” I asked; my sons and I want to be Forty-Sixers too.

“No, just me and her,” she said proudly, then stuck a thumb towards the noob boyfriend. “He’s on number two.”

And that made us feel good, because we were on number nine, and no longer noobs ourselves.

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The Adirondacks in New York are the largest protected park in the continental United States—bigger than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon combined—and within that boundary, 46 peaks rise over 4,000 feet of elevation. Anyone that climbs them all—in any order, over any number of years—becomes a Forty-Sixer. Among hikers in the know, it is a prestigious accomplishment, many marathons worth of trail-work. Some of the peaks lie within easy range of a parking lot, but most require multi-day excursions, to valley-floor base camps below each massif. That dog had done the work to earn those patches.

On that sunny day, my sons and I had chosen two of the more-accessible peaks. It was only three-and-a-half miles from our campsite up to the first summit, through forest that lay in a thick carpet. We were like mites passing among the bristles. But that relatively short path concealed 2,500 feet of elevation gain, and we were panting hard by the end. My youngest son, only eight years old, got vertigo near the end. We had left the trees behind, the trail became all bare rock marked by cairns, and while no steeper than earlier sections, the view was dizzying. For a while, my boy lay flat on his stomach so he couldn’t fall off the mountain.

Wright Peak was worth all the effort, though. And so we added one more of the 46 to our list, our tenth. The rest of that list, in order of completion: Phelps, Porter, Cascade, Giant, Couchsachraga, Santanoni, Panther, Nye, Street. Only 36 more to go.

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The Adirondack Mountains feel higher and more remote than they really are, lying only a few hours drive from the major East Coast metros, Montreal, and the upstate Rust Belt. This sense of isolation is partially a matter of climate, as it can snow on the summits even in summer. But it is also related to their natural history: the southernmost outpost of the Canadian Shield, a stand-alone dome scraped clean by the glaciers, exposing rock so ancient it predates multi-cellular life. On the flanks of the Adirondack peaks, the tiny stunted trees, brutalized all winter into the twisted husks of krummholz, can be hundreds of years old. And the lichen, sedge, and flowering grasses clinging to the exposed summits form a genuine alpine zone, remnants of the last ice age, a pin head’s worth of Greenland transposed south and made accessible to average vacationers.

These natural resources have long attracted holiday-hikers and mountaineers alike. The Adirondacks are home to over 100,000 permanent residents, some living in ski towns and lumber hubs, and others in the poshest Gilded Age digs imaginable. They serve as an ex-urb for those fleeing other refuges closer to New York and Boston; when Concord and the Hudson Valley got too crowded, Emerson and the Vanderbilts moved north.

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Bob and George Marshall were children of just such privilege, and in the 1910s and 1920s, summered at a Great Camp near the Saranac Lakes, in the heart of the park. With their guide and family friend Herb Clark, the brothers began hiking the high peaks when they were teenagers. By 1925, when Bob was 24 and George was just 21, the three men had already summited all 46 peaks believed to be over 4,000 feet, the treeline threshold for many of the mountains. Very few had established trails, though, and the matter might have remained there if Bob Marshall did not write a how-to guide, The High Peaks of the Adirondacks, in 1922.

Both Marshall brothers would go on to become environmental leaders. Bob founded the Wilderness Society. George served as president of that non-profit after his brother’s death, and ran the Sierra Club for a while. But within the Adirondacks, the men’s greatest contribution, arguably, is serving as the inspiration for hundreds of thousands of hikers that would attempt to trace their steps.

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Among the first to catch the high-peak fever were the pastor and parishioners of Grace Methodist Church in Troy, near Albany, New York. Reverend Ernest Ryder was the seventh to summit the rotation, and would coin the term “Forty-Sixer.” Ed Hudowalski made a hiking club out of his Sunday school class, and started leading trips. His wife Grace finished the circuit in 1937, the first woman and ninth overall to do so. As a courtesy, she began to record the names and dates of everyone who finished the 46, and when a new club, the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, held its first meeting near Heart Lake in the spring of 1948, they elected Grace the first President. She would also become the first historian, a job she did for 59 years.

Grace Hudowalski’s list of Forty-Sixers grew and grew, and she made a point of corresponding with each aspirant, asking for their stories. After her death in 2004, others took over but could barely keep up with the volume of inquires. The current co-chairs of the Office of the Historian are a husband-and-wife team, Lee Nesbitt and Siobhan Carney-Nesbitt. Over email, Lee said that there is no one kind of Forty-Sixer—“children, college kids, people who are unemployed, self-employed, blue collar, white collar”—but that the trails are busy, and over the last decade “there definitely is more people out there.”

The numbers are astounding in their growth. Most hikers take years to complete the 46. The current roster is 10,136, and while still exclusive, it is multiplying rapidly. In 2008, about 180 people were added to the rolls. The classes have increased every year since, to more than 700 in 2016. As many names have been added in the last 10 years as the first 72.

It is no coincidence, to most observers, that this Forty-Sixer popularity coincides with the growth of social media. “It used to be people sharing photo slides and other people begrudgingly putting up with viewing them,” Lee said. “Nowadays people love sharing and viewing people's trips and in return more people get interested in doing it themselves.”

The Adirondacks are particularly photo-ready. They contain five essential elements for the perfect varied natural scene: water, rock, sky, vegetation, elevation. This is not just my opinion; check out #46er.

A post shared by Peter Gnade (@peter.gnade) on

Among many outdoor enthusiasts, this whole process—seeking out summits only because they are on some arbitrary list, and then recording every hike—is sometimes derisively known as peak-bagging. Purists hold the exercise in poor regard for its emphasis on stamp-collecting and train-spotting, rather than the natural experience itself. The extreme version of peak-bagging involves racing the circuit, trying to beat the records for each FKT (fastest known time), a stat diligently tracked on an international message board.

Between 2000 and 2004, a man calling himself Cave Dog set a number of speed records, including the 46. Starting with the Colorado 14,000-footers—in jean shorts, no less—he also knocked off the New Hampshire 4,000-footers, the 35-over-3,500 in the Catskills, the 6,000-footers in Tennessee and North Carolina, and the Vermont Long Trail.

Cave Dog, also known (perhaps more appropriately) as Teddy Keizer, was from Oregon, and he beat the 46 record, long held by locals, by a full day. “Not everyone liked an outsider cruising through like that,” say Jan Wellford, another speed hiker. Wellford was from southern Massachusetts, but had family in the Adirondacks’ Keane Valley, and visited regularly. He decided to make a run at it, and reclaim the title for the locals.

Wellford set out on June 24, 2008. His wife drove him between trailheads, and he slept a few hours at a time, when his body gave out. He says the challenge is not the total distance, a relatively short 155 miles, but the elevation: over 60,000 feet. Wellford finished three days, 17 hours, and 14 minutes later. He beat Cave Dog by an hour.

Wellford now guides parties of inexperienced hikers to popular summits. He said he understands the purists, but disagrees with them. “If it takes a list to get people to come back to the mountains, I’m all for it,” he says, adding that social media explains much of the recent popularity.

In the middle of his own FKT run, he took a selfie on the top of Wright, the handsome hulk of Algonquin in the background.

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It turns out that the original geological survey of 1897, the one the Marshalls utilized in their hikes, wasn’t quite right. Forty-Sixers still go by the traditional list, but modern methods have shown four of the 46 are actually below the threshold.

Most hikers today could do without those four: the shortest, only 3,820 feet, is Couchsachraga, an Algonquin word for “dismal wilderness.” It lives up to the name because somehow, seemingly against the rules of hydrology that state water must drain away, a primordial swamp guards the summit.

But my kids and I have done Couchsachraga—miserable as it was, and no, I’m never going back—because we’re completists and collectors and ultimately, agree with Wellford. If it takes a list and a goal to get father and sons out on the trail together for days at a time, then so be it.

On our latest hike, on that late-summer day, our goal, after Wright Peak, was Algonquin, a classic hike and, at 5,114 feet, the second highest of the 46. The whole path was visible from the summit of Wright: the drop into the thickly-forested saddle between the mountains, the steep climb out, the exposed slickrock that dotted the slope like islands in a green sea.

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On our way off Wright, we detoured to a memorial that looks out over the valley. A small plaque was driven into the stone face, and along the ledge, the well-preserved crash remains of a B-47, the U.S. Air Force’s first modern bomber. In 1962, an aircrew of four men was on a training mission out of Plattsburgh, a base on Lake Champlain 40 miles to the northeast. A storm rolled in unexpectedly, and high winds blew them off course. Unable to see, First Lieutenant Rodney D. Bloomgren, the aircraft’s pilot, drove the plane directly into the broadside of the mountain. No one survived.

How many of the peak-baggers stop and notice this, I wondered? Only for a moment, though, because then we pushed on too.

Algonquin’s approach proved more precarious than its final push to the summit. Hiking with children, I’ve learned chocolate cures all sorts of aches, pains, and bad attitudes, but it was hardly required as we scampered the cliff faces, some well-suited for a climbing gym. And then, all of sudden, we poked through the trees and stood in the alpine meadows of club moss and diapensia. The last half mile was joy. Number 11.

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Standing at the top, next to the old rusting survey spike, was a young man with a long wizard beard, wispy like a frayed cloud. He introduced himself as the summit steward, and said it was his job to mind the top of Algonquin five days a week.

“Basically, I tell people to stay off the grass,” he said.

"This place gets a lot of traffic,” I said. “How many are doing the Forty-Six?"

"Too many. That's why most of these people are here," he said. Around us, young couples and middle-aged men in compression socks were busy on their smart phones, taking photos. We agreed it was a bit like Pokémon Go, trying to catch every high peak.

“I've done more than 46 peaks,” the summit steward went on, “but I haven't done the 46, if you know what I mean. If I do it, I probably won't even register."

“Not me,” said an older gentleman behind us. “I’ve already registered with the Forty-Sixers, and this is my second peak. I’m going to do them all.”

Found: A Mosaic From Caligula's Ceremonial Ship, Turned Into a Coffee Table

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Most people wouldn’t choose to make a coffee table from art belonging to a bloodthirsty, tyrannical, sex-crazed Roman Emperor. But antiques dealer Helen Fioratti had no idea that the mosaic that sat in her living room for decades once belonged to Caligula, she told NBC News, until police showed up to take it away.

Fioratti acquired the striking piece 45 years ago, from a family of aristocrats. The mosaic, they told her, had been found in Lake Nemi, nearby the family's home, in the 19th century. She spent thousands of dollars to buy it from them, shipped it to New York, and had it turned into a coffee table, which sat in her Upper East Side apartment for years.

In the past months, though, the Italian military police's Art Recovery Unit and New York’s district attorney office have been working to repatriate stolen Italian art, and the mosaic caught their attention. (It’s not clear exactly how.) The piece, according to the Italian unit, came from a elaborately decorated ceremonial ship from the reign of Caligula in the first century A.D.

Caligula’s rule only lasted four short years and ended in his assassination, after which the ships were sunk in Lake Nemi. In the 1920s, they were excavated, and the mosaic flooring brought to the Ships of Nemi Museum in 1936. That museum was used as a bomb shelter in World War II, and few of the antiquities survived, making the mosaic that much more valuable.

Now, it’s being returned to Italy, along with other recently rediscovered art. Fioratti told NBC News that she had no idea that it was stolen and was sad to see it go.


Why Is the World Always on the Back of a Turtle?

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Anyone who’s ever heard the expression “it’s turtles all the way down” is probably familiar with the image of the world being carried on the back of a giant turtle. While that philosophical one-liner is of relatively modern vintage, the cosmic turtle mytheme has appeared in disparate cultures across the globe for millennia. In honor of everyone’s favorite intellectual quandary, let’s take a moment to celebrate the tortoises that hold up the world.

In his book Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, the turn-of-the-20th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor writes that the world turtle concept likely first appeared in Hindu mythology. In one Vedic story, the form of the god Vishnu’s second avatar, Kurma, is a great turtle, which provides a celestial foundation upon which a mountain is balanced.

Over in China, part of the traditional creation mythology involves a giant turtle named Ao, although the image in this case is a but different. According to the legend, the creator goddess cut off the legs of the cosmic turtle and used them to prop up the heavens, which had been damaged by another god. It’s not quite carrying the world on its back, but it still puts a terrapin at the center of the universe, making sure that the very sky doesn’t fall down.

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The concept of a world turtle seems to have arisen independently within Native American myth and legend. In the creation stories of the Lenape and Iroquois people, the Earth is created as soil is piled on the back of a great sea turtle that continues to grow until it carrying the entire world. Many indigenous tribes in North America refer to the continent as Turtle Island to this day.

The image of the world being carried through space by an ancient, impossibly massive tortoise is evocative, so it's not hard to imagine why it has survived for so long in so many different cultures. But in the end, why turtles?

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In a 1974 issue of the anthropological journal Man, the scholar Jay Miller provides some thoughts on what makes the turtle such a popular world bearer, writing, “I viewed the turtle as a logical choice for such an atlantean because its shape and appearance were suited to this role.” But he goes on to write, specifically of the Lenape belief in a world turtle, that the creature also mirrored aspects that they valued in their culture, such as perseverance and longevity. And that idea doesn’t just apply to the cosmic turtle in Lenape culture. “With intensive research, the above analysis should also apply for other societies that place the earth on the back of a turtle.” Most turtles and tortoises are also famously long-lived, giving them a wise, ancient quality that lends itself to mythologizing.

World turtles appear in more modern pop culture as well, from the Great A'Tuin of the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld franchise, to the all-knowing Maturin of Stephen King’s metaverse. Clearly, it remains cool to imagine that our world is being led through space by a being that actually knows where we’re headed.

Can You Really Hear a Coin Drop From the Back Row of an Ancient Greek Theater?

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Tourists come from far and wide to visit the 2,300-year-old Greek theater of Epidaurus, where they stand in one of the back rows, scrunch up their eyes, and listen for the far-off sound of a coin being dropped or a piece of paper being ripped by a tour guide standing on the stage. Like other amphitheaters of the period, it's supposed to have legendary acoustics. But the sonic properties of this theater may not be as dazzling as they're made out to be, say scientists at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, who presented their findings at the scientific conference Acoustics '17 Boston earlier this year.

The team undertook multiple sound measurements from hundreds of spots across the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the theater of Argos, and the theater of Epidaurus to get a wider picture of the audibility of sounds throughout the auditoriums, at various times of the day to reflect changes in humidity and temperature. They focused on the sounds often demonstrated to tourists—falling coins, tearing paper, a whisper. These, they found, were not audible from the back rows, as they are often said to be.

The study has sparked a commotion among classicists, however. In a statement given to the Times of London, the Hellenic Institute of Acoustics said that the findings “lacked sufficient scientific evidence,” that the conclusions were "arbitrary," and that it would be requesting a "thorough review of their findings." Many scholars and journalists have posited that the study purports to measure the acoustics as they would have once been, thousands of years ago. According to Remy Wenmaekers, coauthor of the study, this reaction came because of confusion over what he and his team had set out to study. “What we investigated was the current theaters, as they are right now," he says. "Our conclusions are saying nothing about what the theaters would have been like 2,000 years ago, and our expectation is that they were very different."

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There is no shortage of reasons why today's acoustics may be different than those heralded in ancient literature, Wenmaekers says. Ancient theaters may, for instance, have had decorative backdrops behind the stage that helped bounce sound to the cheap seats. “That would probably have quite a big impact on the acoustics,” he adds.

Further, Armand D'Angour, classical scholar and musician at the University of Oxford, mentions that the degradation of the theater's surfaces has an impact as well. "The original theater surfaces would have been shiny, because they’d have been polished marble, whereas they’re now very rutted." There's still much that remains unknown about the other ways the ancient Greeks projected sound, he says, and whether that included the placement of additional objects around the theater to help project sound farther. "Clear voice was the most positive adjective you could use of a herald or of a singer," he says. "In order to achieve that clarity, the people who built these theaters would have known all kinds of things."

Finally, acoustics both modern and ancient can be profoundly influenced by the psychological state of the listener. D'Angour describes the intense focus one might have at the theater. "Maybe that changes you the way you actually listen out for sound," he says. Theater tour guides might also use a kind of psychological groupthink as a trick of the trade. “Nobody dares to say that they didn’t hear it," says Wenmaekers, "because if somebody hears it and you don’t—well, you feel stupid. That is how it works.”

What Happened to the Severed Head of Peter the Great's Wife's Lover

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The Kunstkamera of St. Petersburg, Russia, is an art and ethnography museum stuffed full of more than 2,000,000 objects. Within its blue-and-white walls, you can find a taxidermied pangolin, Native American baskets, and more than a dozen jarred, pickled fetuses floating in a suspicious yellow liquid, prepared by Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch. What you won’t find, however, is what’s often cited as one of its main attractions: the severed head of the supposed lover of Peter the Great’s wife, in a glass jar.

William Mons was young, German, and exceptionally dashing—at least one observer described him as one of the “best-made and most handsome men I have ever seen.” He was ambitious and opportunistic, with a keen eye for which patrons might have his interests close at heart. These attributes shot him into the upper echelons of imperial Russia. Eventually, in 1724, he became the secretary and confidant of Catherine, the empress and Peter the Great’s wife. No one can say for sure whether their relationship was exclusively professional, however. “Lurid stories circulated,” writes historian Robert K. Massie, in his biography of the emperor, “including one that Peter had found his wife with Mons one moonlit night in a compromising position in her garden."

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There are plenty of reasons to doubt this story, Massie says. Taking a lover seems out of character for Catherine, who was very fond of Peter and well-acquainted with his furious temper. On top of that, the "moonlit night," had it happened, would have been in November—no time for an outdoor tryst in frigid St. Petersburg. But other stories about Mons were also being shared, ones with more obvious basis in fact, including that he was soliciting hefty bribes from anyone hoping to have a message passed to the empress.

Peter, when he found out about this behavior, moved swiftly. Late on a frosty Wednesday evening in early November 1724, Mons’s papers were seized. That night, he was taken away in chains. Within a week he was sentenced to death, despite an attempt by Catherine to seek a pardon from her husband. Eight days after his arrest, he was dead—publicly decapitated in front of crowds in central St. Petersburg. While he died, Catherine was practicing a minuet with her daughters and their dancing master, and withholding any trace of emotion from her husband and the eagle-eyed public.

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The execution had a profound effect on Peter and Catherine’s relationship, Massie writes. Even a month after Mons's death, whispers at court said that they hardly ate together and no longer slept in the same room, though this chill appeared eventually to thaw. In the meantime, Peter battled a bladder illness and cirrhosis. (He had been a hard-drinking man, inventor of the vodka "penalty shot" for anyone who arrived late to one of his feasts.) Three months after Mons’s death, the emperor followed him, aged 53.

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But what happened to the head famously and publicly removed from Mons's body? For reasons known to only to the emperor himself, Peter had Mons’s head pickled in spirits and placed in a large glass jar. A few years earlier, when his own lover, Mary Hamilton, was executed for crimes including abortion, infanticide, and theft, he had had her head preserved in a similar way. Some accounts claim he presented Catherine with her secretary's head. Others maintain he forced her to keep it by her bed—as a warning, perhaps. Certainly, after the emperor died, she kept the head in her possession until her death. This has led at least one biographer to speculate that it served as a grisly memento of a man she may have loved.

A little over 25 years earlier, in Dresden, Peter the Great had visited a kunstkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities,” with a collection of rare books, mechanical clocks, and other wonders. He was so inspired that he resolved to start his own museum of natural history, which he opened in 1718. Peter offered Russians between three and 100 rubles for “specimens” of so-called “freaks of nature”—dead and pickled in spirits or double-distilled wine, or, more lucratively, alive. This was partly to dispel common beliefs that such “monsters,” as he referred to them, were the work of the devil, rather than the simple products of nature. Soon the collection boasted an eight-legged lamb, a two-headed baby, and other unusual natural phenomena. It came to be known, as it is today, as the Kunstkamera.

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Catherine died in 1727, a little over two years after her husband. The head found its way into the Kunstkamera, where it remained for half a century, even through a devastating fire in 1747. In the 1780s, Catherine the Great, the wife of Peter the Great’s grandson, spotted it by Mary Hamilton’s head on a dusty shelf, while walking by with a friend. “Princess Dashkov and Catherine remarked on the wonderful preservation of the two beautiful young faces, still striking after the passage of fifty years,” the scholar Oleg Neverov wrote in 1985. Some sense of propriety took hold, and she had them buried. Precisely where underground these two young, comely heads wound up seems to have been lost.

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So you won’t find the severed head of Peter the Great’s wife’s lover in any museum, and certainly not in the Kunstkamera, not any more. But the Kunstkamera does have a veritable trove of human parts—heads, organs, limbs, and other medical artifacts. The story of Mons’s head—if not the head itself—fit right in.

Every Halloween, an Oakland Man Stages Spooky Marionette Shows in His Driveway

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“When I moved here 25 years ago, Halloween was a cultural wasteland,” says Larry Schmidt, sitting on a homemade bench in his driveway in the Trestle Glen neighborhood of Oakland, California. “There wasn't much in the way of trick-or-treating or jack-o'-lanterns. And I was disturbed that the cultural event I remembered wasn't happening.”

As the 64-year-old Schmidt recalls, a slow erosion—due to reasons ranging from a culture fearful of knocking on neighbor's doors, to the razors-in-apples news stories of the ‘90s—had turned Halloween into just another day on the calendar. Pumpkins went uncarved, decorations stayed in the attic, uncostumed kids spent the evening indoors. “You didn't have that inter-generational exchange anymore,” he says.

He set about trying to reignite the Halloween spirit.

First, he hoisted his old massive witch sculpture onto his garage roof to loom over the passersby. Next, he designed a “front yard haunt” for prospective trick-or-treaters. Schmidt slowly added decorations to the haunt over the years, but when space became cramped, he knew it was time to try something else. So, he built a theater in his driveway, constructed benches for an audience, and wrote a puppet show.

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This Halloween, Schmidt's “Driveway Follies” will celebrate its 11th anniversary with a now-customary set of musical numbers using intricately crafted and expertly manipulated marionette dolls, interspersed with a few jokes from the ghost puppet M.C. The performances take place before and on Halloween, starting when the sun goes down, resetting for a new audience after each 25-ish minute show concludes, and replaying it until the crowd’s gone for the night; they generally pull off between four and six shows, rain or shine.

If Schmidt's ultimate goal was to bring Halloween back to the neighborhood, it's worked.

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“Last year, there were some empty seats, and I thought, that's strange. I was a little disappointed,” he says. “But then on the sidewalk, I noticed a flurry of adults and children making the rounds. I liked that I had to compete with other things.”

This year, among Schmidt's rotating army of puppeteers, stage managers, and vocal talent—the group that makes his vision possible—is a 13-year-old puppeteer named William. He’s not only an invaluable assistant, but gives Schmidt hope about the future of the art form.

“It's hard for me to imagine marionettes will have a resurgence, because they're more difficult than puppets,” he says. “A hand puppet is so immediately connected to our bodies, and it's wonderful because it's intimate and cozy. But the marionette is on strings, it's a little more mysterious.”

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Like the yard haunt, Schmidt adds a little something new to the show every year; this time it's new benches and the help of an usher, who will be dressed in 1930s garb with a red hat and yellow detailing. “I initially thought it wouldn't be fun to have an authority figure, as the show is slightly chaotic in a fun way,” he says. “But he'll serve apple cider, get people seated, maybe relay a message back to us if the sound system isn't perfect.”

While most of the audience will watch the show, have a few laughs, and head home, Schmidt's hope is that the endeavor plants seeds that will blossom into their own ways to celebrate the holiday.

“It was never my plan to be the King of Halloween. What I'd rather have is an even distribution all over,” he says. “People sometimes think this show in the driveway was an experiment, that I should put it in a commercial 'legitimate' theater space. But if I took it to a theater, there wouldn't be the street scene around it. This way, it's part of the culture of the night.”

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It's also why Schmidt performs the show for free. Last year, with Schmidt's blessing, a group of fans formed the “Friends of the Driveway Follies” committee to promote the show, an effort that included an IndieGoGo page that raised over $7,000 in donations. But that's a fundraising method Schmidt wants to avoid. This year, with the help of a few grants, Schmidt is once again keeping monetary exchange out of the audience/show relationship.

“The free part is important to me,” he says. “Free used to be a good thing, but now people think the word means of lower quality. For me, for my generation, 'free' means that it's a gift.”

After this year’s gift is delivered, when the calendar flips to November, Schmidt will break down the set and cram it back into the garage. He’ll work on a longer, single-story show that he hopes will be ready in a few years, and he'll tinker with his “bucket list” idea of a Christmas marionette show. But when next year’s weather chills again, he'll begin work on the next Halloween show, for another round of putting that lost feeling from his youth back into the world.

Shows this year are on October 30 and 31, and adults are encouraged to come out after 9 p.m., after the crowd of kids has thinned out. More information is availablehere.

Vintage Photos from 100 Years of NASA

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In July 1927, NACA—the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA—opened the Langley Propeller Research Tunnel. Compared with earlier wind tunnels, which had measured a measly five feet in diameter, it was a behemoth. It housed a 28-foot propeller with eight blades, each weighing 600 pounds, and was powered by two 1,000-horsepower diesel submarine engines. The result was a 20-foot stream of air that could reach 110 miles per hour, for testing aircraft components.

The tunnel was located at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, a place where, since 1917, engineers and mathematicians have researched and tested the knottiest of aerodynamic problems. In 1958, NACA’s focus shifted to space technology, and changed its name to NASA.

All through this time, the research facility at Langley has been home to a notable number of achievements. Four years after building the Propeller Research Tunnel, Langley opened the world’s first full-scale wind tunnel, which tested most high-performance aircraft used in World War II. Langley also constructed a Lunar Landing Facility to simulate the Moon landing, which was used by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, among others.

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The facility was also home to some extraordinary mathematical minds. Katherine Johnson was originally hired to work at NACA before working on the calculations for both Alan Shepard's and John Glenn’s space flights, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight. Her achievements, which were recognized in 2015 by President Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, are all the more extraordinary considering the barriers facing African-American women in the mid-20th century.

It has been 100 years since the Langley Research Center first opened. To celebrate its centenary, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, has a new photo exhibition, which runs through to March 11, 2018. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the show.

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