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Driving a Muffin Car Is Fun (and Slightly Dangerous)

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For 14 years, "Muffineers" have built movable treats.

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At parades, Maker Faires, and Burning Man, they're a show-stopping sight. Giant muffins and cupcakes roll along, steered by drivers whose heads poke out of the tops. Built by a loose group of makers under the banner of Acme Muffineering, the electric, eclectic vehicles have been rolling since 2004. The tiny cars, which have featured in The Simpsons and on The Late Show, were dreamed up by two muffin-driving pioneers, the husband and wife team Lisa Pongrace and Greg Solberg.

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While today's muffineers number around two baker's dozens, originally there were just the two of them, and they didn't start with muffin cars: For the Burning Man festival in 2002, the couple made a pair of massive pink bunny slippers to drive around the desert floor. "Size seven-and-a half," Pongrace tells me, and that's in feet, not shoe size.

Two years later, she was wracking her brains for a new project. Her Burning Man name, she says, was Space Muffin, and she wanted an appropriate costume. Solberg suggested a muffin car. Pongrace remembers her reaction: "Yeah! A car!" It wasn't exactly a leap for either of them to fashion two decorative, motorized muffins. Pongrace studied studio art at the University of California, Berkeley, and Solberg is an engineer at the electric car company Tesla Motors.

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Of course, they each needed to have a car, Pongrace decided. And it would make an even better scene if their friends had muffin cars too. While they weren't able to get up to a baker's dozen that first year, the first batch numbered five decorated muffins and cupcakes, each eighteen times bigger than the actual baked good. The cars were a hit, and soon other friends were making their own.

The muffineers often sport hats to match their cars, which they decorate with large sprinkles, faux icing, or candles. It adds an extra element of whimsy to an already whimsical image. (Pongrace is delightfully whimsical as well. When our phone connection broke up, she sang "Do You Know the Muffin Man?" until we reconnected.)

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Pongrace and Solberg still have their original cars, even 14 years on. One is a blueberry bran muffin, and the other a chocolate cupcake. In fact, many muffineers are really cupcakeers.

"Cupcakes are more interesting than muffins," Pongrace observes, what with the frosting and decorations. Marc Stelzer, a muffineer of eight year's standing, agrees. "I have a cupcake, so I take some umbrage with the 'muffin' concept," he says. He got involved with muffineering nearly a decade ago, when his young daughter saw the cars on parade at the San Mateo Maker Faire. But when her father finished their car (chocolate sprinkles, Stelzer says) the intense attention from Maker Faire attendees proved to be too much for her. But Stelzer doesn't mind it, proudly telling me that his cupcake is one of the fastest ones.

So fast, in fact, that when driving it from his home to this year's Maker Faire, a digital traffic sign told him he reached 22 miles an hour. The typical top speed, Pongrace tells me, is around 17 miles an hour, "which is really fast for a cupcake." Different cars move at different speeds, and some aren't motorized at all. Muffineers have made pedal versions for children, while others merely look like small bikes, but have motors. The original muffin cars built by Pongrace and Solberg were made from scratch. But muffineers have modified mobility scooters as well.

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While making the cars is fun, Stelzer likes the reactions even more. "It's fun to put smiles on people's faces. It's absurd," he says. Nearly ten years ago, the cars received a burst of attention beyond Burning Man and Maker Faire. In 2009, customized muffin cars were included in the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, a once-a-year publication of that includes fanciful gifts for the super-wealthy. The problem was, "We really didn't want anybody to buy one," she says, "Which was one of the reasons we priced it so high." The cars cost $25,000 each, making them the most expensive gift on offer that year.

While Pongrace calls the experience "super fun," the cars are a little too dangerous for just anyone to drive. Pongrace and Solberg's cars are fast and can turn on a dime, but they can tip over easily. The brakes aren't great. Going down hills is especially challenging. "The liability would have been awful," she shudders.

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The publicity netted a muffin car appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. While the experience was interesting, Pongrace is still a little indignant about how Letterman drove. "Letterman tried to crash the muffin," she says. A better tribute came in the form of a Simpsons episode that aired in 2014, where the eponymous family goes to "Blazing Guy." "Cars shaped like cupcakes!" Homer yells in glee as a group of muffineers speed by. "I'm home!"

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That could be you, too. "If you want to make a muffin, you should contact us and ask specific questions," Pongrace says, pointing out that the muffineers have a website and a mailing list. While many muffineers live in California, she says that people in other states have used their website and advice from the community to build their own movable feasts.

"I'm just completely honored when other people make cupcakes," Pongrace says. The one question that everyone asks is whether it's hot inside the muffin cars. Not at all, Pongrace says. "They're insulated so they're not hot. If you're driving them, there's a little breeze that comes up through the bottom."


Aliens Might Never Appreciate How Cool Voyager's Golden Record Is

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If they find it, they may just be confused.

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In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched a pair of interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and 2. Like most spacecrafts, these two were built to gather information about unknown realms. More unusually, they also had something to give in return: Each held a copy of what's known as the Golden Record, a set of images and sounds carefully chosen to give anyone who might find them a taste of Earthly life.

More than 40 years after its launch, the Golden Record hasn't found any extraterrestrial listeners—that we know of. It does, however, enjoy serious hometown fandom. Here on Earth, it's been the subject of poetry books, an as-yet unproduced screenplay, and at least one SXSW panel. Last year, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, it even got a vinyl re-release. In a way, the record has already found its intended audience. As consultant B.M. Oliver wrote in a history of the project, "its real function … is to appeal to and expand the human spirit."

But at least two diehard fans think there's something to be gained from considering alternative audiences a bit more rigorously. "Every time you try to communicate, you have an intention you are after," says Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor at Bowling Green University, and a board member of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), an organization dedicated to reaching out to aliens. "But you have no idea how you're going to be received."

Lately, Wells-Jensen, along with fiction writer Rebecca Orchard, have been examining the Golden Record with new eyes and ears. The result has been a confusing cacophony. "There are so many ways it could be misunderstood," says Orchard, who presented on the topic at METI's "Language in the Cosmos" conference this May. Like hapless teens making a mixtape, we've etched our soul onto this record and flung it at beings we don't understand in the slightest. If they actually found it, what would they even think?


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Getting to this scenario—in which someone Out There actually intercepts, and seriously tries to decode, the Golden Record—requires working through whorl after whorl of improbabilities. First of all, as its creators knew full well, "there's an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up," says Wells-Jensen. "[The Voyager probes] are tip-toeing around out there in the interstellar void. They're itty-bitty, and it's dark … the odds are low."

But suppose someone does tow the record out of nothingness, and bring it to some sort of extraterrestrial DJ station. In that case, "there are two things that could happen," Wells-Jensen says. The first option is that the aliens already know what to do—that they've got a whole stack of interstellar missives, and a set of criteria for understanding them. She launches into an imitation: "They're like, 'Oh, it's another artifact, from another planet that's just creeping into a technological phase of civilization! A baby race. Isn't it cute?'"

The second possibility, she continues, "is that instead, they look at it and go, 'What the heck is that?'" It's this particular what-if, she and Orchard agree, that is the most fun to think about.

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The Golden Record is stuffed to the gills with information. It has 116 images, a mix of songs in different musical styles, and greetings recorded in 55 languages. There's an audio collage, "The Sounds of Earth," that starts with a sonic interpretation of planetary motion and ends with the zap of a pulsar, with stops in between for clanging rocks, barking dogs, and chugging tractors. There is also an hour's worth of brain-and-heart data, transformed into sound. This came courtesy of the record's creative director, Ann Druyan, who later wrote that she was thinking about "the history of ideas," "the predicament our civilization finds itself in," and "what it [is] like to fall in love"—specifically with project lead Carl Sagan, who she later married.

To an Earthly listener, this is all pretty understandable. Crickets and chimpanzees? We've heard those guys. "El Cascabel" followed by "Johnny B. Goode"? Let's rock. Crushing on Carl Sagan? Hey, many of us get that, too. But begin to abstract yourself away, and the record looks and sounds increasingly curious. "It's almost dizzying to think about all the different ways that these moments could be misinterpreted," Orchard says.

Take, for example, that series of multilingual greetings. The messages say everything from "Hi, how are you?" to "We greet you, O great ones," in languages that range from Akkadian to Zulu. Linda Salzman Sagan, who coordinated the recordings, described the overall effect as "an aural Gestalt, in which each culture is a contributing voice in the choir." The structure of the recording—each snippet said by a different voice, one after another—might help to get this across, she wrote.

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As Wells-Jensen points out, though, there are plenty of other interpretations available. "We can tell that those voices changing mean a different individual is speaking," she says. "But that's not necessarily clear [to an alien]." Is the whole recording one person, speaking in different ways? After all, many of the albums made on Earth are meant to showcase all the different things one person's voice can do.

Or maybe it's meant to be some kind of time-lapse—akin to Tony Schwartz's "Nancy Grows Up," in which the documentarian distilled recordings from 13 years of his niece's life into a few minutes of sound. Another section of "Sounds of Earth" compilation does strive to be somewhat chronological: it moves from "timeless" sounds, like rainstorms and footsteps, through more recently developed ones, such as Morse code and rocket ships. If the aliens managed to figure this out, why wouldn't they assume that "Greetings to the Universe in 55 Different Languages" was instead "Earthling Grows Up"?

Even if they do grok that it's multiple people, Wells-Jensen adds, "Why are they talking to each other? Are they having an argument? Are they playing a game, like we play telephone? Is it a religious ritual?" When you start to think in this way, 55 disjointed greetings all in a row doesn't seem like an obvious call at all.

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Then there are all of the things that could be considered clues, but aren't. Orchard is particularly fascinated by the record's 116 images, a selection of which can be seen here. "If you look at the photos back to back, parts of them form a narrative," she says. For example, a fertilized ovum is followed by a fetus, and then a baby being born. Other juxtapositions, though, are not narrative at all. "There's a picture of a toad in a hand, followed by a picture of a dead, upside-down alligator." We humans know that these are two different creatures. But aliens, in their attempts to understand, might draw other conclusions. "Does the toad grow into that alligator?"

It's also easy to imagine the aliens playing the "Sounds of Earth" while flipping through the images, lining the two up slideshow-style. (It's a worthwhile exercise.) Some convergences are lucky: a photo of the Red Sea, for example, lines up with the sound of dripping water. But with others, further confusion emerges. The photo of an eagle, for example, goes with the sound of a chittering monkey, or perhaps even a clucking chicken (it's hard to say for sure). Later, "you get the sound of a chainsaw with a little daffodil," says Wells-Jensen. "So that's one way in which the thing could be interpreted wrong."

Both Wells-Jensen and Orchard emphasize that they're not trying to pull a gotcha on the record's creators, who were well aware of its limitations. In Murmurs of Earth, Sagan, Ann Druyan, Jon Lomberg, and others wrote at length about the many decisions they made during the compilation process. Some were rhetorical: They didn't include any overtly distressing images, like mushroom clouds or sick people, because what if aliens took them as intimidations? Others were bureaucratic: NASA insisted that they include a roll-call list of various members of the 1977 U.S. Senate.

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This kind of thing is a large part of why, just 40 years on, certain aspects of the record look ridiculous to Earthlings, too. "But you have to remember, they had six weeks!" says Wells-Jensen. "They did a great job."

Besides, start thinking about what you'd do differently, and confusion starts to seem inevitable. Perhaps, rather than including so many messages in so many different languages, you want to say the same thing over and over again, in a Rosetta Stone sort of way. Wells-Jensen says this might not be such a great idea either, as it violates a conversational maxim that, at least on Earth, seems to be fairly common.

"If I tell you something four times, is that me trying to be really careful and really clear, or is that me telling you that you're stupid?" she explains. "Or does it mean that I'm really boring, because I've only got one thing to say?" As for the photo/sound problem, should you make sure all those things line up perfectly? And if so, as Wells-Jensen puts it, "what sound does a flower make anyway?"

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It's enough to make one throw up one's hands (and then put them down again, for fear of being seen as threatening to aliens). Other attempts at interstellar communication come with their own pros and cons. We beamed some scientific information toward a star cluster way back in 1974. In 2008, we sent a Doritos commercial to a nearby solar system.

METI tried its own strategy in 2017: it sent out a radio wave transmission made up of arithmetic, trigonometry, and geometry, working under the theory that whoever has the technology to receive the message probably understands math. Wells-Jensen considers all of this, collectively, to be a decent strategy. "I don't know if we can be less confusing," she says. "But we can, and should, try different things."

Before and after we've tried them, it can't hurt to think about how they might be received—even if we spin completely around, record-style, and end up mostly learning about ourselves instead. After all, "we're just babies," reiterates Wells-Jensen. "We just started going to our own moon." We've still got a lot of work to do.

What You Told Us About Your Hometown’s Hidden Tunnels

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We asked Atlas Obscura readers to share local stories of secret underground spaces, and they went deep.

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Many cities around the world have local legends about hidden tunnels running underneath the streets. Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us tales of hidden underground passageways from their own hometowns, and the results were even better than we'd hoped. We learned that there's a wide world of subterranean passages out there, some real, some mythical, but all them decidedly underground.

You sent us stories of old bootlegger tunnels, forgotten service networks, insane asylum escape routes, and more than a few cases of steam tunnels lurking beneath the halls of academia. In some cases, your tales of secret spaces were based on something real from history, and a few are even accessible today. Still others seem to be more fiction that fact, unless lizard people really are hiding treasure under the streets of Los Angeles.

We've collected some of our favorite submissions below, so read on to find out what might be lurking just beneath the surface a city near you.

(Mostly) True Tunnel Stories

Milford, Connecticut

Our town was founded in 1639. One day there was a small sinkhole that developed in the sidewalk in front of my aunt's house. Her house was about 1/4 mile from the harbor. The city engineers investigated and found that it was part of a tunnel system that were escape tunnels leading to a small hidden beach by the harbor. I was pretty young at the time so I don't remember exactly, but they were either from the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. — Gretchen Foster

Chattanooga, Tennessee

From the mid-1800s until the Tennessee Valley Authority controlled the Tennessee River with a dam system in the early-mid 1930s, our city flooded with alarming regularity. Over the years, a combination of public and private efforts were made to raise the grade of the downtown streets, with the end result being a weird patchwork of subterranean tunnels and basements that bear the marks of the businesses that occupied them, back when they were street-level storefronts. It’s creepy, not super-accessible, and even dangerous in certain locations—but it’s a neat reminder of a time when the river ruled the lives of Chattanoogans. — Alison Sexter

Norwich, England

There is a network of largely forgotten chalk and flint mine tunnels under the city. These were carved out over hundreds of years of mining. The full extent of the network is not known, and has never been fully mapped. There is however a map of one section which was used as a visitor attraction in the early 19th century. The tunnels of this section were given romantic sounding street names like ‘Beehive Place’ and ‘Bacchus Street.’ This section of the tunnels made the news 30 years ago when one collapsed, taking a double-decker no. 26 bus down with it! — Tom Laws

Fort Worth, Texas

Back in the '50s there was a tunnel going from a parking lot to Leonard's Department Store. People would park their cars in the lot, and board the trolley for a ride underground to the store. They would get off the trolley car and go into the multi level store, where you could buy almost anything you needed. They shut down in the 80s, I believe, but were bought out by someone else, who continued using the trolley cars until they closed and then the trolley cars were parked and the tunnel was closed off. But people still managed to get into them to film and graffiti them. As of today, last I heard they were permanently closed off with concrete. — Tamara

Clare, Michigan

Not my hometown, but the nearest city to where my parents retired in lower central Michigan. The legendary Purple Gang of Jailhouse Rock fame would hole up in the only hotel in town, The Doherty. They installed a tunnel between the hotel and the pharmacy across the street. The upper floor of the pharmacy was a speakeasy and brothel. Part of the tunnel was uncovered during recent road repairs so it was definitely real. — Kelly Wells

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Eureka, California

There are two tunnels originating under the Vance Hotel. One leads under Second Street, one runs parallel to Second Street. Both are blocked off under the hotel. During the remodeling of the old hotel I was fortunate enough to be invited to the basement to view new construction and was shown the tunnel entrances. Rumor has it that they were used by bootleggers during prohibition. Rumor also has it that there are more such tunnels in the Old Town area. Eureka is the largest city (but still under 30,000) on Humboldt Bay, a remote fishing port in far Northwestern California whose heyday as a lumber port is long past. Rumor also has it that those loggers were a thirsty bunch. — Maurice Moley-Viand

Ottumwa, Iowa

Al Capone once had a hideaway mansion here, and had a network of tunnels to avoid authorities. One series connected to an earlier network built in our downtown and the other was a main line that ended at a garage-sized terminal in a cemetery for Capone's getaway car. That tunnel also connected to his mansion which was only a block or so away. — Steve Anderson

Longmont, Colorado

There is a bar/nightclub called "The Speakeasy" on Main Street at below street level, and behind the bar the tunnel starts and continues around behind the stage and supposedly under the streets to an old mansion a block or so away, and was supposedly used during prohibition. — Randy Kiunke

Eastchester, New York

There is a tunnel from the cellar of a house on Winter Hill Road and Post Road that leads to the well in the front of a house across the street. The house on Winter Hill Road was owned by gangster Arthur Simon Flegenheimer AKA Dutch Schultz, and he used the passage as an escape route. — Catherine Houston

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

There is a tunnel between the Graylyn Estate and the Reynolds Estate (founder of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco) built as an escape route from angry depression-era local workers. — Amy Wagner

Minneapolis, Minnesota

There is an old Masonic Temple (currently a school for hairstylists) that the Grateful Dead once played at that has a tunnel running from the basement to an adjacent building that is now a piercing studio. No one really knows why the tunnel is there or what it was used for. — Eric Long

South Saint Paul, Minnesota

The town I grew up in was one of the few places that had a healthy economy during the Great Depression due to the large stockyards off Concord Street. Millions went through South Saint Paul each day, and since St. Paul was a haven for gangsters laying low, there was plenty of contraband to hide. Supposedly, all of the bars along Concord had interconnecting tunnels to hide booze. These tunnels not only connected bars, but led to the Wabasha caves that had been carved out by the Mississippi River. These caves once held a full restaurant that was a favorite hang out of mobsters, and the tunnels probably made for an easy escape route. — Cassandra Konz

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Confirmed Reports From Amateur Investigators

Girona, Spain

It seems the old city of Girona has several tunnels connecting the two main churches of Sant Feliu and the Cathedral, and with a large underground passage out of the city to a place called El Polvorí (‘The Gun Powder Depot’). When I was young, some friends and I had been in the mouth of this last one, but didn't progress very deep into it. It was scary. Surely some of it was obstructed, but it can lead to the main Girona church. — Ramon Carbó-Dorca

Detroit, Michigan

Northville tunnels. Tunnels that went underneath the northville psychiatric hospital and connected to out buildings. The rumors are that more extreme cases were kept in isolation cells down there. Kids would break in when I was a teenager and hangout in them. Homeless people were also known to use them for shelter. — Rachel Woodward

Grand Island, Nebraska

I purchased the historic seven story Masonic Temple, built in 1925 in Grand Island. A magnificent building, it had secret rooms befitting a Masonic building. As a group of urban explorers from Chicago visited me, we searched the basement and found a strange cinder block wall that did not seem right. After some liquid courage, the men and one woman, took turns with a sledge hammer, knocking a hole in the wall. We found the beginnings of an old steam tunnel. As many cities in the Midwest, the city produced electricity and as a byproduct, sold steam to downtown buildings. There was LOTS of sand but we burrowed through to find about three blocks worth. Armed with flashlights, we found tunnels tall enough to comfortably walk, two by two; dark, smelly and dangerous because we felt not enough air could get to us, we were cautious. The steam pipes had been removed. We were convinced the tunnel had not been used since the 1940s and our guess was confirmed, quietly, by city officials and told to seal the entrance. I did so the following week. — Paul Warshauer

Colleges and Universities

Urbana, Illinois

There are steam tunnels under the University of Illinois campus that connect many of the buildings that were once used for heating. These tunnels still exist and students have been known to explore them after hours. There are vents along the tunnels that provide access on the quad. — Will Gray

East Lansing, Michigan

There is a network of steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University that has allegedly hosted cults, bodies, and Dungeons & Dragons Games. — Sarah Kate

Ellensburg, Washington

Between 1999 and 2000, the campus of Central Washington University was plagued by a masturbating mystery man who would appear out of nowhere, do his thing in view of some unfortunate female victim and then disappear before he could be caught. This went on for months causing the campus and city police considerable embarrassment due to their inability to get a handle on the increasingly brazen criminal. The small college town became obsessed with rumors about who the perpetrator was and why the incompetent police couldn't pin him down. Some began speculating that maybe the villain was himself a police officer. Eventually the "campus masturbator" got too cocky and was apprehended when he tried a mid-afternoon attack. Upon searching the house he was renting, police discovered a key to the campus' subterranean system of heating tunnels that could be accessed from many of the university buildings, leading investigators to reason this was the key to his elusive disappearing act that had frustrated the community for so long. — John Hieger

Boston, Massachusetts

I did my undergrad at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in the late 80s and early 90s. There was a series of secret passageways between the newer tower building and the adjacent buildings. They were a series of catacombs and strange spaces that captured our imaginations as young art students. — Cooper Lee Bombardier

Raleigh, North Carolina

There are MILES of secret steam tunnels underneath one of the largest university campuses in the southeast—North Carolina State. Entrances lead to almost every single building, and one could spend days down there without retracing your steps or seeing another person. — Adam Travis Kincaid

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Potsdam, New York

SUNY Potsdam College in northern New York has a series of tunnels that connect the academic and residential buildings to keep students and faculty from having to venture out into the unbelievably cold winter (during a cold spell in 2014, temperatures were consistently below -20 Fahrenheit for nearly two weeks). Rumor has it that one of the tunnels used to have an offshoot, now cemented shut, that led to the Snell home. The Snells were a prominent family in town and made significant financial contributions to the school from what I remember. According to legend, the Snells also had a penchant for incest that led to several Snell children born with hideous physical deformities. To hide their shame, the Snells sealed the tunnel that led to the school and imprisoned their deformed children within it, where they eventually died, hidden away and unloved. — Kristian

Montevallo, Alabama

When attending the University of Montevallo there were stories of tunnels underneath the campus from when it was an all girls school. Apparently they were sealed In the 1970s. One entrance is supposed to be back stage of Palmer theatre. — Austin Carpenter

Flagstaff, Arizona

I went to college at Northern Arizona University. At 7,000 feet, it can get very cold during the winter. The campus is mostly heated by steam and throughout much of the campus there are tunnels to carry steam pipes to heat the various buildings. I was able to gain access when I was a Resident Assistant in one of the dorms. Had a key to the basement and then access to the tunnels. So. Much. Fun. This was in the 70s so I don't know if they're still accessible. — Michael Roberson

Vancouver, British Columbia

There are supposed to be disused mining tunnels running through the North Shore mountains. What makes the story particularly appealing is that it's reported some of them have flooded, and it's possible to go kayaking under the mountains. Also, the University of British Columbia does have steam tunnels for dealing with the output of fume hoods, and they apparently have had a decades-long battle keeping (often drunken) students out of them. — J. J. DeBenedictis

Myths and Rumors

Everett, Washington

When I was going to Sequoia High School, the former principal once told me about a tunnel that supposedly exists under the school. The buildings that are now the high school and the gym were built during the Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘New Deal’ era. She told me that it was constructed as an underground means of escape from one building to the other in the event of an emergency. Apparently, it was also used as part of an initiation for the new principals who were made to run through the pitch black tunnel before assuming their new post. — Claire

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

There are two bridges to get onto the Cape, the Sagamore Bridge and the Bourne Bridge. Locals and tourists alike know that bridge traffic during the summer months is no fun thing. But locals know about the super secret (but not really so secret anymore because it's on bumper stickers all over the place) Cape Cod Tunnel—the hidden route to get on and off the Cape without all the traffic. Is it real? Is it fake? I'm a local, so I'm staying mum. — Shannon

Toronto, Ontario

There is an old story that there are tunnels under the Cabbagetown/Corktown areas of Toronto. A guy claims that he wandered into a cave-like hole, and was greeted by a furry animal with glowing eyes and sharp teeth. It hissed at him ‘Go away…’ repeatedly. — Karsten Johansson

Los Alamos, New Mexico

For years there were rumors about a tunnel, a railroad tunnel, a mile or so down that connected Los Alamos National Lab, where America’s first atomic bombs were built, to Sandia National Lab, some 90ish miles as the crow flies South in Albuquerque. The railroad allegedly moved assembled nuclear weapons from Los Alamos to a storage facility at Sandia. I'd made many visits to both facilities but do recall a visit to Sandia where I witnessed something very odd. I was visiting a facility in the Southern end of the facility, South of where warheads had historically been stored. The now reportedly unused storage facility was always of interest and I wondered what it would be like to walk the tunnels with a geiger counter, so did as I always did and was looking toward the tunnel entrances as I drove by. Once my meeting was finished, i drove past the same area, and clear as day, in the middle of a field with no train tracks sat a railroad boxcar. This would strike anyone as odd, a boxcar in the middle of a field with no apparent railroad tracks or explanation for exactly the boxcar had got there in the last two hours. Had I stumbled across the southern and of the legendary underground railroad? Who knows. But I never saw another boxcar in that field again! — Shawn Jefferds

Boise, Idaho

There are legends of tunnels under Boise dug by Chinese workers to get between different buildings. Most people here dismiss the tunnels as an urban legend, but a few days ago the audio for an old black and white news story about the tunnels was discovered. I'm skeptical that the tunnels still exist, but it's a legend that most people here know about. — Anthony Machado

Breese, Illinois

Not so much a legend, but a running joke of the seniors at the local high school. It's the senior's duty to try and dupe the freshmen into asking for a pool pass for the pool that is rumored to be under the school. If you can't get that, there is always the hot tub on the roof! — Jeff L.

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Oxnard, California

In my hometown there used to be a bunch of myths regarding Lucy Hicks Anderson, the ‘Madam of Oxnard.’ She was a transgender woman from Kentucky that used to run a catering business and a speakeasy bordello before being sent to prison for accepting army spousal benefits as a transgender woman. She's really interesting, and worthy of a lookup on her own. Rumor was, there was a tunnel from a local restaurant to her bordello that ran under Main Street. But I've also heard that the tunnel was into a restaurant, the Golden Chicken Inn, which was rumored to be an opium den back in the day? I also heard there used to be a bomb shelter under the bleachers of old Oxnard High School, but that it was filled with cement later. — John

Franklin, Ohio

The Great Miami River runs right through the heart of Franklin. We are in an area that was a very active part of the Underground Railroad. A number of large old mansions are located along the western bank of the river and it has been rumored that there are tunnels leading from some of those old homes' basements beneath the river to the eastern side into the city. — Ken Wagner

Eritrea

I lived for several years in Eritrea, when it was part of Ethiopia. Tunnel legends abounded there, ancient & modern. It was said that a tunnel allowed the army of Aksum to travel eastward to conquer the city then called Bur (now the archaeological site called Metera). Similar ancient legends suggested a tunnel leading to Jerusalem. When I was there in the 60s & 70s at a U.S. military base in Asmara, many locals believed that there was a tunnel from Washington DC to the base which would allow a full-scale invasion. — Skip Dahlgren

Salt Lake City, Utah

Underneath the LDS Temple in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City there are tunnels that spread out in all directions. More than likely the tunnels were built to help employees of the church to walk back and forth between the temple and their offices. Also underneath Temple Square (basically just a block of church buildings) there are tunnels connecting them. The ones that have been seen people have described them as comfortable, carpeted, well lit, and boring. There’s also supposedly a tunnel between the city county building and the city library (where the jail use to be) to transport prisoners between them. Rumor is Ted Bundy was the last prisoner to walk the tunnel. — Matt Scribner

Portland, Oregon

The Portland waterfront was supposedly riddled with a set of tunnels that were used to shanghai unsuspecting drunks as crew for ships. A "Shanghai Tunnel" tour is a popular tourist attraction, but historians have a technical term for this idea: bullshit. There were some interconnected basements for moving goods and sometimes for fleeing police raids on gambling houses, but nothing like the myth. — Carl Abbott

Los Angeles, California

The Lizard People stored water and treasure in tunnels under Downtown L.A. — Eric Dugdale

Antigua, Guatemala

Old people used to tell that beneath the La Merced Temple (Mercedarian) and Guatemala City's Catholic Cathedral there were several interconnecting tunnels, excavated to protect nuns and priests from a hostile, anti-clerical government. Presided by General Justo Rufino Barrios in the 19th century, who was against the Catholic Church, almost banned it from the country, pillaged its temples, brought Protestant pastors to the country and seized both treasures and properties from the church. People also used to tell that those underground passages were shut off at a later time, because when some excavations were being done, skeletons of unborn fetuses and small children were found. People thought that they were fathered by priests and nuns of former times, interred there in clandestine tombs to hide their heinous proclivities. So they say, but these allegations, to this date, has never been demonstrated. — Leon Aguilera Radford

Porto, Portugal

In my city there is a main tunnel that covers the old river of the village and crosses the whole city, from the 16th century to the present day. There is an urban legend that a crocodile fled from a circus and lived for many years in this tunnel. — Ricardo Ferreira

Pelham, Georgia

Legend has it that there was a tunnel that ran under the street where I was raised. The tunnel was said to run between the Hand Mansion and the Hand Trading Company across the street. The Hand Mansion was demolished years ago, but the Hand Trading Company still stands! — Tim Davis

Evanston, Wyoming

Back when Wyoming became a state it started to divide up the many responsibilities to the different cities. Legend has it that Evanston had the choice to be the home of the state university or insane asylum, and for some unknown reason we picked the insane asylum. It was built in 1887 and due to the harsh winters in Wyoming, they built tunnels underground for the doctors and patients to move safe and warm from building to building. This of course lead to many stories of crazy people running around in these tunnels and kids swearing they found ways into the tunnels to see the unknown. All of these stories were politically incorrect and based off of uneducated fears, but as a child in the late 70s–early 80s, it used to give me the heebie-jeebies when my parents drove past the place. — Brannigan Cheney

Southern Illinois

When I was growing up in a small town in Southern Illinois there were rumors that the grade school and high school were connected by underground tunnels. The grade school was torn down when I was in 6th grade and my family and I went exploring as the progress was made. We never found any tunnels but we did get a bunch of cool bricks and concrete work. — Sarah

Faribault, Minnesota

Before Prohibition, the beer brewed in my hometown was stored in limestone caves tunneled into the side of a dry river bluff. Once Prohibition hit, that changed, and the caves were used to age various cheese, which the town became somewhat known for. While relatively innocuous, there was a dark side to this. You see, the caves ran deep under the east side of town, even under Shattuck St. Mary’s Preparatory School and the old mental hospital by the river. I heard two stories about this growing up. One, that two kids from Shattuck in the 1950s found the tunnel entrance under the school and went exploring. They disappeared, but the school closed off that branch of the tunnels and covered it up like it never happened. The other, slightly more sinister, is this: in the 1980s the Faribault State Mental Institution was shut down, ostensibly due to lack of funding during the Reagan Administration. But the real reason is that the director was a monster, responsible for the drug overdoses of several young teenage boys who he had groomed while they were hospitalized, and for the pregnancies of several hospitalized young women whose babies disappeared. Once his crimes were made known, he took his own life before he could face justice. I was always told that those loyal to him buried his victims in a secret tunnel near the hospital, said to be a forgotten branch of the cheese caves. — John

The Lost Lingo of New York City’s Soda Jerks

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Anyone for a "glob"?

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Throughout the 1940s, during the post-dinner lull, students and staff at Columbia University would make a beeline for Friedgen’s Pharmacy up on Amsterdam Avenue. There, they’d tuck in to strawberry floats, marshmallow sundaes, and chocolate malts, all served up by Thomas Foppiano, “a small, squat, balding man who likes to laugh,” the New York Times reported.

Foppiano was a “soda jerk,” one of half a million employed at tens of thousands of soda fountains across the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. They had white coats, swift fingers, and even swifter tongues—indeed, their linguistic concoctions were as much of a draw as the sweet treats they served up. Foppiano himself, the paper reported, got a special shout-out in a university English course on American colloquialism after a professor ordered a large cherry coke and heard him shout back: “Stretch one, paint it red!”

Soda jerks became known across the country for this kind of esoteric slang. They were often virtuosic wordsmiths, with a gift for puns and riffs. And, at a time when the United States was nuts for all things ice-cream, they were at once “consummate showmen, innovators, and freelance linguists of the drugstore stage,” writes Michael Karl Witzel in The American Drive-In. “America's soda jerk became the pop culture star of the Gilded Age.”

Throughout the 1930s, Americans were eating more ice-cream than ever before: In 1938 alone, the New York Times reported, Americans consumed some 275,000,000 gallons of frozen custard: “We now have the peculiar blessing of a national ice-cream week, ice-cream murders, and a dog ice-cream-eating championship, last won by a pup called Shiver II."

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Nowhere was the cold stuff more popular than in New York City. That year, 20,000,000 gallons of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry glugged down the gullets of New Yorkers, served up at drugstores from Mott Street to Harlem. Customers would sit on swiveling stools and order serving after serving of ice-cream sodas. (Despite a gamut of flavors, consumers tended toward the conservative: About four dishes out of every ten were vanilla. About seven out of ten were vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry.)

Behind the counter were the soda jerks. Their responsibilities were many—breaking and draining eggs with one hand, carving chicken, remembering orders, pulling the correct spigots and spindles on the drugstore soda fountain. But most of all, the Times reported, “the prime requisite of their station is the ability to bandy words.”

In 1936, English professor Harold W. Bentley conducted a full-scale investigation into the cabalistic mumbo-jumbo of these young New Yorkers, publishing his findings in the journal American Speech. They were so semantically inventive, he wrote, that they had become a tourist destination in their own right, skillfully “serving colorfully named concoctions [and] providing an attraction much stronger than stone and concrete piled high. To foreigners in search of local American color, the soda fountains are as good as made to order.” (In fact, soda jerks were slinging lingo all over the country—though many of the terms Bentley described are specific to the Big Apple.)

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There was a competitive edge to it too, Bentley explained: “The bright boys behind the marble counters have extended themselves to outdo the other fellow with fantastic, grotesque, or witty labels for the food combinations from the kitchen or the refreshments spouting out of those fascinating faucets which decorate the bar.”

An order of a simple float might yield a shout of “Burn it and let it swim!” A more complex chocolate malted milk with chocolate ice cream: “Burn one all the way.” If you nixed the ice cream and added an egg, your server would “twist it, choke it, and make it cackle.” Coca-Cola flavored with cherry might be “Shoot one in the red,” or the steamier “Make it virtue.” Drinks without ice “held the hail.” Big drinks were “stretched”; small ones were “short.”

The term used in one drugstore might not hold in another. In one soda fountain Bentley visited, an order of “Black and white” meant a chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream. But in another, it signified black coffee with cream—and in yet another, a chocolate malted milk. A simple glass of milk might variously be called "cow juice," "bovine extract," or "canned cow," while water went by everything from “aqua pura” to “city cocktail” to the deeply unappetizing “Hudson River ale.”

Many of these terms were used in only one soda fountain—or two at the most, with terms swapped around and mixed up almost as vigorously as the drinks they described. There was a certain amount of pressure to keep them up-to-date: An order of five small scoops of vanilla ice-cream topped with whipped cream, a maraschino cherry, and crushed fruit had the nickname “The Dionne Surprise,” for the famous Canadian quintuplets born in 1934.

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Often, the terms were a cocktail of performance and posturing. They were something for tourists to go out of their way for, and a distraction for Times Square showgirls out for a breather between rehearsals, as they sat on high red upholstered stools and nursed dishes of vanilla ice-cream. There was also something compelling about a kind of indecipherable secret language, where guessable terms (a "Traffic Light Sundae" was three scoops of vanilla, with a cherry of red, white, or green on each) mingled with cryptic ones (anyone for a "Brown Derby"?).

On occasion, the code had a simple, practical purpose. That might be in protecting the privacy of the customer: The name of an order spiked with the laxative magnesium citrate would include Mary Garden “because it makes you sing.” If a customer left without paying, whether by accident or otherwise, it was often easier to shout “95!” than to explain what had happened. “99!” denoted the presence of the big boss or an inspector (soda fountains were notoriously unhygienic and tended not to use soap when washing dishes).

But by the mid-1930s, Bentley observed, the hijinks and fast talk of the soda jerk were already on the wane. Whether or not the audience appreciated it, employers seem to have found the volleying calls of “belch water” and “dog and maggot!” hard to stomach. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the practice is frowned down in many fountains, particularly those owned or operated by large chain organizations or by department stores.”

The practice clung on for at least another couple of decades, but as the men got older, they moved on to higher paying jobs in bonds or sales, and gradually, the slang was mostly, if not entirely, forgotten. Meanwhile, national fast food chains replaced mom-and-pop diners and soda fountain drugstores. But little remnants of soda jerk lingo still persist in the English language—so spare a thought for their razzle-dazzle next time you’re offered a hot cup of java, or decide to indulge in an egg cream.

All Black: Chocolate soda with chocolate ice cream.
Add Another: Coffee.
Baby: Glass of fresh milk.
Black Bottom: Chocolate sundae with chocolate syrup.
Black Cow: Root beer.
C. O. Cocktail: Castor oil prepared in soda.
Canary Island Special: Vanilla soda with chocolate cream.
Choc In: Chocolate soda.
Choker Holes: Doughnuts.
Coffee And: Cup of coffee and cake.
Cowcumber: Pickle.
Draw Some Mud: Coffee.
Eighty-Seven and a Half: Girl at table with legs conspicuously crossed or otherwise attractive.
Give: Large glass of fresh milk.
Glob: Plain sundae.
High Yellow Black and White: Chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.
In the Hay: Strawberry milkshake.
Maiden's Delight: Cherries.
Mug of Murk: Cup of coffee without cream.
Ninety-Five: Customer walking out without paying.
Oh Gee: Orangeade.
One On The House: Water.
Pop Boy: Soda man who doesn't know his business.
Rhinelander: Chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.
Saltwater Man: Ice cream mixer.
Scandal Soup: Tea.
Yum-Yum: Sugar.

The Rebellious French Village Making Wine Banned by the E.U.

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Beaumont's beloved, black market wine is made with outlawed American vines.

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On a slow Sunday night at Virginia’s La Table Provencale restaurant, sommelier Christian Borel unveils a prized bottle of Cuvée des Vignes d’Antan. In a hushed, conspiratorial tone, he calls it a “borderline mythical, quasi black-market wine.” It’s made from outlawed jacquez and herbemont grapes, he explains, and is produced by a coop of rebellious vignerons in the Ardéche region of southern France.

Filled with dark garnet-red liquid, the bottle is sealed with shrink wrap. Its label is stamped with vintage information and a line-drawing of a sultry wine goddess. All in all, it looks indistinguishable from something you’d buy at the supermarket.

“This cuvée hails from the tiny, remote village of Beaumont, where it’s been perfected by five generations of local winemakers,” whispers Borel. For the past 84 years, the French government and, most recently, the European Union, has sought to eradicate Beaumont’s grapevines due to their American “blood.” Although the vines are French-American hybrids, they are more than 140 years old. Beaumont’s Association Mémoire de la Vigne makes just 7,000 bottles a year.

Swirled in a glass, the wine offers a floral, fruity aroma of blackberries and what Borel describes as “hues of violet and peony.” Letting it breathe, hints of “vanilla, mild spice, and licorice” emerge. A sip brings thick, pleasantly rounded flavors “backed by firm structure, a finish of supple, smoothed-out tannins …” and a taste that is uncannily “like its bouquet.”

In a word, it’s good.

“This wine should be celebrated as others are,” says Hervé Garnier, the 66-year-old Association Mémoire de la Vigne president and founder. Garnier loves Beaumont, which is situated in Cévennes National Park along France’s highest mountain range, and is home to groves of chestnut trees, wild boar, and high rocky cliffs. Its centuries-old stone buildings have terracotta roofs and rocky terraces, and are etched into the hillsides overlooking the Beaume River. Since its founding in the 11th century, sheepherders have practiced transhumance—moving herds to summer in alpine meadows—by way of traditional paths. They are some of the last in the world to do so.

“What wine do you think they carry when they go?” fumes Garnier. “For 150 years, the Cuvée des Vignes d’Antan is the taste of this land. And yet, a ridiculous archaic law tries to destroy it!”

Indeed. If it wasn’t for Garnier and a group of unruly older winemakers, Beaumont’s wine would be lost to history.

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But how did vines with “American blood” come to thrive in one of the most rugged and remote regions in France? And why is their wine outlawed?

The vines’ presence and legal status is the legacy of American vines nearly destroying—and then saving—French wine. In the early 19th century, American grapevines were imported to Europe and displayed as curios and planted decoratively. Along with the vines, however, came a destructive North American aphid, Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, commonly known as grape phylloxera. The insects are nearly microscopic and feed on the tender young roots and leaves of grapevines. By causing deformities in the roots, the infestation renders plants vulnerable to fungal infections. While American varieties were resistant to the bugs, their European relatives were highly susceptible.

“As the vines begin to die, no one can say what is happening, much less how to stop it,” says Garnier. “The result is panic.”

By the mid-1850s, the Great French Wine Blight was underway. Twenty-five years later, “nearly half of overall wine production had ceased,” says George D. Gale, a professor and author of Dying on the Vine: How Phylloxera Transformed Wine. Looking for a cure, viticulturalists took two approaches: The first, to graft French vines to immune American rootstocks. The second, to infuse Europe’s vinifera vines with resistance via crossbreeding.

The French wine establishment was reluctant to “bastardize” their vines with what they viewed as “inferior American specimens,” says Gale. “When Bordeaux winemaker Leo Laliman alerted the wine world to the phylloxera resistance of American vines, he did so with a huge caveat, saying, ‘But their wine is undrinkable.’”

Nonetheless, small vintners and family farmers began making wine from American-European hybrids. Interestingly, hardy characteristics imparted by the American varieties made the vines suitable for regions that were traditionally inhospitable. In the Cévennes mountains, Beaumont’s villagers capitalized on the development, planting jacquez and herbemont grapes in the late 1870s. Though it was unknown at the time, the pair were accidental crossbreeds between vinifera and a native American variety. Recent genetic analysis from the University of Cape Town has shown that jacquez has a 75 percent European derivation.

In practical terms, Garnier says this means “they are much easier to grow and produce similar flavors to traditional French wines, just a bit sweeter.” While its familiarity made the wine acceptable to local palates, its blackberry-esque sweetness was excellent for blending and inspired “great experimentation.”

Remarkably, the Beaumont terroir proved perfectly suited for the jacquez.

“In the valleys of the Cévennes region, optimal conditions of sunlight, shale soils, and sloping exposure allow for the development of a colorful, rich, flavorful wine,” wrote 97-year-old French vines expert, Pierre Galet, in his 1998 book, Grape Varieties and Rootstock Varieties. Furthermore, the vines’ inborn resistance to disease made them more affordable and easier to manage than grafted vinifera, because they did not require regular application of chemical treatments to prevent pestilence.

“For the villagers of Beaumont, this [was] a godsend,” says Garnier. By adding grapevines to their gardens, they could make enough table wine to last all year. And they quickly discovered that “it is like the vines are made for this place.”

As local vintners shared secrets and competed to make the best wine, their product was increasingly standardized. “What they produce becomes like a legend,” says a reverent Garnier. “It is a taste that, in all the world, exists in this tiny village alone.”

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For more than 50 years, the vines thrived under the loving care of Beaumont’s villagers. Then came the government ban which, in 1935, made it illegal to grow vines with American “blood.” France had been experiencing increasing wine surpluses for years, and when the government sought to cut production, European-American hybrids made an easy target.

“That is insane,” scoffs Garnier. “What they want is to force farmers to stop making wine and buy from the big vineyards.”

Galet agrees the ban was preposterous, but for a different reason. “It was nationalistic,” he says. American vines had brought the phylloxera disaster to France and would, as such, remain forever accursed.

“From the very start, the French position was that if a vine had any American ‘blood,’ its wine would be of a lower quality,” says Gale, the professor and author. “In the mind of official France, American vines remained suspect, and their wines inferior.” Even in the Americas, the majority of winemakers sought to plant imported European vines.

Despite the ban, French farmers initially held firmly to their vines. But in the 1950s, when the government began offering 1,500 francs for each hectare uprooted, that began to change. Three years later, 30 percent of France’s hybrids were gone. Considering the results inadequate, officials upped the ante: a fine of 3,000 francs per hectare and 10-90 days of jail time for recidivism. Additionally, a Reefer Madness-esque campaign of propaganda was instituted.

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“The government issued posters and pamphlets saying wine from hybrids contained excess quantities of methyl alcohol, which was ‘proven to cause madness,’” says Borel. “Of course, the claims had no scientific basis, but it took decades for that to be proven.”

By then, the initiative had achieved its goal. Outside of rural areas, public opinion shifted toward rampant disfavor. Unfamiliar drinkers had been dissuaded from tasting and therefore potentially supporting the wines.

Following further restrictions in the early 1960s, only 8,585 hectares of hybrid vines remained by 1968. Most of that land, says Galet, was protected by a loophole granting farmers aged 65 and older the right to produce wine for personal consumption from preexisting vines. However, those rights were set to expire with the farmer.

“Here, it did not matter so much,” says Garnier. Due to Beaumont’s remoteness, the inspectors simply left it alone. “The people go on doing what they are doing, paying no mind to this Paris rule that is pure nonsense.”

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Such was the case when Garnier arrived in Beaumont in 1970. That day, the 18-year-old had set out walking from his family home in Franche-Comté. He’d hitched a ride, and 451 kilometers later, the driver dropped him off in the 200-person village.

“I have no destination in mind and so I go where he goes,” Garnier recalls, laughing. “Though he carries me to the middle of nowhere, I have this feeling, like, this is where I am supposed to be.”

Young Garnier fell in love with the mountains, blue-green river, rocky escarpments, and stone homes with their vine-laden terraces. Friendly old men took him into their homes, fed him meals, and shared their delicious homemade wine. Within days, Garnier had decided to buy land—in particular, the ruins of a more than 800-year-old abbey and vineyard.

It took years to earn enough money—by studying roofing and carpentry and repairing neighbors’ terracotta roofs—and even more years to slowly rebuild the abbey and its surrounding terraces. He’d learned viticulture in the family vineyard, so he nursed the property’s wines back to life too. Along the way, he learned to make local wine from the area’s aging patriarchs. It wasn’t until the early 90s that he discovered the vines were illegal.

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It happened after the death of a neighbor. In an effort to preserve the landscape, Garnier convinced the new owner to allow him to restore the vineyards. Combining them with his own and those of a dozen or so local farmers—all of whom were in their 60s and 70s—Garnier proposed they work together to commercialize Beaumont’s wine.

“Just like that, we become partners in a business,” says Garnier. Once again, his project required funding. “I created the Mémoire de la Vigne in 1993 to try to collect operating budgets and consult with professional winemakers … That’s when I learn the wine I intend to make is prohibited for sale.”

Baffled, Garnier threw himself into research. It didn’t take long to unearth the conflicted history of Beaumont’s beloved jacquez vines: In addition to the institutional revile of France, the European Commission had adopted the ban on American hybrids in 1979.

Meanwhile, he learned something else. Because the village was situated within the boundaries of the Cévennes National Park, its vines were technically protected by French laws meant to conserve what UNESCO described in 2011 as a “living historical landscape.”

“French national parks are singular in that they not only focus on unique terrains, but they attempt to also capture unique ways of life, and to preserve both,” says Gale. In a spectacular irony, despite rules mandating their extirpation, the “patrimonial cultivation of jacquez was, in effect, a nationally protected folkway.”

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Establishing his association as a begrudged but official patrimony meant Garnier could provide wine to “user-members.” Upon purchasing a yearly “subscription” for 73 euros, members are shipped six bottles of Cuvée des Vignes d’Antan. The group currently has 770 members from 10 countries—including the American sommelier Christian Borel. Its vineyards include about 30 hectares of land, though there are plans for expansion. Some winemakers have passed away, but their children and grandchildren have taken up the mantel.

“A few choose to live here, but many family members drive in to help with the harvest each October,” says Garnier. Additional participants include viticultural students and young winemakers.

Using its membership as an active base for lobbying against the hybrid-vines ban, Garnier’s association has become a small but noisy political faction. In the late 90s, the group funded scientific research that disproved governmental claims of excess methyl alcohol in jacquez wine. And for more than 20 years, Garnier has been sending collectively signed protest letters to the EU and anyone that will listen. Most recently, the group has championed the jacquez and American hybrids’ low environmental impact due to not needing chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

“It is ridiculous that, in 2018, this wine remains forbidden,” says Garnier. “It is like you say dark chocolate is the best, then try to make milk chocolate extinct. That is crazy. Instead, I am for liberty: To my mind, we should celebrate diversity and keep these flavors alive.”

Climate Change Made Zombie Ants Even More Cunning

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Your move, Hollywood.

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This story was originally published by WIRED and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Raquel Loreto is a zombie hunter, and a good one. But traipsing through dried leaves in a hot forest in Sanda, at the southern end of Japan, she needed a guide. Just a few months before, she’d been on the internet and come across the work of the artist Shigeo Ootak, whose fantastical images depict humans with curious protrusions erupting from their heads. She got in touch, and he invited her to Japan for a hike to find his inspiration.

Ootak knew precisely where to look: six feet off the ground. And there in a sparse forest, that’s where they found it: the zombie ant, an entrancing species with two long hooks coming out of its back. By now you may have heard its famous tale. A parasitic fungus, known as Ophiocordyceps, invades an ant’s body, growing through its tissues and soaking up nutrients. Then it somehow orders its host to march out of the nest and up a tree above the colony’s trails. The fungus commands the ant to bite onto the vein of a leaf, then kills the thing and grows as a stalk out of the back of its head, turning it into a shower head raining spores onto victims down below.

That’s how it all goes down in South American forests, where Loreto had already spent plenty of time. But the zombie she found on her hike in Japan was different. First of all, the fungus had driven it higher up a tree. And two, it hadn’t bitten onto a leaf, but had wrapped itself around a twig, hanging upside down.

See, in the tropics, leaves stay on trees all year—but in Japan, they wither and fall. Same goes for zombie ants in the southern United States. By ordering the ant to lock onto a twig, the fungus helps ensure it can stay perched long enough to mature and rain death on more ants. In a study out last week in the journal Evolution, Loreto and her colleagues show that divergence between leaf-biting and twig-biting seems to have been a consequence of ancient climate change. So who knows, modern climate change may also do interesting things to the evolution of the parasite.

Come back in time with me 47 million years to an unrecognizable Germany. It’s much hotter and wetter. As such, evergreen forests grow not only up through Europe, but all the way up to the arctic circle. One day, a zombie ant wanders up a tree and bites onto the vein of a leaf, which conveniently enough gets fossilized. Time goes on. The climate cools, and Germany’s wet forests turn temperate.

Almost a decade ago, the Penn State entomologist David Hughes looked at that fossil leaf and noticed the tell-tale bite marks of a zombie ant. “Given the fossil evidence in Germany, we know leaf biting occurred then,” say Hughes, a coauthor on the paper. “We suspect that it was also present in North America, and as those populations responded to climate change and the cooling temperature, we see a shift from biting leaves to dying on twigs.”

As vegetation changed from evergreen to deciduous, the fungus found itself in a pickle. But evolution loves a pickle. Ophio adapted independently in Japan and North America to order the ant to seek out twigs, which provided a more reliable, longer-term perch. The fungus grows much slower.

Loreto and Hughes know this thanks to the work of Kim Fleming, a citizen scientist who discovered zombie ant graveyards on her property in South Carolina. She’s been collecting meticulous data for the researchers, scouring the forest for the zombies and marking them with colored tape. “I made a map for myself so I wouldn't get lost and leave some out,” says Fleming. (For her efforts, she’s now got a species of her very own: Ophiocordyceps kimflemingiae.)

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What Fleming helped discover is that while in the tropics the fungus reaches full maturity in one or two months, in temperate climes like hers, the fungus sets up its zombie ant on a twig in June, but doesn’t reach maturity until the next year. In fact, the fungi may actually freeze over the winter. If it were attached to a leaf, it’d tumble to the ground in the fall.

“So it's almost as if they've decided that nothing is going to happen this year, I'm just going to have to sit around because I don't have time to mature and get spores out,” says Hughes. Plus, the ants hibernate in the winter anyway. Even if the fungus shot spores, there’d be no ants to infect—they’re all chilling underground in their nest.

Opting for twigs does come with a downside, though: It’s really tough to get good purchase. Until, that is, the fungus initiates a second behavior, ordering the ant to wrap its limbs around the twig, sometimes crossing the legs on the other side of the twig for extra strength. “The hyphae of the fungus growing out of the legs works as glue on the twig as well,” says Loreto. “Sometimes they would even slide down the twig, but they wouldn't fall.”

It's hard to imagine how a fungus with no brain could figure this all out, but that's the power of evolution. And it goes further: In June in temperate climes, the forest is still full of both twigs and leaves, yet the fungus directs zombie ants to lock onto twigs exclusively. And in the Amazon, where it’s lush all year round, they only ever lock onto leaves. “How in the name of ... whoever ... does the fungus inside the body know what the difference between the leaf and the twig is?” Hughes asks. It always has both options, yet only ever “chooses” one—the best strategy for its particular surroundings.

And so a parasitic manipulation that already defied human credulity grows ever more incredible, far beyond any work of zombie fiction. Your move, Hollywood.

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Get Up to Speed With Daytona Beach’s Hidden Wonders

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Spend three obscure days discovering the motorsports mecca.

It’s impossible to deny the need for speed in Daytona Beach, a longtime mecca for motorsports on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Leather, rubber, and sand mix freely here along the the neon-lit boardwalk and main pedestrian drags. Cars cruise these sprawling white-sand beaches, and for many visitors, a trip to Daytona involves a tour of the legendary Speedway racetrack, which includes the opportunity to climb atop the winner’s podium, visit the Motorsports Hall of Fame and, for the adrenaline-seeking, drive an actual race car at top speed around the track.

Ease off the gas to appreciate the surrounding area, which is an all-terrain course for adventure seekers. Volusia County is home to beautiful beaches dotted with secret WWII-era submarine watchtowers; coastal hikes that pass through the remains of ancient Native American civilizations; and winding roads that lead to abandoned sugar mills or failed dinosaur-themed amusement parks. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and while some of it is motor-centric, there are plenty of other ways to hit the open road in Daytona. Here’s where to start.

Day 1: Cruise the Ormond Scenic Loop & Trail

  • Drive, motorcycle, or pedal the trail

  • Visit the Dummett Sugar Mill Ruins

  • Detour to see the primordial environs of Tomoka park

  • Take advantage of a rare opportunity to drive on the beach

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The 34-mile Ormond Scenic Loop & Trail is in Ormond Beach, just north of Daytona Beach. You can drive, or better yet, motorcycle or cycle the loop, which winds through some of the most spectacular scenery in the area, alternating between oceanfront views and live oak tree canopies. Head north and admire the beachfront and barrier island dunes, keeping an eye out near Spanish Waters Drive for the Ormond Beach WWII Submarine Watchtower. Erected in 1942, this wooden watchtower is one of the last left of its kind. In the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks, thousands like it were built in the name of national security. Floridians had extra reason to be vigilant: German U-boats had already sunk British merchant ships off the coast.

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After the Watchtower, keep heading north and turn left on High Bridge Road to peel away from the beach and head down a tree-canopied road toward Old Dixie Highway, crossing over the Highbridge Drawbridge and passing vistas of rivers, creeks, and marshes.

On Old Dixie, slow down about two miles north of the Tomoka State Park entrance to catch the turnout for the Dummett Sugar Mill ruins. Built in 1825, this once-prosperous sugar mill and rum distillery was the site of the first steam-powered cane-crushing mill, helping bring the Industrial Revolution to the growing United States. Today the ruins themselves are behind a fence, but Spanish moss-draped oaks and spiky palms make this an ideal spot for a secluded mid-loop picnic.

Afterward, detour to Tomoka, a 2,000-acre state park with primordial environs that have looked the same for thousands of years. Today, the park is home to West Indian manatees, alligators, and 160 types of birds.

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Once you’ve covered the official scenic route, detour to one of dozens of access points to engage in a time-honored Daytona tradition: driving on the beach. For a fee of $20, you can take your vehicle onto the same packed white sand that played host to the first automobile and motorcycle races here in 1902. This ritual is a big part of how Daytona quickly became the U.S.'s premier location for hot rodders to chase down land speed records (once speeds regularly clocked in above 200 m.p.h, Daytona’s beach was deemed too narrow and record-setting races moved to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah). Just be sure to follow the traffic rules and avoid slow-moving sunbathers.

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Day 2: Explore the Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens

  • Wander the remains of "Bongoland"

  • Tour the Halifax Historical Museum's diverse collection

  • Have a drink at the eccentric Froggy's Saloon on Daytona's main drag

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The Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens, tucked away down a residential street three miles south of Daytona Beach, pack a lot of obscure history into their 10 lush acres. Near the entrance lies the well-preserved ruins of a 19th-century sugar mill, which was burned down (twice) during a succession of Seminole Indian wars, and later served as camp headquarters for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Wander farther into the gardens and you’ll come across life-sized chicken wire-and-concrete sculptures of a giant ground sloth, T-Rex, brontosaurus, and other prehistoric creatures scattered among the ferns.

These jungle-dwellers are the leftovers of the short-lived Bongoland theme park, the brainchild of local dermatologist and dinosaur enthusiast Dr. Jerry Sperber (author of the book Sex and the Dinosaur). In its brief heyday in the early 1950s, Bongoland was billed as “the world’s first monkey village” and featured a captive baboon named Bongo, a recreation of a Seminole village, and a tram disguised as a train to ferry visitors through the grounds. The local artist Manny Lawrence was responsible for the dinosaur sculptures, which look almost natural in the overgrown garden surroundings. Today, Bongoland is a delightfully odd time warp of an adventure, and the volunteers who tend to the plants on weekend mornings are fonts of information and ephemera. Ask nicely and they likely will grant access to the small library, which has meticulously maintained vintage photo albums, newspaper clippings, and Bongoland brochures.

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After the gardens, take a break in air conditioning while continuing to brush up on your historical bona fides at the Halifax Historical Museum, housed in the Beaux Arts-style Merchants Bank Building, built in 1910. The small but densely packed museum traces Daytona’s history from pre-Columbian history to the city’s earliest beach races, featuring artifacts from Timucua tribe rattlesnake tooth-holding cups to a ballgown worn at Abraham Lincoln's inauguration.

Wash down that history with a cold beverage at Froggy’s Saloon, a biker-themed dive bar with all the trimmings (think jukebox, pool table, and giant motorcycle made out of animal bones) on Daytona Beach’s Main Street nightlife strip.

Day 3: Hike Back in Time at Ponce Preserve

  • Hike through the preserve and don't miss the Green Mound

  • Hustle up the steps to the top of the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse

  • Try your hand at some vintage games at the Daytona Arcade Museum

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At 41 acres, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Halifax River, Ponce Preserve is the largest park in the charming beach town of Ponce Inlet. Several interlocking hiking trails cross over sand dunes, wetlands and lush palmetto patches. Head east toward the ocean from the main parking lot, clambering uphill beneath a dense oak canopy that gives way to sprawling dunes, which lead to a lovely and uncrowded part of the beach.

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Back in the forest, scramble over the remains of the Green Mound, an ancient Native American midden that once stood close to 50 feet high. Middens are shell mounds composed entirely of discarded organic material—essentially a giant dumping ground for oyster and clam shells and other debris. Although this midden has shrunk today to about 30 feet, excavations here have uncovered evidence of a thriving village dating to 500 BC. Digging into the mound unveils a sort of vertical chronology of the Native Americans who lived there for centuries. In fact, the formation of the midden itself is significant for marking the shift from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle, fueled by tons of local shellfish.

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You’ll know you’re there when you see the enormous live oak tree with a sign noting its advanced age (supposedly 350 years). Afterward, double back toward the parking lot, crossing Peninsula Drive on foot, to hit the boardwalk that stretches out across the salt prairies and tidal inlets into the Halifax River, where you can launch your own kayak, cast nets with the local fishermen, or relax on the shaded deck at the end of the trail.

After the hike, you’re a short hop from the circa-1887 red-brick Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse (Florida’s tallest), which is still an active navigational aid today. Hustle up the 213 steps to the lantern room, and your reward is panoramic views of the ocean, the Halifax and Indian rivers, and Mosquito Inlet, which was visited regularly by shipwrecked sailors, pirates, and privateers in the 18th century.

On your way back into Daytona Beach, check out the Daytona Arcade Museum, which encourages visitors to get hands-on with dozens of playable vintage games. Ending your Daytona adventure at a museum may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the perfect way to close a trip that departs from the racetrack. Armed with the knowledge that there’s more to Daytona Beach than fast cars and fast times, take a turn at one of the museum’s classic pinball machines. Gripping both sides, eyes locked on the prize, you may even catch a whiff of the thrill of a race car driver barreling around the bend.

Dozens of Mysterious 'Reserve Heads' Were Sealed in Ancient Egyptian Tombs

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Over 30 have been found, but their function is unclear.

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In 1894, the French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan made a perplexing discovery in the royal necropolis of Dashur. In a tomb dating around the reign of Snefru (beginning 2613 B.C.) during Egypt’s fourth dynasty, he found an odd sculpture of a human head. This object, known as a reserve head, has puzzled and inspired scholars for over a century.

In total, 31 reserve heads have been discovered. Of these, 27 were found in tombs at the royal necropolis of Giza, 15 miles southwest of Cairo. The sculpted heads, found in tombs of aristocrats and members of the royal family, including Princess Meretites III, share many common features. Sculpted during the Old Kingdom (2613-2181 B.C.), the heads are often made of limestone, with the bottom of the neck working as a sort of base to allow the object to stand. The features are soft and at times personalized (perhaps to resemble the deceased inhabitant), and the hair is always shaved or cropped close. There is evidence that at least some of the heads were painted. The remnants of plant-based red paint on one head has led to the hypothesis that it was for some reason painted entirely in a bold red.

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Grave robbers and thrill seekers have looted and scattered the heads over millennia. However, according to Nicholas Picardo, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, and a research associate at the institution’s Giza Project, researchers have been able to pin down the heads’ original locations.

“Although all known heads had been disturbed from their exact original placements before their discovery in modern times, all signs point to them having been set up somewhere in the underground sections of tombs, somewhere from the burial shaft to the subterranean burial chamber,” he says. “As a general rule, funerary statues went above ground, ideally in a chapel that was part of the tomb's superstructure or in a small room built specifically to contain it. Placement underground is quite odd.”

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The heads’ functions have been harder to pin down. “In a sense, all tomb statues were stand-ins, or ‘reserves,’ for people whose mortal lives had ended,” Picardo says. “However, the ‘reserve heads’ specifically got their name from an early theory that they were spares—or again, ‘reserves’—to replace a dead person's actual head in case it was lost or destroyed.” Mummies were often tampered with post-entombment, as a result of natural occurrences or grave robberies.

While this theory has fallen out of favor, it is in a sense accurate. “They were physical representations of the deceased that could be embodied by one aspect of a person's ‘spirit’ (for lack of a better modern word) when it crossed back into the mortal plane of existence from the afterlife,” says Picardo.

Complicating everything is the fact that a number of the heads seem to have been intentionally mutilated. According to Catharine H. Roehrig, Egyptologist and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the most common disfigurements include the removal or destruction of the statues’ ears. Many heads also feature scratches or gouges tracing from the top of the head down to the nape of the neck.

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There have been several theories put forward to explain the damage. Peter Lacovara, Director of The Ancient Egyptian Heritage and Archaeology Fund, believes the heads were actually sculptors’ guidelines or molds, and thus easily damaged. A bit of plaster on one of the statues has led some to believe that it was perhaps used to make uniform plaster molds of the deceased. And Egyptologist Roland Tefnin surmises that the heads had been symbolically “killed” to protect the deceased.

Picardo’s theory is somewhat similar. He believes the reason the heads were mutilated has more to do with where the objects were placed—underground, in a sealed off, sacred area— than their functions as tomb statuary. “Just like the buried Egyptian was thought to reanimate in the afterlife after proper burial,” Picardo says, “apparently other things could also ‘come to life,’ so to speak, in that potent, sacred space.”

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“If a reserve head was thought to depict the deceased Egyptian essentially already in a decapitated state, and their placement in tomb space meant that this could become a terrible reality in the next life, then some sort of fix would have been in order—if not elimination of the reserve heads altogether,” he explains. “Damaging them in relatively minor ways may have accomplished this corrective without destroying them completely.”

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Whatever the reserve heads’ real meaning, they offer a personalized, human glimpse at the faces of ancient Egypt. One of Picardo’s favorite statues is of a man known as Nefer/Nofer, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which has eight reserve heads in its collection. “He has a prominent and particularly shaped nose, a feature that appears also in relief decoration from his tomb chapel. This points to Egyptian sculptors of this time actually trying to capture individual likenesses in the statues they were crafting, as opposed to more idealized or standardized representations of the human form, as was the general rule,” Picardo says. “Although … having a fairly prominent nose myself, it may be that I just identify with him a little.”


The World's Most Well-Traveled Real Estate Sign

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It disappeared in New Jersey. Nearly six years later, it was found in France.

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In May 2018, a software consultant named Hannes Frank was walking the shoreline near Bordeaux, France, when he came across a large piece of sign. "Diane Turton, Realtors," it read.

Real estate signs are generally not well-traveled—after all, it's their job to stay in one spot. But this one was far from home. As Frank soon found out, Diane Turton, Realtors serves an entirely different beachfront area, one located about 3,500 miles from France: the Jersey Shore.

According to the New York Times, the sign washed away from its post in Brielle, New Jersey, in October 2012, during Hurricane Sandy. Frank found it around May 14, 2018, approximately five-and-a-half years later. "I looked at it and found it quaint," Frank told the Times. He emailed its original owners: "Just wanted to let you know that I found part of one of your signposts... not in best shape after that crossing."

Indeed, the sign had been cracked nearly in half—although thanks to double-sided printing, any French beachwalkers suddenly interested in buying New Jersey property could piece together the requisite phone number by flipping it over.

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Like most successful cross-cultural signs, this one means different things to different people. Its creators have spun the find into a tongue-in-cheek marketing opportunity. "Having our signage wash up in France... truly proves that Diane Turton, Realtors is a global real estate company," they wrote on Facebook.

Some onlookers have taken the opportunity to bemoan the proliferation of trash in the oceans, while others have photoshopped famous New Jersey beachgoer Chris Christie into the shot.

The oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who studies how floating objects drift, told the Times that the sign's journey made for "really good scientific data." Based on the speed and direction of known ocean currents, he says, the sign might have actually spent the five-and-a-half years on an ambassadorial schedule: crossing to Europe once, heading back to Jersey, and then going to France again.

According to the Independent, Diane Turton, Realtors is trying to get the sign back "to frame it as a memento." They'd better fix it down tighter this time. Once you get the travel bug, it doesn't leave you, even if you're a flat piece of plastic.

Why Is a ‘Pepper’ Different From ‘Pepper’? Blame Christopher Columbus

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Black pepper and chili peppers have little in common.

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Christopher Columbus had a problem.

Less motivated by discovery than by opportunity, he had promised the riches of Asia to his patrons, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. Against all odds, he had sailed across the Atlantic and docked in the Caribbean, where the Taíno ate plants and foods Europeans had never seen or tasted. These included members of the capsicum family, which today range from sweet bells, to the ubiquitous jalapeño, to the lethally hot Carolina Reaper. Their heat gave Columbus an idea: He could equate the fleshy fruits with pepper, or pimiento.

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This was an inspired decision. "Second only to [gold], Ferdinand and Isabella hoped for black pepper" from Columbus's expedition, writes Richard Schweid in Hot Peppers: The Story of Cajuns and Capsicum. Instead, Columbus came across what the Taíno called axí, or the unrelated capsicums. They ate the spicy berries abundantly, Columbus wrote in 1493. Already, he began to build their profile. The peppers, he wrote, were "more valuable than the common sort": that is, more valuable than black pepper. Not only that, but they could be attained much more easily than the fabulously expensive black pepper. "Fifty caravels might be loaded every year of this commodity at Española," he wrote. His mercantile-mindedness made sense. One of the reasons the Spanish monarchs wanted pepper so badly was that the rise of the Ottoman Empire cut off the traditional pepper routes from Asia.

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) had been a culinary mainstay of fine cuisine since the Roman Empire, beating out prior spicy compounds such as horseradish, mustard, and the arguably better long pepper. It was a valued addition to both food and medicine, yet getting it from Asia was expensive and difficult. Columbus was so eager to find pepper that he carried peppercorns with him. When he landed, he showed them to locals. They were similar enough to the allspice berries growing wild in Jamaica that Columbus also likened them to pepper: pimienta de Jamaica. Marjorie Shaffer writes in Pepper: A History of the World's Most Influential Spice that Columbus was likely smart enough to know what he had wasn't pepper, but that he probably didn't care. Allspice and hot peppers headed for Europe.

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Yet dishes such as the Spanish pimientos de Padrón and Italian 'nduja were still a ways off. For a few years, hot peppers were grown ornamentally, but within decades they were ubiquitous in Europe. Before long, the seafaring Portuguese took them to Asia. Since hot peppers grew easily in temperate weather—unlike black pepper—they were gradually and happily adopted by chefs looking for some heat.

But some people weren't happy. Dutch traders, writes Roger Owen in The Oxford Companion to Food, "feared that this cheap new spice would outsell their expensive one," especially because of its association with exquisite black pepper. The Dutch, who would dominate the world's spice trade, never managed to commercialize hot peppers as they did cinnamon and nutmeg. But they did try and enforce a different name for the spice: the Nahuatl, or Mexican term chilli. So whenever you need to struggle to specify between black pepper and chili peppers, feel free to blame Columbus.

Revisiting the Heyday of California's 'Crazy' Novelty Architecture

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Giant hats, portly pigs, and drive-thru donuts.

In the 1930s, a British traveler in Southern California wondered if the local architects had gone a little nuts. It was either that or he had stumbled into a fantasy universe. There was something trippy about the roadside shops he saw along the way.

A new, updated version of California Crazy, a book first released in the 1980s, recounts the unnamed visitor’s puzzlement. “If, when you went shopping, you found you could buy cakes in a windmill, ices in a gigantic cream-can, flowers in a huge flowerpot, you might begin to wonder whether you had not stepped through a looking glass or taken a toss down a rabbit burrow and could expect Mad Hatter or White Queen to appear round the next corner,” he wrote.

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The unusual businesses he saw weren’t on some Hollywood backlot, but were California’s classic coterie of mimetic architecture—that is, buildings shaped like, well, anything but buildings. According to Cristina Carbone, a professor of art and architectural history at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, the practice dates back to at least the Renaissance. By the 18th century, says Carbone, who is working on a book on the style, English gardens were sprinkled with follies, such as dining pavilions masquerading as pagodas, churches, and pyramids. In America, the first known example—a six-story wooden elephant named Lucy—rose over the seaside community of Margate, New Jersey, in 1881.

When this style of vernacular architecture landed in California a few decades later, it emerged into a sea of mission-inspired structures. But soon, these roadside curiosities—built with a wink and a whole lot of plaster—were perhaps more densely clustered there than in anywhere else in the world.

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Though these buildings were rarely large, they were certainly hard to miss. Selling shoes? Try doing so from a shop designed to look like a giant’s oxford. Ice-cream cones? A curbside igloo that wouldn't melt in the heat. Hot dogs? How about a classic doghouse?

In California Crazy’s essays and photos, Jim Heimann, executive editor of Taschen America, and late architecture historian David Gebhard, make a compelling case that these often-goofy buildings are more than just gimmicks—they’re cultural artifacts of a period that changed the landscape of America.

As California’s open spaces were tamed by roads and cars, business owners scrambled to find ways to entice drivers to pull off the highways and reach for their wallets. Automobiles became more widely accessible after World War I, and “the middle class was able to get out, and that had never happened before,” Carbone says. Mimetic buildings were, for a time, a useful tactic—both functional architecture and large, loud advertisement. “If Californians were going to be fully committed to this ‘automania,’” Gebhard writes, “then why not cultivate a set of architectural images which would instantly catch the eye, and which we would continue to remember?” These buildings were “not necessarily near anything terrifically important,” Carbone says, but they could draw the attention of drivers just passing through.

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In a movie-obsessed city such as Los Angeles, teeming with creative folks and the set designers who brought ideas to life, there was no shortage of imagination and assembly skills. The owner of the “Hoot Hoot I Scream” stand, for instance, recruited movie-industry neighbors to help build a massive owl with headlights for eyes.

The result could be disorienting for out-of-towners. One 1928 visitor later mused to the Ice Cream Trade Journal that it was easy to mistake commercial strip for a movie set. “What else could a tourist think,” he recalled, “knowing by hearsay something of the prevalence of studios and the studio folk in that state, found himself whirling past gigantic ice cream freezers, snow block Eskimo igloos glowing in an electric aurora borealis by night, mammoth ice cream cones, and sparkling ice caverns, all established on the city streets or at vantage points along the open highway?” The buildings weren't always literal, accurate, or culturally sensitive. They sometimes muddled fact, fiction, and fantasy, as was the case for a chain of "wigwam" motels, with stucco and concrete bungalows designed, contrary to the name, to look like tepees. (Three still stand, in California, Arizona, and Kentucky.)

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By now, many of these roadside curiosities—even the most well known—have disappeared or mutated. Take the iconic Brown Derby. The restaurant chain was an early adopter of the architectural style—each restaurant was shaped like a giant, jaunty chapeau. The first, on Wilshire Boulevard, opened in the late 1920s, and quickly became a place to see and be seen. The flagship hat moved a little way down the block in 1937, but eventually only the dome remained, and today rises from an otherwise forgettable shopping center. The Hollywood location came down in February 1994, after being damaged by an earthquake. Local preservation groups staged a funeral at the demolition, wearing derbies of their own. Today, Disney World has a replica, and an original sign is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Neon Art, though it spends most days in a warehouse.

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A handful of other mimetic buildings have hung in there. Lucy, the New Jersey elephant, was the first mimetic structure to be included in the National Register of Historic Places. “These buildings often are much-loved by the communities where they are,” says Carbone, who named her dog after the pachyderm. In California, community members have banded together to move some mimetic buildings. The Shutter Shak, for example, an enormous camera that was once home to a photo-developing business, is now in a historical park. In 2015, 44 years after it first opened, a Los Angeles bar shaped like a whiskey barrel was resurrected as the Idle Hour.

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Though California will always have a place in its history, the center of the mimetic architecture scene might be going overseas. Though the Chinese government clamped down on “weird” architecture in 2016, mimetic buildings are still going up—such as a huge crab and an even bigger turtle. Carbone cites examples in Seoul and India, too. Maybe it will also pop back up again in California. “It was never really in fashion,” Carbone says, “and has never entirely gone out of fashion, either.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of additional images from California Crazy.

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How Many Liquor Bottles Can You Find in This 1931 Map of Chicago?

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The "Gangland Map" features drunken fish and goofy jokes alongside descriptions of brutal murders.

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On February 14, 1929, around 10:30 a.m., Clark Street in Chicago was rattled by gunfire. The city's most powerful gang leader, Al "Scarface" Capone, had finally sent some hit men after a rival gang. When the shots subsided, seven people were dead. It was, the Chicago Tribune later put it, "the most infamous of all gangland slayings in America."

In the years since, the killing—now known as the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre"—has been recreated in films, plays, and television shows. But in 1931, a Chicago cartographer gave it an unconventional treatment. In the northeast corner of a map of the city, in between carefully labeled streets, is a tiny cartoon version of the massacre: four gunmen, two disguised in policeman blue, wearing wide-brimmed hats, shooting at their victims. Next to it, an account of the slaying is written neatly on a scroll held aloft by two cherubs.

This is just one of the many events depicted in A Map of Chicago's Gangland—a cynical, hyper-detailed portrayal of a city gripped by chaos. Sometimes hilarious and always gruesome, the 1931 map shows a Chicago riddled with corrupt police, incompetent detectives, and hiccuping bootleggers.

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Rumors swirl around the map like gin in a decanter. For one thing, it's unclear exactly who drew it. "We don't know who the artist was," says Lucy Garrett, a gallery assistant at Daniel Crouch Rare Books. (The dealership is currently selling a copy of the map, and will be displaying it at the London Map Fair on June 9 and 10.) It was published by a Chicago-based company called Bruce Roberts, which, she adds, is similarly shrouded in mystery: "We haven't been able to find any more information about them except for a few other books they published," which include a bridge strategy manual and a guide to marital sex. "It seems that they had a very wide remit."

We do know that whoever made it was well-versed in map history. "It's riffing on earlier, older maps," says Garrett. Even the title, A Map of Chicago's Gangland from Authentic Sources, is a throwback to a practice of centuries before. "On older maps—16th to 18th-century maps—it would say, "A map of wherever, from the best sources," explains Garrett. "That's because the people who were drawing those maps had not actually been there."

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In this case, it seems safe to assume that the cartographer was familiar with the city. The map's title—along with its statement of purpose, "Designed to Inculcate the Most Important Principles of Piety and Virtue in Young Persons And Graphically Portray the Evils and Sin of Large Cities"—seem somewhat tongue-in-cheek, in keeping with the rest of its aesthetic.

Stylistically, the map also has a clear precedent: The Wonderground Map, a whimsical take on London by the graphic designer Leslie MacDonald Gill. That map was published in 1915, and quickly spawned imitators as far afield as Mexico and Australia. The Map of Chicago's Gangland "is very much in this style—pictorial, cartoonish, with little snippets of information integrated into it," says Garrett. It's even got a similar color scheme, and a border with a poem running around it.

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The subject matter, though, is quite different. In the Wonderground Map, a cartoon fish swimming in the Thames says "I'm a beggar for sardines." In the Gangland map, its cousin from the Chicago River brags "I get an alcohol rub every day." London's miniature populace discusses polo and being late for tea, while Chicago's chats about gin and weapons. And where the corners of the Wonderground Map are decorated with coats of arms, Gangland's depict scenes of infamy, like "Armored car used by gangsters in making social and business calls," and "Lawyer running to 'spring' his client with an habeas corpus writ."

This juxtaposition of strife and silliness makes reading the map somewhat dizzying; these crimes, of course, had real victims. One intersection near the river, nicknamed "Death Corner," was the site of a number of gang-related executions. On the map, the spot boasts a stack of skulls and crossbones, and is captioned almost gleefully: "50 Murders—count 'em." Throughout, other deaths get similarly flippant illustrations and descriptions.

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Even the scale bar is a morbid parody, ranging from "One Shooting" all the way to "Massacre." This vertiginous tone might help to explain another rumor attached to the map: That authorities, upset at the image of the city it portrayed, destroyed most copies of it before the 1933 World's Fair.

In certain cases, the japery also comes at the expense of accuracy. As organized-crime expert John Binder recently told the Chicago Tribune, the map contains some crucial mixups. "They’re showing the West Side O’Donnell gang as being around Douglas Park," Binder said. "That was controlled by the Valley gang.” And despite the description of the drainage canal as "a favorite disposal station"—and the two tiny thugs shoving someone into the water—Binder says people didn't often dump bodies there.

If you want something that will tell you where that era's criminals actually did their business, you might be better off with Chicago's Gangland, a more precise (if less lively) rendering of the area's hangouts and hideaways, made in 1927 by the sociologist Frederic Thrasher. If you want another view of a strange time, though—one complete with drunken fish and tire-stealing bootleggers—this map is worth a look.

Meet the Boosters Celebrating the World's Best Bollards

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These pieces of infrastructure can be an unexpected source of delight.

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Ask the World Bollard Association, on Twitter as @WorldBollard since February 2018, what they’re up to, and they’ll remind you that that they have half a billion bollards to look after. Bollards, for the uninitiated, are the posts and other solid objects used to control the movement of cars in public space. The term originated in the 1840s to describe the posts used to moor ships along docks and has since come to describe a panoply of practical objects sticking out of streets and sidewalks across the world.

Once you start looking for them, you’ll see them everywhere, and they can be an unexpected source of delight. A surprising amount of creativity goes into bollard design: Recently the World Bollard Association has highlighted pencil-shaped bollards with an added flourish of street art, the rare “ice cream topped torpedo bollard,” and Playmobile bollards.

In the eyes of the WBA, which has a cheeky sense of humor and no other obvious web presence aside from its Twitter account, “All bollards are exceptional.” Late last month, the organization announced a new “Win a Bollard” contest, with a “Monoscape Spherical 500 Grey Concrete Bollard worth a massive £451.29” as the prize.

The WBA, which describes itself as a “not-for-profit organization”—“We do it for the love of bollards. And world peace,” a spokesperson tells us—will be announcing the winner of the contest “imminently.” In the meantime, the group agreed to answer a few questions from Atlas Obscura.

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Why did you choose the Monoscape Spherical 500 Grey Concrete Bollard as the prize for your bank holiday give away?

The Monoscape Spherical 500 Grey Concrete Bollard is a classic. Our previous competition for a Standard Monoscape Bridgeford Smooth Grey Concrete Bollard worth £178.84 attracted over 2,000 entries, so we knew we had to up our game this time around.

There are so many types of bollards—what recommends this one?

Just look at it. It's magnificent. It's iconic. It’s a wonderful shade of grey. Obviously, we look after over half a billion bollards worldwide, so choosing a favorite is not easy; it's like being asked to pick your favorite child. But sometimes, one bollard just stands out.

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What inspired the formation of the World Bollard Association?

The World Bollard Association was founded by Jimmy Bollard in 1742. [Ed note: We cannot independently confirm that a bollard-loving man named Jimmy Bollard existed in the 18th century.] There was so much global love and admiration for bollards, yet there was no international organization in charge of the upkeep, promotion, and general welfare of bollards.

How does one become a member?

One cannot become a member. Membership is strictly restricted to a few select people who make up the board of the World Bollard Association and whose identity needs to remain protected for obvious security reasons.

If bollard fans want to seek bollards in the wild, where would you recommend looking?

Are you joking? They just need to open their eyes. Bollards are EVERYWHERE.

Why Foley Artists Use Cabbage and Celery to Create Hollywood’s Distinctive Sounds

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Adding sound flourishes to films in post-production remains low-tech.

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In one of the final scenes of James Cameron’s Titanic, Rose (played by Kate Winslet) clings to a floating headboard, a piece of debris from the shipwreck that claimed over 1500 lives. A delirious Rose, adrift in the freezing ocean, sees a rescue team in the distance and moves her head. As she lifts her frozen hair off the wood, it crackles audibly.

But Rose’s hair never actually crackled, and the sound wasn’t made by hair at all: It was the sound of frozen lettuce being peeled by Foley artists in a studio. While subtle to the ear, and almost unnoticeable amidst the dialogue, score, and other sound effects, the crackle is critical to amplifying the scene’s drama. And it’s the responsibility of Foley artists to forge these unique sounds in post-production, often from lettuce heads, coconuts, and other foods.

It's an uncharacteristically overcast May day in Culver City, California—an enclave within Los Angeles where many production studios are found. I'm at Sony Pictures, where two of the studio's resident Foley artists, Robin Harlan and Sarah Monat-Jacobs, recount the struggle to make Rose’s frozen hair sound like frozen hair. First they tried freezing a wig, but that didn’t work. Velcro didn't do the trick, either. Later, Harlan was at home and, while making herself a sandwich, found that a head of lettuce’s crackle worked perfectly. “They really wanted to hear the sound of frozen hair pulling off of this wood bedstead, but I mean, you can’t really freeze your own head,” says Harlan.

Monat-Jacobs and Harlan have been partners for over 30 years and have worked on hundreds of films together, including There Will Be Blood, Best In Show, and several Star Trek films. They work along with a Foley sound mixer on one of three soundstages nestled within Sony’s sprawling campus. This particular Foley soundstage is replete with props and ephemera that provide films with the kind of emotional texture that words often can’t. Here, palm fronds coexist with vintage telephones, window panes that rattle during storm scenes, and a small water tank where they record clothes swishing in the deep, as they did for The Shallows. Small patches of sand and dirt line the floor, close to wooden boards that can give a Western flick an extra creak. And the co-stars of many horror, science fiction, and action films, namely celery and cabbage, sit in the fridge.

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Foley, named after the industry veteran Jack Donovan Foley, has its roots in the heyday of silent films and broadcast radio shows. Organists, pianists, and sometimes entire orchestras soundtracked silent films live, and radio programs sought out sound effects that would correspond with broadcasts. “But they also, at one point, brought in sound effects guys who were really Foley guys,” says David Macmillan, a multiple Academy Award-winning sound mixer and lecturer for UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television. “And they would put the horse clomps in, or the crash of the dish falling. Or footsteps on every kind of surface you can imagine.” These early Foley artists not only added texture to radio and film, they also became part of the performance. “They were, in a sense, live Foley artists,” he adds.

Foley became especially pivotal during an era of moral panic when Hollywood cracked down on what could and couldn’t be shown on-screen. “A lot of directors and writers know that sound has a really powerful potential to ignite the imagination in people, even more so than visuals sometimes,” Harlan says, citing Alfred Hitchcock as an example. “A lot of the classic directors knew that: They weren’t allowed to show a lot of graphic stuff, so a lot of things that they would drop in had to do with sound effects. They would cut away, and you would hear it.”

Now, Foley is an integral part of the sound department, and often rounds out big effects (such as explosions) with the details that make it feel colossal to watch. “[The effects team] will do a big crash, but the shards falling down? That’s us,” explains Monat-Jacobs. But something curious also happened as film, and Foley, continued evolving: Creating “authentic” sounds took a backseat to ones that evoked a visceral reaction in audiences (something that Monty Python famously parodied with coconut shells acting as horses’ hooves). “Guns don’t really make noise, but in the Foley world they make a lot of noise,” Monat-Jacobs says, citing “the gun rattle” central to wartime films.

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That’s how celery became a staple of summer blockbusters, and especially horror films. On its own, celery sounds like, well, celery. But when recorded well and mixed correctly, the fibrous vegetable can sound like an elbow giving way to bone. “Part of the talent is performing it and recording it in a way that’s kind of hidden, with celery not recognizable as celery,” says Monat-Jacobs. With good Foley, gourds become cracked skulls, and ice cream cones double as hatching dinosaur eggs a là Jurassic Park. And jello is a must for science fiction pictures: “You may want that for someone if they’re morphing, or for lizard skins or something like that,” Harlan says.

In a brief scene that we watch in the control room, a certain star is caught in a brutal fight sequence. I find myself wincing at the sound of every punch, although Monat-Jacobs had just extolled the virtues of working with a rubbery material such as cabbage, and the many things one can do with a chamois cloth. “One of the ways you know it works is you play it back from the production and if it just fits right in, and if everyone is like ‘whoa,’” Harlan says. “Or it causes an emotional response in you, you know it’s right.”

While film (and the industry itself) has changed dramatically in the last century, Foley hasn’t budged all that much. “I think it’s interesting that Foley, in this increasingly high tech world, is … still low-tech,” says Monat-Jacobs. “We’re doing it the same way it was always done. It’s just become more complex.” That means that with the advent of recording technology, they, along with their Foley mixers, are able to layer more sounds to build bigger soundtracks. But just as in the old days, Foley artists still perform along with a film, though it’s not in front of an audience now. Only the mixer behind the soundboard—in this case, Nerses Gezalyan—gets to see Harlan (who was an actress) and Monat-Jacobs (who comes from a radio background) in action.

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That’s also why the two believe that Foley prevails in a rapidly-shifting world where even traditional headphone jacks are becoming obsolete. “People have been saying to me since I’ve been doing this, ‘One day it’s not going to be relevant,’” Monat-Jacobs says. “But you don’t get the performance when you do that.” Harlan adds: “There’s a difference between every footfall, depending on if you’re on your heel or toe. Or walking through the forest, or walking on your toes because you don’t want to be heard. It’s still more cost-effective and time-effective for someone to perform those footsteps than an editor to be hired to pull all of that out of a library.” Many editors do have a library of Foley sounds, but in addition to not being any more efficient, according to the duo, using libraries produces sound with less character, especially if it’s done electronically.

The low-tech stylings of Foley artists remain in demand, and it’s a competitive field. The two are quick to say that there’s a lack of education about it in film school (“It’s 15 minutes over four years,” Harlan quips), and apprenticeships don’t crop up too often. But people with performance backgrounds in dance, acting, and music often become Foley artists. “There’s a technical aspect of doing it in sync, but then you have to bring whatever emotion to it, too,” says Monat-Jacobs.

For many people, the process of making and sharing food has an emotional weight to it. But it takes on a completely different meaning in Foley, where, even in a blockbuster that grossed over $1.8 billion and used CGI, a cup of pudding or a head of lettuce can become the sound of a character in flux or distress. “Sometimes certain things don’t make a sound, but in movie world, it needs to have a little magic,” Monat-Jacobs says. “You will make a sound of something and you know it’s not real, but it helps sort of enhance it a bit.” Harlan adds: “And we’re not going to break our bones. I like my job, but not that much.”

What's the Most Surprising Roadside Hotel You've Stayed In?

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We want to hear about the unforgettable places you've dared to lay your head.

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In the middle of the 20th century—the golden age of the American road trip—the U.S. saw a boom in one-of-a-kind lodgings strategically located near highways. They included motels with rooms shaped like cartoon teepees, motor lodges marked with eye-catching neon marquees, and even UFOs or dinosaurs to lure in passing drivers. Such places once dotted the American landscape like tumbleweeds.

Today, the vast majority of roadside hotels and motels across North America are big chains or standardized, recognizable brands. But some surprising, high-concept roadside hotels from that earlier era have survived, and a handful of unique new properties have continued to pop up throughout the years. We want to hear your tales of incredible roadside hotels and one-of-a-kind places to stay that you’ve discovered on your travels.

Maybe it’s an old train that’s been turned into overnight lodging, such as Tennessee’s Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel. Or maybe you’ve braved a night under the unblinking eyes of the Clown Motel in Nevada. Or maybe it’s something even grander, such as China’s Tianzi Hotel, where the buildings themselves are shaped like towering gods. If it’s an amazing or surprising place to stay while on a road trip, we want to hear about it.

Send in your responses via the form below, and we’ll share our favorites in an upcoming article. We’d also love to see pictures of your roadside hotel finds, so please email any images you have to eric@atlasobscura.com. We can’t wait to see all of the unforgettable hotels and motels you’ve encountered.


A Fire Has Broken Out at Chernobyl

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Authorities are thus far unconcerned about radiation levels.

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A fire has broken out near the decommissioned Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, Agence France-Presse reports. Although any activity in the irradiated "exclusion zone" inspires alarm, authorities describe the situation as "fully under control," and say radiation levels remain within acceptable limits.

The Chernobyl plant once produced about 10 percent of Ukraine's electricity. In 1986, one of its four reactors exploded, setting off the worst nuclear accident in history; afterwards, authorities evacuated an area around the plant of 1,000 square miles. Few people live there, and much of the land has been reclaimed by forests and wildlife.

Over 100 firefighters are currently on the scene, aided by "several planes and helicopters dropping water from the sky," RT writes. According to a Facebook post from Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, also quoted by AFP, "There's no need to worry."

This happens sometimes—there was a similar fire last June, and a much larger one in April of 2015. As AFP reports, this particular blaze started in an area of dry grass about six miles from the station.

It eventually spread to cover about 25 acres of woodland in the "Red Forest." The area is named for the original stand of pine trees, which turned red and died from radiation poisoning in the days after the explosion. That forest was bulldozed, and another was planted in its place, to deal with its own allotment of disaster.

What Will Your National Dish Look Like in 2050?

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We want to know your predictions for the future's culinary landscape.

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National dishes are often unofficial. Yet they're proudly upheld as proof of culinary ingenuity and tradition. So when the Europe-based Center for Genomic Gastronomy set out to design new national dishes, they ran into a few speed bumps.

After all, what constitutes a national dish? According to the Center's Zackery Denfield, most countries have several that are considered "national." Plus, different regions and communities often have their own specialties, which can make choosing one dish to represent a nation problematic. Other times, national dishes touch on issues such as colonialism and racism.

Nevertheless, there's something about a national dish that is undeniably compelling to residents and travelers alike. That's true regardless of whether a national dish is unofficial, such as Korean kimchi, or enshrined in law like Norway's fårikål. (Both contain the humble cabbage: Denfield remarks that many national dishes are simple and hearty.)

In 2016, the Center was commissioned to create a new national dish for France. "There's a lot of pride in France about food and food culture," says Denfield, who jokes that a wrong step could mean getting kicked out of the country. Museum-goers at Paris's Jeu de Paume participated in the Center's project: They chose from attributes including "traditional," "vegetarian," or "wasteless,"and then they could try their new dish.

In 2018, Portugal's MAAT Museum commissioned the Center to devise new national dishes for Portugal. Looking ahead to the year 2050, the Center imagined four possible futures for a country facing climate change. Today, we live in a society where our attitudes towards technology and even each other fluctuate. So, the Center imagined four potential futures influenced by those attitudes.

If in 2050 Portugal is a place with high interpersonal trust and confidence in technology, the national dish might constantly fluctuate in response to new fashions, farming methods, and crops designed to withstand weather challenges. But if technology and migration (human and culinary) are viewed with suspicion, then, the Center's report darkly surmises, the Portuguese will eject foreign foods and a grim nationalist cuisine will develop. Traditional dishes containing potatoes and cod will be spared (even though much of Portugal's famed cod comes from abroad), and the future will likely taste "pretty bland," says Denfield. The New National Dish: Portugal 2050 project will continue until October, and chefs in restaurants and the Center's test kitchen will create recipes based on the four scenarios.

In 2050, what do you think your national dish will look like? Will it use futuristic ingredients, or look more traditional? How will it be influenced by future events? Atlas Obscura wants to hear your ideas. Feel free to take inspiration from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy projects, or to devise your own logic. Send us your national dish ideas using this form, and we'll share a selection of your responses in an upcoming article.

Exploring the Hidden Waterways of Florida's Paradise Coast

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How to spend three obscure days wandering the Everglades, the Ten Thousand Islands, and Big Cypress Swamp.

Florida’s “Paradise Coast,” the area that surrounds Naples, Marco Island, and the Everglades, is a landscape of extremes. Beyond neat, palm-lined streets is a vast, wild wonderland dotted with secret beaches, untamed swamplands, and carnivorous creatures (both plant and animal).

This is where the Ten Thousand Islands, a chain of tiny isles stretching over hundreds of square miles along the Gulf Coast, start, offering dozens of hidden beaches accessible only by boat. It’s where candy-colored tropical birds nest and red-eyed alligators lurk, visible from the safety of low-lying airboats that shimmy across the water’s surface. It’s where intrepid hikers can cut swaths across the swamp in search of rare orchids and ancient cypress trees, provided they don’t mind getting a little muddy.

This part of Florida is always changing—you’d be hard-pressed to see the same landscape twice. Beaches appear and disappear with the ebb and flow of the tides. Trails flood and dry with the seasonal rains. Almost otherworldly plants bloom and shrink.


Day 1: Voyage to the Ten Thousand Islands

  • Depart from Marco Island for a tour of the islands and the famous Dome Home

  • Visit a secluded beach like Tigertail

  • Stop by Otter Mound on your way back through Marco Island

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Despite their name, the Ten Thousand Islands number in the hundreds and change from season to season depending on water levels. The labyrinth of small islands and mangrove keys dotting the coast between Cape Romano and Lostman’s River is one of the most alluring parts of Southwest Florida.

The northern part, between Cape Romano and Everglades City, is protected as a National Wildlife Refuge. The southern section is located within Everglades National Park. Occupied by Native Americans for 15,000 years, today almost all of the islands are uninhabited. For the intrepid, primitive overnight camping is allowed on some of the islands’ sandy beaches.

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Even if you can’t sleep under the stars, you can spend a day slingshotting across the islands by boat, courtesy of the skilled and environmentally minded crew at Eco Endeavors. Launching out of Marco Island, Eco Endeavors uses high-performance rigid hull boats to navigate to and around secluded beaches and shoals, often passing pods of dolphins, sea turtles, and even the occasional shark.

You can customize a route with a captain, but don’t miss the remains of the retro-futuristic Dome Home off Cape Romano. Built in 1980, the Dome Home was the brainchild of the retired oil businessman Bob Lee, who built eight interlocking, self-sustaining, solar-powered structures on the underdeveloped beach. Lee’s family lived in the domes until 1993, after which an independent buyer’s plans to renovate never materialized. The structure has since remained uninhabited, save for the pelicans who have made it their home. Today, the abandoned domes are accessible only by boat.

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Finish off a Ten Thousand Islands boat tour with a visit to a secluded beach, such as Tigertail (so named for its stripe-patterned vegetation, and accessible by boat or by foot, provided you’re up for a wade through a shallow lagoon).

Once you’re back in Marco Island, stop by Otter Mound, a nature preserve featuring the remains of an ancient shell mound created by the Calusa Native Americans generations ago. Calusa artifacts are well-preserved in the giant piles of discarded shells, making the midden an archaeological hotspot. The mound is named after a white settler named Ernest Otter who lived on the shell mound from the 1940s to 1997 and used the shells to build decorative walls and line the terraces on his property. Today, visitors can explore the tropical hardwood hammock and its accompanying wildlife, along with the remains of Otter’s still-standing outhouse.


Day 2: Explore the 'River of Grass' on an Airboat

  • Board an airboat to begin your adventure in the Everglades

  • Keep an eye out for soaring and swimming wildlife

  • End the day with a drink and a bite at the historic Everglades Rod & Gun Club

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Venture southeast of Naples and you’ll wind up cruising the flat, low-lying Interstate 41, also known as the Tamiami Trail, which links Tampa and Miami by cutting straight across Everglades National Park. Covering 1.5 million acres, the Everglades consist of sawgrass marshes, freshwater ponds, prairies, and forested uplands. Unlike parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, which were created by Congress to preserve spectacular scenery, the Everglades were the first national park created to protect a fragile ecosystem, which faced a grave threat from encroaching human activity.

The most ubiquitous form of transportation here is the airboat, a flat-bottomed skiff whose propeller and engine are rigged above the surface of the water. Legend has it that Alexander Graham Bell developed an early prototype of the airboat in Nova Scotia in 1905 called The Ugly Duckling. Airboats are ideal for flying over the surface of swampy environments like the Everglades without harming the delicate ecosystem of the waters below.

There are dozens of airboat tour operators in the area, but only Down South Airboat Tours is run by a sixth-generation Everglades family whose tours take place on land leased from the Miccosukee tribe. With just five boats, all of Down South’s tours are for private groups and come outfitted with two-way communication headsets (as you’d find in helicopters). This allows the knowledgeable captains, most of whom grew up in the Everglades and refer to it as their “backyard,” to narrate while zig-zagging across the grasslands and cypress trees at will, not following any predetermined route.

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As you glide across the “River of Grass,” encountering alligators, flocks of exotic birds, and clusters of spider lilies, it’s easy to imagine what life would have been like for the swamp’s early settlers who used to navigate its murky waters in hand-carved pole boats. Clusters of Cypress hammocks—islands that have formed as the tree’s root systems have interlocked—still support Native American burial mounds and the remains of long-retired bootleggers' camps.

On your way back to Naples and Marco Island, make a pit stop at the Everglades Rod & Gun Club, a striking 19th-century Victorian mansion that the entrepreneur Barron Collier (of Collier County fame) once used as a private club to entertain his wealthy friends. Visitors over the years included Harry Truman, Ernest Hemingway, and Mick Jagger. Today, taxidermied alligators, panthers, and flamingos mingle with wooden payphone booths, antique gas lamps, and chrome jukeboxes. There are a handful of small cottages for overnight stays, but those just passing through can linger on the enormous shaded veranda for dinner or drinks overlooking the Barron River. Take note: Just like the good old days, the Rod & Gun Club is cash only.


Day 3: Traverse Big Cypress National Preserve

  • Begin the day at the Big Cypress National Preserve

  • Hike the lush Roberts Lake Trail in the winter, or consider a muddier hike during the summer months with a guided eco-swamp tour

  • Treat yourself to a respite at the beach in Clam Pass Park

  • Finish the trip at historic Tin City

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On day three, head back toward the Everglades to explore the sprawling Big Cypress National Preserve on foot. At over 700,000 acres, Big Cypress is the wild heart of Southwest Florida, pumping freshwater into the Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands. A mosaic of habitats (including hardwood hammocks, pinelands, prairies, estuaries, and its namesake cypress swamps), Big Cypress is also home to elusive wildlife such as the endangered Florida panther and the rare ghost orchid, along with the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes who continue to inhabit the area.

I-41 from Naples cuts straight across the park, but to get up close and personal with the surroundings, nothing compares to a swamp walk. One such option is the Roberts Lake Trail. Accessible from the Oasis Visitor Center in the middle of the park, the trail transports hikers into the brush of another world, where giant clusters of bromeliad plants dangle from cypress branches, blooming canary yellow and fuchsia during the dry winter months.

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In the rainy season (summer), hiking becomes a muddy affair, with much of the trail submerged in waist-deep waters. With a map and a little gumption, you can hike independently, but the local photographer Clyde Butcher (who has been described as “the Ansel Adams of the Everglades”) and his staff offer guided eco-swamp tours for small groups.

After traipsing through the wilderness, relax (and rinse yourself off, if necessary) with a quick trip to Clam Pass Park in Naples, a peaceful beach tucked away through a mangrove tunnel behind the Naples Grande Beach Resort. Explore the tidal pass from which the park takes its name by renting a kayak from the resort’s small tiki hut.

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Return to the comforts of civilization at Tin City, a quaint fishing village-turned-shopping area located at the center of Naples' waterfront. Browse through the area's antique shops and dine on some fresh seafood after discovering all of the wild wonders Naples has to offer.

Take a moment to appreciate the environs. Next time you visit, Naples' hidden beaches, swampy trails and otherworldly landscapes may have shifted into landscapes that are entirely new.

A Gorilla Poop Treasure Hunt Through Central Africa's Virunga Volcanoes

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How researchers collect genetic info without disturbing the majestic primates.

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In 2015 and 2016, troops of field researchers spent weeks slogging through the thickly forested Virunga Mountains, a volcanic ridge that slices across Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was cold and humid, steep and slow-going. Sometimes, they’d only press on for a mile or so each day, machetes in hand, and return to camp exhausted. Their goal? Treasure troves of gorilla poop.

For decades, one method of tracking and counting rare mountain gorillas has involved following their tracks and looking for glimpses of hair. Scientists kept their eyes peeled for splintered bamboo or squashed vegetation, but this has never been an easy way to conduct a census. Paths splinter, jump, and veer off in unexpected directions, or dead-end if an animal decided to scale a tree.

Eyeball counts like that are still used for habituated populations—gorillas that are accustomed to the presence of humans. Researchers have given these creatures names and visit them every day. They know when they’re sick, when one is born, when one dies. But there are other gorillas that researchers know much less about, ones that live deeper in the forest. The prevailing wisdom, these days, is that they should get a wide berth. “We don’t want to meet them, and we don’t want to disturb them,” says Anne-Céline Granjon, a graduate student in primatology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

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Mountain gorillas, one of the two or three subspecies of eastern gorilla, are highly endangered, and war and unrest have changed their world. By the mid-1980s, their numbers dwindled to around 250 individuals. Their ranks appear to have been buoyed by conservation efforts, but data about exactly how many there are, and where, are hard to come by.

When the International Gorilla Conservation Programme—a project of the World Wide Fund For Nature and Flora & Fauna International, which collaborates with parks and local experts across all three nations—set out to conduct that recent census, they wanted data but no close contact. So their field teams followed tracks, too, but in the opposite direction: back to the gorilla’s nests. Like chimps, gorillas bend branches and leaves into little beds. When they wake up in the morning, they relieve themselves, and so their poop became a proxy.

“We basically look for the poop, and we do genetic analysis and look for DNA fingerprints, the way you would at a crime scene,” says Granjon, who trained local field teams and performed the genetic work. The idea was that by studying the stool samples, researchers could get a better grasp of how many individuals there are, and where those individuals had been spending their time.

If gorillas are rare, their scat isn’t, so the researchers had far more material than they could ever need. “They leave too much poop, these gorillas, they poop all the time,” says Granjon. Gorillas heed this call every few hours, and each time produces as much as a large human bowel movement—male mountain gorillas routinely top 350 pounds. But their leavings aren’t particularly rank. “They’ve herbivores, so it doesn’t smell so much,” Granjon says. “It smells when you’re above it, but not from a distance.”

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In their search, the field teams walked more than 1,200 miles to cover 170 square miles of habitat. At the nests, they placed walnut-sized stool samples into vials, and labeled them with GPS coordinates for analysis back at the Max Planck Institute laboratories. A given nest was only sampled once, unless it contained piles that looked really different, which could suggest a baby with its mother. Since DNA degrades in heat and humidity, each tube contained a high-percentage ethanol, which helped push water out of the sample. The following day, they were transferred to another tube, containing silica beads to continue the dehydration process.

No matter how swiftly and thoroughly dried the sample is, though, fecal forensics isn’t ideal. “Poop DNA is not the most perfect DNA one can find in the world,” Granjon says. Samples from blood and other tissues yield more precise results. Because fecal matter hangs around in the forest for a few days, exposed to sun, rain, and other animals, Granjon says, “it’s already pretty fragmented to begin with.” The samples have to be run several times, and since the mountain gorilla population has been low for years, Granjon says, they’re fairly inbred and the genetic differences are subtle. The scientists can tell individuals apart, but can’t necessarily construct detailed family trees.

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Even so, the 1,100 samples generated a lot of data, and Granjon was able to revise the estimate of the number of gorillas in the area. By her count, announced last week, there are at least 186 unhabituated gorillas, in addition to the 418 habituated ones that researchers or tourists routinely see. Overall, this suggests a 26 percent increase from the last census in 2010. "This represents one of the rare success stories in conservation,” said Martha Robbins, a research scientist and gorilla expert at the Max Planck Institute, in a statement. “The population of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes has more than doubled in the past three decades, despite intensive threats of poaching, habitat degradation, and civil conflict."

It's possible that a degree of geopolitical stability helped arrest the gorillas' decline since the end of the Second Congo War in 2003, but fatal skirmishes between rangers, militia, and smugglers are still common in the region. In response, Virunga National Park, home to many of the surviving mountain gorillas, will be closed to tourists until 2019, chief warden Emmanuel de Merode announced this week. "It is abundantly clear that the Virunga is deeply affected by insecurity and that this will be the case for some time," he said in a statement. All primates there—humans and gorillas alike—are vulnerable.

It also remains to be seen how much of the increased gorilla count is due to better methodology, and how much represents a real increase in the population. Chances are it’s a bit of both, and researchers have reason to believe that there are more out there that their count missed. In the future, the team plans to use statistical analysis to take a guess at how many more there might be. “Probably,” Granjon says, “there are a lot of gorillas we still haven’t found.”

History’s Greatest Potato Promoter Relied on Science and Stunts

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Before Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the French considered the tuber disgusting and poisonous.

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Neither prison food nor Prussian food have a great reputation, but during the Seven Years War, the combination made quite an impression on Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. Born in 1737, he became a pharmacist in the French army and spent three years as a prisoner of war. The prison diet consisted largely of potatoes, which the Prussians cultivated but the French viewed with disdain. Once freed, he made the potato his obsession.

While the spud had crossed the Atlantic (from its native South America) in the late 1500s, it was viewed with suspicion in many European countries. In France, it was fed to pigs but considered suspect for human consumption. Superstition held that it was poisonous or caused leprosy—based on gnarled potatoes resembling the stubbed appendages of lepers. The fact that potatoes grow underground, and not from seeds but from chunks of the tuber, also darkened its reputation. Potatoes weren’t sold or grown in any great volume.

But after returning from three years of the potato diet with his health intact, Parmentier set to work to prove that his own experience was no anomaly.

“That’s very typical of the period,” says historical novelist Catherine Delors, who blogs about the 18th century, “when you have the flourishing of the sciences and people challenging old ideas.” This was during the Enlightenment, and experimentation and research was becoming the new norm. By combining this scientific outlook with a flair for showmanship—including publicity stunts—Parmentier put potatoes on European plates and had a dramatic effect on world history.

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Parmentier started by going to scientific institutions and the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. He wanted, says Delors, “an official statement that potatoes were not as dangerous as they had been believed to be in France.” Famine was a recurring problem, and after 1770’s failed harvest, the Academy of Besançon offered a prize for proposals to address the problem. Parmentier won with his potato-propounding essay “Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables That in Times of Necessity Could Substitute for Ordinary Food,” which he then expanded into a more thorough examination of the potato’s potential.

While his work conformed to the relatively new scientific rigors of his day, his public efforts to build awareness of the potato were splashier. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson attended his potato-centric dinners, wherein the potato featured in different guises over as many as 20 courses. A copy of Parmentier’s treatise found its way to Jefferson’s library at Monticello, and it may be that Thomas Jefferson brought what would become the French fry back with him and served it at a White House dinner.

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Parmentier even solicited celebrity endorsements. After a meeting with King Louis XVI, His Majesty and Marie-Antoinette are said to have adorned their outfits with the purple flowers of the potato in their lapel and hat, respectively. In 1886, royal support also included a plot of land to grow potatoes in Sablon, then on the western edge of Paris. Parmentier hyped his urban farm project by hiring guards to watch the plot, creating the impression the potatoes were valuable. Intrigued cityfolk could nonetheless surreptitiously help themselves to “free samples” when the guards retired for the evening.

Farmers’ adoption of the tuber—in the wake of Parmentier’s P.T. Barnum-esque stunts—had a profound impact on history. The potato radically altered the productivity of French farms. Its yields were more reliable than those of wheat, and it could be grown in wheat fields while they lay fallow. It prospered in many different soils and was easy to farm. And in other countries, leaders such as Catherine the Great (Russia) and King Adolf (Sweden) promoted the tuber for similar reasons. By some estimates, potatoes doubled Europe’s food supply in terms of calories, effectively marking an end to the cycle of plenty and famine that had tormented European agriculture for centuries.

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While Parmentier was an effective potato promoter, his message resonated because it fit the needs of the time. “Parmentier’s message and enthusiasm are genuine,” says Charles C. Mann, author of The Wizard and the Prophet, which details the roots of the Green Revolution. “But he gets attention because people are casting about for ways to improve agriculture. The state was very interested in martialing up big populations so they could have lots of soldiers and workers.”

Famine was previously seen as a fact of life, says Mann, and Parmentier became part of government efforts to change that. France and other European states were beginning to institutionalize food production. In hopes of creating a healthy population of workers and soldiers, they encouraged mass production of desirable crops and subsidized and supported farmers. The resulting population boom in Europe, fueled in part by the dependable, productive potato, fueled European expansion and colonization across the globe.

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The king himself acknowledged Parmentier’s efforts, granting a sinecure in 1774 to allow him to conduct his research and eventually telling him, “France will not forget you found food for the poor.” That royal connection cost him dearly during the early years of the French Revolution, when much of his property was seized. But he returned to society relatively quickly. The revolutionaries, after all, had their own interest in feeding the populace. Parmentier’s job security grew during Napoleon’s rule, as Bonaparte wanted to ensure French self-sufficiency while it waged war across Europe. Parmentier’s work by then included researching beet sugar and corn. Napoleon eventually granted him the Legion of Honour.

Parmentier is still well known in France, where he is remembered as a kind of Johnny Appleseed figure. A number of dishes include his name, which is a sign that potatoes are present: Hachis Parmentier is a sort of shepherd's pie of ground beef topped with mashed potatoes. You can also find statues of Parmentier in the Somme, France, and the Parisian metro station that bears his name, which depict him nobly holding forth a potato. When he died in 1813, he was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Even today, his plot is surrounded by potato plants, and the occasional tuber is left on the grave of the great potato promoter.

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