(Photos: Zach Steaban (Groomer Has It); Adam Fagen (Howl to the Moon, The Big Bad Woof); Roshani (The Dogfather); Tom Smith (Indiana Bones); Kevin Lively (Pooches Gracias); Abhishek (Barks 5th Ave); Robin Colgrove (Laundromutt))

See our ultimate crowdsourced map of punny businesses in America.

As much as we love our furry companions, we know deep down that there's something inherently ridiculous in taking an animal to school or to get a haircut.

As a result, many of our punniest pet care businesses are tongue-in-cheek about how their establishment provides services that would be fancy for humans, but are, in fact, for animals (Fine Whines and Lickers, Barks 5th Avenue, Groomingdales). Boarding facilities range from the kingly (Barkingham Palace), to the trendy (Chateau Marmutt), to the shamelessly bourgeois (Crate and Marrow). The particularly cultured creature would likely appreciate a trim at at Vanity Fur in Millbrook, Alabama, followed by a stint at the Bowhaus in Erie, Colorado.

Another trend in pet care pun names involves wishful (wagful?) recasting of beloved TV shows and classic movies. Barks and Recreation and Barking Bad take home top awards in the television category. Two Oscar contenders make an appearance (Citizen Canine, The Dogfather), as do a couple of adventure blockbusters (Indiana Bones and the Temple of Groom, The Crate Escape). Any intellectual property concerns can be directed to Barker & Meowski: A Paw Firm in Chicago. 

Sorting through all these submissions can be ruff, so here are some highlights:

—Variations on doggy style ("Doggie Style," "Doggie Styles," "Doggie Stylez," "Doggy Style," "Doggy Styles"), with 12 total examples.
—4 plays on "canine"
—3 musical references: Cats on Broadway, Wagtime, Wizard of Paws
—3 examples of "The Barking Lot," in 3 different cities
—Chicago and Portland are tied with 5 submissions each. Virginia Woof Dog Daycare gives Portland the edge. 

Editor's picks:

Ace of Spays (Hainesport, NJ)

Bark Side of the Moon (Chicago, IL)

Bark Harbor (Bar Harbor, ME)

Barking Bad Grooming (Albuquerque, NM)

Chateau Marmutt (Los Angeles, CA)

Citizen Canine (Chicago, IL and Oakland, CA)

Crate & Marrow (Charlottesville, VA)

Fine Whines and Lickers (Pittsfield, MA)

Howl To The Chief (Washington, DC)

Howl-A-Day Inn (El Paso, TX)

Indiana Bones and the Temple of Groom (Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, CA)

K9dergarten (Jersey City, NJ)

Pretty Coat Junction (Lakewood, OH)

Snip Doggy Dog (Des Moines IA and Fairfield CT)

Tails Of Two Cities (Minneapolis, MN)

The Crate Escape (Cambridge, MA)

Vanity Fur (Millbrook, AL)

Virginia Woof Dog Daycare (Portland,OR)

Here are the other categories:

Coffee shops

Bar/Pubs 

Other (including retail stores, vape shops and lots of yarn stores)

Doctors and Dentists

Food Trucks

Restaurants

Cleaning Businesses/Flower Shops/Portable Bathrooms

Hair/Nail Salons

The full list:

A clip from ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst's timelapse video. (Photo: ESA/YouTube)

Astronauts on board the International Space Station orbit the earth approximately once every 90 minutes at a speed of nearly 17,500 miles per hour. They see around 15 sunrises and sunsets every day, and observe weather systems from some 250 miles above the earth. Fortunately for the rest of us, these extraordinary views have been captured by European Space Agency astronauts in the form of timelapse videos.

The short videos show thunderstorms across Africa, Western Europe illuminated at night, and perhaps most strikingly, the haunting green glow of an aurora. Atlas Obscura has collected the ESA’s most hypnotically beautiful timelapse videos, below.

The Aurora Borealis, photographed by ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from the ISS:

Western Europe, from the ISS, as seen by ESA astronaut André Kuipers:  

Lighting strikes from space, made from 49 images taken 250 miles above the earth:

From the Canary Islands to Italy, as captured by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti:

An orbit of the earth with lighting, auroras and sunrise by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst:

 Thunderstorms over Africa captured in April 2015 by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti:

The flea (Photo: George Poinar, Jr.)

A flea that has been preserved for 20 million years in an amber mine in the Dominican Republic had some company all that time: tiny bacteria that look an awful lot like the Black Death.

When George Poinar, Jr., an entomology researcher at Oregon State University, examined the flea, he noticed that the it had a bump on its rear end. Fleas that carry the plague tend to have this bump due to the bacteria that collect there and on a flea's proboscis. When Poinar looked the amber mine flea's proboscis, he found bacteria there, too. They had the distinct shape of Yersinia pestis, which caused the Black Death.

These bacteria, then, may have been a very distant ancestor of that disease, which means Yersinia pestis has a much longer history than we previously knew about. The Black Death version of the bacteria evolved about 20,000 years ago, which was around the time that fleas started spreading plagues to creatures like rats and humans. 

But this discovery shows, as Poinar says, that Yersinia pestis predates the human race. These tiny organisms really are good at surviving no matter what the planet throws at them. Don't be surprised if viruses and bacteria inherit the Earth, and probably Mars, too.

Bonus finds: Bronze age sauna, Antikythera shipwreck knick-knacks

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

A room at the Sneek Zand Hotel (Photo: Zand Hotel)

Have you ever seen one of those huge, beautiful, detailed sandcastles and just wanted to crawl inside and spend the night? Well, don't do that—sandcastles don't have wifi. Instead, get 100% less grit in your private areas by spending the night on a real bed in one of the Netherlands' temporary sandcastle hotels. 

The two Zand Hotels, in the awesomely-named towns of Oss and Sneek, are the first hotels of their kind in the world. Event planning company Global PowWow was inspired by Sweden's ice hotels to construct these beautifully-detailed lodgings for attendees of the local sand castle festivals.

The festivals feature about 30 large sand sculptures each, using nearly 900 total tons of sand, but none are as massive as the 26-foot structures that house the hotel accommodations.

The exterior of the Oss Zand Hotel (Photo: Zand Hotel)

The rooms have wifi, running water, electricity, and real furnishings, so you're not getting the full beached-mermaid experience, but that's probably for the best. The walls are also made of reinforced sand and concrete, so you won't be washed out if it rains. Slightly less authentic, but probably worth it to avoid paying $168 a night to end up like this.

Detail at the foot of a Zand Hotel bed (Photo: Zand Hotel)

It's too late to book the sand hotels this year, but they'll be up for the rest of the week. When the festival sculptures come down, so do the hotels—but they'll be back next year.

 After a week in the sand hotel, you might never have to exfoliate again.

Definitely an iceberg (Photo: Rita Willaert/Wikimedia)

When the International Ice Patrol first started searching the North Atlantic for icebergs, after the Titanic sunk in 1912, a ship would make its way into the middle of the ocean, find the southernmost iceberg and babysit it for the rest of the season. When the iceberg moved, so would the ship. By reporting its position to boats trying to cross the ocean, it could keep them out of the way of all the other giant pieces of glacier floating through the water. As long as ships stayed south of that iceberg, they were most likely safe.

“We knew really well where that iceberg was,” says Mike Hicks, the chief science and oceanographer for the IIP. “But we had just a small glimpse of a very large area.”

In the 1940s, the patrol, which is part of the U.S. Coast Guard, vastly expanded its field of vision when the team started using planes to scout out icebergs across the ocean. But for decades the patrol has been thinking about how to surveil the sea from even further upwards, by using satellites.

As early as the 1960s, the International Ice Patrol recognized the potential of spying on icebergs from space; in the 1970s, it seemed clear that satellites would be key to the patrol’s future. “As satellite technology improves, all iceberg production and glacier retreat monitoring will be accomplished remotely and at comparatively little expense,” the patrol’s annual report on the season of 1974 predicted.

But actually incorporating satellite imagery into the daily operations of the organization is more complicated than it might sound. One of the only things keeping icebergs from sinking ships is the information the patrol sends out daily and weekly to mariners, and that information needs to be entirely reliable. Satellites, though, are not: right now, they still have a hard time telling an iceberg from a ship.

The International Ice Patrol in 1943 (Photo: USCGC/Wikimedia)

The International Ice Patrol itself is made up of just 16 people, and their home base these day is in Groton, Connecticut, even though the planes the team uses to patrol come from North Carolina and they run the actual patrols from Newfoundland, in Canada. During the active iceberg season, which runs from February to August, Coast Guard pilots will fly the planes from North Carolina to Connecticut, pick up the Ice Patrol team, and fly to St. John’s, a city on the tip of the Avalon Peninsula, which juts far east into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Ice Patrol team will stay up there for 7 to 10 days, and fly out over the ocean as much as they can. The patrol also track currents, winds and ice conditions, and Hicks uses that data to advise the patrol commander about where to target the flights. Even from the sky, there’s only so much area that the patrol can cover. And some days the mercurial weather is bad enough that planes can’t fly at all. A forecast might look good, but in the morning, the fog will be so thick that it’s impossible to see 100 feet.

These flights aren’t the Ice Patrol's only source of information. Ships that happen to sight icebergs will send reports. Oil and gas companies that operate on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland have their own planes flying reconnaissance flights, and they share that information with the Ice Patrol, too. But most of the IIP’s reconnaissance work depends on the Coast Guard planes.

Those planes, though, aren’t only flying ice patrols. When they’re not in Newfoundland, they might be sent on search-and-rescue missions or to support the Coast Guard’s work to stop drug smuggling. “They're in very high demand to fulfill other Coast Guard missions,” says Hicks. And that’s one reason why the Coast Guard wants to start using the satellites more.

Also definitely an iceberg (Photo: Drew Avery/Wikimedia)

Using satellites to identify ice was a early and obvious application of the technology: the IIP works with agencies like the Canadian Ice Service and the National Ice Center that have a long history of spying ice from above. The Canadian Ice Service is charged with understanding ice conditions in Canada's navigable waters, which include parts of the Arctic Ocean, and the vast and remote nature of that region means that it’s almost impossible to survey with planes alone.

But there are different types of ice to spy on: sea ice—frozen ocean water—is relatively easy to measure from above. Icebergs are whole different story. “We're looking for a tiny moving dot in the ocean,” says Hicks.

The first challenge of using satellite, for the IIP, is that the area in which they operate is covered with clouds 75 to 80 percent of the time. Satellites that collect visible or infrared images just deliver pictures of clouds—not exactly helpful for monitoring icebergs. The Ice Patrol didn’t start seriously experimenting with using satellite images until 1997, when a Canadian company, in partnership with the country’s space agency, launched Radarsat-1, a satellite equipped with a type of radar with a particularly fine resolution.

The images that the radar delivers, looking down on the ocean from above, are just bright spots against a darker background. “It’s not a very clear picture of an iceberg,” says Hicks. That’s sometimes true for the radars that the Coast Guard’s planes use, too. But in a plane, when a spot isn't clearly a berg or a boat, the patrol members can zoom the radar in to observe the mystery object in more detail or they can fly down lower towards the ocean to inspect it.

Satellite images, though, don’t have that flexibility. They’re first examined by a computer algorithm, which identifies possible icebergs; those are analyzed by a person who helps determine what the satellite has actually seen. Ships, says Hicks, tend to have standard shapes, and sometimes, a wake will appear behind a ship for miles. Icebergs are more irregularly shaped, and the radar technology on the satellite can sometimes observe that. 

Still, though, as the IIP wrote in its 2011 report, “Distinguishing between icebergs and vessels is also a significant challenge.”

Icebergs as seen from a helicopter (Photo: Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia)

At the moment, the IIP is working with its partners at other government agencies and in the private sector to teach the algorithms that read satellite data what an iceberg looks like and what a ship looks like. The patrol tries to coordinate their flights with the satellite passes: if they know that they saw an iceberg at a particular place, at a particular time, they can use that information to build a profile that will train the computer to distinguish a giant pile of ice from a giant pile of metal.

There is a certain trade-off between examining a wider area and detailed knowledge about the icebergs they're monitoring. Back in the early days of the Ice Patrol, they knew a lot about that one southernmost iceberg. “You knew how big the iceberg was, and you knew exactly where it was,” says Hicks. But they only knew about that one. Now, says Hicks, “we’re covering more area, but know less about the individual objects.”  

Identifying bergs through satellite images doesn't require the same level of intimacy that the Ice Patrol had with its targets back at the beginning. But the strategy does need to be able to reliably identify icebergs. Right now, iceberg spotting via satellite still misses significant numbers of the icebergs that the Ice Patrol finds: there’s only about a 50 percent overlap.

If the accuracy of the satellite reconnaissance improves, though, the patrol could have a much clearer view of the movements of icebergs over a much wider swath of ocean. Ship captains navigating treacherous stretches would better know what to expect when they spot frozen peaks on the horizon. 

Rollerman gears up for action. (Photo: Buggy-rollin.com)

When Frenchman Jean Yves Blondeau took a step back and considered his first roller suit, he thought, “Oh shit, I created a superhero.” 

And when Blondeau, now 45, transforms into Rollerman and hurtles down steep roads and windy bobsled tracks at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour, he looks so much like a superhero that you wonder how Green Lantern beat Rollerman to the silver screen.

But superheroes were nowhere on his radar when he was casting around in 1994 for his final project at the National School of Applied Arts in Paris at the age of 24. He wanted to discover a new area of design but also create something that didn’t yet exist, perhaps even something that filled gaps in gliding postures in sports. Combining these impulses with his love for skating, he created a suit of full-body armor equipped with 32 wheels placed on the feet, knees, torso, and arms. 

And so the strange sport of Buggy Rollin was born. 

A whole contingent of body bladers, reporting to Blondeau, far left. (Photo: Buggy-rollin.com)

Buggy Rollin, a term coined by Blondeau, is also known as body blading, roller suiting, and wheel suiting. At first sight, it might transport you back to the 1985 film classic Return to Oz, featuring gangly creeps/creatures called Wheelers who sprouted wheels in the place of hands and feet. But Blondeau was neither inspired by Wheelers nor by Marvel (which he dislikes); he was simply focused on function. His roller suit began looking super-heroic because of its design, created to be fast, protective, and aerodynamic—a little like Formula 1, he explains. Your center of gravity is very low when your nose is two or three inches from the ground and the only thing between you and the pavement a few small wheels.

“You have to skate with your own body,” he explains. “Every phenomena of acceleration and braking, you have to learn. It’s like swimming; everything is important—left, right, foot, knee.”

Blondeau says it’s like being a human jet, especially at night when it feels like he’s flying in deep, empty space. Compressed in the present, it’s like explosions are going off in his head, he says.

Rollerman in Japan: The man behind the legend. (Photo: Buggy-rollin.com)

Jean Yves Blondeau grew up in a household where if you couldn’t buy something, you tried to make it. His father constructed his own skis to practice ski jumping, his brothers built their own skateboards, and his mother created art. In the 1980s, kids in France saw pictures of American roller-skates but couldn’t find them in shops, so 10 year-old Blondeau designed his own pair using soccer shoes and skateboard trucks. In graduate school he further pursued his interest in locomotion and human balance while traveling to school each day by skate.

Blondeau didn’t have much to work with when he built his first suit. He used materials available at the school’s workshop, such as PVC and glass fiber, and scavenged wheels from old skates and strollers. He bought a helmet for five francs at a flea market, which he remodeled using foam padding from a camping mattress, and somehow patched it all together. The suit doesn’t feature brakes, instead relying on the wearer to properly reposition himself to decelerate.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Blondeau's roller armor patent. Since then, he says he’s produced between 25 and 27 suits total, with eight or nine suits currently stationed at his home in the mountains near Annecy, France. He builds each suit by hand as one would build a musical instrument—with a lot of time and a lot of love, he says. The suits weigh about 37.5 pounds each, not factoring in the skates, and sell for 3,500 euros ($3,937) a pop. Blondeau receives regular requests for suits, but most people decide they’re too expensive, a problem he is still working on. “I expect one day to achieve, to sell suits all over the world at a good price,” he told me.

Getting ready to roll.  (Photo: Buggy-rollin.com)

Blondeau is tall and spritely. He has disheveled gray hair, bushy eyebrows, and green-gray eyes set in a very lean face. His English is fluent though accented and he smiles a lot. His home office is cluttered with artwork, sketches, comic books, textbooks, and the constant bouncing around of ideas. 

When Blondeau suits up and becomes Rollerman, his identity transforms. First, he says, come the superhuman feelings, and then comes the android sensation—what it might be like to have an exoskeleton or be a cyborg, caught somewhere between man and machine. 

“When you experience Buggy Rollin, it’s the body, mind, the heart … you breathe, you smell, you can get injured,” he says. “Everything is changing. To have the experience in life, everything is changing."

Rollerman and Buggy Rollin first began to attract attention in 1997, in South Korea. At the time, Blondeau was all over Korean television, with strangers constantly coming up to request signatures. But trends move quickly, he says, and his celebrity status soon shifted to Japan.

Nowadays, the hype has moved to China, where Blondeau's rolled down all types of courses, including a 20-minute descent around 99 hairpin turns on Tianmin Mountain in central China. He’s got an active invite to tackle a hill in China that’s steep enough for a new record, but his hosts have refused to tell him where it is, and the roads aren’t even on the map yet.

 (Photo: Buggy-rollin.com)

When I ask him about America, Blondeau puts on a gruff American accent and reenacts the phone call that led to his first major film debut: “Hi, it’s Hollywood. We are making a new movie of Jim Carrey, can you come to Hollywood?” One of the staff of the 2008 movie Yes Man had seen a clip of Buggy Rollin and wanted to incorporate it into the film’s script.

Blondeau brought four suits to California—one for him, one for Jim Carrey, one for Zooey Deschanel, and one for her stunt double, whom he had to train. Blondeau enjoyed the big-budget experience, but the short cameo, to his disappointment, didn’t end up making a big splash for Buggy Rollin in the States.

Jackie Chan’s 2012 flick Chinese Zodiac did a lot more to heighten his status, at least in China. Chan incorporated the roller suit into his fast-paced action flick, giving it a lot more screen time than Yes Man. (Check out a trailer showcasing the roller suit here.) Blondeau has now rolled all over China, from Chengdu and Guangzhou to Shanghai and Xi’an. Europe and Japan are growing older and slower, he says, but China is dynamic.

 (Photo: Buggy-rollin.com)

Blondeau has high hopes and lots of ideas for the future. In addition to scaling up production of Buggy Rollin, he’d love to see the creation of micro-amusement parks or resorts dedicated to gravity sports. He’s working on something called Buggy Ski, and he wants to learn 3D modeling and run more CGI. He’s also writing a story that he hopes to turn into a comic or film, though he’s keeping that secret for now. On top of all that, he'd like to spend more time learning Japanese and Chinese, but he also must squeeze in some skating practice a few times a week.

Even if Rollerman makes it to the big screen, no Hollywood hunk or hottie du jour will ever live up to the superhero's creator. No one will ever truly embody Rollerman in the way that Blondeau does—and after all, being a true superhero is not easy. It can even be lonely.

“I live it, I sweat in it, I bleed in it; I really put life in this thing, and I know it from the inside,” he says. “Right now, I’m just fighting alone in a corner of France."

Hippol Castle, headquarters of the Order of Gimghoul. (Photo: Theevilfluffyface/WikiCommons)

Inside a medieval-style castle on the wooded grounds of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, members of the Order of Gimghoul engage in Masonic-style rituals, the details of which are a mystery to the non-initiated.

Over at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, women known as the fairies of Freya don dark robes and take late-night walks by the glow of a candle.

Collegiate secret societies, and the mysterious behavior that goes along with them, are very much alive in America.

Secret societies bring impressionable undergrads together to make career-enabling connections, forge personal bonds, and, of course, drink. Many are founded in honor of campus legends and incorporate centuries-old imagery and customs—the druids, the masons, and the knights of the round table are popular influences. Yale's Skull & Bones Society, established 1832, has perhaps the greatest name recognition, but there are plenty of others that inspire fascination. Take UNC’s Gimghoul, originally called the Order of Drumgoole, which was founded by five UNC students in 1889.

The logo for Yale's Skull & Bones secret society. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Dromgoole got its name from a bit of campus lore. In 1833, a duel purportedly took place between UNC student Peter Dromgoole and a mysterious drifter. Standing right where the castle is now, the pair apparently dueled over the affections of a Miss Fanny until, according to the prevalent version of the story, Dromgoole was killed and buried beneath a large, bloodstained rock on the property. Legend holds that Miss Fanny frequented the site, pining for her lost love. She eventually died of sorrow, became a ghost, and haunted the property. (Veracity check: records at UNC show that a Peter Dromgoole applied to UNC in 1833. However, he failed the entrance exam, and many people claim he left for Europe and never came back.)

According to Gimghoul’s archives, the Order of Dromgoole founders soon changed their name to the spookier sounding Order of Gimghoul, "in accord with midnight and graves and weirdness.”  Over time, the men-only group “consolidated its beliefs and customs into a combination of the Dromgoole legend and the ideals of Arthurian knighthood and chivalry." In 1926, Gimghoul members pooled their money and built the castle in the UNC woods. To this day, the anonymous order offers scholarships and holds secret ceremonies in the castle, which is equipped with secret-keeping slatted windows.

Gimghoul has a formidable history, but it is far from being the oldest secret society. That honor goes to the Flat Hat Club, founded at the College of William and Mary in Virginia way back in 1750. Flat Hat was created primarily as a drinking club at the famed Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. Thomas Jefferson was a member and allegedly claimed the society “served no useful object.” Though the Flat Hat Club disappeared from college life for decades, word is that it has been revived in modern times.  

Members of the Flat Hat Club in the 1921 College of William and Mary's student yearbook. (Photo: Internet Archive/flickr)

One of the strangest and longest running societies is Mystical Seven at Wesleyan in Connecticut, founded in 1837. One of the seven student founders, Hamilton Brewer—“the sacred brewer,” according to university scholars—helped invent “a complex, arcane set of practices and rituals, including pseudonyms, a special calendar, a vocabulary and their own code of parliamentary procedure.” Members call themselves “Mystics,” and refer to the University as the land of “Willburia,” after a former college president. Everything is centered around the number seven—their former seven-sided clubhouse, their seal, and their songs.  

A sign of the Seven Society at the University of Virginia. (Photo: Queerbubbles/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

An obsession with the number seven, considered magical and sacred in many ancient traditions, can be found in several other well-known collegiate secret societies, including the incredibly wealthy Seven Society of the University of Virginia. Founded in the early 1900s, supposedly when only seven members turned up for a two-table bridge game, it has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the University—all in an elaborate manner that emphasizes sevens. According to UVA historians, during commencement in 1947, there was a small explosion, after which a check for $177,777.77 floated from the stage. In 2008, a check for $14,777.77 was delivered to the University at Scott Stadium by a skydiver carrying a large “Seven” flag. Members’ names are only revealed upon their death, and during their funeral the UVA Chapel bells “toll in increments of seven, every seven seconds, in a dissonant seventh chord, for seven minutes,” says UVA’s magazine.

The original members of the Mystical Seven. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Perhaps the most mirthful of all secretive college organizations is the NoZe Brotherhood of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In 1924, a joke regarding a student named Leonard Shoaf’s nose, which was said to be “of such great length and breadth of nostril” that you could “form a club around it,” led to the formation of the NoZe. Members have their own language, wear rubber noses and wigs to protect their identity, and publish a satirical campus magazine called The Rope. Their officers have titles like the Bearer of the Enlightening Rod of Elmo, the Lorde Mayor and the Shekel Keeper. The group is known for its notorious pranks, which have included dropping 4,000 ping-pong balls in the University Chapel, and repeatedly painting a campus bridge pink.

The NoZe Brotherhood, circa 2002. (Photo: cjosefy/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

Due to their secretive nature, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain just what these organizations are up to. Although Rutgers University in New Jersey has a very well-known society, the 115-year-old Cap and Skull Society,which meets in front of an actual human skull wearing a graduation cap, it is also home to a group so elusive that it probably doesn’t exist at all. Known as the Order of the Bulls Blood, it was supposedly founded in 1834—or possibly 1875. It has been said that the group has been pranking the campus for over a century, and that its members include former NBA commissioner David Stern. One former student claimed to have been “tapped” by the organization in the early 2000s.  However, the order is almost certainly a hoax, started during the 1990s, when the internet made creating the history of a society as easy as opening a Wikipedia page. When asked about its existence, an official at the school wrote back, “We do not have any information on this alleged secret society here at Rutgers.”

Of course, since the key to these secret societies is that members remained tight-lipped, “no information” may very well mean “none of your business.”

Leave a light on for, you know, ghosts. (Photo: aerogondo2/shutterstock.com) 

 For fans, lights are a vital part of the theatergoing experience. Rows of expectant ticket holders wait for the lights to go down and then they wait for them to go up so they know the journey is over. Plenty of tourists trot down New York’s Broadway just to gawk at the marquees.

But for lots of cast and crew, the most atmospheric of all theater lights is a bare bulb called a “ghost light”.

Stage manager Matt Stern has worked almost two dozen Broadway shows over nearly 20 years and in May he held the first ever Broadway Stage Manager Symposium in New York. As the person responsible for ensuring everything stays on schedule, including musical cues, Stern ran “Full Monty” and “The Little Mermaid”. He’s worked on “Wicked”, “Phantom of the Opera” and “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Les Miserable”. And for every single show he’s ensured that there will be a ghost light burning through the night.

“The ghost light is basically a lamp that’s left onstage when all the work is finished in the theater, and everyone’s gone home for the evening,” says Stern. The orchestra pit, he explains, can be around ten feet lower the stage. “So when they power off everything in the building, that’s the one little globe that’s left on so that no one walks in the theater and stumbles off the stage and breaks their neck.”

Of course, that’s just the practical reason.

“The superstition around it is that theaters tend to be inhabited by ghosts,” says Stern. “Whether it’s the ghost of old actors or people who used to work in the building, and ghost lights are supposed to keep those ghosts away so that they don’t get mischievous while everyone else is gone.”

The exact origins of the ghost light is murky, although there are some popular theories. Theater scholar James Fisher writes in Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings that the ghost light “comes from the days of gas-lit theatres and refers to dimly lit gaslights used to relieve pressure on gas valves”. In another tome The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism he relates a popular legend that a burglar once snuck into a Broadway theater, fell from the darkened stage, broke his leg, and then sued the theater. And of course there is the pervasive belief that the light will either ward off ghosts or distract them. 

The ghost light is also sometimes called the “Equity Lamp” which implies that it was once required by the Actor’s Equity Association but Stern says he does not know of any official mandate requiring ghost lights today.

For such hallowed objects, the lights  are humble often just a bare low-wattage bulb on top of a staff. (In keeping with the times, energy efficient halogen or LED bulbs are becoming more common, says Stern.) But despite their unglamorous nature, Stern says that every theater he has ever traveled to maintains one, except in very rare occasions.

A ghost light visible in a darkened theatre. (Photo: Ellwood jon/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Stern stage manages both Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show “Mandy Patinkin: Dress Casual” and his duet show with Patti Lupone, “An Evening with Mandy Patinkin and Patti Lupone”. In both, the ghost light becomes part of the performance. In Patinkin’s solo act, he interacts with objects on the stage, including the ghost light, which becomes “like the moon” says Stern. In the duet show, Patinkin and Lupone share the stage with 29 ghost lights, which glow in different colors. The most recent season of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” featured a ghost light- themed routine. Theater critic Frank Rich called his memoir “Ghost Light”. Plenty of theaters have incorporated the tradition into their name; there is a Ghostlight Theatre in Sun City West, Arizona and in North Towanda, New York. Seattle has a theater company called Ghost Light Theatricals. 

 “The idea of the ghostlight on the stage in a dark theater is very, very magic,” says Stern. “You see that little glow on stage, you can see the edge of the proscenium, like ‘Wow, we’re in this place where anything can happen, who knows what ghosts are lurking around and what wonderful shows have been here before.’”

Visitors to New York's Grand Central Terminal are usually rushing frantically to catch a train. But if they just paused for a moment in front of the famous Oyster Bar on the lower concourse, they would witness some very unusual behavior.

Broad shouldered financiers, Italian moms on vacation, Manhattan grandpas, tourists, locals, and even station employees all perform the same bizarre ritual. They sidle up to the arched corners of a room near the Oyster Bar, and then mush themselves face-first into the crevice like a bad child being punished. When they turn around, everyone is grinning ear to ear. They have experienced the wonder of the whispering gallery.

Each of these naughty corner talkers has an accomplice, someone standing in the opposite arch, who is their partner in acoustic mischief. Despite the noise and chaos of Grand Central the two people in the corners are able whisper sweet nothings, profane jokes, and even marriage proposals to one another. 

A simple wonder, the whispering gallery works its magic every time. 

Reflection in a globe with camera and tripod, 1870. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Of all the forms of early photography, the stereograph was the most popular, affordable and successful. First invented in London by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, a stereograph was two nearly identical images placed side by side. By working with the slightly differing viewpoints of the left eye and right eye, the twin images could become one three-dimensional picture when viewed through a device called a stereoscope.

During the mid to late 1800s, countless images were made for every possible subject. Stereographs were so popular that it was said that every home had a stereoscope. The stereograph was also used for to educate. During the Civil War in particular, thousands of stereographs were produced of soldiers, battlefields, encampments and hospitals. 

There are many stereograph collections around the world, and each provides a unique insight into life in the 1800s. Atlas Obscura has scoured through admittedly only a portion of the mammoth collections held by the Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library to bring you a glimpse of one of the 19^th century’s most popular forms of entertainment.  

Camel drivers waiting at gate of the Taj Mahal, India, 1903. (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr)

A staged stereograph showing an angel and devil try to influence a friar, late 1800s. (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr)

A Company barber shop, possibly during the Spanish-American War, 1899.  (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr)

'The apple woman', Boston Common. (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr)

Vacation sports at Coney Island, 1898. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Looking up his pedigree, 1898. (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr)

Wright aeroplane ready for a flight, Fort Myer, 1915. (Photo: Library of Congress)

President Roosevelt's inauguration address, 1905. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

Major General William T. Sherman, center, leaning on the breach of a cannon, with his staff at Federal Fort No. 7 near Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The first Union wagon train entering Petersburg, Virginia, with provisions, 1865. (Photo: Library of Congress)

San Francisco's magnificent City Hall and Hall of Records, destroyed by fire and earthquake, 1906. (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr)

Frederick Villiers, 'the greatest of living war artists', during the 1905 Russian-Japanese war. (Photo: Boston Public Library/flickr) 

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

When Jeff Wysaski of Obvious Plant puts up one of his creations, he does not stick around to see the reactions. When he’s on a job, leaving fake signs and objects in his gym, at IKEA, in book stores, in chain stores, on the street or at a museum, he tries to be sneaky. Once the deed is done, “I run away as fast as possible,” he says.

Since January, Wysaski, a Los Angeles comedy writer who runs the website Pleated Jeans, has been planting jokes in the real world. They are delightful breaks in the world’s mundanity, like the Donald Trump pamphlet at the doctor’s office...

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

...a fridge that totally does NOT have bats in it…

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

...or the business that’s very flexible about payment options. 

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

“The joy for me is not seeing someone discover it. The joy is knowing that it’s there for people to discover,” Wysaski says. “I want them to find something extraordinary in an ordinary place.”

He got started on this particular project after losing interest in the web comics and other forms of internet humor he’d been pursuing. He’d put up funny signs before, and it happened that, around this time, ideas for jokes in public places started flooding his brain. For the first plant that he characterizes as “a little more adventurous,” he paid $20 or $30 to have a legitimate-looking sign made up, listing rules for a park.

He stuck it in the ground at the park near his house:

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

The reaction to that sign, when he posted the photo on the web, convinced him that this was a genre worth exploring. Soon, he was crafting one or two plants a week and has executed more than 70 so far this year. And, yes, he leaves them up. And, no, they’re not photoshopped.

Some are simple signs, but others are much, much more elaborate. One of his favorite but most time-intensive projects involved writing fake book covers—front, back and inside flaps—and planting them in an actual bookstore. Making the covers took 20 to 30 hours, but it was worth it. After some Obvious Plant fans found the store, went to take pictures and pointed the books out to the store’s employees, the books were displayed prominently, at asking prices of tens of thousands of dollars.

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

The first couple of times that Wysaski went into a public space to plant a joke, he was nervous and kept looking around, for someone to stop him. But soon he realized that everyone around him was just going about their day, unconcerned with whatever he was up to.

“It’s amazing how inattentive people are,” he says. “No one is expecting someone to go into a store and put up fake signs. I’ve done it in front of employees, and they don’t notice.”

Occasionally, too, his plants will stay up for longer than one might expect. A fake hiring sign he put up in Best Buy was there for three whole months.

Right now, Obvious Plant is a local phenomenon, broadcast to the world via Tumblr and Facebook. Most of the plants were placed somewhere within a five-mile radius of Wysaski’s house. He’ll go into stores and look for something mundane, maybe a type of sign that can be replicated, so that from a distance his plant will look like it belongs. The best spots for plants, he says, are very ordinary places where he can put something exceptional.

“You go to a grocery store, weekly, or several times a month. It’s drudgery,” he says. “You’re not prepared to be confronted with something that you’re not expecting.”

Soon, he might try capturing the moments when people find his plants. “There are certain ideas I have that would provoke more interesting responses,” he says. “I can’t really discuss it right now. We’ll say... in the future there may be opportunity to see people’s reactions.” 

(Photo: Jeff Wysaski/Obvious Plant)

Just another shampoo ad contributing to the cultural lexicon. (Image: Youtube)

Modern speech is riddled with catchphrases and cliched sayings. Even if you buckle down and give 110 percent of your attention, you've got a snowball's chance in hell of being able to recognize the origins of every cliche. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Many sayings infiltrate our conversation so easily because they started out as ad slogans, literally designed to worm their way into our lives. The most effective of those advertising brain worms outlive their original purpose, becoming a cliche that seems to have sprung up organically, rather than in a Madison Avenue boardroom. In the interest of letting everyone know that they’ve been sold to, here are the forgotten ads behind eight classic sayings.

“When it rains, it pours!”

If things are going poorly and the world seems to be crashing down around you, its a fair bet someone will utter the classic truism, “When it rains, it pours.” You might even mutter it yourself. But as it turns out, this homespun-sounding phrase came into the world to sell salt. Similar sentiment has existed for time immemorial but that specific construction of the phrase was invented in 1911 by a marketing company to advertise a special property of Morton Salt. Read totally literally, the phrase is actually describing the fact that Morton Salt won’t clump up when it gets humid or rains (they added magnesium to absorb moisture), as other salts apparently did. Even the iconic logo showing a girl spilling salt while walking in the rain alludes to this. The phrase is still the Morton slogan, but it is better known as a source of cold comfort to sadsacks everywhere.   

“Sorry, Charlie.”

Maybe you’ve heard your parents or grandparents say this to assuage one of life’s little let-downs. But this saying is not just a bit of sing-songy assonance, it was originally the somewhat grim catchphrase for a StarKist Tuna ad campaign that ran from the 1960s to the 1980s, encompassing over 80 television spots. The campaign featured Charlie the Tuna, a hip-to-the-jive fish whose goal in life was to be caught by StarKist, chopped into little bits, and canned. His reasoning? He had good taste. Get it? Of course StarKist was looking for tuna that tastes good, not the other way around, so Charlie would always be answered with a note that said, “Sorry, Charlie.” The somewhat convoluted gag is mostly forgotten to time, but the punchline has survived as a cheeky catchphrase that takes the sting out of disappointment. As the StarKist mascot, Charlie the Tuna has also survived, which he probably isn’t very happy about.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

This classic can usually be heard being jokingly bandied about as someone struts and preens, feigning cartoonish vanity. But it was real-life vanity that created the saying. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” was a catchphrase uttered by actress and model Kelly LeBrock during a 1986 television commercial for Pantene shampoo. The commercial is a classic shampoo ad with an achingly '80s LeBrock talking into the camera about the product, but it was that first line that became a phenomenon. The star of Weird Science and The Woman in Red initially wasn’t even very happy about the line, and even turned down the role before being dragged back in by a dogged producer who chased her down the hall. And a good thing they did too, as the phrase was an instant classic, spreading into a print campaign, and the larger cultural consciousness. Many have forgotten that it was LeBrock and Pantene who created the saying, but nobody’s forgetting that cliche any time soon.     

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

Who hasn’t tripped or stumbled and uttered this quote to save a little face? It sounds like something that might have come from a movie, but the line has its origins in a television commercial for an emergency alert device for seniors—and was not meant to be funny at all. The ad, which first appeared in 1987, was for LifeCall, a system that provided the elderly with an electric button that could instantly call emergency services. It shows a series of snippets of injured or helpless seniors, one of whom shouts the famous line in an unforgettable Yiddish accent. The line isn’t explicitly funny, but the commercial’s dramatization was corny enough to make it look like a gag. The phrase quickly spread, and was used and parodied all over the place including TV shows like Roseanne and Family Matters. The line is still well known today, even though the commercial is long gone. It seems to be able to pick itself up just fine.        

“A little dab'll do ya.”

And a simple slogan can be more than enough to create a classic phrase. Another, rather antiquated, but undeniably ubiquitous phrase, “A little dab’ll do ya” isn’t just something people say as a cheeky way of telling you you don’t need much. It came into the world back in the 1950s as part of a jingle for Brylcreem “hair dressing.” In the original black-and-white commercial, a young man with dry, lifeless hair uses Brylcreem to give his hair a moist look that a female voiceover hilariously describes as “excitingly clean, disturbingly healthy.” The ad ends with a peppy little jingle that goes:

Brylcreem—a little dab'll do ya

Brylcreem—you look so debonair

Brylcreem—the girls will all pursue ya

They love to get their fingers in your hair!

Accompanied by a jazzy little puppet, the jingle was a memorable hit and its first line became a classic colloquialism.

“Don't leave home without it.”

Another classic quip that can be heard everywhere from the TV shows like The Sopranos to movies like Batman and Robin to that one person everyone knows who thinks they’re so clever. But this one, too, originated as an advertising slogan, this time for American Express Traveler’s Cheques. The campaign started in the mid-1970s and ran for decades. The first ad featured actor Karl Malden, who became the face of American Express, as he told a sinister story of a successful pickpocket before reminding viewers that their Amex traveler’s cheques could easily be replaced, finally counseling not to leave home without them. The instantly iconic line continued to be used in print and television ads, even as Malden was replaced by other celebrities in the commercials. By the late 1990s the campaign was phased out, but the catchphrase remained. It was reintroduced in 2005, but by then most people would be forgiven for thinking that American Express had stolen it from the general culture.    

“It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Want to seem tough? Saying that you can “take a licking and keep on ticking” is probably not the way to do it. But at least people will know what you are talking about. What they might not know is that this classic phrase began as a watch ad. Developed by the Timex company in the 1950s, the catchy rhyme was the catchphrase attached to a series of print and television ads that saw Timex watches going through intense stress tests. In the very first television commercial, then famous and trusted newsman, John Cameron Swayze, demonstrated that the watch would still work after being attached to the end of an arrow and fired through a pane of glass. In another of the ads, a Timex was taped to a baseball bat and given to Mickey Mantle to hit a ball. The slogan survived into the 2000s before finally being retired. But like the watches themselves, the phrase was already ingrained in the common lexicon, even if people weren’t thinking of it as a Timex commercial.   

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

No one likes to see potential squandered, and there has maybe never been a more succinct manifestation of this feeling than the maxim, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” But what many forget is that this truism is actually an advertising slogan for the United Negro College Fund. First rolled out in 1972, the campaign stressed the importance of providing an education for African-Americans, with one of the earliest commercials memorably showing a man’s head slowly fading away. The phrase continued to be used as the UNCF’s motto in all of its advertising, and is still the Fund’s slogan today. But like others on this list, the phrase itself has taken on a power of its own, expanding into the general vernacular, and leaving its origin behind.

A sea turtle hatchling, playful and spunky in a piece from the Vision Research Collection. (Photo: University of Queensland)

Sea turtles already sport some of the best accessories in the animal kingdom—those shells are so scute! But thanks to University of Queensland researchers, some Australian loggerheads were recently outfitted with something even better: "stylish, customized swimsuits," tailored for each turtle out of material from gently used swim shirts.

This runway-worthy solution addressed a less glamorous problem—how to gather turtle feces, which normally disperse quickly in water. After ruling out a tail attachment, easily kicked off by a disgruntled turtle, PhD student Owen Coffee decided to try a kind of diaper-swimsuit combo to study the dietary habits of his endangered subjects.

Previous researchers had made something similar for hatchlings, so, like a late-season "Project Runway" contestant, all Coffee had to do was scale up the design and add some Velcro. It worked like a charm, and he soon had pounds of information about the reptiles' favorite foods. "Next time I do some research on the loggerhead, I'll be using this swimsuit on all of them for sure," Coffee told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

This adult loggerhead shows off a more daring piece from the 2015 Diaper Swimsuit line. (Photo: University of Queensland)

“The suits were easy to put on, comfortable for the sea turtles to wear, looked great, and Owen was able to collect the entire faecal sample," Dr. Kathy Townsend told UQ News. Would that all species were granted such effective clothing.

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

Securing the mammoth skull and tusks with straps before hoisting it out of the pit. (Photo: Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography)

Two soybean farmers in eastern Michigan were digging deep into a field, aiming to drain water, when, at about eight feet deep, they hit a substance that looked like wood. As the Detroit Free Press reports, the farmers soon realized they had struck not wood, but bone. 

Was it a dinosaur bone? They called the University of Michigan, who passed on the news to Daniel Fisher, at the school's Museum of Paleontology. Once on scene, Fisher determined that it wasn't a dinosaur the farmers had found—it was a mammoth.

Mammoth skull and tusks being hoisted from the excavation pit. (Photo: Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography)

Fisher and his colleague had just one day to uncover the mammoth's skeleton, because the farmers needed to get on with their work, according to the Free Press. They were able to find a head, tusks, ribs and some vertebrae; the missing pieces may have been taken away by humans who possibly killed the creature for food. 

There have been 30 or so other mammoths found in the state, the Free Press reports; this one, Fisher told the paper, may be a Jeffersonian mammoth—a hybrid that's not quite a Woolly mammoth and not quite a Columbian mammoth, but still very large, very impressive, and very much not what you find doing fieldwork every day.

Bonus finds: A Transylvanian horde, 600 kilos of cocaine made to look like coal

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

(Photo: Nattika/shutterstock.com) 

America loves peanut butter. The country spends nearly $800 million a year on it. The average child in the U.S. gulps down 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before graduating high school, if the National Peanut Board is to be believed. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa once asked rhetorically, “what’s more sacred than peanut butter?”  

Last month, former Peanut Corporation of America CEO Stuart Parnell was sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter in 2009.  According to the Justice Department, this was the “harshest criminal sentence ever in a food safety case.”  But this isn’t the first time the peanut butter industry has been roasted for delivering a subpar product. As the 1950s were drawing to a close, the FDA launched an “assault on inferior peanut butters” against the Peanut Butter Manufacturers of America. The story behind the resulting “Peanut Butter Hearings” is actually much stickier. 

In 1959, an FDA study revealed that several items that were labeled as “peanut butter” only contained 75% peanuts. Consumers were furious, and began calling the products “peanut-flavored face cream.” In prior decades, major manufacturers like JIF, Skippy, and Peter Pan had begun altering their recipes to cut costs. Hydrogenated oils were being used instead of more expensive peanut oil, and glycerin had become the favored sweetener. Something had to be done. 

A peanut vendor in 1910. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

In a 1959 press release, the FDA proposed enacting a peanut butter standard of 95 percent peanuts and five percent “optional” ingredients. Peanut butter manufacturers fought back, saying that consumers preferred their peanut butter sweeter and more easily spreadable. Consumer Reportsdidn’t buy it. Thus began what both the FDA and peanut butter lawyers would forever refer to as the great 12-year “Peanut Butter Case.” 

Back-and-forth haggling convinced the FDA to lower the standard to 90%, but the companies countered with 87%. The FDA refused to budge. Lawyers from both sides argued over the exact percentage, but also what “optional ingredients” had to be listed. As one FDA historian said in the book Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, “the peanut butter standard put many lawyers’ children through college.” In late 1964, five years after the original press release, the two sides finally agreed to meet for public hearings to determine how many peanuts actually had to be in peanut butter. 

In November 1965, after two postponements, the “Peanut Butter Hearings” began in a government building in a room that, as the Washington Post noted, had peanut-colored paneling. On one side were the well-paid lawyers of the Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association, representing JIF, Skippy, Peter Pan and other peanut butter companies. On the other side was the understaffed and underfunded FDA, trying to preserve peanut butter standards. The FDA had a secret weapon, though–the uncompromising head of the Federation of Homemakers, Ruth Desmond. 

A peanut butter advertisement from 1920. (Photo: Internet Archive Book Images/flickr) 

Even in 1965, Ruth Desmond was already known as a fierce consumer activist. In 1959, she formed the Arlington, Virginia-based Federation of Homemakers in response to the cranberry crisis of 1959–in which cranberry sauce was contaminated with a weed killer known to be a cancer-causing agent. In the early 1960s, Desmond had gone after meat inspection regulations, nitrates in baby foods and other consumer causes. In 1965, she approached the FDA to help with the peanut butter cause. 

Desmond was fearless, persistent and had a knack for sound bites, once telling a senior General Foods executive at a press conference that, “it amazes me how you gentlemen in the food industry are always concerned about having high quality food yourself. But you want the rest of us to eat sawdust.” 

Desmond attended every day of the hearings, which lasted 20 weeks and produced over 8,000 transcript pages. The press called her “Peanut Butter Grandma.” She would tell them that she couldn’t leave the house without first apologizing to her husband for not being able to make dinner that night. After all, being a consumer activist was a full-time job. “I cannot leave them alone, those lawyers,” she would recite as the punch line.  

An old tin of Peter Pan Peanut Butter. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The hearings dragged on, with the manufacturers arguing that the increased percentage would cause a “stifling of innovation” and that it would cause prices to rise for the consumer. The FDA argued that, at some point, the product stopped being peanut butter. To them, it was at that 90 percent mark. 

Ben Gutterman, who argued the FDA’s case at the hearings, would later say: “We weren’t saying that it was a bad product, only that it wasn’t what the consumer expected to find under the name. Does she expect to buy peanut butter, or a mixture of lard and peanuts, with maybe some turnip greens ground up in there besides? If that’s what the manufacturer wants, let him produce it, but under that name.”  

The hearings concluded in March 1966, with the general consensus being that the FDA was right. Despite this, it took another five years until the US Appeals Court affirmed the 90 percent standard. Finally, on May 3^rd, 1971, 12 years after it was first proposed, any peanut butter that was labeled as such had to have 90 percent peanuts. If it wasn’t, it could still be sold, but with the dreaded label of “peanut spread.” Desmond celebrated by shifting her focus to hot dogs. 

(Photo: robinmcnicoll/flickr)

The “Peanut Butter Hearings" led to many changes. Neither side liked the idea that they were arguing over a mere three percentage points, or as the FDA’s own history states, “about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.”

The FDA moved away from regulating exactly what was being put into food (as long as it was "safe") to pushing for better and more accurate labeling. Today, the food industry is given more freedom to put the ingredients it wants into products, as long as they are correctly labeled. 

In the end, the entire case came down to one simple question: what exactly is peanut butter? 

The footage (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube)

Most people who put together a time capsule pack in some newspapers of the day, maybe a few letters to the future, and some other small fragments of the present. Psychiatrists at the Bahr Treatment Center, a psychiatric hospital built in Indianapolis in 1958, made a video for the time capsule they buried at the cornerstone-laying ceremony. With its mentions of electroshock therapy and speculative talk about "psychiatrists of the future," it's pretty haunting: 

As Matt Novak writes at Paleofuture, this time capsule was found by construction crews working to prepare the same spot for a business and residential development. The Bahr Treatment Center closed in 1992—although in the film, the two men are careful to say that "we have developed a building that's completely flexible to to keep up with the changing pace of the mental health program," at some point the building became obsolete. 

Most of the sound is gone from these videos (and a couple of others posted at Paleofuture). It seems like these men had a strong enough sense of the importance of the work they were doing that they wanted to document it for the future. Whatever they were aiming for, though, only a shadow got through. 

Bonus finds: The Jersey Devil, a glass spear, a naturally mummified cat

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Obviously these sticks and shells are a sea chart. (Image: brewbooks/Flickr)

If you live in a country consisting of over 1,100 islands spread across 750,000 square miles, how do you navigate the sea in between? Easy: with sticks and shells.

The stick charts of the Marshall Islands, in use since they were first inhabited in the 2nd century BCE, are simple-seeming navigational tools that look like little more than a bunch of twigs arranged into a loose lattice. They guide voyagers by depicting the waves and islands they are likely to encounter along the way. But unlike most maritime maps as we understand them today, the delicate stick charts were not brought on sea voyages. Instead, they were studied by the sailors prior to the trip. The directions and swells would be memorized by the mariners, who would then navigate without them.

Look out for that southern wave. (Image: Jason Eppink/Flickr)

The use of Marshallese stick charts was not brought to popular modern attention until a missionary’s report in an 1862 edition of The Nautical Magazine. In the piece, American Protestant missionary Reverend L.H. Gulick described the island inhabitants creation of “rude” maps that described the location of other islands, nearby and afar, using stick formations to delineate wave patterns and oceanic activity.

While Gulick was correct about the charts describing wave activity, they were not made out of sticks per se. The charts were traditionally made from coconut fibers, the sturdy midsection of coconut tree fronds, and small shells like cowries. Gulick undoubtedly used navigational charts, sextants, and other complex Victorian tools of the day to reach the islands but the rustic charts he discovered among the Marshall Islanders may have been just as complex, if not moreso.

The “stick charts,” as they are popularly known regardless of actual make-up, can be broken up into three distinct categories, all of which are dependant on swells, or dependable wave activity not caused by local winds, but by the interaction of static currents and land which deforms the waves. To put it simply, the charts told people where to go based on reliable ocean movements instead of landmarks like on land.  

A mattang. (Image: jmcd303/Flickr)  

The first type of chart was known as a mattang. These charts were generally smaller and used mainly for instruction in the swell patterns of specific voyages, or in how to read a specific swell. These were often more abstract and symbolic, made by specific sailors for personal use, making them a bit more esoteric to the outsider. In these, as in all stick charts, the lines could be straight or curved or intersecting to represent the motion of the waves.

The second type of chart was the medo chart which generally showed the relative position of a small number of islands to one another, and how their landmass’ swells presented and/or interacted. Unlike the mattang chart, the medo, was more concerned with the concrete position of islands, although again the oceanic swells were used to aid in navigation.

A medo. (Image: jmcd303/Flickr)

Finally the most far-reaching type of stick chart was the rebbelib, which covered a much wider area, and a great many more islands. These charts, with their greater number of intersecting points often looked like a loose mesh of criss-crossing lines, dotted with shell markers. Some of these charts, which were not made to scale, could cover nearly the entirety of the Marshall Islands, which are spread over 750,000 square miles of the Pacific.

The stick charts, their language and craft dating back centuries, are impressive both for their complexity and their accuracy. While they can be interpreted by outsiders, they are all but unreadable from a practical standpoint by those who did not grow up on the Marshall Islands, sailing the waters between the little bits of land. Even among islanders, the skills of making and reading the charts were held among select members of each community who would lead large sailing parties.

According to a 2015 Smithsonian article, in 2005, a graduate student studying the stick charts was taken out to sea by a navigator from the Marshall Islands, who asked him if he could feel the subtle swells as they passed over them. The student could not. It is this understanding of oceanic activity as topography that makes reading the stick charts even more challenging.

After centuries of use among the indigenous people of the Marshall Islands, the creation and use of stick charts began to dwindle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as more modern forms of navigation from sextants to GPS made their way to the islands. The decline of the tradition was also helped along by the stringent information control surrounding the traditional navigation techniques. Since the knowledge was limited to only a few members of each community, as they died, so did their unique understanding of the craft.

Navigation by stick chart may be a mostly forgotten art, but many of the delicate navigational tools have survived. The Science Museum at the University of Cambridge has a collection, as does the British Museum. Stateside, you can find stick charts at the Met in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while, in the southern hemisphere, the National Library of Australia and New Zealand's Te Papa Museum both have them in their collections.

A high school football stadium in Tacoma, Washington flooded dramatically over the weekend, with water cascading down the bleachers and covering the field to a depth of several feet.

As player Ryan Wrzesien, who shot the above video, eloquently puts it: "Bro!" And also, "Look at this, I got frickin' Birks on!"

The Stadium Bowl is a sports stadium belonging to Stadium High School, and it's also kind of a bowl. Only the "bowl" part was a problem here—the stadium is carved out of the surrounding hill on three sides, with the other side facing a bay. During Saturday's storm, in which 0.42 inches of rain fell in ten minutes, rainwater overpowered the city's drainage system and ran down to fill the bowl.

This isn't the first time the 105-year-old Stadium Bowl has sustained flooding damage. In 1981, a storm drain burst and washed away the scoreboard and end zone. The stadium didn't reopen until 1985. This time, the city is hoping to implement a solution that will prevent the next flood—double-size drainage pipes, basically.

In the meantime, student games have been relocated, and players may want to check the weather before wearing frickin' Birks, bro.

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

 Wingsuit pilots soaring through the sky—the closest thing to human birds. (Photo: Richard Schneider/Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-2.0)

This weekend in southeastern China, the world’s top 16 birdmen will suit up to fly in the fourth annual World Wingsuit League Grand Prix. They’ll be soaring off Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie National Park, the real-life inspiration behind the floating mountains in the movie Avatar. Hundreds of millions of viewers, and some 15,000 spectators, will watch wingsuit competitors whooshing through the air at up to 125 miles per hour.

Wingsuits are a special kind of jumpsuit with material stretching between the arms and legs, somewhat like the connective membrane of a flying squirrel. They allow wearers to use their bodies to travel through the air like gliders, soaring three feet forward for every foot downward. There is massive Chinese interest in the competitive human flight: last year the Wingsuit Grand Prix reached 390 million viewers in greater China, and this year it’s being broadcast on at least 10 of the country's networks. 

Not until 1998 were wingsuits commercially manufactured and made available to the public. Iiro Seppanen, president of the World Wingsuit League, was one of the first test pilots for these initial wingsuits. The Finnish former magician and professional BASE jumper watched the sport develop; around 2005, wingsuit pilots began to fly close to mountainsides, rather than away from them—something that’s now known as “proximity flying.” 

Wingsuiting is growing more popular and more competitive fast. Over the past three years, Seppanen says, they’ve been learning “the first steps and ABCs of the sport.” At the moment, the WWL has minimum requirements for competitors and processes all sorts of approval waivers. They recently had qualifiers for the first time, selecting from 36 pilots at Norway’s Extreme Sports Week in June. Earlier this month was the first ever USPA National Championships of Wingsuit Flying, held in Illinois. Seppanen says the athletes know the risks, and as crazy as wingsuiting may seem, safety is their top priority.

Pilots at the Grand Prix race through the air over Tianmen Mountain. (Photo: Ian Webb/World Wingsuit League (WWL))

“No one wants to see anything happen—but if anything happens, everyone wants to see,” he says. He adds that no matter what, people will continue jumping, even as they lose friends within the tight-knit community–which they do with relative frequency. Jhonathan Florez, the 2014 Grand Prix winner from Colombia, died in an accident this July; a Hungarian competitor died on a practice run due to a pilot error at the 2013 Grand Prix; and of the 36 pilots at the June qualifications, they’ve already lost two.

Seppanen doesn't wingsuit anymore—a combination of getting injured and seeing lots of carnage. “Now it’s for the next generation to take on.”

Okay, so it's a bit grisly, but before jumping to conclusions about the sport, it's worth gaining a basic understanding of how wingsuit flying actually works. Maybe all these folks are reckless daredevils, but also, maybe they’re not. At least consider a few facts.

Grand Prix competitor Sam Hardy swooping through the air in his wingsuit. (Photo: Sam Hardy/Facebook)

There are very different forms of wingsuit flying. You can jump out of an airplane, à la skydiving, or jump off a building or cliff à la BASE jumping. You can fly away from immovable objects, or you can try to fly as close to them as possible, even threading stone needles or hitting actual targets. When you’re flying close to the ground, there’s zero room for error (or anything else). When you’re flying from a plane, it takes a lot more to truly screw up. 

Seppanen sometimes worries that certain people are wingsuiting for show, rather than for love of flying. Thanks to wingsuiting’s increasing popularity, some novices are skipping out on necessary prep, hungry for YouTube hits and Facebook likes.  

One might assume that all wingsuiters are 20-something men estranged from their families. However, it's not true—there are women like 28 year-old Ellie Brennan, older folks like 60-something year-old Tony Uragallo, and husbands and wives with children. Wingsuiting also takes a lot more than guts (and as many would argue, insanity): it takes hundreds of hours of practice, experience, and commitment. It’s a lifestyle that brings with it the best community imaginable, says Sam Hardy, one of this year’s competitors.

Iiro Seppanen, President of the WWL, hangs out on the starting platform at the top of Tianmen Mountain. (Photo: Ian Webb/World Wingsuit League (WWL))

Hardy, a 26 year-old Briton, says that people are misled about the time and dedication wingsuiting takes. “More than anything, people are really confused by it,” he says—which is understandable, since successful human flight is a fairly new concept. Wingsuiting is like “air yoga” for Hardy. He’s approaching the Grand Prix as an opportunity to have fun, rather than as a source of stress. “That’s secretly my plan of attack for racing as fast as possible.”

Hardy, a co-founder of Project: Base (motto: human flights for human rights), started skydiving at age 17 and has close to 1,400 wingsuit jumps under his belt. He supports himself doing skydiving tandems, running skills camps, and doing stunt and documentary-style work, but now wants to focus on earning money from wingsuiting. It took a little convincing, but his parents are now on board with it.

You should do upwards of 300 skydives before even putting on a wingsuit, kind of like getting your driver’s license, says Hardy. Then you work your way up to bigger, more advanced wingsuits. Different designs completely change the flying experience, and the suits are continuously modified and improved.

“No matter what country or upbringing you’re from,” says Hardy, “it’s everyone’s dream at the end of the day to taste actual human flight.”