Skeleton of a whale in Alaska, 1900. (Photo: Library of Congress)

In the late 1970s, a 17-foot beaked whale washed up on the shore of a small community called Homer, Alaska. The town's natural history center, the Pratt Museum, de-fleshed and cleaned the skeleton, but what do you do with hundreds of large, loose bones?

The skeleton had seen better days. The bones were darkened or split, still heavy with pungent whale oils, and stacked in dark museum storage. Two years after the discovery, the museum wanted to make a whale articulation–the lifelike assembly of a skeleton–but lacked the resources to find out how.

Lee Post, a former bicycle mechanic who co-ran a bookstore, had loved animal bones and natural ephemera since childhood. He volunteered at the museum working with smaller skeletons; when he heard about the mysterious whale bone challenge, he jumped at the opportunity. Post set to work, searching for the instructions to help him begin his dream project: assembling a large skeleton for a natural history museum.

Lee Post working on a recent whale articulation. (Photo: Lee Post)

But the investigation was a flop. Post tried to order a book on the subject, but there were none to be found. He made hopeful calls to museums where he'd seen whale articulations before, and prepared to ask the experts themselves, but to no avail. 

Post still recalls this in disbelief: “It turned out all the whale skeletons I remembered were done more than 100 years before that, by people long dead, who left no instructions on how they did them.” The skeletons Post knew of were a legacy that reached back into time, and he saw them during a unique lull in the history of whale bone enthusiasts.

Humans have been fascinated with cetaceans–the taxonomic order that includes whales and dolphins–for over 2,000 years. In the first century BC, Palestinians wheeled a whale skeleton hundreds of miles to awe Roman crowds. Europeans in the 1600s illustrated beached whales as monsters and bad omens, surrounded by bewildered audiences. And in the 1860s, a whale from Gothenburg, Sweden was shuffled across European cities and set up as a morbid cafe, recounts Joe Roman in his book, Whale. A passerby would see large whale jaws hinged toward the sky, revealing upper-class social adventurers drinking tea in its cavernous throat.

An engraving of a beached whale with allegorical references to natural disaster, death, and the plague by Jan Saenredam, 1602. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

By the late 1800s, museum exhibits had evolved from their origins as personal status-boosting collections, and the British Museum and American Natural History Museum became established institutions. While many curators couldn't get their white-gloved hands on a coveted dinosaur skeleton, practically anyone could get access to a commercially hunted whale.

Whale displays reigned supreme for over 100 years: “Jonah”, the humpback whale, rotted across the U.K in the 1950s as an unpreserved exhibit and memorable olfactory experience. In 1967, traveling showman Jerry Malone bought one of the last whale carcasses hunted in the United States, froze it with liquid nitrogen, and carted it around the country as “Little Irvy” until 1995.

“Virtually every museum had a whale. But over the years they became decrepit, dinosaur-looking, dark with oil in them, no exciting poses,” says Post. “Over the decades they got taken apart and then there were not a lot of places that had them.”

Monster Embalmed Whale show of the Pacific Whaling Company, date unknown. (Photo: Courtesy of Sideshowworld.com)

To make matters for future bone enthusiasts more difficult, museums rarely had whale skeleton experts on staff. They outsourced their stock to design firms–a practice that many museums continue today. Henry A. Ward, an adventurer and naturalist, sent so many specimens to museums in the late 1800s that it became his primary trade. Sadly, many whale experts died in the early years of the 20th century without recording their knowledge, forever guarding proprietary secrets.

Post managed to find “three to four” people in North America who made attempts at whale articulation first-hand, but learned that no one was doing it exactly the same way. In fact, many were copying the outdated anatomy of skeletons from the previous century, or using techniques to connect and preserve bones that seemed rickety and short-lived. Large marine animal bones present unique challenges; size, weight and natural oil content. To do this right, the process had to be reinvented.

Completed beaked whale articulation by Lee Post, hung at the Pratt Museum. (Photo: Lee Post)

Post consulted people who had articulated moose or elephants, and even “anyone interesting” who walked into his bookstore–artists, mechanics, and carpenters–until trial and error revealed solutions that worked. During the dark Alaskan winter he worked intently on his own, and slowly assembled the skeleton in a small museum workspace. Ultimately, Post wrote and illustrated the world’s only whale articulation manuals, and fueled the first resurrection of whale articulation experts since the early 20th century.

More people began to study the craft; over 15 whale articulations now exist in the U.S. with more projects in the making. These days, Post and his colleagues rarely go at it alone. “I admire anyone who's put together a large whale, because it takes so much time and commitment right from the beginning” says Keith Rittmaster, a biologist and natural science curator at the North Carolina Maritime Museum who is is one of the top whale articulation specialists in the country. In 2012, he and volunteers completed the ambitious “Bonehenge” project: an eight-year-long effort to articulate a 33.5-foot sperm whale.

Sperm whale, shortly after it was found on the beach. (Photo: Keith Rittmaster and the Cape Lookout Studies Program)

When a whale washes up on the beach, it's usually deceased–sometimes rotten or half-eaten. Rittmaster's sperm whale was somewhat of an anomaly: it lived long enough to arrive ashore, and then abruptly passed away. “The body was still warm! That's when the excitement came in. This is an endangered species, it's super fresh, and we have veterinarians who can do a knock-out necropsy,” says Rittmaster, whose evident enthusiasm for his work is contagious.

Necropsies, autopsies performed on non-humans, are vital to marine center research. He and a team spent weeks cutting off flesh, dismantling ribs, preserving the heart, and even x-raying the whale's pectoral fin for later reference.

How the whale is prepared depends on the size, location, and freshness of the remains, but many methods are similar. After the body is secured, its parts are examined and processed. Teeth may be sliced to estimate the whale's age, their inner layers counted like tree rings. In some cases the bones are composted or buried for years, in others they are stored in underwater pots until ocean creatures eat residual flesh. Large bones–like the skull of Rittmaster's sperm whale–are tidied by bacteria through a maceration process, which includes a nine-month stay in a water and horse manure pond.

Burying the sperm whale after the necropsy. (Photo: Keith Rittmaster and the Cape Lookout Studies Program)

When the bones are de-fleshed, they can be treated with a trichloroethylene vapor degreaser, an industrial solvent that reduces bone weight, stench, and bacteria. Another soak in hydrogen peroxide evens color and further cleans the bones. No trade tool is left untouched–bookbinder's glue can be applied to preserve color before bones are placed into jigs, drilled for metal supports, and held together with expert welding and fitting tactics.

The extensive time and care put into whale articulation today creates humbling and impressive exhibits. In contrast to opportunistic shows of the past however, recent articulations are mainly meant to educate. When Rittmaster thinks of why it's important to do this at all, it's because of the fragility of marine life. “The number of different species is shocking–even to me, who's been studying these things for 30 years,” he says.

“When oil companies are applying to our federal government to use seismic noise in order to drill for oil, I want people to know what we stand to lose.”

Sperm whale atlas bone, after being buried for three years. (Photo: Keith Rittmaster and the Cape Lookout Studies Program)

This is a fairly new line of thinking. For most of history, whales were seen as otherworldly creatures or, less poetically, commercial opportunities–heating oil and transmission fluid among them. As the public became familiar with the gentle, intelligent whale narrative for the first time, as in Jacques Cousteau's 1955 underwater film The Silent World, the idea of using whale bodies for profit was increasingly seen as inhumane. Conservationists today study whale organs and bones for proof of how humans affect ocean life. It's a sort of forensic investigation that induces laws, like speed limits for vessels that strike whales, toward protecting endangered species. In just a few decades, whales came to represent everything we need to protect instead of the alien unknown.  

Post believes that whale bones will never fail to provoke awe. “No matter what happens in the museum world...there will be people who are fascinated by skeletons, by bones,“ he says. “That's happened since cavemen days–I think there were troglodytes in caves that people were picking up and thinking 'this is cool.'”

One wonders where this is all going. Will we hit another whale articulation peak? Will the experts of today fade over time, only a few dusty articulation manuals left in the world? “Maybe there will be 3-D printed bones, or skeletons with motors in them,” says Post. But the real thing always seems more interesting. Bones have entranced people all over the world for thousands of years, in particular the knowledge that they once functioned in live creatures, in a way not so differently from our own. 

Glorious example at the exquisite Fred French building. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

If you have ever worked in an old building, the chances are you will have at some point walked past a small mysterious brass box . Located about halfway up the wall, it is notable for a flat length of glass leading both into and out it, disappearing into the ceiling and the floor below. Often painted over, ignored and unused, they are a relic of the golden age of early skyscrapers called the Cutler mail chute.

The Cutler mail chutes flourished during the advent of the first multi-story buildings in the turn of the 20^th century. The invention was fairly simple: the glass chutes would run internally the length of the building, with a mailing slot on each floor. Rather than having to make the trek downstairs to find the nearest mail box or post office, you would simply pop your letter into the chute from whichever floored you worked on, and gravity would swiftly carry your letter to a mailbox in the lobby, for daily collection from the postman. In an era when people were sending handfuls of letters each day, the convenience of the Cutler mail chute was a godsend.

Most Cutler mail chutes were installed along side elevator cars. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Remarkably today, the Cutler mail chute is still in use. In fact there are approximately 900 actively working in New York and just over 360 in Chicago alone, from which the post office still routinely collects the mail.

 The mail chute was invented by James Goold Cutler in Rochester, NY, in 1883 and was first installed at the Elwood building in the center of the city. It proved an instant success and Cutler received the patent for the mailing system, that secured him a virtual monopoly for the next 20 years.

 The patent specified that the lobby box itself must be made “of metal, distinctly marked ‘US Letter Box’”, and that the “door must open on hinges on one side, with the bottom of the door not less than 2’6 above the floor.” To protect items of mail that would be dropping from many floors, Cutler outfitted the lobby box with an “elastic cushion to prevent injury to the mail.”

Sketch of a mail chute in 1910. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Working in close co-operation with the post office, Cutler’s patent system was first installed in railways and public buildings.

But as cities boomed skywards, over the next 20 years Cutler sold over 1,600 mail chutes, making their way into brand new, state of the art skyscrapers, office buildings, apartments and hotels. In their exemplary illustrated design history called Art Deco Mailboxes, writers and mail chute aficionados Karen Greene and Lynne Lavelle, note how Cutler’s system quickly became as “essential to the operation of any major hotel, office, civic or residential building as the front door.” And according to report from Rochester in 1888:

“In the present age of multi-storied buildings, no builder or owner of such an edifice has all the needful and convenient appliances until the Cutler US Mail Chute is in use therein—a device as necessary for the businessman as the elevator.”

The mail chute system might have born out of functionality, but Cutler infused the mailboxes themselves with elegance. His catalogue offered lobby boxes furnished with gleaming brass fittings and elaborate detailing. He also had the foresight to collaborate with the leading architects of the day to allow the design of individual mail boxes that would match the grandeur of specific buildings. Through the Beaux Arts movement to Art Nouveau to Art Deco, Cutler’s mailboxes became increasingly beautiful and ornate. The Cutler Co. worked with architects such as Daniel Burnham (the Flatiron), Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (the Empire State), Sloan & Robertson (the St.Regis) and Cass Gilbert (the Woolworth).

Manufactured, designed and first tested in Rochester, NY, Cutler mail chutes were an indispensable feature of early skyscrapers. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Cutler held the patent for the mail chute giving him a virtual monopoly for decades. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

The St. Regis still operates one of the most luxurious lobby box, decorated with the Federal Eagle motif. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

As letters grew in size, clogging of the mail chutes became an increasing problem. A famous example occurred at the grand old McGraw Hill building on West 42nd Street. Once an emerald Art Deco masterpiece, and former home of Marvel Comics, the building has now faded into disrepair and a clog in their mail chute was discovered in the mid 1980s. When it was eventually tracked down and cleared, the resulting avalanche of undelivered mail filled 23 sacks.

Occasionally, letters get stuck for much longer than that. In 1995, in Brooksville, Florida a lady called Marguerite Grisdale Lynch was astonished to receive a letter from her husband 50 years after he dropped it in a mail chute in a Michigan Veteran’s hospital. He had already been dead for 19 years. 

By the 1990s, fire codes all but outlawed Cutler mail chutes from being installed in new buildings. Bespoke mail rooms replaced their use. And some of the ones still in operation are gradually on the wane; the Chrysler building recently sealed theirs, whilst the glitzy Waldorf-Astoria also closed their three chutes.

 The buildings that house the chutes today are a varied lot. Some are grand, such as the gleaming gold lobby of the Fred French, the sleek chromium and steel of the Chrysler, the sophistication of the Roosevelt hotel, and the magnificence of Grand Central Station. Others are more functional like the Port Authority bus terminal, and countless offices lining Broadway, the Garment District and Fifth Avenue.

One of the standard Cutler mail chute boxes at the author's place of work, West 34th Street. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

The chute that is still in use at the Roosevelt hotel. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Cutler mail chutes were to be found in some of New York's most famous locations: here, Grand Central Station. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

From left: Cutler worked with famous architects to customize lobby boxes for different buildings, such as this at One, Grand Central Place; Art Deco styling at the Empire State Building, and still in operation; and  Lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, perhaps used by Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

The first Cutler mail chute I noticed was in my own work building, a fairly average 20 floor office built in 1927 on the corner of 10th Avenue and 34th Street. The chute on my floor, the 5th, had long been painted over in white, but the slot was still open. The mailbox in the lobby didn’t display any of the art deco flourishes of, say, the Cutler box in the old Western Union building. but was still neatly furnished with the brass fittings and black painted inlays of the standard Cutler model 4165. Speaking to the lobby security guard, he didn’t recommend using it up past floor 16 as there was a blockage somewhere. “Sometimes the super will go up and drop something heavy down there to clear it,” he said.

Every day, though, the postman still retrieves letters from the lobby box at the end of the Cutler chute.

A trunk of the Fortingall yew. (Photo: Mogens Engelund/WikiCommons)

The yew tree at Fortingall church in Perthshire, Scotland, might be the oldest tree in Britain. Most experts agree that it's been around for 2,000 to 3,000 years, and even the low-end estimates put it at around 1,500 years old.

When you're that old, you can do whatever you want. And apparently, the Fortingall yew wants to partially change from male to female.

The distinctive red yew berries only appear on female trees; male yews produce pollen instead. And the Fortingall yew has been busily producing pollen for millennia. This year, though, botanists found three berries on one of its branches. After presumably checking to make sure the berries weren't glued there by a prankster, experts concluded that this one branch of the tree is now behaving as female.

Yew berries. (Photo: grassrootsgroundswell/WikiCommons)

This kind of spontaneous sex change is atypical, but not as unusual as you'd think. Conifers like the yew aren't usually hermaphroditic—the entire tree is normally either male or female. But occasionally, part of the tree (usually in the crown) will switch, and the tree will produce both berries and pollen. 

The Fortingall yew's miracle berries will be planted in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden, as part of the garden's yew conservation hedge, a half-mile hedge made of 2,000 yew trees interspersed with cuttings from historic and threatened varieties of yew, including the Fortingall tree. There, they'll help conserve this ancient species—and serve as a reminder that it's never too late to start doing what you love.

(Photo: Trish Steel/WikiCommons)

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. 

Wild canine hybrids lurk in our midst. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Have you heard any wolves howling recently? Most likely not, since there aren’t very many of them left. But if you did hear one, this is probably the English translation of her cries: “I have literally no dating options left in my species … Any wolves out there? Anyone!” 

Nope.

Wolves, whose populations have been steadily dwindling due to deforestation and hunting, have had no choice but to settle for coyotes for a while now. Interspecies dating is a wonderful thing, but for a wolf, the larger and handsomer of the two canines, a coyote is still a serious downgrade, even if some dog genes are thrown into the mix (lonely wolves have also been known to flirt with local dogs). The result of their circumstantial romance is a mezopredator weighing in at about 55 pounds (twice the weight of coyotes), with a genetic makeup around 10 percent dog, 25 percent wolf, and 65 percent coyote. Their hybrid offspring–known as eastern coyotes, coywolves, or coywolfdogs if you want to be comprehensive–are multiplying, and neighborhoods across the northeast are starting to notice. 

In New York City alone, just within the past year, eastern coyotes have been spotted in Chelsea, Long Island City, Queens, the Upper West Side, and the Bronx. They’ve taken to being nocturnal, and they can work their way through neighborhoods without causing trouble or even being noticed, a secret to their success. “They’re so, so sneaky that most people don’t ever see them,” says Dr. Roland Kays of North Carolina State University. In fact, the creature’s presence has become so commonplace that the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation has a guide called “Living With Coyotes in New York City,” which includes “Five Easy Tips for Coexisting with Coyotes.”

A group of coywolves bred in captivity. (Photo: L. David Mech, Bruce W. Christensen, Cheryl S. Asa , Margaret Callahan, Julie K. Young/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dr. Bradley White at Trent University says that researchers believe the coywolf originated about a century ago in Ontario, Canada. Since then, coywolves have reoccupied the original territories of the eastern wolf and have even migrated on ice floes from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland, where they’ve developed a liking for moose and caribou. Meanwhile, the carnivores have infiltrated towns and cities along the eastern seaboard, and in areas where they can hunt in packs for larger prey like deer, they're growing larger and stronger. The coywolves found in cities like Toronto, where they prey on dogs, cats, or rodents, are still smaller, explains White.

Some scientists say that the eastern coyote may be the most adaptable animal on the planet. “It’s not only persisting but thriving,” says Kays.

Since its inception, the eastern coyote has established itself as a new top predator where wolves once reigned. They are heftier, faster, and have larger jaws than coyotes, and their songs are a blend of wolf howl and coyote yip. They eat discarded food, including fruits and vegetables, as well as available mammals. They’re opportunistic predators, meaning that they’ll take whatever they can get, another quality that makes them supremely adaptable to new environments. They’re smart, traveling by railroad track and looking both ways before crossing the highway. Rarely have we seen such a successful hybrid colonize such a large area.

The coywolfdog has taken an interesting evolutionary short cut. “Hybridization seems to be a way that evolution can work very rapidly compared to what we traditionally think,” says Kays. As natural climates and habitats change at a rate faster than ever before, hybridization is a way for different species to keep up and adapt in order to survive. Kays points out that in the fish and plant worlds, hybridization is much easier, since there’s no internal fertilization; organisms can throw their sex gametes into the wind or water and mix much more easily.

In general, though, hybridization—which, to clarify, is not a new phenomenon—is almost certainly going to grow more and more common as species’ shrinking numbers make the single-and-looking-to-mingle more and more desperate. 

Siblings or dating? (Photo: Nickton/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

Hybridization is a big concern in some areas, where atypical romantic choices can cause the original form of an animal to be lost, especially between wild and domestic species. For example, the Scottish wildcat is growing rarer as it increasingly hybridizes with domestic cats; a similar thing is happening with the Asian water buffalo and its domestic counterpart, as well as woodland and migratory caribou and southern and northern flying squirrels, whose habitats have newly overlapped.

It also brings up a contested scientific question: what exactly qualifies as a species?

“There are over 20 different species concepts,” explains White, and it depends on your definition. Kays doesn’t like that the eastern coyote is being called a “coywolf” and labeled a new species–it’s not, he says. It would have to be substantially different from western coyotes and not share significant gene flow, which is the movement of individuals and their genetic material between populations. Neither of those are currently the case. “Is it evolving towards a new species, and going to be something totally different in 5,000 years? Maybe,” says Kays. But it's not there yet.

White says that while the eastern coyote is not isolated in terms of gene flow, there’s no question that it is an entity, whether you want to call it a species or not—and whether you do comes down to whether you’re a splitter or a clumper. Do you want one group with a lot of diversity, or do you want to split it up into several different groups? 

A coywolf looking coy. (Photo: www.ForestWander.com/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

So what does the near future look like for the eastern coyote? Or, perhaps a more relevant question: what does it look like for city-dwellers from Chicago to Boston, D.C. to New York, anxious about wild canines wandering their streets at night? 

“Coyotes are going to enforce the suggestion that birdwatchers have been asking for ages–to keep cats indoors,” says Kays. “That’s really the biggest concern.” In some western areas, he says, coyotes have gotten bold, but that hasn’t happened yet on the east coast. He explains that coyotes are naturally keen to avoid dangerous creatures, as they have to watch out for bigger predators like wolves and cougars.

“If they realize that humans are dangerous creatures, they will avoid us and reduce conflict,” says Kays. “If not, they will move closer and closer, eat cats, dogs, and eventually even start attacking small people.” It’s important to make sure they maintain a healthy fear of humans, and that city-dwellers not begin feeding them. Other than that, “turns out there’s not much we can actually do about it,” says Kays.

The only thing that can really reduce the number of coyotes in an area is adding wolves to keep them out. But that won’t work. We’ve run out of wolves, and the ones that remain have already starting shacking up with coyotes.

“I think the coyotes here to stay,” says White. “Now it’s a matter of humans learning to adapt.”

The arrest of Guy Fawkes, painted by Henry Perronet Briggs. (Photo: Public domain/WikiCommons)

Asserting that Guy Fawkes Night is Britain's Burning Man may seem controversial, but look at the evidence – giant art projects, bacchanalia, political commentary, and massive structures being set on fire. We rest our case.

Of course, unlike Burning Man, Guy Fawkes Night–which is observed every November 5th– has 410 years of historical tradition behind it. In 1605, the eponymous Guy was arrested for his complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, an assassination attempt against King James I that would have involved blowing up the House of Lords. With his arrest, the plot was foiled, the king was saved, and the country broke out in celebratory bonfires. This celebration soon became an official annual holiday, on which hated figures were traditionally burned in effigy.

An effigy of Guy Fawkes burning. (Photo: William Warby/flickr)

The effigies weren't originally of Guy Fawkes–they were figures like the Whore of Babylon, and on one occasion in 1677, a Pope filled with live cats. During the 18th century it became tradition to burn a figure of Fawkes himself, and while other notorious celebrities still join him on the pyre, they're usually referred to as "Guys." (For a long time, children would also build their own Guys and take the effigies around town begging for pennies, though this isn't popular anymore, perhaps because pennies are worthless.)

The Lewes bonfire, at Lewes in East Sussex, is the biggest in the country, and this year there are two celebrity Guys: a nude David Cameron holding a pig's head (a reference to this unsettling story), and former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who is mired in a different sort of controversy.

David Cameron, ready for the barbecue. (Photo: Steve Tremlett/Twitter)

Sepp Blatter in what appears to be a bathtub full of money. (Photo: Adam Vaughan/Twitter)

Disgraced Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson will also be burned at Lewes, along with a 50-foot Guy Fawkes.

Blatter's shady financial ethics have made him so popular that he's doubling up this year; he's also making an appearance at the Edenbridge bonfire in Kent, whose past Guys have included Lance Armstrong. Hopefully he really, really likes the heat.

But where is his bathtub? (Photo: Tom Pugh/Twitter)

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. 

Mulberry Street, where New York's "Little Italy" is centered, c. 1909.  (Photo: Library of Congress)

“Don’t eat gabagool, Grandma,” says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. “It’s nothing but fat and nitrates.” The pronunciation of “gabagool,” a mutation of the word "capicola," might surprise a casual viewer, although it and words like it should be familiar to viewers of other New Jersey-based shows like the now-defunct Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, where food often drives conversation. The casts are heavily Italian-American, but few of them can actually speak, in any real way, the Italian language. Regardless, when they talk about food, even food that’s widely known by the non-Italian population, they often use a specific accent.

And it’s a weird one. “Mozzarella” becomes something like “mutzadell.” “Ricotta” becomes “ree-goat.” “Prosciutto” becomes “pruh-zhoot.” There is a mangling of the language in an instantly identifiable way: final syllables are deleted, certain consonants are swapped with others, certain vowels are mutated in certain places.

Most immigrant groups in the U.S. retain certain words and phrases from the old language even if the modern population can’t speak it. But for people outside those groups, and even, often, inside them, it’s next to impossible to pick out a specific regional accent in the way a Jewish American says “challah” or a Korean-American says “jjigae.” How can someone who doesn’t speak the language possibly have an regional accent?

Yet Italian-Americans do. It’s even been parodied; on an episode of Kroll Show, comedian Nick Kroll’s character Bobby Bottleservice, a Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino-type, describes his lunch in this thick accent, eliminating the final syllable of each item. “Cap-uh-coal,” he says, pointing at capicola. “Mort-ah-dell,” he says, as the camera pans over a thin, pale arrangement of mortadella. “Coca-coal,” he finishes, as the camera moves over to a glass of Coke. “Capicola,” made famous in its mutation by The Sopranos, gets even more mutated for comedic effect on The Office, where it becomes “gabagool.”

I spoke to a few linguists and experts on Italian-American culture to figure out why a kid from Paterson, New Jersey, who doesn’t speak Italian, would earnestly ask for a taste of “mutzadell.” The answer takes us way back through history and deep into the completely chaotic world of Italian linguistics.

“One thing that I need to tell you, because this is something that is not clear even for linguists, let alone the layperson—the linguistic situation in Italy is quite complicated,” says Mariapaola D'Imperio, a professor in the linguistics department at Aix-Marseille University who was born in Naples and studied in Ohio before moving to France. The situation is so complicated that the terms used to describe pockets of language are not widely agreed upon; some use “language,” some use “dialect,” some use “accent,” and some use “variation.” Linguists like to argue about the terminology of this kind of thing. 

A map of Italy from 1494 showing the different kingdoms. (Photo: Shadowxfox/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The basic story is this: Italy is a very young country made up of many very old kingdoms awkwardly stapled together to make a patchwork whole. Before 1861, these different kingdoms—Sardinia, Rome, Tuscany, Venice, Sicily (they were called different things at the time, but roughly correspond to those regions now)—those were, basically, different countries. Its citizens didn’t speak the same language, didn’t identify as countrymen, sometimes were even at war with each other. The country was unified over the period from around 1861 until World War I, and during that period, the wealthier northern parts of the newly-constructed Italy imposed unfair taxes and, basically, annexed the poorer southern parts. As a result, southern Italians, ranging from just south of Rome all the way down to Sicily, fled in huge numbers to other countries, including the U.S.

About 80 percent of Italian-Americans are of southern Italian descent, says Fred Gardaphe, a professor of Italian-American studies at Queens University. “Ships from Palermo went to New Orleans and the ships from Genoa and Naples went to New York,” he says. They spread from there, but the richest pockets of Italian-Americans aren’t far from New York City. They’re clustered in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and in and around Philadelphia. 

Yet those Italians, all from southern Italy and all recent immigrants in close proximity to each other in the US, wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves countrymen. That’s because each of the old Italian kingdoms had their own...well, D’Imperio, who is Italian, calls them “dialects.” But others refer to them in different ways. Basically the old Italian kingdoms each spoke their own languages that largely came from the same family tree, slightly but not all that much closer than the Romance languages, like French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The general family name for these languages is Italo-Dalmatian (Dalmatian, it turns out, refers to Croatia. The dog is from there, too.). They were not all mutually comprehensible, and had their own external influences. Calabrian, for example, is heavily influenced by Greek, thanks to a long Greek occupation and interchange. In the northwest near the border with France, Piedmont, with its capital of Turin, spoke a language called Piedmontese, which is sort of French-ish. Sicilian, very close to North Africa, had a lot of Arabic-type stuff in it. I use the past tense for these because these languages are dying, quickly. “Dialects do still exist, but they're spoken mainly by old people,” says D’Imperio. (Sicilian put up more of a fight than most.)

Italian earthquake refugees on their way to America, c. 1909. (Photo: Library of Congress)

During unification, the northern Italian powers decided that having a country that speaks about a dozen different languages would pose a bit of a challenge to their efforts, so they picked one and called it “Standard Italian” and made everyone learn it. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer. (You can see why calling these languages “dialects” is tricky; Standard Italian is just one more dialect, not the base language which Calabrian or Piedmontese riffs on, which is kind of the implication.)

Standard Italian has variations, like any other language, which we’ll call accents. Someone from Sicily would have a Sicilian accent, but when speaking Standard Italian, a person from Milan will, hopefully, be able to understand them, because at a basic level, they’ll be using a language with the same structure and a vocabulary that is mostly identical.

But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of “Italians,” such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn’t have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian. 

Mozzarella, or sometimes “mutzadell". (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Linguists say that there are two trajectories for a language divorced from its place of origin. It sometimes dies out quickly; people assimilate, speak the most popular language wherever they live, stop teaching their children the old language. But sometimes, the language has a firmer hold on its speakers than most, and refuses to entirely let go. The Italian dialects are like that.

“I grew up speaking English and Italian dialects from my family's region of Puglia,” says Gardaphe. “And when I went to Italy, very few people could understand me, even the people in my parents' region. They recognized that I was speaking as if I was a 70-year-old man, when I was only 26 years old.” Italian-American Italian is not at all like Standard Italian; instead it’s a construction of the frozen shards left over from languages that don’t even really exist in Italy anymore with minimal intervention from modern Italian.

There’s a spectrum to all this, of course. Somebody, even in their 70s or 80s, who was born in Italy and lived in the US can still be understood in Italy. But Italian has undergone huge standardization changes in the past few decades, and it’ll be hard for modern Italian speakers to understand them, even harder than if somebody showed up in New York in 2015 speaking in 1920s New Yorker “Thoity-Thoid Street” slang and accent.

For whatever reason, foods and curse words linger longer in a disrupted language. I think of my own complete lack of knowledge of Yiddish, with my lousy vocabulary made up entirely of words like blintzes, kugel, kvetch, nudnik, and schmuck. If you can’t eat them or yell them, foreign words don’t often stick around.

Ann Marie Olivo-Shaw, who grew up on and studied the sociolinguistics of Long Island, thinks the various pockets of southern Italian immigrants could understand each other, sort of, a little. (Jersey Italians are not, linguistically, distinct from New York or Rhode Island or Philadelphia Italians when speaking Italian.) Generally being fairly close in proximity, even if they were only speaking similar languages, they would necessarily have some cultural similarities. Culinarily similarities also abound: less meat-heavy, more like Provence or Greece in the use of seafood, vegetables, and even, rare for western Europe, spice. (Capicola and mozzarella are, probably, creations of southern Italy, though there are versions elsewhere and Italians love to argue about who invented what.)

And they shared some qualities linguistically as well. Let’s do a fun experiment and take three separate linguistic trends from southern Italian dialects and combine them all to show how one Standard Italian word can be so thoroughly mangled in the U.S.

First: “The features that you'll find across a lot of these dialects, and one that you still hear a lot in southern Italy today, is vowels at the ends of words are pronounced very very softly, and usually as more of an 'uh' vowel,” says Olivo-Shaw. D’Imperio is a little more extreme, calling it “vowel deletion.” Basically: if the final syllable is a vowel? You can get rid of it. Vowel deletion is common amongst many languages, and is done for the same reason that, sometimes, vowels are added: to make the flow from one word to another more seamless. It's easiest, in terms of muscle movement, to transition from a vowel to a consonant and vice versa. A vowel to a vowel is difficult; in English, that's why we have "a" versus "an" in phrases like "a potato" or "an apple." Some Italian words that would follow food words, like prepositions or articles, would start with a vowel, and it's easier to just remove it so you don't have to do the vowel-to-vowel transition.

The stereotypical Italian "It's a-me, Mario!" addition of a vowel is done for the same reason: Italian is a very fluid, musical language, and Italian speakers will try to eliminate the awkwardness of going consonant-to-consonant. So they'll just add in a generic vowel sound—"ah" or "uh"—between consonants, to make it flow better.

Second: “A lot of the ‘o’ sounds will be, as we call it in linguistics, raised, so it'll be pronounced more like ‘ooh’,” says Olivo-Shaw. Got it: O=Ooh.

And third: “A lot of what we call the voiceless consonants, like a ‘k’ sound, will be pronounced as a voiced consonant,” says Olivo-Shaw. This is a tricky one to explain, but basically the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant can be felt if you place your fingers over your Adam’s apple and say as short of a sound with that consonant as you can. A voiced consonant will cause a vibration, and voiceless will not. So like, when you try to just make a “g” sound, it’ll come out as “guh.” But a “k” sound can be made without using your vocal chords at all, preventing a vibration. So “k” would be voiceless, and “g” would be voiced. Try it! It’s fun.

Okay so, we’ve got three linguistic quirks common to most of the southern Italian ancient languages. Now try to pronounce “capicola.”

The “c” sounds, which are really “k” sounds, become voiced, so they turn into “g”. Do the same with the “p”; that’s a voiceless consonant, and we want voiced ones, so change that to a “b”. The second-to-last vowel, an “oh” sound, gets raised, so change that to an “ooh.” And toss out the last syllable. It’s just a vowel, who needs it? Now try again.

Yeah. Gabagool.

If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn’t find people saying “gabagool.” But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering “mutzadell.” In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian-Italians. There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese.

“Language is so much a part of how we identify,” says Olivo-Shaw. “The way we speak is who we are. I think that for Italians, we have such a pride in our ancestry and such a pride in our culture that it's just kind of an unconscious way of expressing that.” 

Update, 11/5: An earlier version of the story had the wrong age for Fred Gardaphe. 

Hugh Tracey in the International Library of African Music at Msaho, Roodepoort 1960s. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

There’s a song drifting around the backwaters of the internet called “Chemirocha.”

It’s a scratchy field recording made in Kenya, in 1950, of a little village girl singing with her friends. Someone in the background strums a sort of makeshift lyre called a chepkong. The entire recording is only 90 seconds long, but it has an arresting, unearthly beauty. It’s the sort of thing that once lived only on freeform radio stations at the left of the dial, or on worn-out mix tapes passed between obsessive collectors. Now it’s on YouTube and Soundcloud.

Anyone can hear the song’s appeal. But there’s something that turns simple fans of chemirocha into fanatics—enthusiasts and evangelists who bring up the song at dinner parties or cocktail hours; who use it to enliven a weary work happy hour or impress a date with their acumen. And that is its backstory.

According to Hugh Tracey, the ethnomusicologist who made the recording in 1950, British missionaries had come through the village some years earlier with a wind-up gramophone, and played American country records for the Kipsigis tribe. They loved one singer in particular. They couldn’t believe their ears, that a human being could sing and play like this. So they decided he must be a sort of deity, half-man and half-antelope. The Kipsigis created a whole legend around this country singer, who was Jimmie Rodgers, the “father of country music.” They pronounced his name “Chemirocha.”

Hugh Tracey tells this story himself before introducing the song on the 1952 LP he released of his Kenyan recordings, Music of Africa Volume 2:

It’s a great story. Except that it’s probably wrong and possibly racist, or at least incredibly reductive. “Simple villagers encounter Western culture and elevate white people to the status of gods” is a catchy and convenient tale that we’ve heard too many times.

To explain Hugh Tracey’s account, we don’t have to look much further than the milieu he came from. Tracey was a British émigré who arrived in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1921, to help his brother farm tobacco there. He learned the local dialect while working in the fields, and quickly grew to love the traditional music, ultimately becoming the Alan Lomax of sub-Saharan Africa. 

Inside ILAM, The akadinda (large xylophone), kalimbas on the wall, and a photo of Hugh Tracey. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

He spent six decades traveling the continent and made over 40,000 recordings of the music he found there, from Pygmy yodels to Zulu choral music. He was almost always the first person to document this music. Along the way, he created a library to house all of this material: the International Library of African Music (ILAM), at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

Hugh Tracey died in 1977. His son Andrew Tracey then ran ILAM for the next 28 years, retiring in 2005. The current director of ILAM, and the keeper of Hugh Tracey’s extensive collection of notes, recordings, and African musical instruments, is a woman named Diane Thram.

Philip Cheruiyot (center left) leans in to read the song titles on the CD booklet brought by Diane Thram. Cheruiyot’s grandfather sang on Hugh Tracey’s recording of “Chemirocha II.” (Photo: Ryan Kailath)  

When she took over in 2006, Thram set about cataloging and digitizing the massive ILAM collection. That’s when it occurred to her that most of the musicians in Hugh Tracey’s collection had never heard their own recordings. “I remember having this realization one day,” she says, “that now that we know what we have, it’s time to give it back.”

Thram teamed up with Tabu Osusa, whose record label, Ketebul Music, archives rural Kenyan music and hunts down obscure and forgotten Kenyan folk recordings from the past. Together, Osusa and Thram set out to bring the recorded music back to the people who created it.

“It’s not fair for them,” says Osusa, “that their music was recorded, and they have no idea that music exists! So, I think this is the right thing to do. Take the music back to the people, so from then on they know—this was ours.”

Hugh Tracey’s original field notes for “Chemirocha I.” (Photo: Courtesy International Library of African Music)

Luckily for the pair trying to retrace his footsteps, Tracey took extensive field notes, including the names and locations of the performers he recorded. It was in these notes that Thram made a surprising discovery. “Chemirocha” was actually “Chemirocha III”: the last of three separate chemirocha songs that Tracey recorded that day in 1950.

“Chemirocha I” and “II” were sung by men. “The main theme of this song,” wrote Tracey on his field card for the first song, “is affection for the Kipsigis country. He also asks why the white man should have taken over the country…the name ‘Chemirocha’ is their pronunciation of ‘Jimmy Rodgers,’ whose gramophone records were the first to be heard in the district. It is now synonymous for anything strange + new.”

Jimmie Rodgers, American country singer. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Already Tracey’s notes belied the popular “primitive” reading of the Kipsigis and their reaction to chemirocha. But for the whole truth, Osusa and Thram would have to find a handful of Kipsigis villagers in an area roughly the size of Ireland: Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.

To start the search, two locals were sent on a reconnaissance mission, including one Ketebul employee, Sapat Opipohott, and a Kipsigis fixer known as 50 Cows (cows are an important status symbol in Kipsigis culture; his name is a play on that of the rapper 50 Cent).

“If you don’t have somebody on the ground that the people know, they don’t trust what you’re doing,” says Opipohott. “If you’re looking for certain families, everybody will be curious: ‘Why are they looking for that family? What have they done?’”

Elizabeth Betts (holding CD) was a little girl the day that Hugh Tracey recorded thirty songs in her village, in 1950. This picture was taken shortly after Betts heard those recordings for the first time. To her right is Diane Thram, director of the International Library of African Music. (Photo: Ryan Kailath)

After encountering suspicion and mistrust all over the Rift Valley, they found enough of a lead to bring Thram and her team out to the bush. One of the first people they met was Elizabeth Betts. Now an old woman, she was a little girl on the day that Hugh Tracey recorded 34 songs in her village of Kapkatet. She could still sing all of the songs by heart.

“Where did those songs go to?” asked Betts via 50 Cows, who translated. “I would be happy if we could go back to singing like those days.”

Everywhere the team went, they encountered people who knew and remembered the songs Hugh Tracey recorded, though none remembered the recording session itself. And interpretations of what the word “chemirocha” actually meant varied wildly. 

Many families had no way of playing the CDs they were given. Here, a borrowed laptop is rigged up to a portable radio—connected to a speaker powered by a car battery—in order to play the CD.  (Photo: Ryan Kailath)

Patricia Lasoi, Minister of the Kenyan district of Bomet, agreed that “chemirocha” was just a word for Jimmie Rodgers. But her adviser said that it had come to stand for a whole genre of “slow, nice music” and “classic songs.”

Philip Cheruiyot, grandson of one of the male singers of “Chemirocha II,” said that because his grandfather was a musician, he took the term as a nickname, and was known as “a chemirocha of the village.”

And Steve Kivutia, a member of the ILAM expedition, recalled that when he was young, if you were a tough guy around town, you were known as a “Jimmie”—after the rough and ready cowboy Jimmie Rodgers.

Philip Cheruiyot (center, in sportscoat) is surrounded by friends and family as Diane Thram explains what is on the CD she has brought him. Cheruiyot’s grandfather sang on one of the songs on the CD, recorded in 1950 and never before heard in the village. (Photo: Ryan Kailath)

Then, after days in the field, Thram and her team found their key witness. Josiah Arapsang is son of the Kipsigis District Chief who organized all the local singers and musicians for Hugh Tracey to record that day. Arapsang was eight years old then, and recalled the scene. But when presented with Tracey’s “half-man, half-beast” formulation, he laughed.

He said that yes, the Kipsigis thought that “chemirocha” was half-beast, because they thought that all white people were half-beast—and not in the sense of deities. For one, the white missionaries who came through their village ate an unfamiliar food that looked like worms (white rice). Further, the missionaries preached about literally eating the body and blood of Christ. And then the Kipsigis men were rounded up, without warning, to give blood for the war effort.

A road in the Rift Valley, Kenya, c. 1936. (Photo: Library of Congress)

“What the colonial government used to do,” Arapsang explains, “they will just collect you, put you into a vehicle, rush you to the hospital. The Kipsigis had never seen people hooked up to bags to give blood before.

So, as Arapsang says, they thought, “‘Aha! These people—they are man-eaters.’ As a result, they formed the idea that ‘yeah, this one is a human being, but half-animal, because he eats people.’” 

Half-man, half-beast “chemirochas.” Far from the popular conception of the myth is the deliciously ironic truth: the Kipsigis villagers are the ones who actually thought the white Europeans were savages.

Cheruiyot Arap Kuri, born in 1926, sang on Hugh Tracey’s 1950 recording of “Chemirocha I.” This picture was taken moments after he heard that recording for the first time. (Photo: Ryan Kailath) 

After a week in the field, Thram found Cheruiyot Arap Kuri. Now 88 years old, he was one one of the actual musicians performing on "Chemirocha I.” Upon meeting him, Thram was visibly overcome by emotion: “It’s like a dream come true to find someone who’s still alive, who played this music on that day.”

She presented him with a CD of Tracey’s recordings, and with 50 Cows translating, explained their origin. Like Elizabeth Betts before, Arap Kuri recalled the songs as soon as he heard them again, and even began to sing along with some. Thram asked if he remembered the white man who came and made the recording.

“We never understood what the white man was doing,” says Arap Kuri via translation. “We were just singing for him and having fun. All those other old men who sang together have passed on, and I sang with all of them.”

Arap Kuri continued, “I am very happy you have come back with this,” he told Thram. “I always wanted to imagine where are those songs, and the singers in those days who all went their own way.” 

At some point, even Desert Storm got it's own set of trading cards. (Image: UnknownNet Photography/Flickr)

Maybe you remember collecting X-Men cards during your childhood, or maybe your parents had a collection of baseball cards that they were convinced would one day put you through college. Trading cards for athletes and superheroes seem to have been around forever.

But the world of trading cards is far more varied and strange than just sports and comics. And technology hasn't killed them as kids' toys. In fact, it might have made them stronger. 

The trading card as we think of it today actually started with Victorian “trade cards.” These illustrated business cards were produced by shops and craftsmen to promote their wares. They would often feature a full color image or goofy cartoon on one side, with the merchant’s info on the other. The colorful illustrations were a hit with kids who would paste the cards into scrapbooks, not unlike the card binders collectors use today.

A trade card for chewing tobacco. (Image: Boston Public Library/Flickr) 

These trade cards gave way to the iconic baseball card, the first of which was actually a trade card that featured an image of the Red Stocking Base Ball Club of Cincinnati. In 1886 a cigarette company began including cards featuring baseball players in their packs of smokes. The rigid cards helped to keep the packages sturdy, and protect the product. Tobacco cards soon became ubiquitous across the entire industry and began featuring other designs like soldiers, or women in fancy dresses, or even images of space, although baseball remained the most popular motif. It was during the era of the tobacco card that the most valuable baseball card of all time was released, a Honus Wagner card worth over $2 million today.

By the 1930s, baseball cards had moved away from the cigarette industry and were mainly being sold in packs of bubblegum, and the types of cards were expanding as well. In addition to other sports, comedy card series began being released, like 1948’s Atomic Laugh Bombs, which featured comic illustrations that they called “gloom chasers.” By the 1950s, cards were becoming standardized to the size we know today by one of the companies that would become a leader in the field, Topps.

The front and back of the Sheri Lewis card from the Supersisters series. (Image: Theo's Little Bot/Wikipedia)

By the 1960s, other forms of entertainment started using trading cards as promotional material – for instance, TV shows like Batman or Lost In Space. A number of educational series popped up, based on historical subjects like the moon landing or military subjects like special forces units. Over the next two decades, the number and scope of trading card series continued to grow, and while baseball cards continued to rule the market, other series began to break new ground. One especially revolutionary set of cards was the Supersisters series from 1979, a 72-card set featuring such female luminaries as Gloria Steinem, Rosa Parks, and Helen Reddy, with pictures of them on the front and an informational blurb on the back. The independent series celebrated women of note, in response to the almost exclusively masculine subjects of most trading cards. 

During the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, the trading card industry truly boomed, and the era of ubiquitous trading cards kicked into high gear. Nearly every movie and TV show, from Star Wars to Grease to Mork & Mindy, got its own trading card set–usually with stills images on one side and information on the other, ranging from quotes to behind the scenes tidbits. Sports cards, comedy cards like Garbage Pail Kids, and sci-fi/fantasy property cards continued to rule during this golden era, but new series aimed at nearly every demographic continued to debut.

Twin Peaks trading cards? Why not. Gotta get that rare Cup of Coffee card! (Image: David Ashleydale/Flickr)

There was the 1984 set that accompanied the release of David Lynch’s dour Dune, and a 1985 card set based on Cyndi Lauper. Genre entertainments of all stripes were nearly guaranteed a trading card set, thanks to their devoted fans' proven penchant for collecting. But there were even stranger trading card series, often inviting the question, “Who the heck are these meant for?” There was The Soaps of ABC, featuring All My Children series from 1991, aimed at the fans of daytime dramas, or Topps’ Desert Storm Collector Cards from that same year, which tried to appeal to military buffs by turning images of the war into a collectible pastime.

Also during the '90s, a company named Mother Productions began releasing small sets of adult-themed trading cards: series like Faces of Death, which showed grisly scenes of corpses; Perverted Priests, featuring sex offenders of the cloth; and Hollywood Dead, which collected images of famous people’s headstones. These sets were released in single, complete sets, so despite the name, the act of trading was not really necessary. Nonetheless, they definitely expanded the scope of what a trading card could be.

A card featuring a scrap of wardrobe from The Walking Dead. (Image: 1000thghost/Wikipedia)

Even as fandom and interest moved into the digital realm, non-sports trading card series kept flourishing, especially for TV shows (Alias and Supernatural, for example, both had associated card sets). But even these series needed a more to keep collectors coming back, so rare "chase cards" began to become more elaborate. Randomly inserted special cards with holograms or celebrity signatures on them have long been a staple of the industry, but in recent years there have also been cards with bits of props or wardrobe embedded in them. One rare Buffy the Vampire Slayer card contained a shaving from one of the wooden stakes used in the show, and countless “wardrobe cards” that feature a scrap of clothing used in shows like The Walking Dead, or even Psych.

This past year saw the release of a Star Wars trading card phone and tablet app that lets people collect and trade digital copies of cards. Like the original series of Star Wars cards released back in 1977, there is no game or other functionality, simply digital images of cards. The thrill of collecting seems to be impervious to the march of time, and the magic of the trading card apparently refuses to die. Whatever your interests may be, there is likely a trading card set for it. 

In the final installment from our spooky October 100 Wonders, we bring you the Highgate Cemetery, and the Great Vampire Panic of 1970.

Highgate is one of the great Victorian cemeteries, crammed with examples of incredible funerary architecture. It is home to the remains of everyone from philosopher Karl Marx to science fiction author Douglas Adams.

However in the late 1960s it also became the home of a "King Vampire of the Undead", at least in the pages of the British Press and the minds of English teenagers. Through the perfect storm of teenage high jinks, yellow journalism, and local dueling occultists, the cemetery became home to a vampire panic that would result in corpses being disinterred, staked through the heart, beheaded, and set on fire.  

Create your own adventure. (Photo: Suzanna Law/Pop-Up Adventure Play)

More and more people are considering a new degree: Ph.D in Playwork. 

Why? Because children’s play has lost its way. Across the world, according to a pair of academics, adults have become stifling and engineering, domineering and overcalculating in their oversight of how kids bide their time. Urbanization has certainly played a role, limiting “playgrounds” to rigid metal structures lacking the magical potential of backyards, fields and forests. But parenting trends have also been moving in an increasingly hands-on direction, influenced in part by practical concerns such as safety and bullying, but also by a hungry desire for measurable results and a general distrust of children’s abilities to teach themselves—to control the content and direction of their own play, whether it involves crayons or saws.

Morgan Leichter-Saxby and Suzanna Law are working on PhDs in Playwork at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, which recently appointed the world’s first Professor of Playwork. Their PhD adviser, Dr. Fraser Brown, describes playwork as “non-judgmental, non-directive and largely reflective.” The “three Frees” of play require that it be freely chosen, free of charge, and that children must be free to come and go as they please. 

Adventure play can take a variety of forms, ranging from natural spaces with treehouses and twine forts reminiscent of Huck Finn or Pippi Longstocking, to dump-like playgrounds filled with old tires and plastic junk, to temporary arts and crafts gatherings. One of the most critical components of adventure play are playworkers, a group of trained staff who are able to trust the children and watch their progress and learning, adults who guide, monitor and support without intervening.

Leichter-Saxby and Law are currently on a six-country world tour promoting Pop-Up Adventure Play, an organization they founded in 2010. Registered as a charity, Pop-Up Adventure Play functions under the belief that “children have the right to play as they please, and that a place that supports children’s play benefits everyone.” It doesn’t seem like a revolutionary concept, but some are realizing that in some ways, it is. The values behind adventure play have caused a growing number of adults to recognize the ways in which they are constricting children’s creativity. 

The divine mayhem of proper play. (Photo: Suzanna Law/Pop-Up Adventure Play)

When Leichter-Saxby came across her first adventure playground, she says “the vibe was like nowhere else on earth.” She and Law became play rangers, a type of playwork which involves bringing play into play-deprived communities. The more work they did, the more they felt that this was something that America really needed. 

With Pop-Up Adventure Play, they wanted to create an accessible model of an adventure playground and provide the basic ideas to get people started. Anyone can access their free Pop-Up Play Shop Toolkit and Resource Pack, and ask for advice on how to get started. There have now been pop-ups in around 17 different countries, temporary projects intended to create momentum for long-term objectives.

Across different countries and neighborhoods, Leichter-Saxby and Law have observed that while governments have different initiatives, the main issues stay the same. “In Bogota, they're saying the militia moved the drug lords out, and nobody knows their neighbors,” says Leichter-Saxby. "In Park Slope, it's concerns about childcare, educational agenda, and testing that are overwhelming parents; kids aren't playing outside, and nobody knows their neighbors. But you have the same stories.”

Best playground ever. (Photo: Suzanna Law/Pop-Up Adventure Play)

The two women have helped to create pop-up adventure play in museums, parks, parking lots, and empty shops. “We meet people where they are, rather than asking them to come to us,” says Law. Adventure playgrounds evolve organically to meet a community’s immediate needs, meaning that no two playgrounds will be the same. It’s a matter of incremental risk and cultivating awareness. “I think a lot of adults today think that they’re afraid of fire and sharp tools with children—but they’re really afraid of letting children do what they please,” says Law. 

Erin Davis is the director of a short documentary about The Land, an adventure playground in Wrexham, Wales known for its edginess and unconventional levels of autonomy.

At The Land, children can climb trees and make fires, work with saws and hammers, and very much build their own adventure. The reason this can work is that The Land is a very insular community, and the riskier elements are possible due to the playworkers who eliminate real safety hazards like stray nails, as well as their intimacy and familiarity with the same group of kids. “Something like The Land would not be safe in a place like New York City, where people are playing once, if they’re visiting, or come with a school group for an afternoon,” explains Davis. 

With adventure play, kids can build the playground they want. (Photo: Suzanna Law/Pop-Up Adventure Play)

Compared to hundreds across the UK and Europe, there are only five or six adventure playgrounds in the U.S. Perhaps the most high-profile for its incorporation of both moving parts and playworkers is Manhattan’s Imagination Playground, established in 2010, which rejects the  fixed equipment model and instead offers oversized foam blocks that kids can move around.

“What captured my attention was the idea of playwork, and what it takes for an adult to support play,” Davis says of her time working on the film. “I was definitely reminded how competent children are; they get no credit for being smart creatures—clever, wise, and creative when given the opportunity.” 

 “It is how children explore and experiment, testing themselves, taking risks on their own terms and discovering how they function—what they like and don’t like—as much as discovering how their world works and how it responds to them,” she says.

England and Scotland have both launched campaigns for children’s play, but in the U.S., playwork has struggled to gain footing. “Ultimately, adult agendas have gotten in the way of adventure playwork blossoming in the U.S.,” says Law. She says Americans seem to prefer the “carefully curated baskets of joy” you get at preschools to the dirtiness and chaos of an adventure playground. 

Regular playgrounds start to feel rather sterile. (Photo: Ildar Sagdejev/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)

Jeremiah Dockray and his wife Erin Larsen are spearheading Santa Clarita Valley Adventure Play in their community of Val Verde, 30 minutes north of Los Angeles. Dockray came across adventure play in an article from a ways back where adventure playgrounds were described as a parable for anarchy. He thought the playgrounds were extinct, but he found the concept amazing and wanted something similar for their five year-old son. The couple discovered an abandoned park in their neighborhood, saw it was for sale, fell in love with it, and bought it. They signed up for an online class offered by Law and Leichter-Saxby and began started to adopt the pop-up model for outreach to their community. For nearly two years, the couple has been doing pop-up playgrounds at least once a month, as well as working to make some inroads with local parks and recreation officials and public and charter schools, trying to get some adventure play concepts into schools and recess.

Right now, their permanent spot is being very slowly developed. “We’re trying not to head into it so fast that we make something that nobody actually asked for,” says Dockray. “What we’re trying to do is basically get to know as many of the families in the area.” They want to offer a physical and mental space that kids aren’t usually allowed in more regimented environments. “It’s a local idea, to help each other, look out for each other, day in and day out, for kids to come in and work on projects for weeks and weeks, months and months,” says Dockray. “To change the playground as they change—that’s the romantic vision, anyway.”

Neighborhood pop-ups bringing communities together. (Photo: Suzanna Law/Pop-Up Adventure Play)

The community response has been positive, but they’re still navigating partnerships with the official entities and have yet to handle the legal side of things. Dockray says that when you sit insurance companies down and let them see data, adventure playgrounds are often more safe than the “bubble-wrapped playgrounds that they kind of cut-and-paste across America, where kids have a kind of an illusion that they can’t hurt themselves,” he says. “In the adventure play situation, kids can be in such a higher state of play, so focused that they’re in fact very careful, and aware of own bodies and space.”

Playworkers are one of most important aspects of having an adventure playground that truly does what it should, says Dockray, which is one reason that funding is important. They want to create something where people can make a living doing their playwork and helping out the community at no cost to them. Dockray and Larsen are working on several grants and partnerships, though they’re encountering a lot of regulations. Dockray says it’s actually easier to have an adventure playground if you don’t call yourself a playground.

Thanks to the individual efforts of people like Dockray and the support of organizations like Pop-Up Play, playwork is gradually gaining more traction in the U.S. There is now an annual Play Symposium held in Ithaca, New York, though no American universities yet offer degrees in Playwork. Leichter-Saxby and Law are hoping they can jumpstart a “play revolution.” 

But it all comes down to the question: Are we willing to relinquish control, and let children direct themselves? 

This cute little guy may be the future of medicinal technology. (Courtesy of Joshua Rosenthal/Used with Permission)

A report was released earlier this month about a trio of baby giant squid that was discovered off the coast of Japan, giving us our first glimpse at the early lives of these mysterious creatures. But even with this astounding new find, much about cephalopods in general remains a mystery. How do they think? How do they control their alien bodies? How do they get so good at hiding?

Luckily cephalopod scientists are looking for answers, and recent discoveries suggest that they could have an impact everywhere from the medical world to the military.

To find out more, we spoke with Dr. Joshua Rosenthal with the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus. Rosenthal has studied cephalopod genetics for 25 years and he says there are a number of areas of interest currently fascinating researchers, chief among them the ways that cephalopods think, their molecular odd makeup, and their remarkable camouflage abilities. But really it all comes down to their complexity. “Ninety percent of the work being done on cephalopods can be thought of as being under the umbrella of complexity.” says Rosenthal.

Nothing is simple about squid and octopi, neither their behavior nor their molecular make-up. As Rosenthal notes, the roots of cephalopod behavior is completely alien to our own. “You could argue that a mouse or a dog or us or a chimp, that we’ve come along a similar lineage to achieve behavioral complexity.” says Rosenthal “Becoming organisms that can make choices, solve puzzles, things like that.” However cephalopods have come to this sort of higher functioning through a completely different, and seemingly unique lineage that we are now trying to understand. This presents in a number of ways, from octopi that are able to open jars or escape their tanks (and even predict sports outcome, although that is less scientific), to a remarkable behavior observed in Humboldt squid that may be a form of communication. In the case of the humboldt squid, they have been observed creating a strobe effect along their skin, rapidly changing the color from red to white, in what is hypothesized to be a way of talking to other nearby squid. 

Another big question along these lines is whether or not cephalopods have thinking skin. All cephalopods have chromatophores in their skin that allow them to change colors, generally to camouflage themselves, but we are now learning that this process may be controlled by a system that could be thought of as a secondary brain spread throughout the skin. Octopi in particular are possibly the greatest chameleons in all of nature with the ability to change not only the color, but also the texture of their skin. “These guys blow chameleons away.” says Rosenthal.

As Rosenthal told us, the central nervous system of cephalopods is known to play a part in the production of their camouflage abilities, but they may also use a peripheral nervous system to automatically change color in response to stimulus. Researchers have found that some cephalopods not only have light-sensing proteins embedded in their skin (proteins that are normally found in the eye), but that they may be able to change their skin color without consulting their brain. “Maybe the skin as an organ has the ability to process information locally.” said Rosenthal “We always think of our brain as the brain in our head, right? [But with cephalopods] you might have to start thinking of their brain as this mass of neurons in their head, but also they have a lot of neurons in the periphery, in their arms, in their skin, that are processing information.”  Of course the research into the smart skin of cephalopods and their remarkable camo, is of great interest to military contractors, who actually fund some of the work in the field.

One giant brain. (Courtesy of Joshua Rosenthal/Used with Permission)

And it’s not just color, but movement as well. Israeli researchers have recently discovered that some octopi tentacles look to be controlled not directly by the brain, but by their neuron-dense arms themselves. Just imagine if your arm was able to do its own thing while your brain focused on something else. If this same behavior could be taught to robotic arms we may be one step closer to life-like robots, as one example.

Even down to the molecular level, we are still discovering amazing things about cephalopods. Rosenthal’s own work is at the level of genes and RNA, and he has discovered a cephalopod trait that could one day have a massive impact on the world of medicine. Without getting too lost in the jargon, Rosenthal has found that cephalopods are masters of RNA editing. Traditionally in biological systems of any kind, genes send information to RNA, which acts as a middleman, processing the information from genes, and spitting out the appropriate proteins that then go out and enact whatever function they were created for. However in cephalopods it is beginning to look like their RNA is regularly changing and editing the information from their genes, possibly in response to outside stimulus. “Cephalopods have this really active system of changing information at the level of RNA,” Rosenthal said, “60-70 percent of their genes are changed at the level of RNA. So the gene will say, ‘the protein should look like this,’ but then it gets changed into RNA and it gets edited slightly. Like you’d edit a story.”

Lovely and a bit terrifying. (Courtesy of Joshua Rosenthal/Used with Permission)

RNA editing is not unheard of in other species. In fact, humans have around 100 sites in their body where the process can occur. But according to Rosenthal’s research there are close to 60,000 such sites in squid. What all this science talk means, is that squid may be able to change their genetic information on the fly in response to their environment. The actual application of this RNA editing is still being researched, but if it is true that single organisms can change their molecules and internal processes to immediately adapt to changes, the ramifications could be huge. The biggest application could very well be in the field of medicine where we may one day be able to get our own bodies to be so molecularly fleet-footed. Cephalopods are riding a wave a popularity right now (pun intended), and the more we get to know about them it seems that they might be creeping into the spotlight more and more. 

One of the worst parts of the holidays ... untangling the lights. (Photo: Joseph Nadler/flickr)

Folks seem so flummoxed by their knotted piles of holiday lights that a Tesco supermarket is launching the UK’s first ever Christmas light untangling service—and currently hiring for the position.

Exceptionally gifted cord untanglers should check out the job posting, which is accepting applications until November 19. Job description details for Tesco's designated "Christmas Light Untangler" are provided on the careers page of the British grocery chain. Located in Wrexham, England, the part-time position offers a "competitive salary" and a 36-hour week.

Responsibilities include manning and managing the Christmas Lights Untangling stand as well as being knowledgable about the service being offered. The ideal candidate should be able to untangle 3 meters of Christmas lights in under three minutes. They should also be passionate about Christmas. 

A Christmas Light Untangler's worse nightmare... or greatest delight? (Photo: Stacie/flickr)

If you can’t afford a Christmas Light Untangler, online detangling tutorials might be able to help. Either way, the most important thing to remember when untangling lights is to put on your favorite holiday music and pull up your comfiest armchair.

Looks like demand for this service extends far beyond Wrexham. Take television chef Rachel Ray, who recently admitted (while revealing a fantastic Christmas light trick) that she’s gotten so frustrated with tangled lights that she’s thrown out perfectly good sets and bought brand new ones.

Rachel Ray is undoubtedly not the only one guilty of this. Untangling lights is clearly a challenge that overwhelms countless well-wishers eager to celebrate the holidays. All things considered, it's really about time that stores started hiring staff for Christmas Light Untangling.

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.

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, declassified in the 1970s. (Photo: Joe Loong/Flickr)

When you think of Allied espionage, you might imagine disguised explosives, wiretaps, bat bombs, or other dramatic inventions. But declassified documents reveal that World War II was won in part by more everyday saboteurs–purposefully clumsy factory workers, annoying train conductors, and bad middle managers, all trained by the U.S.'s Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

In 1944, World War II was in its final throes. Though the Allies were holding their own against the Axis, they were in need of more troops and more local cooperation. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, envisioned a special kind of special forces–an army of dissatisfied European citizens, waging war on existing governments simply by doing their jobs badly. They wrote up the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a kind of ultimate un-training manual, which was full of ideas for motivating and inspiring locals to make things harder on their governments. Selections and adaptations from it were disseminated in leaflets, over the radio, and in person, when agents met people who seemed right for the job.

William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, first head of the OSS and supervisor of the Simple Sabotage Manual. (Photo: National Archives & Records Administration/Public Domain)

There are “innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform,” the manual’s introduction promises. It is possible to commit destruction with “salt, nails, candles, pebbles, thread, or any other materials he might normally be expected to possess.”

The potential of these materials is limited only by the saboteur’s imagination and circumstances. You could jam a lock with a hairpin, drop a wrench into a fusebox, or sand a surface that’s supposed to be lubricated. As the manual explains, thinking bigger is better. Any military factory worker could easily slash an army truck’s tires on their way to work–but it’s even better to spill a bunch of hair into an assembly-line cauldron, spoiling the rubber meant to outfit a whole fleet.

A second type of simple sabotage, the manual explains, requires no tools and produces no physical damage. Instead, “it is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit.” Like all good maneuvers, this tactic gets a fancy name–”the human element.” Once again, there’s a simple sabotage for every occasion. Citizens should “cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.” Train conductors can “issue two tickets for the same seat in the train, so that an interesting argument will result.” Most impressively, any audience member can ruin a propaganda film by bringing a bag of moths into the theater: “Take the bag to the movies with you” and leave it on the floor of an empty section of the theater. “The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.”

Middle managers, especially, can get in on the act. Those with white-collar jobs should pontificate, flip-flop, and take every decision into committee, says a section on ‘General Interference with Organizations and Production.’ “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible,” the OSS advises. Promote bad workers and complain about good ones. “Haggle over precise wordings… Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”

CIA's manual for "simple sabotage" from 1944. Sounds like the management training manual for some jobs I've had. pic.twitter.com/TN7MdiPF8m

— Lars Doucet ن (@larsiusprime) November 3, 2015

To a reader entrenched in modern-day bureaucracies, this sounds a little like how things go even when no trickery is planned. “Some of the instructions… remain surprisingly relevant” as “a reminder of how easily productivity and order can be undermined,” writes the CIA website. A few businessmen recently wrote an advice book based on the Simple Sabotage manual, meant to help frustrated higher-ups “detect and reduce the impact” of saboteur tactics.

This is a thoroughly contemporary take, though. At the time, the OSS was careful to point out to saboteur recruiters that most people are not naturally prone to idiotic decisions. “Purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature,” they write in a section called “Motivating the Saboteur.” Your average recruit “frequently needs… information and suggestions,” incentives, and the assurance that there are many saboteurs like him, sanding things that don’t need to be sanded, holding meetings that don’t need to be held, and bringing bags of moths to the movies.

The whole manual is available for your perusal on the CIA’s website. Pages 8 through 11 have good instructions for setting almost anything on fire. Page 19 teaches you how to derail mine cars. And remember, if you are caught, “always be profuse in your apologies.” Happy trails, saboteurs.

"A guide to the golden state": the Federal Writers Project California guide. (Photo: Library of Congress)

In 1975 the TV show The Waltons, a fixture of the 1970s CBS Thursday night lineup, aired an episode called “The Boondoggle.” The episode was mostly about John-Boy wanting to be a writer–they were all, pretty much, about John-Boy wanting to be a writer–but it centered on a government-employed journalist coming to Virginia to do research for the Federal Writers Project’s American Guide Series. The episode was called "The Boondoggle" because Grandma Walton was dead-set against putting writers on the government’s payroll. Writers! Of all people!

But the Guide was real. From 1935 to 1943 the Federal Works Project, under the umbrella of the Works Project Administration, employed over 6,500 writers and editors, artists and photographers, cartographers and researchers, all working towards one grand goal: to take down a full account of the country, state by state, city by city, and deliver it to ourselves. Like Grandma Walton, a lot of people at the time thought the American Guide Series, the FWP, the WPA, and Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” itself were boondoggles. But the project kept thousands employed, including many writers who are household names today.  

Henry G. Alsberg, Director of the Federal Writers' Project, in 1938. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The brainchild of a government bureaucrat named Henry Alsberg, the FWP was established in the 1930s as a way to expand employment through government means, beyond the manual labor that was needed for the WPA's public works programs and building projects. Alsberg’s challenge wasn’t easy: how could the WPA help several thousand workers who were not manual laborers per se? The WPA was not an entitlement program, and Alsberg wanted to have workers produce something–to give them actual work along with an actual paycheck.

The answer, as the story goes, came at a Washington cocktail party: Katherine Kellock, Alsberg's wife and herself a writer employed by the WPA, shouted over the din of the party: “The thing you have to do for writers is to put them to work writing Baedekers.” She meant Baedeker’s United States, the last major U.S. travel guide, which had stopped publishing in 1909 and was both out of print and out-of-date. Luckily Kellock's advice fell on just the right set of ears: the ones belonging to WPA administrator Arthur Goldsmith.

Goldsmith dropped the hint to Alsberg, who took it as a chance to employ both professional or published writers in need of work, and a much larger group of workers. In his words, Alsberg wanted to employ “near writers… occasional writers… young college men and women who want to write, probably can write, but lack the opportunity.” The American Guide Series was to be that opportunity.

Credits page from New York City Guide. (Photo: Courtesy Anne Reddington)

Over the course of eight years, the FWP hired unknown, well-known, and soon to be well-known writers alike for the series, pairing them with government-paid photographers, artists, and cartographers. Collectively they managed to publish guidebooks for each of the 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii having not yet entered the union), several city and regional guides, and hundreds of pamphlets, maps and guided tours. It’s hard to imagine the difficulty of the undertaking, especially since the project flourished during the later years of the Depression and the first years of the United States’ involvement in World War II. But the sheer amount of information, let alone the breadth and elegance of much of the writing, art and map work, represented the small army of men and women who benefitted from the Federal Writers Project.

There are almost no credited names or bylines in the volumes themselves, but mixed in among the thousands of anonymous and amateur writers were names that went on to have celebrated careers. Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Eudora Welty, and a young assistant editor of the New York City Guide named John Cheever, all contributed to the project.

American guide week poster. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Many others, less universally familiar to us now, went on to earn Pulitzer Prizes (like poets Mark Van Doren and Conrad Aiken) and National Book Awards (like Nelson Algren, author of Man with the Golden Arm). Still others came to the project with celebrated writing credentials earned during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, and Claude McKay, to name three.

For a week in November of 1941, less than a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Americans to celebrate the Federal Writers Project and the American Guide Series. The “American Guide Week” was intended to embrace the ideals of the thousands of writers, artists, researchers and field agents who had come together in order to “describe America to Americans." That's the purpose they still serve. In the end, you can’t call the American Guide Series a boondoggle–sorry, Grandma Walton. Today, the volumes aren't only valuable as history, geography, and first-person travel chronicles; they are also collector’s items, telling us the story of our country and its past.

Illustrations from the New York volume. (Photo: Courtesy Anne Reddington)

Many of the descriptions of cities and states are still recognizable almost 75 years later, as in the following excerpts:

It would be a brave man who would sit down, alone or with company, and attempt a portrait of this State.... At best it can hope to provide a few thumbnail sketches, some directions to help the visitor... Looked back upon, it is an age of almost paradoxical contrast, with its conservatism politically and socially, and the radical changes preparing in its factories and workshops, a strange mixture of the past and future working together in a harmonious present, which seemed likely to prolong itself indefinitely… Connecticut, though nearly New York, is really New England.

Galveston, Texas… Seen from the wharves, the harbor, protected by artificial moles, is alive with traffic from a hundred ports; grimy tramp steamers, sluggish, wallowing oil tankers, trim passenger ships crowd the docks; bustling, self-important tugs nose along the larger vessels, thrusting a fruit ship out to sea, edging a steamer gingerly to dock. 

The Illinois volume. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Gargantuan alike in size and rate of growth, the New World’s second largest metropolis, the seventh largest on the globe–“Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders”–it lies at the point where the long finger of Lake Michigan pushes deep into the continent through the North woods and touches the fertile open prairie, the granary and stock farm of the Nation. Of that contact Chicago was born…

It is this huge army of Federal employees – drawn from every part of the country and organized in scores of separate units, but deriving its livelihood from a common source and therefore held together by a common bond – which chiefly affects the city’s routine life, its economic life in particular…. There are retired officials of every sort – ex-Senators and ex-Representatives; Army and Navy men, to whom Washington is the only fixed point in an unstable universe… There are journalists and press correspondents, probably the largest group of its kind in the world, who mirror and echo Washington life for the Nation.

A guide to winter sports in the North-East. (Photo: Library of Congress)

New York City ~ The ship moves along the path of a thousand living steamers, past the ghosts of ten thousand sailing vessels and steamships; vessels that brought the Dutch, the English and their goods, Negro slaves, West Indian run, British textiles, Australian wool, German machinery. Night draws to a close. Bands are still playing behind closed doors of half a dozen nightclubs. The river wind lifts yesterday's paper the length of a block. A water wagon rolls by. A solitary taxi tracks the wet paving. Good night darling, goodnight, goodnight. A blast from the far-off Narrows whispers through dead streets; spruce from Norway, asbestos from South Africa, German, Austrian, Polish, Italian refugees.

Los Angeles, known to the ends of the earth as the mother of Hollywood, that dazzling daughter still sheltered under the family roof, has other liens on fame and fortune. The country's fifth largest city, in area the nation's largest municipality, Los Angeles extends one thin arm to embrace the harbors of San Pedro and Wilmington, and with the other reaches past Santa Monica to the San Gabriel Mountains. Amoeba-like, it has grown out and around many independent communities... so numerous that wits never tire of describing the scene as "nineteen suburbs in search of a city."... To still others it is a fashionable cafe, a luxurious hotel, a boulevard on which to stroll and see and be seen by the great and near-great, a paradise for the collector of autographs and the hunter of social lions. 

A map from the California guide. (Photo: Courtesy Anne Reddington) 

The San Francisco of the old vice-ridden Barbary Coast days is gone, but the traditions established by hordes of happy-go-lucky miners, gamblers, adventurers of all kinds, epicures, and others of the city’s first American population have not been entirely obliterated. Those were the days of laissez-faire, of easy-come-easy-go, of good-natured tolerance, not unnatural in a city where fortunes were made and lost overnight, where a bartender one day was a nabob the next, where today’s bonanza kind was tomorrow’s roustabout.

And finally, a little prophetically:

Massachusetts ~ Tempers wore thin as cherished passages were cruelly blue-penciled, and editorial conferences developed into pitch battles. But out of it all, writers of varied ability and training and of widely differing temperament, thrown together on the common basis of need, shared a new experience – an adventure in cooperation.

That doesn't just describe Massachusetts; it's true of the entire American Guide Series.

Detail of a hologram on a German ID card. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

A version of this post originally appeared on the Tedium newsletter. 

True story—a couple weeks ago, a restaurant attempted to deny me service because they thought I had a fake ID.

The ID was a few years old, granted, and it has a small crack in it, but it nonetheless was a real form of identification. The waiter made a joke along the lines of the ID looking like a fake ID he used in college, which seemed like a bad joke until a few minutes later, when the manager came out and asked to look at it. The guy claimed it was tampered!

This would have been the end of a 20-year-old’s fun night out, but considering that I’m 34 and was sitting with my wife for a quiet brunch, it seemed like an especially absurd situation.

But the fake ID racket has been going on for decades, and—to be fair to my waiter—there’s plenty of reason for alcohol-sellers to be skeptical. They could be dealing with the next McLovin'.

The world's first drivers' license, issued to Karl Benz upon his request, 1888. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The history of the fake ID has much in common with other forms of secure information commonly held on a person. Credit cards are a good example: slowly, cards became such a common way that we paid for things that they had to eventually get more secure, because it became imperative to their growth. Likewise, if currency isn’t well-secured and counterfeits get into the monetary bloodstream, the whole system eventually fails.

And forms of identification are very much the same way. A century ago, identification was not even an issue at all, but the need to associate people with a specific identity started to become essential as automobiles became popular and alcohol became more heavily regulated. A driver’s license is sort of a de facto way of checking someone’s age, but even that took some time to become formalized—many states didn’t even require that licenses had photos before the 1970s.

Fake IDs are often seen as a relatively recent phenomenon as a result, but there are at least a few examples of people using fakes as early as the ‘70s.

For example, Kurtis Blow, an early hip-hop star, used a fake ID to his advantage in starting his music career. While his classmates were still in school, Blow was getting to know DJs around New York City as early as 1972.

“When I was 13 I had a fake ID that said that I was 19. I was getting in all the clubs,” Blow explained in an interview.

That networking paid off by 1980, when Blow became the first rapper to have a gold-selling single, the first rapper to perform overseas, and the first to sign to a major label. He did all of this before his 22nd birthday.

A saloon in Charleston, Arizona in 1885, in the days before any minimum drinking age, and when a bouncer's job was just to forcibly eject brawlers. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

At the time that Blow was coming up, his situation was a relative rarity; fake IDs weren’t so much a big thing back then in part because a number of states had laws that had set the drinking age at 18, something done in response to the fact that many teenagers could vote and legally be sent to war at that age.

Eventually, though, that changed, and it’s all thanks to a clever law.

Much like the book 1984 was a turning point for dystopian literature, the year 1984 was a turning point for the rise of fake IDs. That year, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg teamed with Mothers Against Drunk Driving to get the National Minimum Drinking Age Act passed.

The law was a clever workaround of the 21st Amendment, which didn’t allow for federal regulations of drinking. See, Lautenberg’s law doesn’t require a drinking age, per se, but states that have a drinking age below 21 automatically lose 10 percent of their highway funding, which is a nice strategy for strong-arming states into compliance.

Now, there were sound reasons for the law—specifically, the rise of automobile crashes caused by drunk drivers was directly related to the lower legal age limits in states with lower drinking standards. There were also sound reasons against it—the fact that people who can legally vote and be sent to war can’t buy a Natty Boh on their own accord. Nonetheless, the law had the effect of boosting interest in the creation of fake IDs.

Much like dollar bills began to start looking like works of avant-garde art in the early '90s, state-issued IDs began adding all sorts of crazy gizmos to discourage fakery. Photos were an obvious step, one that many states started adding in the 1970s. In recent years, states have started using holograms, moving from plastic to laminate, adding barcodes and other digital features, and hiding ultraviolet pictures inside of the cards.

The more crazy stuff you put on the card, the harder it is to fake. To give you an idea, this is what California’s driver’s license looks like these days.

Why are these cards so over the top nowadays? Simply put, it’s become clear, as security has become a much bigger issue around the world, that the rise of fake IDs represents a lot more than a few extra PBRs given out to kids under the age of 21. They also can (depending on who you ask) lead to a loss of tax revenue, a flood of unauthorized immigration, and potential threats to national or international security.

That last one shouldn’t be taken lightly, by the way: After the disappearance last year of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, there was a brief freakout when Interpol realized that two of the passengers had used forged passports. Those people were merely asylum-seekers from Iran, but it nonetheless highlights the risks fake IDs can create.

Those who use fake IDs are also putting themselves in great risk of legal action: In some states, such as Florida and Illinois, usage of a fake ID is a felony offense.

A board advertising fake IDs in Thailand. (Photo: 1000 Words/shutterstock.com)

These days, the fake ID game is a bit of an arms race: As real IDs have improved, so too have the strategies used by the creators of fakes.

Guides on how to make your own fakes—noting the usage of materials like Teslin paper, hologram overlays, and magnetic stripe encoders—are rampant all over the internet, but the complexity of creating an ID of this nature on your own is way beyond the knowledge of any Photoshop expert. Just because you can cut out an image doesn’t mean that you can make a realistic-looking ID.

It’s probably a good idea, then, to leave it to the internet experts. In recent years, the Reddit community /r/FakeID has become a key source for acquiring these handmade works of art. People around the world are willing to risk potential arrest and prosecution to create these cards, but often the financial rewards—often paid out in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin—make the risk worthwhile.

The community is pretty good at policing itself, with a list of verified vendors and scammers right at the top of the page.

Beyond the Reddit community, the primary driver of the fake ID business these days is China, where businesses of questionable legality ship IDs inside of small packages to college towns across the country. The quality of these IDs is so good that they sometimes fool the experts.

The import of fake IDs is common enough that customs officials are keeping an eye out: Between October 2013 to September 2014, authorities at Kennedy International Airport confiscated 4,585 fake IDs, most of them from China. Why has it become so common? Simply put, it’s harder to prosecute people committing fraud half a world away in countries where the specific crime isn’t even illegal. 

One advocacy group, the Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, has been one of the biggest critics of the rise of fake IDs from China, which it says raise security issues and threaten lives. In a USA Today op-ed earlier this year, the group’s director of research, Max Bluestein, said that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security needs to work with the Chinese government to stop the spread of fake IDs from the country.

“The driver’s license is fundamental to our security infrastructure. While Chinese companies are flooding our borders with these counterfeits, that infrastructure is in danger of crumbling,” Bluestein wrote.

The new California license. (Photo: dmv.ca.gov) 

By the way, it’s worth pointing out that—even if you have a high-quality fake ID—there’s a good chance that the bouncers at the bar or counter slaves at the liquor store will be able to easily figure out that it’s not real. Because they’ve seen it all.

“If an ID is from Wilmington, Delaware, it’s fake 100 percent of the time. Wilmington, Delaware is the hands down, all star of fake IDs,” a New York City bouncer wrote on Jobstr back in 2013.

And they can spot trends better than you can. Earlier this year, a Maryland grocery store stopped accepting Connecticut IDs because they were seeing so many fakes—high-quality fakes that managed to include perfect holograms of the state’s seal. The one stop to all of this production could be biometrics becoming more integrated in ID technology—but while that's on the way, it hasn't quite arrived yet. 

Perhaps that’s what happened to me at that restaurant I went to a couple weeks back: They had seen so many IDs that were fake that they assumed a 34-year-old married guy with a beard and an appalling lack of common sense was trying to pull a fast one on them.

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

A view of an Amazon tributary in Peru. (Photo: Paul Alexander/flickr)

Steven King had to learn the hard way that wearing G.I.-style boots in the Amazon jungle was not a good idea.

It was the late 1970s, and King, a young ethnobotanist, was studying diet and medicinal plants through the Amazonian Anthropology and its Practical Application Center, in Peru, while working for a tribe of Secoya people who lived in the forest. During his nine month stay, King learned to hunt and helped the tribe clear small sections of the forest so they could plant gardens. King also spent an inordinate amount of time tending to his footwear, and to his feet, which, in the dampness of the Peruvian Amazon, had succumbed to fungal infections and blisters.

“I learned that the smart thing to wear are sandals, or no shoes at all,” King recalls. He also learned to treat his wounds using sap from a local tree called Sangre de Drago. Meaning Dragon’s Blood in English, the name is both poetic and precise, since the sap of the tree is bright red, and stands out vividly against the reptilian-looking bark, which is stubbly, grey and usually covered in moss. Valued for its medicinal properties, the sap has been used widely across South America to treat everything from upset stomachs to colds, and because it contains latex, it’s also a liquid bandage, forming a second skin over open wounds. It was the only thing that relieved King’s burning feet.

Sangre de Grado, or Dragon's Blood. (Photo: por natikka/WikiCommons CC BY 2.5)

Eventually, King’s personal discovery would also help launch a near-epic journey to bring that blood-red sap to the U.S. pharmaceutical market. It was a process that lasted decades and weathered the boom and bust of the dot com era, the crisis of the AIDS epidemic, a backlash against bio-prospecting, and trends around eco-activism, as it wended its way towards FDA approval. Twenty five years later, the tale of the blood red sap is both hopeful and cautionary, a window onto the history of finding cures in the rainforest, as well as the pitfalls and complications of bringing those cures to market.

Coming up as a young ethnobotanist, King, who is now Senior Vice President at Napo Pharmaceuticals, where he oversees sustainable supply, ethnobotanical research and intellectual property, was mentored by Dr. Richard Schultes, who is often described as “the father of ethnobotany”, “a swashbuckling plant hunter,” and “the last great explorer of the Victorian tradition,” in his 2001 New York Times obituary.

Those monikers bear the patina of romance, as well as the stain of white privilege. And yet Schultes’ field work is still widely revered. His books on hallucinogenic plants like peyote and ayahuasca were cultural touchstones for William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, and other psychedelic explorers (most of whom Schultes roundly denounced). And his research into plants that produced curare–a poison applied to arrows, mostly for hunting monkeys and other prey–in the 1940s and 50s became foundational. Today, a diluted form of the poison curare is used as a muscle relaxer in surgery, and many plants that he collected still bear his name, including the orchid Pachyphyllum schultesi.

Dr. Richard Evan Schultes in the Amazon. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In the decades that followed, a new generation of ethnobotanists set out to find cures in the Amazon with Schultes’ name on their lips. There was Tim Ploughman, who collected more than 700 specimens of coca plant, making him a foremost authority on the plant from which cocaine derives. (The nightshade species Brunfelsia plowmaniana was named for him.) And there was Wade Davis, who, after collecting some 6,000 botanical specimens, is now an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.

There were also important breakthroughs, such as the discovery of Madagascar Periwinkle, an ancient folk remedy for diabetes that was marketed by Eli Lilly as a powerful anti-cancer drug.

But the ethics around such breakthroughs have long been cloudy at best, if not outright exploitative. For instance, as a consequence of the commercialization of Madagascar Periwinkle, “Eli Lilly now realizes $100 million annually from sales of these drugs, sold under the trade names Velbun and Oncovin,” writes Michael Hassemer, in a collection of legal essays titled, Indigenous Heritage and Intellectual Property.“In contrast, local populations do not share in the benefits that arise from the rosy periwinkle, which holds particularly true of the people of Madagascar, the original home of this plant.”

This unfair dynamic, now known as biopiracy, is also a long held tradition, and has been in play ever since the Portuguese first set foot on the shores of Brazil.

Madagascar periwinkle, or catharanthus roseus. (Photo: Joydeep/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

By 1980s, the hunt for plants had grown increasingly commercialized, with many scientists and pharmaceutical companies doing research into plants for medicine and agricultural products. The National Cancer Institute invested heavily in the search for tropical plants with tumor-fighting activity, and there were reports of researchers going from village to village in Africa, South America and Asia asking the people and their medicine men how they treat various maladies. 

At the time, King was completing a PhD on Andean tubers at the New York Botanical Garden, while doing a post-doctoral fellowship across the Hudson River at Merck & Co. With a foot in both worlds, King remembers this as an era when big pharmaceutical companies, under increasing pressure to innovate, had turned plant hunting into big business.

Yet, King says, it was also the start of a downturn. Despite its investments in new plant research, The National Cancer Institute, which had screened some 35,000 plants and animals since 1956 in its quest to find anti-cancer compounds, abandoned the program in 1981 after largely failing to identify new treatments. And with new advances in chemistry and synthetic drugs, some companies were beginning to question the value of natural remedies.

“It was like, ‘why go to the rainforest when we can make this stuff in our labs?'” King says of the sentiment at the time.

Shaman Pharmaceuticals collected plants from regions such as Madagascar, above. (Photo: Rod Waddington/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

However, as King would soon learn, his line of work could live and die by shifting social movements. In the 1990s, when saving the rainforest became the cause célèbre of the decade, there was a spike of enthusiasm for finding and protecting the natural cures of the Amazon. After a stint as Chief Botanist for Latin America for the Nature Conservancy, in Washington D.C., King was recruited by Shaman Pharmaceuticals, a biotech startup in San Francisco. There, he served as their scientific advisor, along with other Schultes protegees, including Mark Plotkin, who, at the time, was scouring the jungle for a cure for diabetes.

'We all had a mantra that we had to save the rainforest because it was a repository of natural drugs,'' Dr. Wade Davis, who studied ethnobotany at Harvard, told the New York Times in 1999.

This was a period of great promise for the sap of the Sangre de Drago, also known as Croton lechleri. Riding the fumes of the dot com bubble, Shaman Pharmaceuticals explored and invested in communities as far-flung as Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and Peru, while implementing an approach that was more progressive than any previous era. Armed with teams of ethnobotanists, medical physicians, and local scientists, they reinvested 15 to 20 percent of their profits back into the local communities they met with, regardless of whether or not they ended up researching their local cures. The end results–mosquito nets for maternity wards in Tanzania; water pipes for thirsty villages in Borneo–were a calculated benefit in a time when countries were increasingly wary of bioprospecting.

“The odds of finding a drug you can take to market are really, really low because of the likelihood of any one thing being successful,” King says. “Putting into place an immediate sense of reciprocity had immediate and long term benefits. We wanted to build a global network of good will, so you didn't just have us gringos come and go.”

The flowers and stem from the Dragon's Blood tree. (Photo: Dick Culbert/flickr)

The company eventually collected some 2,300 plants, and it wasn’t long before they were homing in on the blood-red goo that King had first encountered in the ‘70s. Used widely to treat everything from machete cuts and sore gums to post-partum hemorrhaging, the company started isolating and extracting its various compounds, testing its antiviral activities, with an eye towards treating respiratory infections. They also began to cultivate Sangre de Drago on the ground by employing local, small-scale farmers to plant it amongst their other crops, and partnering up with “traveling river salesmen,” known as regatones.

Supply, King found, would not be a problem. “I wouldn’t call it a weed, because that’s too pejorative,” King says of Sangre de Drago. “But it’s a super-abundant pioneer species.”

Back in the lab, they had given up on the respiratory angle, and found success by isolating another compound that held potential for treating diarrhea by stemming the loss of fluids. The compound, which came to be known as Crofelemer, had legs. It passed initial clinical trials, and with AIDS activists and patients crying out furiously for better treatments–diarrhea was just one of the many potentially dangerous side effects of antiretroviral drugs–the FDA was soon interested. King was optimistic that the drug might one day be used to fight cholera and treat refugees and vulnerable children–anyone at risk of dying from diarrhea-related diseases.

Yet bringing a drug to market can take more time than investors are willing to spare. When the FDA sent the drug back for more trials, Shaman Pharmaceuticals’ stock slid until it was virtually worthless. The company abandoned their mission, and after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, changed their name to Shaman Botanicals and moved into dietary supplements, becoming part of a growing trend of beauty brands that partnered with local cultures. Meanwhile, Lisa Conte, Shaman’s original founder, continued on her course. After purchasing its technology and botanical collections, she founded a new biotech firm called Napo Pharmaceuticals, and brought King into the fold once more.

Thus began a decade-long low point of complicated partnerships and infomercials–a period that King looks back on as “pretty hysterical.”

A specimen of Brunfelsia plowmaniana, named after Tim Ploughman. (Photo: Daniel Mietchen/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

The tides changed again in 2012, when Crofelemer finally broke through. After years of being sold by way of 1-800 numbers, the drug was approved by the FDA, becoming the first anti-diarrheal drug for HIV/AIDS patients, and only the second botanical prescription ever approved by the FDA. Conte’s firm licensed the product to Salix while retaining the intellectual property rights. “It makes it all worthwhile,” Conte once said of the approval. 

Today, after a grinding but ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit with Salix, which the company sued for “deliberately blocking, or unreasonably impeding” Crofelemer’s sales (the drug was notably slow to reach the people who needed it), Crofelemer is available by prescription, and King has branched into the veterinary and agricultural market. Most recently, there have been hopeful signs that Sangre de Drago-based drugs may help treat diarrhea in calves and other farm animals (the product would not stop an infection, but it might help control the loss of fluids).

“This 25 year story is just insane,” King says, reflecting back on the journey of Sangre de Drago, and to that time in Peru, when he used its sap to treat the blisters on his feet. As for the future, King hasn’t given up on the hope that one day Crofelemer might be able to help the world’s most vulnerable populations–children, refugees, and of course, the communities that initially pointed them to it.

Imagine a rat about 10 times larger than this little guy. Much less cute. (Image: Jean-Jacques Boujot/Flickr)

Archaeology can yield a lot of surprises, as researchers from the Australian National University found out recently when they went searching for early signs of human life and ended up discovering the remains of what may have been the biggest rat to ever live.

ANU researcher Julien Louys and his team were in East Timor studying the movement habits of ancient humans when they found the rat fossils. The remains proved that rats about the size of a small dogs—and 10 times heavier than today's average rat—once skittered around the area.

Having only died out around a thousand years ago, the rats would have existed right alongside people. In fact, thanks to marks and scorches on the discovered bones, it appears that the humans of the day would have fed on these giant rodents.

While the researchers didn't expect to find their massive new rat, they are now looking into its past to find out why the species died out. It is thought that the rat population began to plummet as metal tools were introduced to the local culture, which not only would have made humans more effective hunters, but led to an increase in local deforestation. With nowhere to call home, the rats would have slowly died off, leaving humanity with mere rat-sized rats rather than dog-sized ones.

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. 

Blurring its way to a world title. (Photo: Norwegian Speed Factory/Facebook)

On Friday November 6, an unusual vehicle sped down the rain-slicked runway of Norway's Torp Sandefjord Airport. It wasn't a plane, a helicopter, or even one of those inscrutable little airport conveyances. It was a souped-up Viking T6 lawnmower, eschewing grass for pavement in search of a world speed title.

The Norwegians behind the green machine have been working on it for several months, in collaboration with VIKING gardening company. Led by driver Pekka Lundefaret, the team shredded their goal, bringing the mower up to 133.5 miles per hour and slicing up last year's record of 117 miles per hour.

"This is so great," Lundefaret told his hometown news outlet, Conpot. "I had never imagined that we might make a new world record today under these conditions." 

The mower has traded in much of its traditional hardware for speedier gear, and boasts a 408-horsepower V8 engine and Formula 3 wheels. Some fear that in its quest for greatness, the machine has traded its soul–its grass clipping collector, for example, has been converted into a fuel tank. As one YouTube commenter put it, "What about that thing is a lawnmower?" At press time, the World's Fastest Lawnmower was presumably zooming too quickly to respond.

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.

Joseph Noel Paton's 1849 painting of Oberon and Titania, fairies from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Fairies are renowned for causing mischief, so it is little surprise to discover that the fairytale capital of the world is in dispute. In one corner stands the city of Odense in Denmark (pop. 173,814), the birthplace of fabulous fabulist, Hans Christian Andersen. In the other corner looms the city of Kassel in Germany (pop. 194,087), hometown of the magicians of make-believe, the Grimm Brothers. Who is the rightful fairytale capital of the world? 

Andersen’s links to Odense are intense. The writer of countless classic fairytales, including  “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling”, was born in a slum in the city, the son of an impoverished shoemaker. He was sent to a school for the poor that he hated and where he was roundly abused by both fellow pupils and teachers alike. The themes of being an outsider and an outcast, themes that suffuse Andersen’s sadder tales, can be traced back to his experiences in Odense. As such the city was instrumental in the creation of his fairytales. Today it is filled with statues of Andersen and his creations.

Hans Christian Andersen's childhood home in Odense. (Photo: Kåre Thor Olsen/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Grimms’ relationship to Kassel was quite the opposite. They grew up in a wealthy family and spent their formative years working as linguists in the pay of the King of Westphalia. They began collecting folk tales that they found in the royal library, or which they heard being told amongst their sister’s friends, or Kassel acquaintances such as Dorothea Viehmann, a tavern-owner’s daughter. The brothers compiled and published their first fairytale collection in 1812, unleashing on the world the stories of “Cinderella”, “Rapunzel” and the” Frog Princess”, although these stories have been greatly sanitized by translators and the Grimms themselves. (To give you an idea of the differences, in the original stories Cinderella’s sisters have their eyes pecked out by pigeons, Sleeping Beauty does not have an evil stepmother, and Rapunzel is pregnant). Kassel today lies at the heart of the German Fairy Tale Route, a 370-mile-long tour dedicated to the life and works of the Brothers Grimm.

 Interestingly Andersen actually met the Grimms in 1844, although not in Odense or Kassel but in Berlin. It was not a success. As Andersen described it in his autobiography:

“I entered the room, and Jacob Grimm, with his knowing and strongly marked countenance, stood before me.

“I come to you,” said I, “without letters of introduction because I hope that my name is not wholly unknown to you.”

“Who are you?” asked he.

I told him; and Jacob Grimm said, in a half-embarrassed voice, “I do not remember to have heard this name: what have you written?”

It was now my turn to be embarrassed in a high degree; but I now mentioned my little stories.

“I do not know them,” said he; “but mention to me some other of your writings, because I certainly must have heard them spoken of.”

I named the titles of several; but he shook his head. I felt myself quite unlucky."

Awkward introductions aside, Andersen and the brothers were eventually reconciled and became great friends. Alas the same cannot occur between Odense and Kassel. While there can be many great fairytale writers, there cannot be two fairytale capitals of the world.

An illustration from Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen, 1914. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In order to discover the true fairytale capital of the world, it seems only sensible to try and discover where fairies themselves come from, and follow the pixie dust to what they call home. Fortunately while descriptions of nymphs, jinni and angels stretch back millennia, the term “fairy” dates only as far back as the Middle Ages. It is first mentioned in the Old French epic poems known as the chanson de geste (“song of deeds”). In the epic known as Huon of Bordeaux, a 13^th Century knightly romp, Huon is set a series of seemingly impossible tasks which he achieves with the assistance of the fairy king, Oberon. In this poem fairyland is described as existing just beyond Palestine. Other chansons suggest it is more in the vicinity of Persia.

Kassel, Germany, home of the Brothers Grimm. (Photo: Nikanos/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.5)

In A.C. Hamilton’s monumental encyclopedia on the granddaddy of fairy writing, Edmund Spenser, Hamilton explains that fairyland is constantly changing position because “Fairyland exists just beyond the boundaries of the known.” As knowledge of the world was constantly changing in the Middle Ages, fairyland itself kept moving. One moment it was near the Caspian Sea, the next by the Pacific. In fact fairyland tended to be located near whatever new land had recently been discovered. As Columbus discovered America and Magellan circumnavigated the globe, fairyland receded farther and farther away. Up to a certain point it had been possible to ride or sail to fairyland, but soon fairyland drifted out of reach, towards the stars, or as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, to some place deep within: “Faery is a place of the mind, a place of knowledge and perception, a place where spirit and love are known and experienced.”

In other words, fairyland was nowhere at all.

The Brothers Grimm and historic buildings of Kassel on the last 1000 DM banknote. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

As such neither Odense nor Kassel, both of which are definitely somewhere, seem entirely suitable to be titled the Fairytale Capital of the World. Fortunately one other place is. Or rather, it isn’t.

Buxtehude in northern Germany (pop. 39,777) labels itself the Fairytale Capital of the World, but is rather overshadowed by Kassel and Odense. Its claim to the title rests largely on the fact that it is mentioned by name in a number of German fairytales, like in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Hare and the Hedgehog”.

Buxtehude, Germany, a claimant for 'Fairy Tale Capital of the World'. (Photo: Arne Hückelheim/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

In itself, this would offer little weight to its claim. However because of Buxtehude’s use as a backdrop for the fantastical, the town’s name has itself come to mean a faraway, imagined place. A German saying—“nach Buxtehude jagen”, “hunting for Buxtehude“— means something like “going on a wild goose chase.” “Buxtehude” has come to mean a place that you can’t find, a place that doesn’t exist, a place that is nowhere at all. Which, happily enough, is exactly where you can find fairyland.

Your only responsibility to celebrate is to online shop. (Photo: Pixabay/Public Domain)

A holiday named “Bare Sticks” may not sound very celebratory, but it might be the most important day in the year for shoppers in the world's most populated country. Known in English as “Singles’ Day” (in Chinese, literally “bare sticks”), November 11th in China has become the greatest commercial success ever witnessed—or manufactured. 

Singles’ Day falls on 11/11 (single-single-single-single), and in 2014, it brought in $9.34 billion in a 24-hour period of online sales for Alibaba, a Chinese company similar to eBay and Amazon founded in 1999. That is more than three times the 2014 Cyber Monday sales revenue for all U.S. merchants combined, and this year, Alibaba is gearing up for yet another record-breaking e-commerce carnival. The company's chairman, Jack Ma, now says that he wants “Double 11”—a new term trademarked by Alibaba in 2012—to become a global holiday. 

In the hours leading up to “Singles’ Day,” or “Double 11,” web-savvy Chinese, no matter what their marital status, load up their virtual shopping carts and wait until midnight to snatch deals and steals. But back in the early 1990s when the “holiday” first took shape, Singles' Day was very much an offline solace for actual single people. A small group of students at Nanjing University are said to have chosen 11/11 as a day that singles could do activities like karaoke together. By the late 2000s, Singles’ Day was widely known, sometimes called Bachelors’ Day, either because its initial creators were men or because of China’s massive gender imbalance. Yet it wasn’t until 2009 that Alibaba revamped 11/11 into today’s wild shopping spree, cleverly capitalizing on the holiday lull between China’s National Day in September and Spring Festival in February.  

Where dreams come true: an online shop storage and transportation center in China. (Photo: junrong/shutterstock.com)

Some singles see the day as an opportunity to pamper themselves (since no one else is doing it for them); others see it as a time to hang out with friends; and yet others see it as a chance to bring an end to their solo status, through speed dating or gift giving. Yet singlehood is more often stigmatized than celebrated, which is one reason that Alibaba coined the neutral “Double 11” label. Of course, the online giant, which runs the popular shopping sites Tmall and Taobao, is also trying to monopolize Double 11 revenue by leveraging the new trademark to make legal threats. We're looking at the world’s biggest population of online shoppers (193 million), still only a fraction of China’s current internet users (538 million), which is just a sliver of China’s total population (over 1.4 billion). Alibaba wants to reel in and rule them all.

But can Singles’ Day, or Double 11, really go global? And is it possible to construct a holiday practically from scratch?

More and more Chinese with expendable income + the internet = e-commerce bonanza. (Photo: chillchill_lanla/shutterstock)

“The history of holidays that started that recently is quite limited,” says John Deighton of Harvard Business School, who specializes in consumer behavior and digital marketing. “I would say that holidays are very tough to build from scratch. They’re part of long histories deeply woven into the culture of communities.” Deighton mentions Kwanzaa and Hanukkah as newer holidays that exist in relation to other things within a shifting landscape of social relations. “Most things don’t simply come into being because somebody in a boardroom decided it would happen; it’s usually a case of putting a spark into something already flammable," he says.

Even Hallmark can’t create its own holidays, something they clarify on their page, “‘Hallmark Holidays’: Not Invented Here!” The greeting card company explains: “Hallmark must respond to what people want, not the other way around… Congressional resolutions, proclamations, religious observances, cultural traditions and grassroots leadership by ordinary people create holidays.”

Singles’ Day is founded upon none of these things. It was a half-born caterpillar when Alibaba transformed it into a massive money-making butterfly, and it sort of seems that some chums in a boardroom did just get together and decide to fabricate a holiday.

But Deighton doesn’t think Double 11 will catch on elsewhere. “I think it would be monumental and really surprising if anyone could create a Singles’ Day event in U.S. culture,” he tells me. It certainly doesn’t help that November 11 is Veteran’s Day, when holiday season is already in swing. “My argument isn’t completely intact—it’s hard to predict something for which there’s so little to go on, “ he says. “But boy would that be remarkable.”

Remarkable, indeed—and turns out some people already on it. Inspired by China’s Singles’ Day success, a group in West Hollywood, California has launched an American version of the event, a day that says, “Hey, all you single people—we love you!” Their inaugural celebration took place on January 11, 2014, and they believe Singles’ Day is something that people are more than ready for. They’re aiming to make 1/11 an official American holiday, “a day of recognition for those who find themselves on the other side of the couple’s fence—by happenstance or by choice, temporarily or for life.” Their website points out that the U.S. is more single now than ever, with the number of unmarried Americans at a record high. So far they haven't gained much traction, but who knows? Maybe Target will come to the rescue and take it over.

So, is a holiday really all that hard to create? It depends, perhaps, on what counts as a holiday. There are plenty of sort-of-holidays like Mothers and Fathers day and pseudo-holidays like National Donut Day and National Dress Up Your Pet Day, but no one considers those—or Black Friday and Cyber Monday—true holidays.

What about if Amazon declared, for instance, May 27 as "You Do You Day"? A holiday of sales and self-appreciation that Walt Whitman could really get behind—its slogan could be “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and buy things for myself!” Finally, an excuse to indulge and pamper yourself rather than spend money on others, et voilà—suddenly we've got a new holiday.