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The Bankrupt Irishman Who Created the Dollar Sign by Accident

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The only known depiction of Oliver Pollock, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo: Richard Cummins/Alamy)

Wars cost money. So when the Revolutionary War broke out, the Colonies turned to a number of sources for backing. The top contributors to America’s Independence: The Kingdoms of France and Spain, the Dutch banking conglomerate, and a single Irish merchant based in New Orleans. His name was Oliver Pollock, and he was the “Financier of the Revolution in the West.”  

Pollock saw opportunity in war– the chance for a young but wealthy immigrant to stand as a symbol of success and greatness. He desired to carve out a place for himself in America’s financial landscape and perhaps even leave a mark in the nation’s history. He achieved all those things. Just not in the way he expected.

America was a British colony in revolt, so the preferred currency became the Spanish dollar, also known as Spanish peso, which was commonly obtained through illicit trade in the Spanish Caribbean. This was the exact manner of trade in which Oliver Pollock made his fortune. Pollock reached into his own deep pockets and made available to the American war cause 300,000 Spanish pesos. That amount is valued at roughly one billion dollars in today’s currency.

It was a massive sum, even for someone as wealthy as Pollock, but he gladly parted with it in order to back the revolution. After all, Pollock was Irish, and he believed that fighting Britain was his duty. As important as it was to root for the right horse, Pollock was still a businessman; he believed a sizable investment in the Revolution would pay dividends in the long run–and give him access to some of the most famous names in America.

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A 1761 plan for New Orleans, where Oliver Pollock worked as a merchant. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The primary beneficiary of Pollock’s finances was General George Rogers Clark, whose successful campaigns across the American frontier and especially in Illinois opened up the Northwest for the Colonial forces. In fact, James Alton James, the author of the sole book written about Pollock, Oliver Pollock: The Life and Times of an Unknown Patriot, argues that “the accomplishments of Clark [were] impossible without the contributions of Pollock.”

The Irishman followed his financial contribution with a diplomatic one. The American cause was believed too idealistic by some potential allies, while others saw Washington’s early struggles on the battlefield as a harbinger of Britain’s inevitable victory. Oliver Pollock refused to let these minor concerns get in the way of his financial windfall. Having been named the official representative of the Colonies in New Orleans by the Continental Congress, Pollock took it upon himself to approach “neutral” individuals on their behalf, providing support however needed.

When it came time to launch a crucial campaign against the British military in the South to prevent them from encircling the American rebels and keeping open a vital conduit for supplies, Oliver Pollock approached the skeptical Spanish Colonel and Governor of Louisiana Bernardo de Gálvez. Pollock personally convinced Governor Gálvez of General Washington’s ability to win this war and then sweetened the pot by personally raising the troops and supplies Governor Gálvez used to capture British forts in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. The campaign was a massive success. It was also a huge drain on Pollock’s personal fortune. 

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A view of Havana, 1765, where Oliver Pollack was headquartered after leaving Pennsylvania. (Photo: Library of Congress)

 Pollock had to find another way to raise money for the revolutionary effort: so he drew up bills of exchange, or war bonds, to sell to supporters of the colonies. When Pollock reached out to the Founding Fathers to support his new plan, they had no problem backing their man in New Orleans. “Investors were willing to purchase because of the public support given Pollock by Thomas Jefferson, who then served as Governor of Virginia,” explains Light Townsend Cummins in his paper Oliver Pollock and George Rogers Clarks’ Service of Supply: A Case Study in Financial Disaster.”

The “Financial Disaster” part ofthe aforementioned title gives away what happened next–Oliver Pollock went broke. The expensive cost of raising of armies and supplies left him with nothing. To make matters worse, as a result of some favorable re-negotiating on the bills of exchange he had issued, he was made liable for them, as opposed to the merchant companies and the state congresses who originally backed them.

His creditors came looking for repayment. Pollock had no choice but to turn to his Northern friends for help. “Letters from Pollock...were read on the floor of Congress, and the Commercial Committee resolved that the U.S. Treasury should pay Pollock more than twenty thousand dollars…” writes Kathleen DuVal, in Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. But neither Congress or the state of Virginia had twenty thousand dollars to spare. 

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Illustration of George Rogers Clark's march to Vincennes in the American Revolutionary War, 1779. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

More accurately, they didn’t have twenty thousand dollars for Oliver Pollock. At least not at that time. America’s coffers were earmarked for nation-building and unfortunately for Pollock, he had accrued his massive debt supporting the American cause in the West and the South–territory that was then handed over to France and Spain for their support during the War. Oliver Pollock backed the right horse. It just didn’t pay off.

Ironically, said nation-building did include Secretary of Finance Alexander Hamilton’s plan to establish a strong central bank and currency. Washington’s Superintendent of Finance, and Pollock’s close friend and business partner, Robert Morris–himself a key financial backer of the Revolution–began the process by sifting through the countless ledgers sent to Congress by Pollock, who, per Dr. Cummins,“kept careful record of these amounts, noting both the Bills which he received and the supplies which he purchased.”

It was with those ledgers that Oliver Pollock finally achieved his dream of providing America with an important, lasting contribution. Not the numbers, but the poor penmanship that accompanied them.

“Pollock...entered the abbreviation ‘ps’ by the figures for ‘peso.’ Because Pollock recorded these Spanish “dollars” or “pesos” as ‘ps” and because he tended to run both letters together, the resulting symbol resembled a ‘$,’” says Jim Woodrick, the Historic Preservation Division Director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

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Jefferson's letter to Pollock, May 4, 1811: "all the particulars of the transactions concerning you while I was governor, are obliterated from my mind.." (Photo: Library of Congress

 That’s it. Historians have analyzed the source of the $ symbol and have yet to find it written down prior to Pollock’s use in his ledgers. His unintentional creation is supported by the fact that Robert Morris chose to adopt the symbol and by 1797 had it cast in type in Philadelphia as the official symbol for new nation’s own currency.

Meanwhile, Oliver Pollock did the only thing he could do. He declared bankruptcy in early 1782 and liquidated his assets and personal possessions. This included the Mississippi River lands near Baton Rouge and Pointe Coupée upon which Louisiana State University would be built.

Pollock thought he had caught another break in 1783 when he was appointed an agent of the United States in Havana, but that backfired when his Cuban creditors decided he owed them $150,000. He spent more than a year languishing in a Havana debtors prison until he was bailed out by his old war buddy Governor Gálvez.

Pollock returned to the U.S. in 1785 and continued his attempts to regain his wealth and stature. His efforts to do so are best illustrated by the missive he received from his old friend Thomas Jefferson in 1811: “All the particulars of the transactions concerning you while I was governor, are obliterated from my mind, I only recollect generally that we had considerable transactions with you,” wrote Jefferson in May of that year.

Just as swiftly as he found himself among the upper echelon of American revolutionaries, Pollock disappeared from their ranks, becoming only a footnote in their successful quest for independence from Britain.

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Fifty-five dollars issued in 1779. (Photo: Beyond My Ken/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

It wasn’t until 1791 when Congress finally discharged Pollock of his debts. He moved to Cumberland county, an Irish immigrant enclave in Pennsylvania, where he ran for Congress –and lost–three times. When his second wife died in 1820, he went to live with one of his daughters, who had married a plantation owner in Pinckneyville, Mississippi, which is where he died in 1823.

In one final ignominy to his memory, a gunboat shelled the property during the Civil War and all of his personal effects were destroyed in the ensuing fire. All that remains of him is a single gravestone in the defunct Pinckneyville Episcopal Church cemetery, which his sole depiction in the U.S. is an impressionistic bronze sculpture on display since 1979 in Galvez Plaza in downtown Baton Rouge.

Oliver Pollock is proof that while money can buy many things–from victorious armies to powerful connections–it can’t guarantee what sometimes happens by accident: a legacy. 


The Story Behind This Mystifying Photo of KKK Members at a Colorado Fair

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(Photo:  Courtesy of the Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center)

This is the first of an occasional series called Camera Obscura, a deep dive into a photograph that is seemingly inexplicable. If you have any suggestions for future stories, send them to pitches@atlasobscura.com.

On April 27, 1926, the Cañon City Daily Record ran a surprising bulletin on its front page. Right under a notice that the local junior high school was putting together a variety show, the local newspaper of the small central Colorado town printed the headline “Klansmen pose for picture on merry-go-round,” along with a brief, staid description of a parade of hooded locals that went from the Klan headquarters on Main Street to the travelling amusement park that had been set up a couple blocks away.

The photo itself, though, wasn’t printed, as the photographer didn’t share it with the paper. In fact, it didn’t show up until more than 65 years later. And when it did, of course, it went viral. 

The story of how this photo got to the internet touches on topics as diverse as Colorado demographics and the history of the Ferris wheel—but it also reveals the blind spots in our historical memory. As grotesque as is the image of the hooded men enjoying an amusement park ride, the spectacle was not nearly as unusual as many Westerners might hope. 


It’s hard to overstate the influence of the Klan in Colorado during the 1920s. The governor, Clarence Morley, was a Klansman. Senator Rice Means was openly endorsed by the Klan. Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton had KKK connections. Yet, the Klan’s hub of power was not in a state metropolis. From 1924 to 1928, Cañon City, a former mining town in the eastern half of the state that had become dependent on the jobs from the nearby state prison, was the Klan capital. The Grand Dragon of the Colorado Klan was Reverend Fred Arnold, the minister of Cañon City’s First Baptist Church and the chaplain of the prison. He ran the Klan offices from the Hotel St. Cloud across the street from the church downtown.

Even though the aesthetic of the Klan remains consistent whether in Colorado or Alabama, in 1926 or 1968, the group went through different expressions of its broadly bigoted ideology. The Klan of the 1920s had different goals from the one that came to prominence in the South in the 1960s. This iteration of the Klan focused its hatred more onto Catholics than black people. Intimidation, not violence, was its m.o.; in Colorado, the Klan seems to have only been responsible for a couple of beatings and no deaths. Despite the hoods, the group conducted its business out in the open with the imprimatur of the government.

And so it was the construction of a local abbey near Cañon City that got the Klan's attention in the early 1920s.

The Catholic Church decided to fund construction of the Holy Cross Abbey after a large influx of immigrants arrived from Southern Europe after World War I, swelling its ranks. Local Protestants, on the other hand, were worried that the new arrivals were taking too many mining jobs and morally disrupting the town’s temperate culture. (The Klan of the 1920s strongly supported Prohibition. The Abbey, on the other hand, now doubles as a winery.) As a result, Arnold found it easy to recruit a large majority of the Protestants to the Klan, and soon installed Klansmen into every local political office, often under the slogan “100 percent Americanism".

According to researchers at the Royal Gorge Museum & History Center, the KKK became so popular that children of local Klansmen often wrote “KKK” on the bibs of their school overalls and called themselves the “Ku Klux Kids”. 

By the time this photo was taken in 1926, the Klan’s power was at its zenith. According to the Daily Record, the Klansmen were invited to pose for the portrait by the site’s proprietor, William Forsythe, a Klansman himself, who brought his mini-carnival down south from Fort Collins. In addition to running the fair, Forsythe also invented rides. In 1924, Forsythe filed a patent for an “amusement structure” known as the Andean Staircase, which uses a system of cables and pulleys to tow carriages through a diamond-shaped tunnel. (A year later, he offered “All patent rights on wonderful new riding device, with large earning capacity” for sale in the classifieds of Popular Mechanics magazine.)

It’s not surprising to learn that the photographer, Clinton Rolfe, likely had Klan ties as well. Like Forsythe, Rolfe originally came from Fort Collins, where he ran The Rolfe Studios. (A 1919 ad for the studio in the Fort Collins Courier read “Say dad do you realize what a real man-like photo of the Old Man would mean to your Boy? Think it over. Then make an appointment with us for a sitting.”) After he set up shop in Cañon City, Rolfe was profiled in The Daily American, a new Klan-affiliated newspaper. After noting that he now specialized in baby photos, Rolfe wryly noted, “I like Cañon City as well as any city I have ever been in, but would take fiendish delight in seeing it take on a more liberal attitude to progress.” 


Rolfe’s actual photo never seems to have ended up in any local paper, and may never have been published anywhere. Instead, it’s likely that it was simply distributed to the Klan members pictured. In 1991, a local family donated a copy to the Royal Gorge Museum & History Center, where it was kept in their archives along with scads of other information about the Klan’s brief hold on power in Cañon City. In 2003, the then-director of the museum, LaDonna Gunn, wrote an essay called “The Protestant ‘Kluxing’ of Cañon City, Colorado” which featured the photo. From there, it leaked out to a few different internet forums like Reddit and Neatorama. The museum shared a scan of the original image with us.

In the photo, the Klansmen of Cañon City Local Chapter 21 aren’t posing on an Andean Staircase, or even a Merry-Go-Round, as the Daily Record headline stated. They are on a Ferris wheel, a symbol of modern ingenuity invented in Chicago in 1892 as America’s response to the construction of the Eiffel Tower. (“Make no little plans” was the directive that brought it into being.) By the mid-20’s, the wheel was at the height of its popularity in the United States. Sitting three abreast and taking up all 12 of the wheel’s buckets, the hooded men face the camera. Like the five Klansmen standing below them, they all seem to emanate malevolence, creating a surreal juxtaposition of progressive and regressive symbols.

The Klan would soon lose its grip on the city, and Colorado in general. Its members were voted out of local and state office. And in 1928, Arnold died unexpectedly. With no succession plan in place, the Klan’s local office folded. The white hooded men who helped run the state slipped into the shadows, but photographic evidence of the Klan’s power, obviously, remained.

How Turducken Went From Food Of Kings To Poultry of the Populace

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Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie–the blue-blood ancestor of the turducken. (Image: Mother Goose's Melodies/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Once upon a time, you had to be royalty to be surprised by your food. But these days, an ordinary Thanksgiving gathering is cause for trepidation and excitement. It's 2015, and any turkey you face could be a turducken. 

The turducken, if you’ve managed to avoid its company thus far, is exactly what it sounds like–a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey, all deboned and layered with various types of stuffing. It looks like a regular turkey, but, when cut, magically reveals its true soul (the duck), as well as its soul’s soul (the chicken). It would fit nicely next to a Midwestern dessert salad, but is also the kind of main course you’d expect from a Thanksgiving feast thrown by the psychedelic machine minds at Google Deep Dream. In short, it is a truly mysterious food, melding the nostalgic with the futuristic, the traditional with the impossible. 

The carnivore-baiting chimera has been a gold-plated staple of New Orleans cuisine since 1980, when Chef Paul Prudhomme began serving up a Cajun-inflected version in his restaurant, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen. Prudhomme trademarked the name in 1986, and we’ve been calling it that ever since.

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Chef Paul Prudhomme, Father of the Turducken. (Photo: Brett Rosenbach/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

But although the branding may be new, the meatmanteau it describes is not. Roman emperors were said to enjoy the occasional “tetrafarmacum,” a concoction of sow’s udder, pheasant, wild boar, and ham, piled together in a starchy shell. Medieval lords would flaunt their prestige by commissioning complex “illusion foods”—huge pastry castles stuffed with meat and fruit, or roasted peacocks with the feathers carefully replaced, so that diners could have their ‘cock and eat it too. One 15th-century king was fond of cockentrice, a pig’s top half sewn onto a rooster’s bottom. The more specific vision of "putting one bird inside another bird inside of another bird and cooking them" goes back to the Renaissance, when it was practically common practice, says food historian Andrew F. Smith.

As meat became less of a luxury, everyday people got in on the game. By the 18th century, ordinary (though ambitious) British homemakers were encouraged to impress their guests with “Christmas Pyes” filled with three or four nested fowls. By the 19th century, Smith says, “there are many recipes in American cookbooks that talk about the same kind of concept,” often adding beef tongue, pork, and other meats to the fray.

After Prudhomme carved his version into the history books, the turducken became a regional favorite, a joyfully off-kilter food you could get in the joyfully off-kilter city of New Orleans. Nationwide popularity came a couple of decades later, courtesy of enthusiastic fan John Madden, who carved one on live TV during a Thanksgiving Day football game broadcast in 1997. After that, the turducken expanded its reach, slowly pulling in devotees from up north and out west. In 2010, it made the Oxford English Dictionary, and now you can buy a frozen one at Sam’s Club

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A properly cooked turducken looks like an overfed turkey. (Photo: Engelmann/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

There are tons of strange, previously royal foods commoners wouldn’t dream of mass-producing. Why did the ungainly turducken make the leap? Smith thinks it was a question of etiquette and thrift. With a regular turkey, “you can only do so much with a knife and a fork,” he says, “and if you’re in polite company, on occasion, it can get a little awkward, or you waste a lot of meat.” The turducken, he says, sidesteps these problems–you get all of the meat with none of the mess. (Tell that to John Madden, who said of his first time: “It smelled and looked so good. I didn't have any plates or silverware or anything, and I just started eating it with my hands.”)

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats perfected his turducken recipe in 2012. But after years of obsessing over oven temperatures and stuffing composition, he thinks the appeal is skin-deep. Taste-wise, he says, a turducken is less than the sum of its birds. “It’s a stunt food,” he says. “People make it because it’s a feat of engineering. It’s just, 'What thing can we stuff into another thing?'”

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The veggieducken lets everyone get in on the game. (Photo: The Sporkful/Flickr)

Lopez-Alt attributes the canonization of this impulse to the internet, where “if someone does something ridiculous, somebody’s going to say, ‘Hey, look at this ridiculous thing.” Stuffing things into other things is the online stunt-food version of dressing to impress. “That’s how Taco Bell comes up with new menu items, right?” he asks.

A quick glance at the turducken internet reveals that the standard variety no longer suffices. The turducken arms race has escalated, leading to monstrosities like the 12-bird roast, the Lovecraftian Cthurkey, and the cherpumple, a dessert-course spinoff that has several different pies baked inside the layers of a cake.

This is only natural. In a world where ordinary people eat turducken, the true royals, internet or otherwise, have to separate themselves from the plebes. And the way to do that, as Lopez-Alt says, is to "stick things in other things" in increasingly immoderate ways.

Fleeting Wonders: This Japanese Island Ate Another Island

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An eruption at Nishinoshima in October. (Photo: Japan Coast Guard)

In a rough real estate market, some geological formations have all the luck. Since it first surfaced in 2013, one volcano in Japan has multiplied its land holdings by 12, swallowing up a whole island in the process, Japan Today reports.

Its strategy? Blowing its top for two straight years. In 2013, Nishinoshima was a small, crescent-shaped island about 600 miles south of Tokyo. Then, that November, an underwater volcano began erupting, creating another tiny island nearby. Scientists named the newcomer Niijima, and watched its progress.

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Niijima and Nishinoshima in 2013, just after Niijima emerged. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

Although volcanic growths of this size regularly disappear as quickly as they arrive, worn down by tides and erosion, this one lasted–and then some. By the end of 2013, thanks to continual eruptions, the once-tiny island had merged with Nishinoshima. By the end of 2014, it had completely overtaken the larger island.  

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Niijima merges with Nishinoshima. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

Now, after two years, the new Nishinoshima is nearly 1.5 miles square and over 300 feet tall. That makes it 12 times its original size–large enough to fit 600 Thanksgiving Day football games next to each other.

The volcano, which is still going strong, is now aboveground, spewing yellow-gray smoke and red-hot lava, which spreads and cools into yet more island. Scientists monitoring it say it the volcanic activity is likely to continue–until, presumably, another tiny island appears, and starts the seismic ouroboros all over again. 

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Nishinoshima in March 2015. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

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.

FOUND: 10,000-Year-Old Fava Beans

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Modern fava beans—still kind of tricksy (Photo: Hohum/Wikimedia)

Long before Hannibal Lecter was enjoying his human liver with fava beans and Chianti, early farmers in Galilee were cultivating the same legumes. 

At three sites in Israel, archaeologists have found 469 charred fava beans—and dated them to 10,200 years ago. Their analysis, published in Nature Scientific Reports, indicates that people were cultivating these beans as early as the 11th millennium B.C.E., around the time that domestication of plants began in this area of the world.

But scientists are still puzzling out exactly how that worked. How did humans coax plants into reliably producing fat seeds to feed us? The seeds that the archaeologists examined in these studies indicated that one mechanism early farmers used was selecting for seeds that were "non-dormant"—that they could convince to germinate on cue, without having to wait for their natural production cycle to kick in.

This was very early in the plant cultivation game. The first evidence of wine making is dated to only 8,000 or so years ago, which means it would take 4,000 years for anyone to try pairing favas with red wine.

Bonus finds: A century-old piece of wedding cake, a 1,700-year-old ring featuring a naked Cupida new species of monkey ancestor

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. 

 

More Severe Storms Are Throwing off Bird Migration

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Ominous skies don't bode well for migrating birds. (Photo: Unsplash/pixabay)

If it wasn’t already enough to fly thousands of miles—44,000 round trip, if you’re the Arctic tern—birds of all shapes, sizes, and flying styles are now facing increasing obstacles to migration. Warmer weather is shepherding in shorter winters and angrier storms, and there's recently been an upsurge in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes.

With shrinking winters affecting birds’ migration schedules, which start as early as June or as late as December, many birds find themselves awing during peak Atlantic hurricane season. While certain stormy winds can provide direct superhighways, and some birds may be able to harness a hurricane as a sort of slingshot to launch themselves forward at higher speeds, those are exceptions to the norm.

Caught up in storms, birds naturally seek out safety and shelter down on the ground. If they’re already in flight, they usually try to find an area with the least turbulent conditions and keep flying downwind. The less lucky ones end up battered on the beach or stranded and starved, with possibly hundreds of thousands of casualties after a major hurricane. 

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 The type of winds that birds want to steer clear of. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Birds are some of Earth’s most talented navigators, using a suite of sensory modalities to orient and to navigate, explains Andrew Farnsworth of the Information Science Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which runs eBird and BirdCast, two birding and migration databases.

“They orient with a magnetic compass, so to speak, which relates to the presence of a molecule in the eye that allows them to see the magnetic field,” he says. They’re orienting with celestial and solar, acoustic and visual cues as well. Some birds set off on their journey almost by the clock each year, while others base their departures more closely on local conditions. Routes and strategies differ greatly, in addition to time of day, frequency of pit stops, and modes of flight (such as soaring and flapping).

The increasingly evident and rapid climate effects in recent years, however, are starting to give migrating birds—which constitute 40 to 50 percent of all birds—a real run for their money. Increasing droughts force birds to reroute for sufficient food or face starvation, and unpredictable seasons mean unpredictable resources. Yet isn’t that the whole reason migration exists—to respond to changing climates? 

Yes—but perhaps not one that is changing quite so quickly.

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The Sooty Tern, a seabird belonging to tropical oceans, can end up deposited as far as Europe after an intense hurricane. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

“The idea that a changing climate in and of itself may adversely affect migration is not quite right, since the two are closely tied together,” says Farnsworth. “Speed and intensity are obviously the two key components here.”

Hurricanes are growing and evolving rapidly; in late October the Western Hemisphere saw its most powerful tropical cyclone ever measured with the arrival of Category 5 Hurricane Patricia near Mexico, which intensified in size and speed at a madcap pace. Fast-changing situations like Patricia are very challenging for migrating birds to deal with, says Farnsworth, and it’s not something that the birds may be able to perceive. Scientists are still working to figure out what happens when birds that weigh mere ounces get caught up in gale-force winds, where even the strongest flyers don't always have enough fuel to make it through. 

The usual stormy elements—rain and wind, thunder and fog—are not new to birds, who are seasoned experts in weather management. Birds often fly through rain depending on how heavily it’s falling, though as water weighs them down, locomotion becomes inefficient. Some birds can coast along strong winds, but too much turbulence poses an issue.

Thunder and fog prompt a search for shelter, a search that can be extremely hazardous in areas with dense light pollution. Disoriented by the fog infused with city lights, birds will fly around for hours trying to figure out where to go, colliding with buildings and each other and dying in large numbers.

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A hurricane heading in to wreak some havoc and cause a lot of bird fallouts. (Photo: Roger W/flickr)

How capable are displaced birds at finding their way back on track? Could certain birds use storms to their advantage, to be transported to new habitats intentionally? Farnsworth says it’s difficult to know, as there’s a dearth of focused research, but it seems lost birds are not all that adept at re-routing. “It certainly seems that some species may use ‘bad weather’ like hurricanes to disperse, but this has never been proven,” he says.

Whether it’s intentional, bad luck, or a bit of both remains to be determined. Farnsworth points out that we already have trouble predicting where a hurricane is going to go, let alone the details of what exactly is happening to the birds inside of it.

As temperatures continue to rise, this is an area that is ripe for research. When thinking about migration itself as a response to changing climates, one hopes that the migratory birds we love will be able to adapt quickly to ever-shifting conditions.

Fleeting Wonders: A Sisyphean Snow Plow Ballet

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Kinnick Stadium Snow Removal TimeLapse

Time lapse of the snow removal in Kinnick Stadium from 6pm to 9:15 am

Posted by Iowa Hawkeyes on Saturday, 21 November 2015

When there’s a serious football game to be had, sub-zero temperatures and pounding snowfall won't stop it. 

As snow began to fall onto the Iowa Hawkeyes' Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City around 6 p.m. last Friday, the ground crew got to work clearing the field for the following day's football game. Breaking out the snow plow carts, Facilities and Turf Management began piling up the snow and carting it out of the stadium in a Sisyphean attempt to keep the field and stands clear. The process, captured in a time-lapse recording, was hypnotic.

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Git er done. (Image: Iowa Hawkeyes Facebook)

As the video shows, as soon as the crew cleared the turf, it was nearly instantly covered with snow again. Dozens of workers manning four plows cleared the field again and again and again, repeating the process at least 12 times throughout the night and into the next day. Meanwhile, up in the stands, single workers with hand shovels worked to keep the stairways clean.

It snowed for around 15 hours straight, dropping a record-breaking seven to nine inches of snow in the region, but by game time Saturday, the field was ready for action. The Hawkeyes faced the Purdue at noon, soundly trouncing the Boilermakers 40-20. It was an exciting win for the team, but it couldn’t have happened without the back-breaking ballet performed by the snow clearing team the night before.

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True gridiron heroes. (Image: Iowa Hawkeyes Facebook)

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

The Telharmonium Was the Spotify of 1906

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Detail from the cover of Scientific American's March 9, 1907 issue, which had a glowing article about the telharmonium. (Image: archive.org)

It's a tumultuous time for streaming music services. One of the year's biggest albums, Adele's 25, was released on November 20, but not made available on Apple Music, Spotify, or any other streaming app by the artist's own decision. On November 23, music service Rdio, the first smartphone-era music streaming service to try to crack the U.S. market, began winding down after five years of struggling to attract paying subscribers.

Rdio, however, was not the first service to allow American subscribers to stream music from their phones. That honor goes to the telharmonium, the first patent for which was granted in 1897. It was, essentially, a Victorian Spotify.

Invented by lawyer Thaddeus Cahill and initially known as the dynamophone, the telharmonium made use of telephone networks to transmit music from a central hub in midtown Manhattan to restaurants, hotels, and homes around the city. Subscribers could pick up their phone, ask the operator to connect them to the telharmonium, and the wires of their phone line would be linked with the wires emerging from the telharmonium station. The electrically generated tunes would then stream from their phone receiver, which was fitted with a large paper funnel to help pump up the volume. (The electric amplifier had not yet been invented.) 

The music was generated live at what Cahill called a "music plant," which was located at Broadway and 39th Street. An entire floor of the building, which came to be known as Telharmonic Hall, was filled with the 200 tons of machinery required to generate the telharmonium's tunes. With its banks of spinning rotors, switchboards, transformers, and alternators, the behemoth instrument gave "the impression of nothing so much as a busy machine-shop, or the center of a considerable manufacturing industry," according to a 1906 article in McClure's Magazine.

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One of the telharmonium's tone mixers. (Photo: McClure's Magazine, 1906)

Amid all this machinery, the telharmonium still required humans to generate the tunes. In a room on a floor above the music plant were two keyboards attached to all the rotors and generators by wires. Cahill recruited musicians to play these customized keyboards. Each key, when pressed, operated a switch that would set a particular dynamo in motion. Then, explained McClure's, the "electric waves sent out by the great central machine are transformed, by the familiar device of the telephone, into sound waves, and reach our ears as symphonies, lullabies or other music, at the will of the players."

"Apparently he had two players playing continuously, 24 hours a day," says Andy Cavatorta, a telharmonium enthusiast and sound artist who designed and built Bjork's gravity harps. "It was a sort of weird, non-stop eerie telharmonium music, including a lot of pieces that were composed just for the instrument."

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Two keyboard operators make beautiful music together. (Image: McClure's Magazine, 1906)

This eerie music—and the technology behind it—blew people's minds. “One’s first feeling, upon hearing of the new machine, is one of utter incredulity,” raved McClure's. The New York Times went further in a feature on the telharmonium published in December 1906:

“[I]t is scientifically perfect music, capable of reproducing any sound produced by any musical instrument and many more that no musical instrument produces. Sounds like the extravagant exaggeration of a charlatan, doesn’t it?”

The Times article struck the fancy of one Mark Twain, who, a week after reading it, ventured over to 39th and Broadway to see the newfangled machine for himself. Impressed by the "beautiful, novel" invention, he did not mince words, according to the Times. "Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this I have to postpone my death right off," he said, while sitting at the music plant's keyboard console. "I couldn’t possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again.”

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A New York Times headline from December 1906. (Image: TimesMachine)

Nine days later, at his New Year's Eve party, Twain was boasting of his plans to become an early adopter of the telharmonium. (Service had expanded to restaurants and hotels in late 1906, but private homes were not yet connected.) The Times reported that after the clock struck midnight, the first thing Twain did to usher in 1907 was "to glory in the fact that he would be able to rejoice over other dead people when he died in having been the first man to have telharmonium music turned on in his house–'like gas.'"

This idea of music as a service–as something available on tap, just like gas or water–was revolutionary. “Instead of bringing the people to the music the new method sends the music to the people,” marveled McClure's. The people in question would pay 20 cents an hour to listen to as much opera, symphony, or rag time music as they liked, with the ability to switch their live entertainment on and off whenever they pleased. With home radio still over a decade away, this was huge. It heralded "the age of musical democracy," Raymond Weidenaar writes in Magic Music from the Telharmonium.

After a successful run at hotels and restaurants, telharmonium service finally became available to the public in 1907. Cahill's big plan was to expand geographic coverage beyond New York City, as well as the amount and variety of sonic entertainment on offer. “It is the dream of the inventor that, in the future, we may be awakened by appropriate music in the morning, and go to bed at night with lullabies,” noted McClure's.

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Thaddeus Cahill, telharmonium inventor. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Unfortunately, technological limitations and unfavorable economics thwarted these dreams. Due to the lack of electronic amplification, "everything that he did musically had to be generated at full power," says Andy Cavatorta. "With those rotors he had to power perhaps hundreds or more of those little telephone earpieces." It was “a very inefficient system that lost a lot of electricity along the way." Subscribers would hear faint or distorted music. Phone conversations were regularly interrupted by the sounds of the telharmonium, which would filter into lines that ran from the same telephone poles. 

In April 1907, Hammond Hayes, head of AT&T's engineering department, determined that “any investment in the telharmonium would be enormously expensive and unprofitable for many years,” according to Magic Music from the Telharmonium. Electric music, though marvelous in theory, was too disruptive and pricey in practice.

“If suddenly you thought you could get an extra 10,000 subscribers, you’d have to build a new power plant in order to accommodate them," notes Cavatorta. That was not a sustainable business model. Despite attempts by Cahill to keep the service going, the telharmonium ultimately folded in 1916. By 1920, the 200 tons of whirring machinery had been removed from 39th and Broadway.

Though the telharmonium did not ultimately succeed, it had a profound impact on the development of electronically generated music. The Hammond organ, developed in the 1930s, operates according to technology first seen in Cahill's ambitious invention. From the Hammond organ came the synthesizer, initially in the form of analog synths like the Moog, then in the form of electronic keyboards and digital pianos.

In addition to the innovative technology the telharmonium exhibited, there was also "something going on there with the emerging notion of virtuality that we now take for granted," says Cavatorta. "The idea of things being there that aren’t there."

In the early 20th century, the idea of music being piped into your living room from miles away via, in the words of the Times, the "magic of wonder-working electric forces" was astounding. Now, on-demand music, stored in a cloud and streamed to your phone, is ubiquitous.


How Americans Changed the Meaning of 'Dream'

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Albert Joseph Moore's Dreamers, 1884. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons

This is part two of a five-part series on sleep and dreams, sponsored by Oso mattresses. Read the first one here

There was a time when “hopes” were not automatically paired with “dreams” in our lexicon. But when did these two concepts start comingling? How did English speakers repurpose a word used to refer to an involuntary activity, to describe, instead, the kind of purposeful visions that might guide the life of a striver? When did the verb “to dream” come to mean “to aspire?”

You can blame the Americans. Our collective embrace of the so-called “American dream” was the cornerstone of this particular 20th-century shift in usage.

In fact, before a historian invented the phrase in the Depression years, “dreaming” of a better life was not always looked upon favorably. 

According to Oxford English Dictionary terms “dream, verb 2,” usage type number 4a: “To imagine and envisage as if in a dream; to have a vision or fantasy of. Now chiefly: to think or daydream about (something greatly desired); to hope or long for.” Also, usage type number 4b: “To indulge in fantasies or reveries; to daydream about something. Now chiefly: to have a vision of the future; to hope or long for something.”

The OED finds examples of each usage type as early as the 14th century, but for the first few centuries of its use, the connotations of this kind of “dreaming” were negative. As the etymology bloggers Take Our Word For It write, the roots of “dream” probably come from a Germanic root, draum-, and that root might derive from another one, dreug, which means “to deceive, or to delude.” Early waking dreamers thinking wild, idealistic thoughts about life were seen as deluded, indulgent, and a little bit lost.

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The Architect's Dream by Thomas Cole (1840) shows a vision of buildings in the historical styles of the Western tradition, from Ancient Egypt through to Classical Revival. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In one example, in 1667, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam asks the angel Raphael to explain cosmology—the nature of the sun, moon, and stars, and their relationship to the Earth. The angel responds by counseling the first man against such musings:

Think onely what concernes thee and they being;

Dream not of other Worlds, what creatures there

Live, in what state, condition or degree,

Contented that thus farr hath been reveal’d

Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav’n.

Other citations in the OED from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries offer echoes of Raphael’s caution, associating aspirational dreaming with foolhardiness. The phrase “pipe dream” entered British and American lexicon in the late 19th century, “apparently” (according to the OED) “with reference to the kind of visions experienced when smoking an opium pipe.” (The Chicago Tribune called aerial navigation a “pipe-dream” in 1890, in the phrase’s first appearance in print.) “Pipe dream” came to stand in for an impracticality that didn’t understand its own folly. Like foolish Adam or besotted opium addicts, aspirational dreamers thought of themselves as rational inquirers, following their curiosity; they didn’t realize that they were overstepping the bounds of reality, and slipping their own earthly responsibilities as they did so. 

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James Tissot's The Dreamer (Summer Evening), painted in 1871. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Everything changed in the 20th century. In 1931, American historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “The American Dream,” in his book The Epic of America. This one-volume history of the country, published at the beginning of the Depression, was a bestseller in its time, and was distributed through the then-new Book-of-the-Month Club, greatly expanding its reach. Adams used the “dream” as a structuring conceit for his gloss of American history, describing this dream as one of material prosperity, but also of what we might now call self-actualization.

Americans, Adams wrote, should be “able to grow to fullest development as men and women, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had been erected for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” Introducing a new edition of Adams’ book in 2012, Howard Schneiderman wrote that the “famous metaphorical phrase took off like a rocket, and it was soon being used in academic articles, as well as in popular magazines.”

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Edwin Landseer's Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Titania, under a spell, falls in love with Nick Bottom, who has also been enchanted with the head of an ass. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But the use of “dream” for “aspire” still holds within itself some of the verb’s pre-20th-century negative connotations. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out the gap between American aspirations of equality and the lives of people of color. “In his “Ballot or Bullet” speech, delivered in April, 1964, Malcolm X told listeners that the vaunted American social system had “victims,” and added: “I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” Hubert Selby, Jr.’s 1978 book Requiem for a Dream followed a mother and son from their initial social aspirations, through their drug addictions, into a very memorable collapse marked by a grisly amputation (for the son) and electroshock therapy (for the son). The author told Salon in 2000 that its pursuit could be a “disaster.”

And so, both meanings of “to dream” survive. George Carlin got big laughs for this 2005 punch line: “That’s why they call it the American Dream. Because you have to be asleep to believe it.” But self-help books with titles like Dare to Dream Wild abound, and dreamers put together “vision boards” to help guide their aspirations. In America and all around the world, the dream endures.

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The World War II Tool That Changed How We Listen To Birdsong

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A bird shows off his mysterious linguistic chops. (Photo: Kenny Louie/Flickr)

In past centuries, birdsong experts tried to distinguish mockingbirds from thrashers by keeping their ears peeled. These days, they're better served by eagle eyes.

When studying birdsong, contemporary ornithologists use their vision as often as their hearing, picking out unique features of sounds from multicolored smudges they trace in computer windows. This approach owes much to the spectrograph—a technology built in the 1940s to identify warships and enemy radio operators that is now used to deal with much smaller, featherier targets of interest.

Long before this invention, bird fanatics had to make do with words in order to share the chirps they'd heard. "The very early renditions of birdsong amount to prose," says Greg Budney, curator of audio for Cornell University's Macaulay Library. Those who wanted to capture a certain bird on the page would try translating its calls into human letters, trusting that their readers would be able to fill in the melodic ups and downs.

Athanasius Kircher, 17th-century polymath, was the first to drape these chirps and twitters over the musical staff. Kircher wanted more than just words because he had something to prove—he was arguing for the existence of a “cosmic harmony,” composed by God and borne out by birdsong. In his transcriptions, from 1650's Musurgia universalis, a hen clucks in staccato A's, a cuckoo goes heavy on the downbeat, and a parrot, maybe tone-deaf, simply says “χαίρε”—Greek for “hello.

Ferdinand S. Mathews, an American naturalist, scored the songs of over a hundred wild birds in this way for his 1904 opus, Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music. Mathews also saw his endeavor as something more than science—“I believe the birds with their music are the revelation of a greater world,” he wrote in the introduction. But his chief purpose was to keep the songs “in a state of scientific preservation,” and he found musical notation to be the best possible formaldehyde. /p>

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Athanasius Kircher's singing menagerie, the first known example of musically notated birdsong. (Image: Musurgia universalis/Petrucci Music Library Public Domain)

Increasingly, though, his fellow experts felt this wasn’t enough. "It was basically impossible to do anything in a really quantitative, numerical way," says Russ Charif, an acoustic biologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology—and when people tried, they ran into the limits of their own ears. "How long were the songs, what were the spaces between notes ... in some cases, it could even be challenging to count the notes, because in many bird songs, they're very fast."

When birdsong experts did keep up, their language failed them. Western musical notation is great at getting across certain aspects of sound, but it leaves some important things out completely—it excludes pitches and rhythms that fall between regular intervals, and it doesn’t deal at all with timbre, the quality that makes a note played on, say, a guitar, sound different from the same note played on a piano or a banjo. Put simply, notation was built to serve particular types of human music, and, as biology teacher A.A. Saunders wrote in a 1915 letter to British birding magazine The Auk, “birds do not usually sing according to such standards.”

To deal with these shortcomings, ornithologists began inventing their own notation. Saunders’ type, which involved plotting swoops, chirps and trills on a 12-by-10 grid, led him to carry a tuning fork, a stopwatch, and graph paper in his pocket wherever he went. In 1924, a pair of field biologists employed Morse Code-like dots and dashes to compare and contrast nearly 200 sparrow songs. Soon after, naturalist Lucy Coffin suggested turning to Chinese or Gregorian scales, and involving “a battery of instruments ... [including] the banjo, the zither, the metal piccolo, and the bassoons.” Mostly, though, she despaired: “We have standardized our color-scheme in ornithology, we have named each part of a bird’s anatomy, but we have devised no symbols to convey to our associates an adequate description of bird-call.”

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Ornithologist L. Irby Davis examines a spectrogram from an early Kay Elemetrics Sona-Graph, in the 1950s. (Photo: ©2015 Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

Then World War II came. Suddenly, the United States found super-detailed analysis of sound to be a matter of national security. Beginning in the early 1940s, scientists at New Jersey's Bell Laboratories ramped up work on the sound spectrograph, a machine that could chew sound waves into data and spit them back out as images. "They were interested in the signatures of submarines, and ships in general," says Budney. After the war, when the technology was declassified, a company named Kay Elemetrics began making their own version, called the Sono-Graph. Birders, sensing an answer to their troubles, flocked to it, says Budney. "That is when things took off."

When they started feeding their favorite songs through the machines, ornithologists discovered all kinds of details that, audible or not, had fallen through the cracks of previous notations. Pitches soared up and down the y-axis, and timbre was visible as ghostly traces above the main melodic line, called overtones. “For the first time, the extraordinary virtuosity of the avian voice was revealed in all its glorious detail,” writes Peter Marler in his history of birdsong, Nature’s Music.

Scientists could also pursue lines of inquiry that would have been unthinkable before. The advent of sound spectrography was "truly revolutionary," Charif says, a turbo-boost in the middle of the slow advancement that often characterizes science. It "opened up a whole new world of kinds of things that people could do." Comparing and contrasting sonograms has allowed us to learn about not just what birds sing, but how they learn their songs, how many they know, and exactly how local bird dialects vary. Today, ornithologists at Cornell are using them to census species that migrate at night, and to see how blue jays and another birds pack information into particular alarm calls.

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The song of the southwestern Canyon Wren, through a spectrograph. (Image: Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

Indeed, spectrographs are such a staple of contemporary ornithology research that asking about their latest uses "is like asking an accountant 'Are you doing anything that uses spreadsheets?'" says Charif. "When you're publishing a research paper you're going to analyze sound," agrees Budney. Since the seismic shift the spectrograph caused in the 1950s, the field has changed by degree—spectrography has gotten "faster and easier and cheaper," able to record more sound at a time or to work in stereo, but no new big thing has come along to replace it.

But there's one small thing that spectrographs still can't do—they can't help birdwatchers identify birds. The brushstrokes of spectrograms, though often aesthetically pleasing in themselves, do not immediately suggest familiar trills. One field guide from the 1970s tried to get the public into the spirit by printing small spectrograms next to their respective species, but it was a flop. Even Charif, who has worked with spectrograms since 1979, says he can "kind-of sort-of" hear spectrograms in his head, and only then if they're pretty simple ("I think others may be better," he says).

For that, though, we still have the old ways. "Every major field guide to birds has a description of voices," Budney says. And if you want to go really traditional, Mathews' Field Book of Wild Birds And Their Music is still available in paperback, last-century musical notation and all.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

FOUND: A Fake Historical Plaque on Trump Golf Course

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Trump, in 2013 (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

At the Trump National Golf Club, in Sterling, Virginia, not far from D.C., the New York Times reports that there is a plaque on a stone pedestal right after the 14th hole. The course, renovated and re-opened this year, is on the Potomac River, and the plaque, according to the Times, reads:

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot. The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as 'The River of Blood.'"

There is no evidence that this is true, outside Trump's statement that a number of historians told Trump employees about this piece of history. Also, he told the Times:

“That was a prime site for river crossings. So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot—a lot of them.”

But, as far as anyone else can tell, no one died here. There were no casualties. The water did not turn red. It was not known as the River of Blood. The signage was installed by the golf course, not any officially recognized historical (National Trust for Historic PreservationNational Register of Historic Places) or governmental body. 

The plaque itself, though, appears to be real. It is a plaque. 

Bonus finds: A very old fence

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. 

 

How to Trap Gators and Influence People

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Christy Kroboth kissing her Prince Charming. (All photos: Christy Kroboth)

Late one November night in Fort Bend County, Texas, Christy Kroboth was called in to catch an alligator. Three cops stood by, watching her as she wrangled the 12-foot reptile under control. When she was done, one of them raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth. “Wow," she recalls him saying, " I didn't know Rapunzel caught alligators.”

Christy Kroboth—five foot six, 30 years old, and brimming with energy—is currently transitioning from her job as a dental assistant into working full time with alligators. This entails trapping them, training others how to trap them and teaching students about the misunderstood “monsters.” Born and raised in Stafford, Texas, she and her buddy Chris Stevens now run Gator Squad, a business handling “alligator nuisance control” in their region of  southern Texas. When there’s an urgent emergency call, such as a gator blocking traffic, Kroboth generally handles the situation solo, tucking the gator in the trunk of her Honda CR-V. (Kroboth can fit an 11-footer if she lays the back seat down.) If there’s an alligator nuisance that can wait a bit, or that’s too big to fit in her car, she’ll grab Stevens (and his truck) and they’ll do it together. The average gator is around 12 feet long and 800 pounds, and Kroboth names each of her catches. 

Kroboth took some time to give us the inside scoop on what it’s like to swim with modern-day dinosaurs and be labeled “the world’s most beautiful alligator hunter.” Kroboth speaks in a light, songful voice that bubbles over with laughter, and when she talks about gators, you can just feel the huge smile across her face. 

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Chubbs, a proper 12-footer, who was wandering around a local golf course. 

How did you get into gator trapping?

I started catching alligators about two years ago. I’ve always been an animal lover—we’ve always taken in strays, and any little thing we could do to help we always did. So I got into alligators just ‘cause i knew a lot of people just go out and don’t know how to deal with them, so they’ll go out and shoot them, and then they’ll sell them for their skin and their meat.

I wanted to help save the alligator. I was like, well, if I can get out there before another trapper gets out there, if I can take the alligator alive, then that’s basically a win-win for both me and the alligator. So, I’ve gotten into it to of course help save them, but I also got into it to do educational stuff. We teach people that they’re not the big, scary monsters that everyone thinks they are—they are just like any other animal and they deserve respect. So I got into it more just to kinda change people’s perspectives.

What are the steps to trapping a gator?

Okay, so the first step of course is approaching the animal and seeing how it behaves. All alligators are different, and all alligators are going to behave differently when you walk up to them. So it’s kind of just approach the alligator, know its behavior, see how it’s going to react. Then you want it to tire out, but you want the animal to tire out itself—you don’t want to get tired in the process. So that’s basically getting the animal to do natural behaviors, like rolling on ground or turning in circles, stuff like that. 

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Hey, what's crackin? 

Once you get it tired, then most of the time you’re able to go up and do a front-catch on him, where you grab the jaw and tape his mouth shut. There’s so many different techniques on how to catch gators, and mostly you kind of learn as you go what works and what doesn’t. You kind of just have to do each alligator differently. On the big ones, you can basically get their jaws pretty easy, on the smaller ones you may have to jump on their back and hold them still so they don’t move. So it just kind of depends on the situation. But once you get him taped up and secure, and when he’s really worn out and tired, then he kind of just gives in to you. He knows that you’re the one who caught him, he knows that you’re the dominant one, so he’s basically gonna lay there and be like “Don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you,”  and when he’s finally at that stage, that’s when it’s safe to go in to try and pick them up and put them in the back of the truck.

Do you need some kind of permit or license to handle gators?

I had to get my license from the state, so I got mine from Texas Parks and Wildlife. And since alligators are protected, you have to have a license to trap alligators or do anything with alligators. So I went through the whole training course and learned about them and we had a handling course. Once you get your license, then you kinda have the freedom to do whatever you want, and whenever there is an alligator that needs help, or an alligator that needs to be removed, the call goes into Texas Parks and Wildlife and then they will let whoever is closest to the area know about it. I live in Fort Bend County, so I get all the calls from my county.

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Not what you find in the trunk of your average CR-V. 

How do the training and handling classes work?

So the first part of the course is all the rules and regulations. Since alligators are a protected here, we have to know the laws and everything. You have to learn how to do the paperwork, and if one does have to be put down, you have to know how to put a tag on it. And then there’s also the handling class, which is hands-on, and it’s the basic skills of catching and handling an alligator safely. 

Are people surprised when a young blonde woman shows up to trap the alligator?

It’s mostly only guys that do this, so when I show up on a call, the first question that I usually get is “Who are you, what are you doing?” and I have to explain, “I’m the alligator trapper, Texas Parks and Wildlife called me.” Most of the time when I get on a call, the guys are bigger than me. A lot of the times it’s either the police that called me or homeowners, and so they’re like—“You? You’re going to catch this alligator?” And I always have to go, “Yes, I’ve caught millions of them, I’m gonna catch him,” and they always doubt me a little bit at first, or the guys will go into protective mode and be like, “Oh here I’ll help you,” and I have to tell them “No, stand back, you called me—I’m gonna do this.”

It is a big stereotype and they are always super surprised when I show up, but then once I have the alligator caught and taped up and safely secure I always invite everybody over to pet the alligator, take pictures of him, and that’s kind of when I go into my whole educational speech, and then everybody’s like—Oh, you did great, we’re sorry we thought that way at first. So they always do end up apologizing at the very end. So it’s fun. (Chuckles.)

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Some "nuisances" require a Kroboth to take a long swim to tire them out. 

What are the most important things when it comes to handling an alligator?

(Laughs.) Try not to get bit. But of course, working with alligators, you’re gonna get bit. You know, you just kind of sign up for that when you mess with them. So you’re gonna get bit, but one of the most important things is just safety. We try to put safety first and we’re always worried about the public. Sometimes we’ll go into catches and we’ll be so focused on the animal, that when we look up there’s tons of people around us trying to take pictures. So our first thing is safety first and we try to keep the public back. 

We’ve kind of worked with alligators long enough to know what the animal is capable of; we kind of know its behavior, so most importantly, if we’re out there with our partner, just watch each other’s back and go slow—that’s the most important thing. Don’t go too fast. If you go too fast and if you go in with the attitude of “I’ve got this,” that’s when things can go wrong. Number one thing is to go slow, and take your time. It’s a wild animal; it’s capable of doing whatever it wants, it’s unpredictable. So we always go slow and we make sure we just really work the animal to get it really tired before we do any sort of handling on it.

article-image Kroboth has given many a gator noogie. 

What happens to your gators after you trap them?

I one-hundred-percent believe in population management, and some of them, you know, can’t make it and you can’t save them all. But I have a really good relationship with some game wardens, so some of my alligators can be released back into the wild, if they have no health problems—if they’re good, healthy gators that are scared of people, those can be released back into the wild. If they’re not afraid of people, if people have been feeding them and now they swim up to people looking for handouts, those can’t be released back into the wild, because, you know, they’ll just walk up to somebody else. So those actually have to go to a place and and just live the rest of their lives in captivity. 

And then the big ones that I’ve been catching lately, they’re blind, and that just comes with age, so those can’t be released back in wild either, because if I put them there, they may just crawl out into the middle of the street again. So those go down to an alligator farm, and they’re put into the breeding program, where there’s tons of ponds, there’s a lot of acreage, and they just breed. There are other alligators there, they’re fit, they’re happy, they’re less alone. They’re not put on display or shows, the public can’t go out there and see them, they’re way out in country and a guy goes out couple times a week and feeds and checks on them, and just leaves them alone. So it’s like the next best environment to be in besides out in the actual wild. It’s a natural environment, and just looks like a swampland; it’s fenced in so they can’t get out and someone is there to keep an eye on them. So they just live out the rest of their life.

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Hey! Hey guys! What's happening up there? I'm having trouble keeping up with the conversation. 

Do you need to stay super fit for gator wrangling?

No, not really, I mean I don’t really work out or anything. I probably need to focus more on swimming and techniques for holding my breath. I’ve seen all sorts of people do this. And it’s more of kind of mind game. Knowing the animal and knowing its next move—just trying to outsmart him.

Have you had any close calls with the gators?

I’ve been bit before, but no arms or fingers or toes missing. If they wanted to eat me, Godzilla, the 13-footer, could have eaten me if he wanted to. I’ve been bitten by little ones—they can jump higher and spin around faster. But nothing too serious or major, no close calls or anything. I’ve swam with them, I’ve been in water with them, and they always go the other way, unless they really seriously feel threatened. I don’t advise anyone to get in water—I had to get in water to actually do a catch—but no close calls or anything. 

I got a call once that this family had an alligator in their swimming pool. Their backyard wasn’t fenced off and it kind of backed up to a creek, and so they had a big six-foot alligator in their swimming pool, and he had sunk down to the bottom. So I had to get in and me and the alligator, we ended up swimming laps, back and forth, trying to wear each other out. [Laughing] We were both tired by the end, but afterwards I finally was able to get him to stop in the shallow end of the pool and was able to put a rope around him.

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Just a girl and her gator.

Where do alligators usually tend to show up?

In Texas, it’s the south part of Texas, wherever there’s heat—they are cold-blooded so they like heat. In any body of water there can be an alligator, because they are water creatures—that’s where they swim, that’s where they hunt, that’s where they mate, that’s where they eat. But of course, too, they do move around, especially at night. They know during the daytime that people are out walking around so they know to kind of stay in the water. And they’re so smart—they know that at night we tend to be inside, and so they feel more comfortable at night to get up and walk around and maybe find a different water hole or go find a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you know.

What are some of your key educational points about gators?

So I always let them know that alligators don’t want to hurt people. They aren't out being like, “Oh, where’s a nice human that I can get.” No, alligators, they know their food, they’re in the water, they eat fish. They don’t want to attack anybody.

But then, any other animal, if they feel threatened, they’ll defend themselves. Just like us—if anyone’s trying to tie us up and stuff us in a trunk, we’ll defend ourselves. And I always let people know that alligators will give warnings. Don’t get too close to them because yes, they are a wild animal and if they wanna bite they will, but they always give warning signs. If you keep pushing them, keep pushing them, then of course they will bite. But I always let people know, don’t feed them because that creates a problem—they’ll start looking for people for food. They’ve been around for millions of years, they don’t need us to feed them. And then of course I go into the whole “Here’s their ear, here’s their eye, here’s their toes,” and stuff like that.

But the basic stuff is just: Don’t approach, don’t feed, and just respect them, leave them alone, don’t mess with them. 

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 Kroboth, all smiles in the face of a Texas dinosaur.

Are there any particularly memorable gators that you’ve handled?

I’ve caught so many, and each one kind of has its own story. I name all my alligators so that way I remember the story that goes with it. This one alligator, I named him Runway, because he was actually on the runway at an airport and the airplanes couldn’t land. We got to the airport and the airplanes are circling around and I’m over here trying to catch this alligator—so that was a good memory one.

And then we caught an alligator, his name was Ray Charles. He’s completely blind; someone shot his eyes with a pellet gun. So we had to take him to vet and they actually had to remove the pellets out of his eyes. Now he’s trained with a dog clicker so that when he hears the clicker he’ll open his mouth and you can feed him. He can’t see but he’s super smart and he follows commands. So he’s super cool.

And then of course there’s the big alligators, like the Godzilla from the Home Depot parking lot, and the one from the golf course that I just caught—Chubbs—the big 12-footer. Those are the awesome, fun stories. 

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Gator now wrangled and under control. 

How often do you get calls about gators?

Right now, it’s slowing down, because it’s wintertime. Kind of like bears, they do go into a hibernation stage. But my alligators for some reason just haven’t gotten that memo yet. It’s slowing down. I probably won’t have any more calls right now for winter, but in the springtime that’s when it will start up again. Typically during the spring and summertime, I’ll get about three to four calls a week about alligators.

This coming year I am going to be doing alligators full time. Of course in the spring and summertime I’m busy with tracking gators and all that. But now, like I said, we’re also planning to do the courses for the cops and do the training with alligators so that’s going to keep us busy going from police department to police department. And wintertime is typically when we do our school events, and we go into schools with a small gator and teach the children about them.

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Young man, one day you will grow into an 800-pound warrior.

What are some of your favorite things about alligators and gator trapping?

I just love the fact that I’m able to work with these animals. Like I said, a lot of people think they’re scary, that they’re mean and monsters. Me, being able to work alongside them every day, and see a different type of them, see that that’s not their behavior—I love that. Because they are awesome animals and they’ve been around since the dinosaurs and it’s really cool to work with an animal that’s been around that long. And they’re so smart, being with them every day, I just learn something new from them all the time.

The Beloved Pioneer Bread that Smells Like Feet and Breaks Food Safety Rules

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A loaf of salt-rising bread. (Photo: Wonderland Kitchen/flickr)

Its flavor is often described as 'cheese-like', its crumb dense, and its odor memorable. Salt-rising bread is special to those who remember it as a home-cooked comfort by a grandmother or parent. It’s also one of the only breads that uses a mix of bacteria, rather than yeast, to rise–a mix that includes a form of Clostridium perfringens, the culprit commonly known to cause the discomforts of food poisoning and the purulent wounds of gangrene.

No one exactly knows where salt-rising bread originated, but the prevailing idea is that pioneer women developed the bread as they traveled along the Appalachian mountain range, where the bread is most often found today. Before the 1860s, commercial yeast didn't exist–most breads were leavened through sourdough starters, or by skimming the yeast and bacterial byproducts from the beer making process, neither of which were available in pioneer life. Salt-rising bread doesn't need yeast to rise, and contrary to its name, the bread doesn't really need salt; the use of heated rock salt to regulate the temperature of the starter dough for pioneers very possibly contributed to its name.

Salt-rising bread's pungent, sharp smell is either loved or hated, and sometimes compared to dirty socks, with a unique cheesy taste that aficionados love. After its invention the bread became incredibly popular, with recipes for it appearing in many cookbooks into the 1920s; it even played a central role in the Kansas governor’s race in 1910. Even in 2012, Country magazine called salt-rising bread its “all-time most requested recipe."

Glenda Riley writes in The Annals of Iowa journal that the meals of one pioneer “regularly featured … salt-rising bread, which she worked at in between her other chores,” starting the bread as they made afternoon camp, letting it rise until midnight by the fire, and having the dough rise again until it was ready to bake at breakfast time, ever with a watchful eye that the dough was rising properly.

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A family outside their cabin in the Appalachian Mountains, where salt-rising bread is said to have originated. (Photo: Library of Congress)

If you think this sounds time-consuming and difficult, you would be correct. In Beard on Bread James Beard agrees that salt-rising bread is “unpredictable," adding that, ”You may try the same recipe three or four times and find that it works the fifth time...you may be disappointed.” If you Google salt-rising bread, one of the first results is an allrecipes.com entry that warns in the shouting tone of capslock: “THIS IS NOT AN EASY BREAD TO MAKE!

In the early 20th century, this lengthy, yeast-less process also became an interest of microbiologists. In 1914, Richard N. Hart noted in his book Leavening Agents that salt-rising bread “seems to fail in a well-sterilized room," and alludes to the experiments of Henry A. Kohman, who discovered that salt-rising dough lacked yeast completely “but literally swarmed with bacteria.”

In 1910 Kohman was funded by the aforementioned bread-obsessed Kansas Governor, Walter R. Stubbs, to learn how bakers may reliably make it, and concluded that a variety of anaerobic bacteria allowed the bread to rise. In 1923, microbiologist Stuart A. Koser began to suspect the mix might include bacteria found in human intestines and wounds.

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More Clostridium perfringens bacteria, an essential element to salt-rising bread. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons

To explore his hypothesis, Koser started with a few experiments that exposed guinea pigs to the bacteria, and confirmed that innocuous Bacillus welchii (now called C. perfringens) spores were present in the bread, but his experiments quickly dove into the macabre. He decided to take it a step further and bake a loaf of his own using the toxic bacteria from a soldier's gangrenous wound.

Koser made a salt-rising bread starter in his lab, and successfully created the grossest, and possibly the most dangerous bread in history–the wound-bacteria made bread that did not go over so well with the guinea pigs this time around.

It seems that practically anything can capture the right bacteria to make salt-rising bread. A man named Reinald Neilsen conducted dozens of baking experiments using different salt-rising bread starters. In 2002, he published an article in Petits Propos Culinaires on how he successfully made salt-rising bread starters out of oats, cheese, and even tree bark–which apparently works well, but needs to be picked out of the bread as it's eaten. 

The diverse range of salt-rising bread starters is possible because of the bacteria they attract. Salt-rising bread bakers create a fruitful environment for bacteria using a process called alkaline fermentation. Boiling water or milk is poured over a base like cornmeal or potatoes. It is left to sit for hours between 90 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit before flour is added and it sits again. This captures a medley of wild bacteria including Bacillus, C. perfringens and Lactobacillus, which feed from each other in a symbiotic relationship visible in the bubbling, foaming mixture that forms, called the 'sponge'. After nine to 12 hours of bacterial growth, it's ready to bake.

Typically, this sounds like the opposite of what one wants to do with food. The dangerous strains of the C. perfringens bacteria are what keep us from eating old meat, the nightmare that keeps restaurants in a constant state of concern about food temperatures, and the microbe responsible for gas gangrene necrotic enteritis. So how have generations of Appalachian cooks been eating this bread, which hasn't produced a single case of food poisoning?

The truth is, the strain of bacteria in salt-rising bread is completely safe–though the reasons why are slightly mysterious. Jenny Bardwell and Susan Brown, professional bakers who have researched how salt-rising bread works for over 20 years, collaborated with microbiologists test it. The resulting paper, “The Microbiology of Salt Rising Bread,” published in West Virginia Medical Journal, notes that the bread does contain this bacteria, but testing indicates the strain is “unable to cause C. perfringens type A food poisoning.”

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Clostridium perfringens colonies. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The reason this strain exists may lie in bacteria's ability to change. In certain environments, bacteria may find a mini-evolutionary advantage to gaining or losing genetic traits–including traits that involve giving off toxins. The environment of a wound, in contrast to that of bread dough, might attract and cultivate very different strains of the same bacteria. Even if toxic strains of C. perfringens make it into the bread, study co-author Gregory Juckett notes that baking temperatures are far above tolerance levels for the bacteria.

Since salt-rising bread has so far been known as a niche food item, there has been little funding to study it, but there have been studies with other breads using bacterial fermentation. In Greece a similar bread uses chickpeas, and in Sudan another calls for lentils. Preparations of both items indicate that the result is like that of salt-rising bread. Kenkey, a dumpling-like bread from Ghana made of a corn-based fermented dough, may also use a related process.

Not everyone has the drive to experiment, however, and the time needed to make salt-rising bread is what eventually caused it to recede into obscurity. By 1920, the book Manual of Homemaking had labeled salt-rising bread, “An old-fashioned bread, the making of which is almost a lost art to-day."

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Susan Brown with her grandmother, who routinely baked salt-rising bread. (Photo: Susan Brown/saltrisingbread.net

Bardwell and Brown explain in The Handbook of Indigenous Alkalyne Fermentation that by the mid-1900s salt-rising bread was available in bakeries, with fewer people baking it at home. When production of commercial salt-rising bread starters ceased in the 1960s, most people stopped making it. Today salt-rising bread is usually sought because of nostalgia, the memory of lost family members and home-cooked meals; Bardwell and Brown's own personal ties to the bread go back generations, and are part of what inspired their research in the first place.

“There are memories that tastes provoke and smells provoke–and salt-rising bread has a very strong smell,” says Brown. “People will come into the bakery, take a loaf, put it up to their face and take a really long, deep breath.” At Rising Creek Bakery in Mt. Morris, Pennsylvania, Bardwell and Brown bake salt-rising bread and hope to revive the tradition, teach anyone who will listen how to make it, and encourage scientists to study it. Bardwell and Brown believe that salt-rising bread may even further teach microbiologists how probiotics keep us healthy.

“Susan and I have many responses from people saying that salt-rising bread calms their stomachs and is soothing to them when they can't eat anything else,” says Bardwell. “Salt-rising bread may even be some kind of cure that helps people." This might make sense– C. perfringens and Lactobacillus are, after all, both present in the human digestive system. Amid studies about intestinal flora and a constant stream of probiotics on grocery shelves, studying and eating this unlikely food may hold more benefits than its pioneer inventors knew.


In honor of Thanksgiving, here is Susan Brown's recipe for salt-­rising bread stuffing:

Salt Rising Bread Stuffing

Ingredients:
16 cups of 1 inch salt rising bread cubes (1 1/2 # loaf)
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
2 cups medium diced onion (2 onions)
1 cup medium diced celery (2 stalks)
2 tablespoons chopped, fresh parsley or 2 teaspoons dried parsley
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1­2 cups turkey broth or chicken stock

Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Place the bread cubes in a single layer on a sheet pan and bake for 7 minutes.
3. Remove the bread cubes to a very large bowl.
4. Melt the butter and add the onions, celery, parsley, salt, and pepper. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes until the vegetables are softened. Add to the bread cubes.
5. Add the turkey (or chicken) broth or stock to the mixture. Mix well and pour into a greased 9-by-12-­inch baking dish.
6. Bake, uncovered, for 30 minutes, until browned on top and hot in the middle. Serve warm.

Fleeting Wonders: Japan's World Record Baby-Racing Competition

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More than 600 Japanese kids just earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records before they even learned to walk.

A 610-baby crawling competition, held on November 23 in the Yokohama shopping mall, was the largest one to date, shattering the record of a crawling race with 451 babies that took place in China last year. Infants made their way down a 10-foot track, and the fastest tyke won a headset camera (intended to let parents take constant photos of their offspring while leaving their hands free). Though of course, the real prize is being a part of baby history.

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(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Baby crawling races take place worldwide, and like any sporting event, they have their scandals. This summer in Minnesota, the winner of a baby race was disqualified for using a contested "scooting" technique. The Yokohama race was unmarred by any such controversy, and moved smoothly into the record books.

Well, for some values of "smoothly," anyway. The scene in the mall was pretty chaotic, with parents trying to coax babies to move faster, and babies mainly doing what babies do, which is cry, poop, and lie down. And yet, they have a Guinness record and you don't!

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We hear you, kid. (Image: YouTube screenshot)

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.

FOUND: A Silly Joke Stinking Up the Periodic Table of Elements

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Plutonium (Photo: Department of Energy/Wikimedia)

After World War II ended, chemist and Manhattan Project member Glenn Seaborg finally got to add Plutonium, the element he had discovered during the war, to the periodic table.

As Robert Krulwich recounts at National Geographic, Seaborg also chose the short-hand symbol for plutonium: Pu.

There's something strange about that decision. A more obvious choice would have been to have Pl as the element's symbol. But, as Seaborg's son told Krulwich, "'he just thought it would be fun' to treat this element as if it were stinky." So, he chose P and U, as in: Pee-yew, that stinks!

This wasn't meant to be a political statement, according to Krulwich. It was just a joke! One that will last for as long as the periodic table, a (rotten) easter egg just waiting to be discovered.

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. 

 


Inside the Brooklyn Building that Held the Subway's Secrets

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Rendering from the Board of Transportation Annual Report, 1949. (Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

If there were a contest for New York City’s least favorite building, 370 Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn would almost certainly be in the running. “Blight,” “derelict,” and “eyesore” are some of the nicer words politicians and journalists have used to describe the quality of the former transit headquarters. The Brooklyn Eagle shortlisted it as one of the borough’s ugliest buildings. And, as a 2012 New York Times piece about its renovation noted, “it is pretty much impossible to love the Transportation Building.”

Even a casual visitor can understand why it gets a bad rap. The 13-story limestone structure, situated just above the Jay Street-MetroTech subway station, has been wrapped in scaffolding for years–and its blocky, modernist design gives it a soul-crushing bureaucratic vibe. But bureaucracy was precisely what the building was designed for–and exactly what its early cheerleaders loved about it. 

“Not a cathedral of commerce, not a temple of advertising, not a palace of municipal power: just a grouping of offices arranged for the efficient dispatch of administration,” wrote Lewis Mumford, the city’s pre-eminent architecture critic, in the April 25, 1953 edition of the New Yorker

And while the greyish building isn’t much to look at, inside, it’s a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine. Called the Transportation Building, it was the epicenter of the city’s transit infrastructure and housed thousands of employees who kept track of everything from the Subway Command Center, a long console that helps dispatchers keep track of trains throughout the system, to public-facing services like the lost and found. In fact, 370 Jay Street has what some transit experts call a secret history–one that includes a hidden money elevator, top-secret passageways and an infamous heist.

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The data processing rooms which recorded the operations of the subway system, 1957. (Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

One of the recurring challenges of running New York’s transit system was managing the safe collection of millions of dollars worth of fares at each station. “Initially when they collected all the money from the stations they had to use armored cars, which was a little complicated, a little unsafe,” explains Brigid Harmon, Curator at the New York Transit Museum.

The designers of 370 Jay Street had an idea: Take advantage of the subway lines below the new headquarters and send trains to collect the cash that accumulated at each station. And that’s exactly what they did. Teams of armed guards went from station to station, loading up the fares and taking them through secret passageways and elevators up to what workers called “the Money Room” on the second floor of the building.

But that plan wasn’t foolproof. One Saturday morning in 1979, there was a planned blackout at 370 Jay as part of a drill. Even though extra guards were posted at the Money Room, the robbers got their way. “Monday morning, people walk in, they open the vault, and $600,000 is missing,” Harmon says. All of the ten-dollar bills were gone, 120 pounds worth.

Officials scrambled to figure out what happened. They found an escape hole in the wall of the adjacent women’s bathroom and tracked the thieves to a hotel room in New Jersey, where they found an empty bag marked “Transit Authority.” After an initial investigation that reportedly focused on someone inside the transit agency, officials eventually put out a $25,000 reward to catch the suspects. But they were never caught and the money was never returned. 

Despite the heist, the money train survived until 2006. The decision to abandon that system was largely logistical. Automated MetroCard machines simply took longer to empty than old-fashioned bags of cash, which left the money train idling in the station and held up normal train service. The MTA returned to armored cars–and the days of 370 Jay Street were numbered.

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By 1961, an "Information by Automation" machine, called a Directomat was installed in the lobby. (Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

The elaborate fare collection apparatus wasn’t the only way 370 Jay Street’s form mirrored its function. It had entire rooms dedicated to phone equipment with people who manually connected calls. It housed a lost and found, which saw hundreds of umbrellas, tubas, a pheasant, and a jar full of ashes labeled “my dear wife Ada.” There was a department devoted to complaints about everything from smells to rider behavior–and a room for photo reproduction equipment used to document the transit system’s history.

Though many of those same functions technically still exist within the MTA, most don’t require rooms full of people manually laboring over phone equipment or piles of documents. By 2006, the MTA largely vacated the building and returned to Manhattan.

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Employees of the Photography Reproduction Department, 1964. (Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum)

“The building was built with a very particular reason and a number of those reasons changed drastically once we hit the 21st century,” says the transit museum’s Harmon, who led a tour of a new exhibit devoted to the history of 370 Jay Street that will run through May. “You didn’t need a room this big–you didn't need that much data processing. These were rooms full of telephone equipment.”

By 2017 the building is scheduled to be transformed again, this time by New York University, which plans to house a global center for science, technology and education there. And while the university plans to renovate 370 Jay Street, it is vowing to keep many of its architectural features in tact. That might mean decades more of intentionally bureaucratic architecture anchoring downtown Brooklyn, but if incoming students look closely enough, they might just find a secret passageway to its past. 

FOUND: A Pet-Sized Dinosaur

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An artist's conception of the dinosaur (Image: University of Bath)

One hundred million years ago, the continent that is now North America was made up of two ancient continents separated by an inland sea. The eastern continent, Appalachia, had diminutive, dog-sized dinosaurs running around, according to a new study.

These dinosaurs were part of the Ceratopsia family, whose members have crests and horns topping their heads. Triceratops is the most famous (if not the most typical) of this herbivorous clan. The newly discovered, dog-sized dinosaur was identified from a partial jaw bone, so it's hard to say exactly what species it was or what it looked like. But the curve of its jaw indicates that its mouth had a beak-like shape.

We don't know much about the dinosaurs that lived on the continent of Appalachia, mostly because whatever fossils might have survived over those millions of years are buried beneath highly vegetated areas. Most fossils are found in areas of the world where a dry climate exposes the earth and the fossil beneath. This new, rare fossil adds support to the idea that Appalachian dinosaurs were distinct from the dinosaurs living in what would become the western half of North America.

The newfound diminutive dinos don't really fit the image of dinosaurs as "terrible lizards," either. They sound more like a creature that us humans would try to keep as a pet: the Late Cretaceous version of a pot-bellied pig.

Bonus finds: The lunar crash site of an Apollo 16 booster rocket, the tallest chestnut tree in North Americaa plague of spiked baseball bats

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. 

 

Fleeting Wonders: A Cheese Heist in Canada

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Would you ever steal cheese? (Photo: Pixabay/Public Domain)

Thirty thousand pounds of cheese hijacked? That’s not gouda.

Last week in Ontario, Canada, police arrested three men for stealing a tractor trailer full of cheesy goodness. Whether the cargo thieves were hoping to make pizzas, train for the annual Gloucestershire cheese rolling competition or simply woo hungry women with the stuff is unclear, but whatever their motivation might have been, they showed a clear need for cheese. And as tends to be the case with any intense cheese craving, this took place at 1:10am.

The need for cheese changed into a need for speed as the thieves successfully escaped the cops before the tractor trailer rolled over and they were spotted trying to hail a cab. Upon arrest, the three men lost their bounty of dairy, which was worth some $5,000.

Cargo theft is reportedly a recurring problem in this area of Ontario. It really makes you wonder who’s the big cheese behind it all. 

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

Ill-Gotten Treasures of Ancient Crimea Are Flooding eBay

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Ruins of ancient Greek colony of Chersonesos, in Crimea. (Photo: Burliai /WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, shells dropped, bullets flew, and international borders were effectively redrawn. Cultural heritage also fell under siege. UNESCO reported that the “massive transfer of priceless cultural objects from Crimean museums to the Russian capital is alarming.” There have been flurries of posts on Twitter, linking back to auction sites hawking ancient Crimean coins. 

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where such coins came from, by what means, how long they’ve been in circulation, and whether they’re even authentic. Even so, Evelina Kravchenko, a Ukrainian archaeologist working in Kiev, believes that they and others like them likely “come from extortionate digging in Crimea,” adding bitterly, “Russia does nothing to control this process.” (Not surprisingly, a click on one of these Twitter links comes with a warning that the link may be unsafe).

Extortionate digging has been happening on the Black Sea peninsula for more than a hundred years, since the days when archaeology was just becoming professionalized, and collecting was seen as a legitimate way of expanding and sharing knowledge of the past. When the Soviet Union imploded, a black market for antiquities was born. In a region that’s filled with the treasures of foreign invaders, private collections surged as demand fueled greater supply.

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Scythian treasure from Kul-Oba, an ancient archeological site in Eastern Crimea. (Photo: PHGCOM/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

These days, the on-going conflict between Ukraine and Russia has turned Crimea’s archaeological sites and gems–from ancient Greek cities to Roman and Byzantine ruins–into flashpoints for geopolitical struggles, bringing cultural heritage and power into very close alignment. Who ends up owning these objects is key.

Just as conflict fuels the market, a national exhibition, and who controls which ruin, have become important political symbols, assertions of sovereignty. Orwell’s dictum, “He who owns the past controls the future,” is playing out across archaeological sites and museums from the Netherlands to Moscow.

A new exhibit at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is just the latest example. Titled “In the Land of the Gryphon, The Hermitage Antique Archaeology Collection in The Crimea,” the show evokes a mythical creature that’s part eagle, part lion, and displays objects from the museum’s extensive collection, including jugs, the remains of an ancient theater, and coins, many of which were collected over the course of the last two decades as well as the Soviet period.

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A map of Crimea. (Photo: Maximilian Dörrbecker/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

On the website, the language describing the show is scholarly, nuanced, and absent of nationalistic rhetoric. Still, that such an exhibit exists at all has thrown enflamed concerns in certain archaeological circles.

“It’s quite normal that it can organize an exhibition on this topic,” says Thibaut Castelli, a historian in Paris who writes about Crimea’s cultural heritage. Yet in light of the current political context, Castelli sees the exhibit as an important political signal, showing that “Crimea is Russia.”

Castelli points to other signals like it, including Putin’s recent visit to the ancient site of Chersonesus with former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi–Chersonesus recently made international headlines when the director of its museum was controversially outed for a Russian appointee–and Putin’s underwater dive to explore an ancient shipwreck off the Crimean coast. Castelli called these widely publicized events “important political gestures.”

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St. Vladimir's Cathedral overlooks the extensive excavations of Chersonesus, on the Crimean Peninsula. (Photo: Dmitry A. Mottl/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Others take a harsher view. In the wake of what happened to the Museum of Donetsk (badly damaged by fighting in the summer of 2014, there are reports that some of its collections “disappeared”), and the fact that Putin has just placed Chersonesus under Russian federal control, making it difficult for Ukranian archaeologists to continue their work there, mistrust over who’s watching over these sites, and the flow of objects in and out of them, is strong.

Fair or not, some archaeologists are concerned that the exhibition at The Hermitage may reflect violations of current international protocols.

“Relevant international laws explicitly forbid any archaeological excavations in the occupied territories by the state-invader,” said Yakov Gershkovich, a Senior Research Fellow of Institute of Archaeology of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, who has studied this topic extensively. “Any export of archeological finds from occupied territories is forbidden by the international conventions. This exhibition demonstrates that Russian archaeologists infringe the rule of international law and norms of professional ethics. Unfortunately, I haven't other explanations.”

The Hermitage Museum did not respond to a request for comment.

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Mangup, a historic fortress in Crimea. (Photo: Elena Pleskevich/flickr)

In a symbol of just how deep this mistrust is among Ukrainian archaeologists, and how protective they are of their heritage, the All-Ukrainian Public Association of Archaeologists was founded in 2010 to care for the “destiny of archaeological heritage,” and protect it from threat of destruction by natural factors, economic activities, and racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts. While the name of the association has a nationalistic ring to it, Gershkovich, who serves as its vice president, says the association welcomes archaeologists of all nationalities living in the Ukraine, and that he himself is Jewish. The association’s goals were born of past political conflicts. These days, some Ukrainian archaeologists are refusing to work on Crimean sites under Russian control, even when they’re able to.

“In theory, Russia allows them to work on the sites, on a team directed by Russia,” Castelli explains. “One or two have done it, but the majority of Ukrainian archaeologists wouldn’t accept this because it will be accepting the loss of Crimea.”

Meanwhile, other Ukrainian archaeologists face more literal bars to access. For instance, Evelina Kravchenko says a site that she formerly worked on has become a military base, making it impossible, at least for the time being, to work there. This comes at a moment when Russia is building a bridge to Crimea, despite protests by archaeologists that its construction is a threat to Phanagoria, an important archaeological site nearby.

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A tomb showing a griffin, excavated from Phanagoria, and currently in a museum in Feodosiya, Crimea. Phanagoria is an important archaeological site that is close to the bridge Russia is building to Crimea. (Photo: Janmad/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Speaking of another recent skirmish, involving Crimean cultural objects that were “held hostage by politics” at a museum in Amsterdam, the museum’s director told the New York Times that “the Crimean case is illustrating in a very strong way that objects of cultural heritage can be claimed from a political perspective.”

Political perspectives have also claimed some of the information itself, as in the case of reports on the Donetsk museum (“for this topic, you have to be careful about propaganda and disinformation from all parts implicated in this conflict,” Castelli warned via Skype). For Gershkovich, Putin’s recent photo opps fall into this category too: “It’s part of an effort to propagandize the idea of Crimea as special sacral place for modern Russia (especially as it concerns Chersonesus). One can see the myth-making is in the process,” he says.

Then Gershkovich took a step back, as though assessing his own analysis: “One may say that Russia is a political and war offender, but extortionate digging has been happening in Crimea for a while.” Striking a more defiant note, he adds: “Whether there has been an increase in illegal digging in Crimea, we will know when Crimea becomes Ukrainian territory again.” 

How The Hidden Track Faded From Recorded Music

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(Photo: AngeloDeVal/shutterstock.com)

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

The music industry’s transition to digital everything has made for great gains in convenience for listeners.

But we have also lost things along the way—think of record sleeves, media towers, and Tower Records. And, perhaps most irreplaceably, the hidden track.

The secret bonus songs and obscure skits were among the few things about an album that couldn't easily be converted to MP3 or Spotify. Why is that? Simple: When everything's a file and Siri can dig it up for you if you ask nicely enough, there's simply nowhere to hide anymore. And it's a shame, because the hidden tracks were the only interesting part of some albums.

Let's look back on how the hidden track became such an important art form.


While musical Easter eggs really shined during the CD era, there were plenty of examples that predated the introduction of lasers to music-playback devices.

The world first cottoned to the idea thanks to the Beatles, whose sound engineers used the form to override the wishes of the musicians themselves. An act of quiet defiance by one of those engineers gave Abbey Road listeners a little surprise at the end—and the world its first "hidden track."

Little, literally: "Her Majesty," the song that closes out the second side of the record, was just 23 seconds long. A simple acoustic ditty by Paul McCartney, the song was basically a loose end from the medley that defines the back half of that album. It was a nice enough song, but there was nowhere to put it in the midst of all the other songs on the record, so McCartney ordered engineer John Kurlander to remove it from the album.

He did, but later added it to the end of the album after a few seconds of silence.

“The Beatles always picked up on accidental things. It came as a nice little surprise there at the end, and he didn’t mind," Kurlander later recalled.

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A stack of CDs. (Photo: Tekke/flickr)

Another recording engineer with ties to the Beatles is responsible for at least two other types of vinyl-era Easter eggs. George Peckham, who worked at Abbey Road on many of the band's records, helped the comedy troupe Monty Python figure out a clever vinyl-pressing trick they had batted around for a while but failed to figure out on their own: The three-sided record.

Peckham pulled off the trick on the band's The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief, which came out in 1973. The record featured a concurrent groove, which made it so that it would play different music based on where you placed the needle.

The goal was confusion—something assisted by the fact that both sides of the record are labeled "Side 2." The comics basically wanted listeners to trip upon the third side by accident.

“We had these visions of stoned fans, of which there were a lot in the early '70s, having the shock of their lives when brand new material was playing on a record they had had for months," Python's Michael Palin recalled. "Some people thought there was an alternative version because they would hear talk of these mysterious sketches that they had never heard on their record. It drove people mad. This was precisely why we did it, of course."

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The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief, where both sides of the record were labelled 'Side 2'.  (Photo: WikiCommons)

Peckham eventually left Abbey Road Studios, but he wasn't done with the music industry. Eventually, young bands would go to him, interested in his vinyl-pressing services. He was happy to help, but he wanted to put a stamp of his approval on the records he made.

To do that, he created the "run-off groove," in which hard-to-see messages are placed onto the dead area of the wax.

Peckham generally called his records "A Porky Prime Cut," though he was known for offering up a variety of other phrases of this nature. His trick eventually got into the hands of the artists, some of whom—like Joy Division and The Smiths—put a lot of thought into the end result.

It was a fun trick, but only a small sign of what was to come.


The compact disc was such a forward-thinking format when it first came out in 1982 that it needed its own bible. That bible was called the Red Book.

The book, formulated by Philips and Sony, explains the detailed technical specifications of the format, including the maximum length of a CD (74 minutes), the maximum number of tracks there can be (99), the minimum length of a single track (4 seconds), and the standard sampling rate (44.1 kHz).

(If you would like to read a copy of the Red Book, be prepared to pay: as it describes the innards of a proprietary material, it'll cost you a solid $295.)

The Red Book also hid within its specifications a number of opportunities to do really interesting things with albums that you couldn't do during the vinyl era. For one thing, you could mess with the track listing by adding a few seconds of silence between tracks; for another, you could actually put music before the official start of the album, in an area called the pregap. It's a spot so hidden—only accessible by rewinding the CD as far back as possible—that most computers to this day still can't access these hidden tracks.

For the most part, hidden tracks at the end of the album tend to hide full songs (famously "Endless, Nameless" at the end of Nirvana's Nevermind), while hidden tracks in the pregap area tend to hide introductory music in most cases. (One notable exception to that rule is the Northern Ireland band Ash, whose album 1977 included the band's pre-album single, "Jack Names the Planets," in the pregap.) 

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Nirvana's Nevermind, which held the hidden track Endless, Nameless. (Photo: Wishbook/flickr)

Even now, new albums are taking advantage of these tricks—even though most buyers are most likely never hearing them in this form. A good example of this is the Arcade Fire's most recent album, Reflektor. The first disc of the double album includes a 10-minute pregap track of reversed instrumental music culled from other parts of the album.

Unfortunately, the pregap was a better trick when we were using five-disc players. Computers, for the most part, don't recognize pregaps, and modern DVD and Blu-Ray players don't register them either, as one Arcade Fire fan learned when his Blu-Ray treated the pregap as part of the first track of the album, leading to confusion among fans on Reddit and elsewhere.


While CDs made hidden tracks a regular event, most of them functioned as a goofy one-off or a musical accident given room to breathe on a record. But there are a few examples of records where the hidden tracks became famous on their own merit.

Perhaps the most noteworthy example is The Clash's "Train in Vain." The song was added to the band's landmark London Calling after the sleeves had already been printed, but quickly became popular in the U.S. , where it was one of the band's two Top 40 hits.

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Arcade Fire on stage in Chicago. (Photo: Mary/flickr)

The '90s alt-rock band Cracker had a similar rationale for their song "Euro-Trash Girl." The tune, one of three hidden tracks at the tail end of the band's 1993 album Kerosene Hat, essentially got added to the album after it was already completed, due to positive reaction from fans. Their decision proved wise after the song became a hit. The album took advantage of one of the CD era's numerous tricks—an excessive number of blank tracks—to ensure the track was listed at track number 69. (Real mature, guys.)

Covers also tended to be popular targets for hidden tracks—and at times such covers transcended their hidden status. Lauryn Hill's rendition of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," featured on her immensely popular 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, was such a critical success that it received a Grammy nomination—one of 10 that she received for the album,

On the other hand, sometimes it's a cover that helps make a song more prominent than ever. The ever-profane “B*****s Ain’t S**t,” an unlisted track on Dr. Dre's landmark 1992 album The Chronic, found a second life on the pop charts in 2005 after Ben Folds made a version that introduced it to a whole new audience.

Finally, there can be artistic reasons for burying a track. That last situation happened to Mark Oliver Everett, better known as Eels. After he wrote a radio-friendly song called "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues," his label pressured him to put it on his record Daisies of the Galaxy. He did so because the label essentially said they wouldn't release the record unless the song was included. It broke the flow of the album in his view, so he made it a hidden track.

The label made it the single and forced him to put the song in a Tom Green movie. Not so hidden.


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London Calling with the hidden track Train in Vain. (Photo: @HayeurJF/flickr)

By the point that Eels was fighting his record label for proper placement of one of his most popular songs around 2000, the hidden track was facing some serious overexposure—a fact that is often lost in fond reflections on the practice..

"It's time for musicians and labels to rethink why they hide what they hide," wrote Scott Sutherland in a 1999 New York Times essay, "If most artists have a hard enough time filling even half the space on a 74-minute CD with compelling material, why bother hiding something equally uncompelling? And if a song is good enough to be the best thing on the disk, why hide it at all?"

As annoying as they were for the listener, they could often be just as annoying for the label. A 2014 Wondering Sound piece on hidden tracks noted how They Might Be Giants really angered Elektra Records by including a pregap track on their 1996 album Factory Showroom. The reason for this is that such tracks require a more detailed production process, meaning that the label has to do more work to ensure that the discs are up to snuff during the pressing.

Perhaps the only people who are truly happy to see the demise of hidden tracks are those who had to make them. process.These days, we just call these extra pieces of art what they are: bonus tracks. No hiding necessary. It's not like Spotify will let us hide them anyway. 

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

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