The Associated Press, which was founded over 170 years ago and has won 52 Pulitzer Prizes in its illustrious history, reported Wednesday that a man in Linz, Austria, tried to bring a "sack full" of cockroaches into a court building before being turned away by security.
The unidentified man's motives were unclear, the AP said, raising the prospect that a man with a lot of cockroaches in his possession—and, perhaps, some bad intentions—was at large in Austria's third-largest city.
But, thankfully, the Austrian broadcaster ORF (and Google Translate) can clear up some of the details. The man, ORF reported, brought the cockroaches Tuesday in a "jam jar," not a sack, and told authorities they were for evidence.
Still, officials denied him entry anyway, in part to avoid having the insects get loose inside the building. Some, in fact, during an interview with security, already had.
"Even during the conversation with the security personnel, some animals escaped from the glass, which the [man] immediately crushed on the desk with his bare thumb," ORF reported.
Please be prepared if you need to bring cockroaches to court and maybe also consult a professional.
When Newcomb Mott flew into the small airport in Kirkenes, Norway, in 1965, nothing had ever truly gone wrong in his life.
He was 27 and tall (over six feet), with notably red hair (though it was starting to recede from his high forehead). He was an American man from a well-off family. He had gone to college at Antioch, in Ohio. During his college years, he tried his hand at being a forest ranger in the Berkshires, a copy boy for the Toledo Blade, an assistant in the press gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, and an elementary school teacher. At the time he landed in Kirkenes, he was working as a college textbook salesman. He'd lived for a time in Mexico, and visited close to 20 other countries. He dreamed of becoming an editor.
Mott was, as one U.S. ambassador would later describe him,“a kind of innocent abroad,” who had come to this isolated place, north of the Arctic Circle, on a whim. He had a confidence characteristic of young, educated, American white men in the 1960s—a feeling that everything would probably work out, because, the great majority of the time, everything did. But when Newcomb Mott illegally crossed the border into the USSR in 1965, aiming to collect a new stamp on his passport, everything did not go right for him.
Within a year of crossing the border, Newcomb Mott was dead, killed either by fellow prisoners or by government agents, although the Soviet government officially ruled his death a suicide. Under different circumstances, he might have been given a fine and set free after a few days or weeks. But borders are fraught places, where the rules can shift quickly and individual choices, the power of the state, and politics can turn small mistakes into tragedies.
As a purveyor of academic textbooks, Mott got summers off, and he had been traveling around Scandinavia as he neared the end of his trip. He'd been planning to take a bus from Finland to a different town in Norway, but a Finnair employee convinced him to fly to Kirkenes, a small Lapland town just miles from the Soviet border. Earlier in his trip, Mott had looked into going to the USSR, but found it too complicated. Now, with the border so close, the allure of stepping foot in one more country tempted him.
There wasn’t much to see in that isolated part of the world. Kirkenes, a pretty enough place in summer, was full of neat, bright houses, a charming shopping street, and not much else. Mott didn’t have enough time to take a boat across the nearby fjord, and he started considering the possibility of visiting Boris Gleb, a tourist outpost across the border. There wasn’t much to see there, either—just a low-slung building where Norwegians went to buy cheap vodka and, nearby, a 17th century church named after Boris and Gleb, two princes who were murdered by their brother in the 11th century and later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. But at minimum, he'd be able to say he had visited the USSR.
The small stretch of border between Norway and the USSR, just 121 miles, had only recently been opened up, in a limited way. Norwegians were allowed to cross without a visa, an enticement for them to spend their foreign currency on vodka and other goods stocked at the Soviet outpost. (There was some implication, too, that perhaps Boris Gleb might attract Communist sympathizers looking to get into espionage work.)
But Americans still needed a visa. That's what Mott was told at the hotel where he was staying, but as DeWitt S. Copp reported in his 1968 book, Incident at Boris Gleb, he decided to try to cross the border anyway. If the Soviet border guards wouldn’t let him through, “he would then ask them to stamp his passport to prove that he had been there, and so be one up on his brother Rusty, with whom he had a running contest on countries visited,” writes Copp. Either way, Mott intended to be back in Norway by the afternoon, to catch his flight out.
The next morning, he got on the bus for Boris Gleb. Mott didn’t speak either Norwegian or Russian, and that was the beginning of his difficulties that day. Instead of taking the bus to the border, he got off when the bus driver opened the door, pointed down a road, and said “Boris Gleb.” He still might have ended up at an official border crosspoint, but instead, through a combination of misunderstanding a Russian sign and miscommunicating with two Norwegian locals, he ended up at an unguarded part of the border and decided to cross. A short time later, he arrived in Boris Gleb, cheerfully greeted the guards there, showed them his passport, and was immediately apprehended.
Mott never denied that he had broken a law by crossing the border, but he did maintain that he never intended to do anything illegal. Even after he was detained, he was optimistic that the problem would soon be sorted out. He wasn’t wrong to think so: although there was no way for him to know this, there had been a couple incidents in the past, one involving a German and another an American, where the illegal border crosser had been let go relatively quickly. But that would not be Mott’s story.
The first Soviet authorities to question Mott asked him repeatedly: Do you belong to the CIA? Do you know anyone who does? But they seem to have given up the idea rather quickly that he might be a spy. (American papers were less convinced: an Amherst newspaper was still arguing that Mott may have been a member of the CIA after he had died.) Instead, they were interested in trading him for one.
A couple of years before, Igor A. Ivanov had been arrested for espionage and, by the end of 1964, convicted of the crime. The Soviet government had tried once, unsuccessfully, to trade an American detained in the USSR for Ivanov; with Mott, they saw another opportunity. The U.S., though, wasn’t interested in that sort of trade. From the government’s perspective, trading Ivanov for Mott would give the Soviet government an opening: every time they wanted one of their imprisoned spies shipped back to the USSR, they would only have to arrest an American on some pretense and threaten to punish them harshly.
Even outside the State Department, which was helping Mott as he was brought to trial, the U.S. government was paying attention to the case. The CIA was, at the very least, collecting news coverage and likely working other sources to find out more. The case was included in at least one intelligence bulletin and one presidential intelligence report, and in both cases the version of the documents now available to the public have had information withheld, either because releasing it would reveal an intelligence source or harm the U.S.’s relationship with a foreign government.
Despite the State Department’s efforts to have Mott released, his case went to trial after he had been detained for two months, and he was found guilty. The punishment for illegal border crossing was one to three years in prison; Mott was sentenced to 18 months in a corrective labor camp. “He wept at the verdict,” UPI reported, but when he was sentenced, reacted “without any display of emotion,” according to the AP.
Mott had been kept in a prison not far from Boris Gleb while his case was appealed, but in January he was put on a train to be transferred to a labor camp. He may have known he was in danger: in his book, Copp argues that some unusual passages in Mott’s last letter were intended to try to communicate a threat to the State Department. He died on the train: the Soviet government reported his death to American diplomats as a suicide. But two autopsies, one after his parents were able to recover his body, showed more than 60 wounds on his body. He'd been stabbed to death.
It’s never been clear exactly who killed Mott and what the Soviet government’s involvement was. One American writer suggested that perhaps the Soviets were punishing America for refusing to trade Mott for Ivanov. Another thought that, even if Mott were not a spy, perhaps he had inadvertently seen a Soviet intelligence operation he should not have. Whatever the reason for his death, it's a cautionary tale. Explore, yes, by all means, just not near politically fraught international borders, even if you are a white man from America, with all the privilege in the world to marshal.
— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) March 1, 2017
Most people could only be so lucky as to receive the kind of funeral that two goldfish in the Scottish isle of Orkney were given by some elementary school kids (or primary school, as they say there) who were learning about Vikings.
The pair of classroom mascots, Bubbles and Freddy, belonged to the 3rd and 4th grade classes of the Papdale School in the town of Kirkwall, according to the BBC. The fish had been with the students for a few months, but died about a week before the kids were due to learn about the Vikings, so it was decided that they would send the pets to Valhalla with a Viking funeral.
As they shared on their classroom blog, the students created a small fleet of miniature boats to send off the deceased, fashioning coffin boats out of cereal boxes and egg crates. They also wrote and recited their favorite memories about Bubbles and Freddy. Finally, they led a funeral procession to a nearby stream where the boats were put in the water, and the lead vessel was set on fire (it’s unclear whether the actual fish bodies were aboard).
May Bubbles and Freddy forever swim in the halls of their warrior heaven.
There are more than 5,000 minerals in the world—naturally occurring chemical compounds that are stable at room temperature and have a unique chemical formula. But, as Scientific American reports, humans are rapidly adding to that number. In a new report in American Mineralogist, a team of scientists reports that they found 208 new minerals that would never have occurred without humans and thousands more mineral-like compounds that humans have created.
“There is nothing at all like this in the geology of the past 4.5 billion years on Earth,” one geologist told Scientific American.
The new minerals, SciAm reports, formed in conditions created only by humans—in man-made mines with unnatural humidity or in shipwrecks deep on the ocean floor.
Humans have also added thousands of new chemical compounds, many more than were created in the “Great Oxidation Event,” a period that lasted two billion years, when the increase in the supply of oxygen created thousands of oxides.
The compounds that humans have created will change the geological record forever: our most lasting legacy may be in the ground. Like the holes and tunnels humans have created, the earth’s strata will show marks of our presence long after we’re gone. SciAm:
The Washington Monument, for example, will eventually be a lens-shaped pocket composed of limestone where no other limestone is found. And the pocket that was once the Smithsonian will contain so many rare minerals that they could not possibly have formed so close together in nature.
Which means that whoever inherits the Earth will have more than a few geological mysteries to solve.
After I wrote about “jawn,” the all-purpose noun that’s embedded in the culture of Philadelphia, I started getting emails telling me about a similar, and maybe even wilder, term native to a small group of isolated islands nearly 5,000 miles away. Hawaii’s “da kine” is not only an all-purpose noun, capable of standing in for objects, events, and people: it’s also a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and a symbol of Hawaiian people and the unique way they speak. It may be the most versatile phrase on the planet.
To understand da kine, you first have to understand exactly what language modern Hawaiians speak, which is not nearly as simple as you might think. There are several languages co-existing on the Hawaiian islands: Hawaiian, the Polynesian language of the original Hawaiians that’s experienced a renaissance of late; English, brought to the archipelago by American imperialism; the various languages brought by immigrant workers, including Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Spanish; and something which is now called Hawaiian Pidgin. It’s the last of these that brings us da kine.
A pidgin, which is not capitalized, is a form of communication that arises when multiple groups of people need to talk with each other, but do not have a language in common, and for whatever reason choose not to, or are not able to, teach each other their native languages. They are not considered full languages, in that they generally have limited and simplified grammar and vocabulary. Basically, pidgins are tools: you have to speak to somebody, but you can’t use either your own language or the other person’s language, so you come up with this basic system to get your point across.
The majority of pidgins tend to mine the vocabulary of the ruling class’s language for words. In Hawaii, as well as in the Caribbean and other places, that language was English. In Hawaii, immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and China all came to work the plantations, but their only option for communication was to create an English pidgin. “This is partially done purposely,” says Kent Sakoda, who teaches a class on pidgin at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “They don't want people to be able to organize. So you separate them, and one of the ways you do that is by language.”
The various Asian immigrant groups were separated in lodging, but still worked together in the fields, so had to come up with a way to talk. The solution was a pidgin, using English words the workers heard from their bosses. English is the “lexifier” in this case, meaning English lends the words to the pidgin. So this form of pidgin would be “English-lexified.”
But here’s the thing: Hawaiian Pidgin—note the capitalization—is not a pidgin, not anymore. It’s a creole.
Pidgins often have a limited lifespan. Maybe the isolated groups figure out a way to teach each other their native languages, or they just learn the lexifier language. A pidgin is, by definition, not a primary form of communication; pidgins are tools, but they’re sort of blunt tools, not capable of the kind of complexity that all humans need to communicate. But sometimes something weird happens: the pidgin begins to grow. The children of the immigrants who created the pidgin add to it. In a generation or two, the pidgin isn’t a tool alongside a native language: it is the native language. And at that point it’s called a creole.
“A creole has to do everything for its speakers that any language would do for any speaker. So it has to be more precise and more complex,” says Sakoda. “When it becomes a native language, it's a full-blown language, a language of great complexity, like any other language in the world.” By the 1920s, Hawaiian pidgin wasn’t a pidgin, it was a creole, but the name, despite its inaccuracy, has stuck. Today it’s capitalized, which goes a little way to indicate that Hawaiian Pidgin is more than a standard pidgin. What it is is a full language.
Hawaiian Pidgin today is made up of largely English-derived words, with some words from the various languages of the Hawaiian immigrants and the native Hawaiians, in a structure that’s sort of like English, sort of like other creoles, and contains some syntax from various Asian languages. It is not really mutually intelligible with English; sometimes an English speaker might understand enough words to kind of get the gist of a Hawaiian Pidgin sentence, but that’s true of, say, a native Spanish speaker listening to Italian, too. What makes a creole so confounding is that many of the words may have originated from another language, but have taken on totally new or different meanings. Even if, as an English speaker, you think you recognize and understand a Hawaiian Pidgin word, you might not really be getting it.
Da kine is one of these. It originally comes from the English “the kind,” possibly relating to the meaning of that English word as “kind of,” or “type of.” But there are not that many instances where you can replace da kine with “the kind” and have any idea what a Hawaiian Pidgin speaker is saying.
The most popular use of da kine is a similar one to jawn, in that it’s a stand-in for another word, kind of like “whatchamacallit.” But there’s an added social meaning to that use of da kine. “When people use da kine, the expectation is that the other person will be able to recover what is meant,” says Sakoda. “The implication is that you know each other well enough that the person using da kine will not have to explain it. There's even an understanding that the other person will not ask what is meant by da kine.” There’s an intimacy to the use of da kine that you don’t really get from “whatchamacallit.”
That intimacy also comes with a darker side. Sakoda gave me an example of saying, “She’s so da kine,” which could mean, in the right context, something negative: she’s mean, she talks too much, that kind of thing. When da kine is used as an adjective like that, Sakoda says he thinks the meaning can often veer negative, but there’s a reason for that. “If it's negative, you don't want to say it,” he says. “You're talking about somebody else—we say here, you're talking stink about somebody else—and you don't want to be responsible for saying that. So da kine is sort of like, it's your interpretation, and if I get called on it, well, I didn't say it!”
There are plenty of circumstances in which using da kine as a stand-in isn’t necessarily because you’ve forgotten what you want to say. Instead, it’s because, well, you don’t want to say what you have to say. Here’s another: “Don’t get sloppy with me, before I da kine you.” What does that mean? Well, nothing good, but maybe you don’t want to go on the record making a specific threat. So pull out the trusty da kine.
This isn’t to say that da kine is always negative, nor that, really, it has to have “da” in front of it. You could describe someone as “a smart kine people,” or tell your kid to “make sure you da kine before we go” (referring to doing a chore), or explain where someone went by saying “he wen da kine dem” (referring to going with somebody’s family, or friends, or whatever makes the most sense in context). Sometimes you can get clues: the word “stay,” in Hawaiian Pidgin, indicates an ongoing action. If you say “I stay eat lunch,” that means, basically, “I am eating lunch,” with no need for the -ing ending that English uses. If you talk about a woman, and you say she’s “stay da kine,” that often means, says Sakoda, that the woman is pregnant.
Where things get tricky with Hawaiian Pidgin is figuring out what even is Pidgin and what’s more like a dialect of English. With the continued presence of native English speakers—hard to avoid given that Hawaii is an American state—the line between Pidgin and English can sometimes be blurred, or not fully understood. Sakoda says that he often has to point out to his students when they’re using an English-derived word in its American English sense versus its Pidgin meaning.
Take the word “never.” In English, if you were to say “I never go to Las Vegas,” that would be interpreted as meaning “at no point in the past or future do I go to Las Vegas.” There’s a permanence to the English meaning of “never.” In Hawaiian, not so much. “In Pidgin, it's just a past negative, meaning ‘didn't,’” says Sakoda. “So it could mean ‘this year I didn't go to Vegas.’” In Pidgin, that use of the word “never—spelled “nevah”—would often be followed by a time period to clarify that. “I nevah go Las Vegas this year,” say. Someone with a keen ear might pick out the differences in meaning between the English “never” and the Pidgin “nevah,” but even the speaker may not realize he or she is speaking one rather than the other. Pidgin’s coexistence with English makes it tricky to tell if someone is bilingual; the overlap between Hawaiian Pidgin and Hawaiian English is fluid and ever-changing. It’s not as simple as switching from Spanish to English.
There is a perception of all pidgins that they are broken or incorrect versions of a language. That’s not usually too much of a problem, since a pidgin is a supplementary tool. But in Hawaii, where Hawaiian Pidgin is not actually a pidgin but a native language, the perception that this language is a bad form of English is a dangerous one. “There's a stigma attached to the Pidgin that's spoken here,” says Sakoda. So there's kind of a social or educational force to lose the Pidgin and to speak so-called ‘better English.’”
Sakoda thinks Hawaiian Pidgin, thanks to those forces and the continual presence of English, is making Pidgin more English-like. But it won’t necessarily stay that way. There are plenty of creoles and even English dialects that begin at some point to further extricate themselves from the lexifier language. (This has happened, to some extent and in some communities, with AAVE, better known as Black English Vernacular.) Maybe speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin don’t want to be associated with mainland American English, want to use their language as an identity marker of themselves as Hawaiian. If that was to happen, the trend could reverse: Pidgin could begin to lose some of its similarities to English. Whether or not that happens, though, da kine isn’t going anywhere.
The Ahlin family, of Santaquin, Utah, isn't sure what they're going to name their new baby. They don't know the baby's hair color or eye color, and they've chosen not to ask about their biological sex.
But after the baby's latest ultrasound, there's one thing the family knows: that kid is metal as heck.
As Fox 13 News reports, Makelle and Jared Ahlin were looking through ultrasound images of their soon-to-be third child when they spotted one in which the fetus was throwing up a classic set of "devil horns" with their right hand.
Makelle and Jared have two other children, who Jared described as "very active." "It probably sounds like they will fit into the family," Jared said of the newest addition.
The rockin' baby is due near the end of June, which gives the rest of us some time to prepare.
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.
We may never get to see the uproarious hijinks of 1991’s comedy classic, King Ralph, but, thankfully, reality is often stranger than fiction. Take, for example, a Colorado man who believes that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien are “more than fiction” and has formally laid his claim to the title of King of England.
As spotted by David Mapstone, a journalist at Britain's Sky News, Allan V. Evans of Wheat Ridge, Colorado, took out a lengthy ad in The Times of London on Wednesday claiming that due to his unbroken lineage—trailing back to the fictional Kingdom of Gondor, he says—makes him the rightful King of England. In the ad, Evans traces his ancestry through real historical kings such as Cunedda Wledig, founder of Wales, before finally arriving at where he appears to think history intersects with the stories of Tolkien, Wales being just a new name for what was once called Gondor.
An American has taken out a big ad in the Times to say he's the rightful king & intends to seize power. pic.twitter.com/ba1iQUyGer
Evans goes on to state that in 30 days from the post of the notice, he will be claiming his rightful lands, titles, assets, and all the rest, but will also wait until the natural death of Queen Elizabeth II.
The ad ends with a rousing call to his cause and countrymen, before the revealing final line, making any previous fictional reference explicit.
"For the legend was not a myth but was indeed true," the ad says, "and more than a mere Tolkien story, that the men of the West are now returning and now is the time of the return of the King."
Dwarf beech trees are not ordinary trees. Found in a forest near Reims, France, in the summer they look like green igloos, or large turtles, or something out of The Little Prince. But instead of hiding elephants, these green, leafy mounds, ranging from 3 feet to 15 feet high, cover deformed trunks and gnarly branches that squirm and twist and zigzag like contortionists in repose. In winter, they look like the skeletal remains of mutant serpents that reach defiantly toward the sky as if to say, “You want a piece of me?”
Verzy, a small village 15 miles south of Reims, is home to the largest stand of Faux—an Old French word that means beech trees. But there are similar trees found elsewhere in France, as well as in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Les Faux de Verzy has about 800 of the trees, some believed to be over 300 years old.
No one's exactly sure how or why they grow the way they do. Scientists guess the mushroom-shaped specimens are a result of a genetic mutation, but the trees’ offspring are just as likely to be normal and straight as they are to be crooked. Other possible explanations for their odd traits include climate, chemicals, air currents, soil composition, telluric radiation, underground cavities, radioactive meteors, a virus—or perhaps a curse?
Perhaps not surprisingly, an intriguing web of legends and half-truths about these trees has developed over the centuries. They involve a cast of unlikely characters: a pious saint, Joan of Arc, monks, scientists, plus a few witches, trolls, townsfolk, and maybe even evil fairies.
In the case of Les Faux de Verzy in particular, some legends say that in olden times, the trees sheltered pagan deities, worshipped by the local townspeople. Saint Basel, a devout monk who lived in a monastery nearby, is said to have cursed the trees, causing them to twist like pretzels instead of soaring up toward heaven. Others say monks in the monastery became fond of Les Faux and cultivated them, using techniques such as layering—burying part of a low branch to start a new tree—to increase the number. Perhaps the monks gave the trees away to travelers, which would explain how they ended up growing elsewhere.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, people from Verzy and surrounding villages danced in the shadows of Les Faux at bacchanalian festivals, complete with orchestras and cases of champagne from nearby cellars. Michele Renoir, a local resident, recalls the trees provided natural hiding places, perfect for romantic dalliances, where couples would swoon under the enchanting spell of the branches—or maybe it was the champagne.
Others still whisper about witches and trolls who, in a frenzy late at night, might have twirled these trees into corkscrew shapes, just for the fun of it. One legend claims that Joan of Arc came to Les Faux de Verzy and climbed into a tree, letting its twisted branches embrace her young body.
Anatole France, author of The Life of Joan of Arc, tells the tale of how a similar tree figured in young Joan’s life. Her village of Domremy-la-Purcelle in Lorraine—where dwarf beech trees are also found today—was home to a “Fairy Tree,” whose low branches swept the ground. As a girl, Joan danced around the tree in springtime celebrations. Along with other young maidens, she hung the tree with garlands and wreaths, which would mysteriously disappear at night.
The townspeople of Joan’s era truly believed fairies lived in the tree. Once powerful, the fairies “had fallen long since from their powerful and high estate,” France writes, and were “as simple as the people among whom they lived.” Locals invited the fairies to baptisms and set a place for them at the dinner table. “Some were very kind,” writes France, but others cast evil spells. Given her famous demise at age 19, perhaps in her youth, poor Joan of Arc displeased a fairy.
Les Faux de Verzy are found in a remote area of Parc Naturel Régional de la Montagne de Reims and attract some 300,000 visitors per year. Lately, forest rangers are concerned about damage to the trees and have erected fences around many of them so tourists don’t trample on their fragile root system. In 2016, the park received the coveted designation of “Exceptional Forest” by the National Forests Office.
Nearby resident Nicole Quevy-Lefevre is a huge fan of Les Faux de Verzy and says the grove is a “garden of relaxation.” She and her husband, Paul, visit the trees several times a week, weather permitting. They have names for their favorites and mourn when one of the trees is damaged in a storm. But the trees are resilient, she says, and live for centuries. They are like “little crazy men,” as she puts it.
Quevy-Lefevre says her favorite season for enjoying the trees is in winter, when the snow provides stark contrast to gnarly dark branches. But no matter the time of year, a magical experience awaits at Les Faux de Verzy.
Yesterday, around 10:40 a.m. local time at London's Heathrow Airport, a British Airways flight to San Francisco was grounded for around four hours after the plane's crew announced there was a mouse on board.
For passengers, this created some consternation, and, of course, the opportunity to say something on social media that they thought was funny.
Just had my flight to SFO cancelled because of a mouse on board the plane. Could it not get a visa?? #britishairways
Nearly 11 years ago, Samuel L. Jackson starred in a movie titled Snakes on a Plane. You may have heard of it. At least one passenger on the plane with the mouse on it had heard of it as well, getting inspired enough to also make a joke, which referenced the movie Snakes on a Plane, the plot of which Rotten Tomatoes describes this way: "Forget terrorists or hijackers—there's a handful of deadly assassins aboard a jet liner and they don't even have arms or legs in this airborne thriller."
I'm going to sell this to the movies. It can be the slightly more pedestrian prequel to snakes on a plane. Maybe this is what lured them on?
According to the BBC, British Airways made a cheeky statement of their own on the matter, which came alongside some preening about how great British Airways is.
"We know almost everyone wants to fly with us to San Francisco, but on this occasion there was one very small customer who we had to send back to the gate," the airline said. "Everyone with two legs is now on their way to California, and we are sorry for the delay."
Nature is full of mystery, but none are as compelling at this very moment than why these turkeys are circling a dead cat.
As seen in a recently released video that has been spreading across the internet like overflowing gravy on a Thanksgiving plate, a group of turkeys was caught on tape walking in a nearly perfect circle around a deceased cat in the middle of the street. The person filming the strange behavior, which he tweeted, seems to be baffled by the birds’ conga line, but experts quoted across the internet seem to blame it on one thing: turkeys are kind of dumb.
An expert Gizmodo spoke with, posited that the birds were just curiously checking out a potential threat, and got locked in a hypnotic cycle of one bird following the tail of the one in front of it, unto infinity. Other turkey specialists, including ones quoted in The Verge, seem to have come to similar conclusions, saying they’d seen similar behavior in the turkeys before.
King Henry VIII may be most famous for ruthlessly beheading his wives, but he was also keen on rolling other spherical objects: namely, bowling balls. Henry VIII and his courtiers were known to be fans of lawn bowling, which involved tossing a “bowl” or ball across open lawns in royal gardens.
The Tudor-era bowling ball above, recently discovered in what used to be the moat of King John’s Court manor house thanks to digging work related to London's Crossrail project, is a remnant of one of the British monarchy’s favorite pastimes.
The English didn't invent bowling. The first precursor of the sport is said to date to the Egyptians and Romans, who would stuff leather balls with corn, as Roy Shephard notes in An Illustrated History of Health and Fitness. In England, historians trace the sport back to the late 13th century, as open greens or “bowling greens” became more of a common feature in gardens.
Bowling was just one of many sports that were played in these courts. During the early modern period, sport was typically reserved for elites and even governed by the monarchy. Games such as tennis, wrestling, jousting, and bowling were not only for physical fitness, but opportunities for dukes and lords to socialize and exhibit power.
“If used carefully, [sport] could propel a gentleman to the heart of power,” writes James Williams in the journal Sport in History. “For the early Tudor gentlemen, sport could be a ‘deadly serious game’ with an essential social and political role.”
Special structures and venues were an expense only the wealthy could afford. Henry VIII, an avid sportsman, attached a number of sporting venues to his palaces. Hampton Court, Nonsuch Palace, and Whitehall boasted tiltyards, cockpits, and bowling alleys. The complex at Whitehall was particularly elaborate, including four indoor tennis courts, a jousting yard, a cock-fighting and bear-baiting pit, and a bowling green.
There were many different types of lawn games that involved rolling a bowl and hitting a pin or cone, such as bocce and nine-pins. One of the earliest forms of bowling was a game called “cones,” in which two small cone-shaped objects were placed on two opposite ends, and players would try to roll their bowl as close as possible to the opponent’s cone. The game “kayles”—later called nine-pins—usually involved throwing a stick at a series of nine pins set up in a square formation, though sometimes players would roll a bowl instead. Similar to the ten-pin bowling commonly played today, bowlers would aim to knock down all the pins with the least number of throws. Sometimes, the game would feature a larger “king pin” in the center of the square. If that was knocked down, the player would automatically win the game.
Choosing the proper shape and type of bowl was important depending on the turf, as Joseph Strutt notes in The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. Flat bowls were best for alleys, round biased bowls (a ball with a weight on one side) gave an advantage on open grounds, and round bowls were selected for greens that were plain and level.
The sport was widely popular. Local taverns arranged bowling matches in halls or the village green. Gambling was also common. One account in 1648 reported that Sir Edgar Hungerford had lost his entire estate while betting on a bowling match.
More than one British monarch tried to ban commoners and peasants from participating in bowling, along with other sports, arguing that they were a waste of time and encouraged gambling. In 1477, King Edward IV decreed that for commoners, playing sports was a finable offense:
“whosoever shall occupy a place of closh, kayles, half-bowle, hand-in, hand-out or queck board shall be three years imprisoned and forfeit £20, and he that will use any of the said games shall be two years imprisoned and forfeit £10.”
Similarly, in 1511, King Henry VIII tried to make the sport even more exclusive. He declared that bowling was illegal for common people, and that “no manner of Persons could at any time play at any Bowl or Bowls in Open Places out of his Garden or Orchard.” Those who broke the law would receive a statutory fine of six shillings and eight pence. Though according to Shephard, noblemen who owned property valued at more than £100 could obtain a “bowling license” to play. It would take centuries for these laws to be amended.
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In 1887, the Parsons family donated their private collection of books to Downside Abbey, a Benedictine monastery occupied since 1814 by a community of monks founded in 1606. For many years, the abbey’s library was accessible only to the monks who lived there, but recently the abbey has been working with volunteers to create public access to the collections.
The book includes a series of intriguing recipes from England’s Georgian period. There are recipes for plum pudding and coconut tarts, and for fricassee lobsters and chicken curry. There are also more unusual dishes, though, including, most notably, “Calves Head Turtle Fashion” and “Fricassee of Pigs Feet and Ears.”
Recipe books from this era did not just include recipes for food, but often for medical treatments or other household needs. This one includes a recipe for furniture oil.
If you happen to be in need of such a recipe, or are curious about Calves Head Turtle Fashion, the recipes are being published in a new book, set to be released in April. If you do try out one of the more adventurous recipes, report back, please!
In 2008, Jack Norheim's cat, Ernst, left their home in Skellefteå, Sweden, and failed to return. After a while, Norheim, who described Ernst as "practically his best friend," gave him up for gone, The Local reports. He moved across the border to Norway, built a life, found a partner, and had a son. Last year, he moved back to Skellefteå.
Then, last week, he got a call from the local animal shelter, asking him to come in and pick up his cat.
Ernst wasn't dead—he had just been playing the long game. After he left the Norheim household, the tabby took up with an older couple in a nearby village, who cared for him until they passed away a few weeks ago. He ended up at the shelter, who called the phone number attached to his microchip.
Ernst—who, in photos, looks very pleased with himself—now lives with Norheim and his family once again. "I was a little bit nervous at first," Norheim told local TV broadcaster SVT, but things have been working out great.
Although Ernst is certainly impressive, other recent footloose felines have him beat. This past July, Moon Unit of East London was reunited with his family after eight years of absence, during which he somehow made it to Paris.
In the fall of 2015, Glitter, a stylish cat from Sweden, also turned up in France, about 1000 miles away from home. And way back in 2013, a tortoiseshell named Holly jumped out of her family's RV in Daytona, Florida, and staggered 200 miles back home—apparently on foot—to West Palm Beach.
Imagine you were a rich European in the 16th century, and you wanted to travel. Top on your bucket list might be Venice, a cosmopolitan, free-wheeling city, known for its diversity, romance, and relaxed mores. Venice was a wealthy place, where Titian, Tintoretto, and other famous artists were at the height of their powers. As a republican port city, it was tolerant of all sorts of people and all sorts of behavior in ways that other European cities were not.
While in Venice, you might purchase a flap book to help you remember the good times you had there. Above is one example of an illustration fromLe vere imagini et descritioni delle piv nobilli citta del mondo—"the true images and descriptions of the most noble city in the world."
This image is part of a new exhibit at the New York Public Library, Love in Venice, which includes two flap books from the late 16th century that depict a lascivious kind of love.
The books are attributed to Donato Bertelli, a printmaker and bookseller, although it’s hard to say exactly who wrote the book. What is clear, says Madeleine Viljoen, the curator of the exhibit, is that the book is connected to “a family of very savvy book publishers who understood how to take advantage of people coming to Venice for tourism and people curious about what they might see there and experience there.”
In the 16th century, flap books were a fun innovation in publishing, used for purposes both serious and satirical. One of the most studied types of flap book displayed the anatomy of the human body: you could dissect a person by paging through the flaps. Publishers also would used layers of paper to create volvelles, wheels made of paper that might be used to calculate the movement of the sun or moon.
But there were also some cheekier uses of the flaps. During the Counterreformation, for instance, one flap book let the reader lift up the robes of Martin Luther and peek underneath. “I don’t think it was meant to be playful or titillating,” says Viljoen. “It’s about humiliation.”
Some of the images in the Venetian flap books have an edge to them, too. One shows a woman riding a donkey; flip the image up, and it’s revealed that she’s riding on the back of a man, an image meant, perhaps, to warn of the dangers of female power. There’s also another image of a woman with a flippable dress, but underneath this dress, there are only skeletal legs.
For the most part, though, flap books were supposed to be fun. Another image in the exhibition plays on the famous trope of a woman and her not-very-good chaperon:
“It’s meant to be playful and mischievous and point to why Venice was perceived as playground,” says Viljoen. “What went to Venice was left in Venice.”
"All politics is local" is a political cliché at this point, used by politicians, pundits, and journalists, among other hacks, to mean something like "I don't quite understand what I'm talking about but here's a phrase that can mean pretty much anything and also fills some space."
All of which doesn't mean that some politics aren't local, like, for example, local politics, or, in the case of the Greater Scranton YMCA in eastern Pennsylvania, the tenor of conversations one has at the local gym.
That's because, this week, the gym—after a series of political disputes between members that gym authorities feared might turned violent—blocked 24-hour news channels from its televisions, according to WBRE.
The gym is hoping that might calm the political discourse, or at least move it outside the walls of the YMCA, itself not usually thought of as a home for political argument, though we live in special times.
Even so, members told the station that the hottest political moments at the gym might have already passed.
"I think it is probably an overreaction," YMCA member David Dimmick told WBRE. "There was a lot of arguing going on during the election, protesting, that type of thing. But I think it's all gone now."
You can address a letter to Marley, Illinois. You can check into Marley, Illinois on Facebook. You can say you live in Marley, Illinois and locals will know exactly where you reside. But Marley, Illinois is not an actual town. Well, not anymore.
Marley was once a promising railroad settlement. It was built in 1830 when the Wabash Railroad from Chicago to Joliet cut through the hill on the corner of a farm owned by a man named George Haley, leaving a triangular piece of land that was developed around it. Though incredibly rural, the Marley train stop became an essential milk shipping station into Chicago. Local farmers shipped milk and grains, which caused local businesses to pop up in the area at a rapid rate.
“It was a lively place,” says Julie Cleveland, of Marley in the late 19th and early 20th century. “There used to be Fourth of July parades and everything up and down the streets. I wish I was here back then!”
Cleveland moved to Marley in 1962 when she married her husband, a lifelong resident of the town and member of its founding Marshall family. Originally the secluded, four-street, 111-lot settlement was only inhabited by the Haley family and the Marshall family, with many of the descendants of those families still living in Marley today. The name Marley came about after the post office was built in 1879 and they decided to combine Haley and Marshall into Marley.
In 1932, tragedy struck when a train derailment destroyed the railway station. The station was never rebuilt and Marley was never able to recover from the accident. The tiny town lost so many businesses that now only the school, retirement home, and candle shop, and the white-steepled Marley Church remain. The church has been standing since 1900 with few adjustments, though, according to the late Marley historian Iva Gillet Sproat, “the previous steeple had to be removed in 1924 after being ravaged by woodpeckers."
Today Marley is a short few blocks off of 187th Street that feel like they are stuck back in time, with many of the original farmhouses remaining and former businesses such as the general store having been converted into homes. The last general store closed in 1954, leaving the area mostly residential.
“We don't consider ourselves Mokena or New Lenox,” says Cleveland, referring to the neighboring towns. “We're far enough away to be our own community.”
The community spirit is most evident at Marley Candles, which has been in operation since the ‘60s. Employee Arlene Nelson has created a shrine to the history of Marley and Marley Candles in the back of the store for all curious visitors to peruse. Newspaper clippings, the original candle molds, and documents showing handwritten notes from old Marley residents on their candles are all displayed in glass.
Arlene insists the community is held together by the candle shop and the church, both places that proudly pass on their legacies. Candlemaker Betsy Milligan carries on the tradition of making candles exactly the same way and in the same spot as the original owners did, carefully pouring molds in an almost meditative ritual in the backroom of the shop. Kathy Chapleau and her father John Fixari keep the business going at what is now a staple of the Marley community.
Though Marley residents are proud to say live in Marley, practicality—and the postal service—sometimes require them to assimilate into neighboring communities. Frankfort postal employee Maria Weber recalled seeing “Marley, IL” addressed on mail for years until only a few years ago when the postmaster threatened Marley residents against doing so. “The old postmaster said he would stop delivering their mail if they didn’t start using the correct address,” she says. “Marley doesn’t have its own zipcode.” The postal service has asked Marley inhabitants to use the zipcode of neighboring Mokena.
There is, however, one glimmer of hope for the future. For the first time since the derailment, the railroad tracks are being used again by Metra commuter trains. Who knows? Perhaps Marley can once again grow.
In the late 1930s, Michihiko Wada—Mike to his friends and family—graduated from the University of Redlands, in California, and headed east to study engineering. Wada, a slim man with an easy smile, left most of his family—his parents, his sisters—out West. He began building his own life in New York, earning his graduate degree and setting off on what looked to become a promising career.
But then, in February of 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. One by one, Wada's family members received arrest warrants. His mother, Kuni, who taught at a Japanese language school, was named "a dangerous alien engaging in subversive activities" because she used textbooks approved by the Japanese government in her classroom. His father, the Reverend Masahiko Wada, was accused of "pro-Japanese sympathies and activities." Both were sent to detention facilities in separate states.
Mike left his job in New York and headed back home, where he too was shipped off to an internment camp. After a short stint at a detention center in Wyoming, he ended up at Colorado's Granada Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache, with his two sisters, his brother-in-law, and his nieces and nephews.
There, he temporarily changed careers. For two years, instead of pursuing his dreams, Wada—along with dozens of Amache detainees—worked as a professional artist at the Amache Silk Screen Shop, printing posters and pamphlets for the U.S. military, the very entity that was imprisoning his entire family.
"He came back from New York knowing full well he would get swept up in the evacuations," says Mitch Homma, Mike's great-nephew. In 2006, Homma found his great-uncle's silk screen work—and many letters, records, and pieces of camp paraphernalia—packed in boxes in his grandmother Kuni's closet. Mike Wada's photos and prints—along with those of the few dozen artists who worked at Amache Silk Screen Shop—make up a bittersweet historical record, shedding color and light on one of America's darkest eras.
As the historian Melvin Yazawa explains in his history of Camp Amache, the Western "relocation centers" that housed 120,000 detainees were constructed hastily. There were a few War Department employees assigned to each camp, in charge of administrative work. But for the most part, it was left to the internees—who generally came to the camps on about a week's notice, with few to no possessions—to piece together various community institutions, based on guidelines set by the War Relocation Authority, or WRA.
When the first prisoners came to Camp Amache, in August of 1942, only a few of the barracks were habitable, and there was no running water. By the time Mike Wada got there about a year later, the camp had a mess hall, a school system, a hospital, a post office, police and firefighting forces, and an elected community council. A look through the Granada Pioneer—Camp Amache's biweekly, bilingual newspaper, itself staffed by internees—details an energetic schedule of camp events, including basketball games, school dances, film screenings, and the occasional carnival.
Amache also had something unique among the camps: a successful silk screen shop. As the war ramped up, the U.S. Navy found themselves with boatloads of new sailors, and—due to the wartime labor shortage—no one to print the posters, charts, and other materials necessary to train them. In the spring of 1943, Maida Campbell, a Red Cross nurse with an artistic background, was sent to Camp Amache to see whether it would be feasible to open a printing operation there.
Campbell set up the shop in a recreation hall, and began advertising in the Pioneer for employees. A month into their work, the Pioneer reported that the shop's 25 artists had printed "some 185 large posters, 250 stickers, and 100 cards," for practice. By August, they had their first order from the Navy, for four posters that depicted "motives for enlistment." Over the course of 1943, the shop printed at least 120,000 posters in dozens of designs, depicting everything from signal flags to principles of seamanship. Employees took on the entire process, from design and stenciling through color selection and printing.
"Because the shop is in a War Relocation Authority center, we have more problems than the average shop," wrote Campbell in an introductory booklet. As she explains, printing was often interrupted by everyday tasks, such as haircuts and doctor's appointments, which could only happen during working hours, when the camp's other amenities were available.
But for the workers—and the internees in general—the main problem was the Colorado dust. "The walls would seep sand and dust, it would come up through the floor," says Homma, whose father—Mike Wada's nephew, Hisao Homma—spent three years of his childhood in the camp. The 1943 April Fool's issue of the Pioneer jokingly reported a monthly dust forecast of "about 750 feet." If a windstorm kicked up, the shop had to be abandoned, lest the wet posters get coated in it.
The dust was but one unsettling aspect of a place that was, essentially, a massive interruption. As Yazawa writes, most internees had been forced to evacuate their homes extremely quickly. Many lost their jobs, possessions, and homes while they were gone. "It changed our family forever," says Homma, whose relatives started anew in Seattle after they were released.
Although silk screening jobs were in demand, the shop wasn't immune to further injustices. The pay topped out at $19 per month, about half of what one could expect to receive for similar work outside. Despite Campbell's evident respect for her employees, she, like other administrators, wrote frequently about how the shop provided "vocational training" for them—never mind the fact that their detainment at the camp was preventing them from pursuing their actual vocations, hobbies, and lives.
Still, the workers made the most of it. When there were no Navy orders to fill, the artists turned their skills toward helping the community. The silk screen shop took every opportunity to brighten up ordinary camp materials, printing brochure covers, Thanksgiving menus, food production guideline posters, concert programs, and the annual high school yearbook, among many other items.
On Christmas Eve, 1943, the artists trekked around camp, hand-delivering a special calendar they had designed and pressed in 20 colors. The shop also offered to print diplomas for graduates of every camp school in the country—although it's unclear whether the plan ever went through—and fielded a basketball team (which, according to the camp's sports pages, tended to trounce the Pioneer's team). "That's very Japanese," says Homma. "You work for the good of the community, and you give back to the community."
Artists also pursued their own projects. In their first days, to learn the silk screening process, each new employee drew a bookplate, Christmas card, or letterhead, and took it through the whole workflow. Some artists exhibited their work in camp shows, while others drew comics for the Pioneer.
Mike Wada, who worked in the shop darkroom, immediately took to photography. Although internees technically weren't allowed their own cameras, he was able to practice in his off-hours thanks to his brother-in-law, Dr. Kyushiro Homma, an avid photographer who had brought some along in his capacity as camp dentist. Wada's photograph above, of the camp's imposing water tower, was reimagined in the silk screen shop as the frontispiece of the camp Christmas calendar, and is probably the best-known print to come out of the shop.
Over its two-year tenure, the Amache Silk Screen Shop doubled in size, eventually employing 50 people. (The employees at one point had to renovate a second recreation hall to fit everyone.) And after a second shop, at Wyoming's Heart Mountain Camp, failed to get off the ground, the Amache crew inherited all of its equipment. By the time the shop shuttered, in May of 1945, its artists had printed over 250,000 posters.
In the meantime, Wada, like the rest of the country's detainees, had lost years of his life. He'd also lost his brother-in-law and mentor, Dr. Homma—Mitch's grandfather—who shed 50 pounds over the course of his incarceration, and died of a heart attack and stroke in August of 1944. For decades, Wada and his family also lost the will to talk much about their experience. "When I was growing up, and I heard people talking about camp, I thought they meant church camp," says Homma. It took until the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, when the U.S. government began detaining some Muslim people, before most survivors Homma knows began speaking up about their experiences, he says: "They were always told it wouldn't happen again."
Mike Wada went back to New York and became an engineer; by the time he died, in the late 1980s, he was the Vice President of Mitsubishi North America. Like many people who took up creative work in the internment camps, he never silkscreened anything again. He did bring one thing with him, though: "All his life he was an avid photographer," says Mitch.
Border agents at London’s Heathrow Airport recently arrested a slick customer in a major smuggling bust. The items he is accused of trying to sneak through customs? Some 600,000 eels.
According to the Evening Standard, agents at the airport caught a 64-year-old man from the Chessington area of London attempting to smuggle the eels into Hong Kong. Glass eels are considered a delicacy in many East Asian countries, but the European Union has enforced a total ban on their export since their numbers went into sharp decline.
The man had hidden the trays of eels beneath shipments of other, totally legal fish, but his simple scheme didn’t pass inspection. Officials with Britain's Border Force consider the seizure to be a major bust, estimating that, on the eel black market, the seafood would have been worth nearly $1.5 million.
Having originated in Spain, the eels were returned to their home country. It is unclear if they would be eaten.
In ancient Greece, guys with STDs didn’t have a ton of options when it came to medical treatments. Sick people often had no recourse other than to appeal to Asclepius, god of health and medicine. They’d go to his temples, and after Asclepius “cured” them in exchange for an offering or a fee, grateful supplicants dedicated votive reliefs in the shape of the body part he healed. As a result, archaeologists have found many terracotta carvings over the years of Ancient Greek legs, arms, ears, or, yes, even penises.
It’s believed such carvings either commemorated successful healings or were requests to get Asclepius to pay attention to ailing limbs. They would have been hung in the sanctuary—called an Asclepeion—in a public area, so visitors could see just how good at his job Asclepius was. Models of genitals, breasts, eyes, ears, and limbs were pierced and hung from the ceiling; reproductions of larger portions of the body, such as torsos or entire heads, were put on shelves.
In a process called incubation, patients would sleep overnight in a room dedicated to healing, known as anabaton; Asclepius, they believed, would then help either “by direct intervention (laying on of hands, applying medicines, even performing surgery) or indirectly by sending a dream in which he recommended a treatment,” as the classicist Steven M. Oberhelman writes in the Athens Journal of Health. In the ancient world, there wasn’t the same division between what modern scholars define as professional medicine (i.e., a practicing doctor) and “popular medicine” (think homeopathic healers and herbalists, charm-sellers and magicians). And it’s worth noting that Asclepius wasn’t the only deity believed to have magical healing powers.
Some sanctuaries may have specialized in healing certain diseases. According to Oberhelman, 40 percent of the votives found at the Athenian Asclepeion depicted eyes, indicating visitors often asked for help with ophthalmic issues. At Corinth, most of the models were of hands and feet, perhaps reflecting agricultural injuries to local farmers, and genitals, suggesting that Corinthians may have suffered in particular from sexually transmitted diseases.
At the Asclepeion in Epidaurus, the iamata, or patients’ chronicles of how Asclepius cured them, were inscribed on stelae, probably by priests; although some scholars debate these stories’ factual reliability, they remain fascinating chronicles of the belief in dream healing in Ancient Greece. One iamaton reads: “Hermon from Thasos. This man, who was blind, he healed. When he did not subsequently bring the healing fee, the god again made him blind. When he came back and slept in the sanctuary again, he healed him.” One woman named Nikasibula was “sleeping for children,” meaning she was asking the god to heal her infertility. Her night in the abaton found her dreaming of Asclepius coming to her, “bringing a snake slithering with him. She had sex with it.” As a result of this dream, Nikasibula reportedly gave birth to two boys within the year.
Over 7.6 million people have "liked" The Weather Channel's Facebook page, which, as far as brand accomplishments go, isn't bad. But all those millions aren't coming for a daily forecast, they're coming for hot viral content, which The Weather Channel serves up a few times an hour, frequently in the form of short videos, some of which are dubbed "Viral Weather."
Nature, you see, is the original viral hit maker.
Earlier today they posted the video you see above, featuring a tree that began burning from the inside after being struck by lightning in St. Louis. The video was shot on Wednesday, according to the station.
The Weather Channel also calls the tree "totally eerie," a fair description given that the tree was located in a cemetery, in addition to, on the video, the audible, reasonably heavy wheezing of the videographer.
Perhaps, though, whoever was taking the video simply knew then what The Weather Channel picked up on later: they just might have a viral hit on their hands.
