Have you ever watched an X-Games style snowboarding video, where the camera smoothly follows its target down the slope, and thought, "this is decent, but I wish that human athlete were a moose?"
Today is your lucky day. Cheri Luther and Amy Loofa were snowboarding at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado on Saturday when Luther snapped the above video, of an unexpected, four-hoofed powder junkie.
"I turned around to make sure [Loofa] was still behind me, but instead I saw a moose," Luther later wrote on Instagram. Rather than stopping in the middle of the run, she explained, she figured it would be safer to keep going, and get some action shots.
If you're having trouble getting up and going this Monday morning, this video will help—the moose is both swift and powerful as she hoofs it over the snow, and imagining her chasing you should provide a good kick out the door. Luther agrees: "I still have an adrenaline rush," she wrote.
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.
Every dog deserves a proper burial, but few pups reach a level of fame earning them a tombstone that will be visited for generations. These seven graves comprise a macabre memorial tour of the Western world's most beloved fallen canines. These good dogs were honored in death in a manner befitting of humankind's best friend.
Opened in 1899, the Cimetière des Chiens, or Cemetery of the Dogs, is the oldest pet cemetery in Europe. Here among the dog toy-decorated tombs and stone dog-house mausoleums is the final resting place of one of the biggest canine celebrities of all time, Rin Tin Tin. The world-famous German Shepherd appeared in nearly 30 Hollywood films, and is largely responsible for the popularity of the breed as pets. Rin Tin Tin's descendants starred in even more films and the Adventures of Rin Tin Tin television series. Despite being an American movie star, Rinty is buried in France, where he was found and rescued from the trenches during World War I.
Speaking of oldest pet cemeteries, hop across the Atlantic to New York and you’ll find Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, the first in the United States. Founded in 1896, it has over 80,000 dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, reptiles, monkeys, horses, a lion, and even some humans buried on its five acres.
At the center of the cemetery is the War Dog Memorial in honor of the dogs that served in World War I, and it’s encircled with tributes to the space dog Laika (who is not buried in the cemetery) as well as the dogs who helped with search and rescue following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Sirius, a dog who lost his life in the September 11 terror attacks, is also memorialized.
As we all know from the classic line in The Wizard of Oz, “There is no place like home.” Unfortunately for the film’s beloved pooch, Toto’s own puppyhood home—including his gravesite—was bulldozed by the state of California in 1958 in order to build the Ventura Freeway.
Many years later, concerned that there was nowhere to commemorate the celebrity pup, some fans got together and launched an online campaign to build a memorial for Toto at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Robert Baum, the great-grandson of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, even attended the dedication to pay his respects to the canine movie star. The crowd at the dedication sang a rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
This unassuming memorial stone is dedicated to a mysterious dog named Boomer who is said to have died trying to save his master while running on three legs. As the story goes, the dog was running alongside a railway line when a fire broke out on the train. Seeing this, Boomer supposedly lifted his leg mid-run and attempted to put the fire out with his urine—a heroic bit of multitasking that unfortunately cost the dog his life. While this tale may seem a bit outlandish, it nonetheless inspired the creation of the Boomer memorial under which the dog is said to be buried.
The tombstone of Greyfriars Bobby reads, “Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.” The little skye terrier known as Greyfriars Bobby was said to have stood vigil at his owner’s grave for 14 years after his death. His dedication and loyalty became legendary, and when he finally died in January 1872, he was laid to rest in Greyfriars Kirkyard, not far from his owner’s grave.
It’s a heartwarming story that has inspired numerous books, films, and even an episode of Futurama. Unfortunately, it seems the whole thing may have been just a publicity stunt, and the original Bobby was just a stray who found that by lingering around the churchyard he could get snacks from sympathetic visitors who assumed he was mourning the loss of his owner.
Owned by no one but beloved by all, Brownie, a large, brown, short-haired stray dog, lived on Beach Street for 15 years, and became known far beyond his seaside home as the Town Dog of Daytona Beach. Locals, Beach Street merchants and tourists all donated funds to keep Brownie well fed and well cared for, and even established a Florida Bank and Trust account in his name to make sure there was always enough money to buy dog food and pay any vet bills. Each year, the townspeople bought Brownie a dog license, his tag always #1—signifying that he was the official goodwill ambassador for the town.
When Brownie died on Halloween in 1954 at the age of 15, the entire city mourned the good dog’s passing and 75 people attended his funeral. The mayor gave the eulogy.
This quaint New Jersey graveyard, started in 1918 by a husband and wife who loved their pets almost as much as they loved each other, is an eternal resting place for thousands of beloved pets. Many celebrities who performed in nearby Atlantic City buried their beloved companions here, and showbiz pups including Petey from the short-film series Our Gang and Rex the Wonder Dog are also resting here, after a long, hard life on the road.
Rex was a star attraction at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier during the 1930s and 1940s. Many people flocked to see this dynamic dog bravely water ski. Another star dog was Paradiddle Ben. He has one of the most notable tombstones, etched with the masks of comedy and tragedy. Services at Clara Glen could be very elaborate. It is said that the burial of one Atlantic City bartender’s dog was attended by 20 limos.
On October 20, 1880, just a couple weeks before the U.S. presidential election of that year, the New York newspaper Truth published a letter made up of two short paragraphs signed by James A. Garfield, the Republican candidate for president. Those two paragraphs could have been, as the paper wrote a few days later, Garfield’s “political death warrant.”
Addressed to one H.L. Morey, the letter concerned the immigration of Chinese laborers to America. “Individuals or companies have the right to buy labor when they can get it cheapest,” the letter read. “We have a treaty with the Chinese Government... I am not prepared to say that it should be abrogated until our great manufacturing and corporate interests are conserved in the matter of labor.”
More than 135 years later, that might sound reasonable enough. But in the 1880s, America was caught up in a cascade of nativism and anti-Chinese sentiment. To parts of the American populace—in particular, voters in California and other western states, where Chinese labor was seen as a threat to white workers—this was an outrage.
The “Morey letter,” as it quickly came to be known, was a classic October surprise, an attack in the waning days of a campaign meant to land a death blow. But the letter also raised some pressing questions. First of all, who was H.L. Morey?
The 1880 election was going to be very close. It was the first election after the end of Reconstruction, and while the Republicans were still the party of Lincoln, they were divided among themselves. Garfield had been nominated at the longest Republican National Convention ever, after 36 rounds of balloting in which neither of the two leading candidates, Ulysses S. Grant and Senator James Blaine, was able to command a majority. Democrats controlled the South and much of the West. To win, Garfield would have to sweep the North and the West Coast.
“Communication was very poor compared to today,” says Kenneth Ackerman, the author of Dark Horse, a history of Garfield’s election and assassination. “There was no TV and no radio. Even the telegraph was relatively new. These were weakness in the system that a clever plant could take advantage of.” Start a rumor close to the election, in other words, and even if it was grossly untrue, your opponent might not have enough time to fight back.
Garfield was already a bit vulnerable to a nativist attack on the issue of Chinese immigration. The Burlingame Treaty referred to in the letter allowed for unlimited immigration from China; just the year before, President Rutherford B. Hayes had vetoed a bill that would have limited the number of Chinese immigrants to 15 people per ship. As a congressman, Garfield had supported the veto on the grounds that breaking the treaty could endanger American missionaries and other ex-pats living in China.
But the letter put him solidly on the pro-immigration side of the issue, and Democrats immediately took advantage of it. Garfield’s opponents had the letter translated into different languages. They made hundreds of thousands of copies and sent them by train to California, where political operatives would hand them out at schools and in front of mills. In Denver, there was an anti-Chinese riot in the city after the letter was printed in the local paper.
Garfield, at first, kept silent. Working from his home in Ohio, he hoped the scandal would quiet down if he didn’t engage. But he also had a nagging doubt. He didn’t think he had written the letter, but he wasn't sure. During the campaign, he had signed so many letters, and it was possible he'd signed this one, too. He dispatched a secretary to Washington to search through his files there.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party had started to investigate this H.L. Morey. The day after the Morey letter was published, newspapers were already reporting doubts. Morey was supposed to live in Lynn, Massachusetts, about 10 miles from Boston, and have been part of the Employers’ Union. But business leaders in Boston said that no such organization had ever existed, and they knew of no H.L. Morey. Still, the Truth continued its campaign against Garfield; on October 23, the paper published a facsimile of the Morey letter on the cover of the paper. Pressure on Garfield increased—if he hadn’t written the letter, he needed to denounce it.
Garfield took a risk. He went public with a denial: he hadn’t written the letter. It wasn’t until October 25 that he received a copy of the Truth with the facsimile on the cover. Immediately, Garfield was reassured. The letter wasn’t in his handwriting nor that of his aides. Not long after, word came from D.C.: there was no copy of the letter in the files there. The letter was a fraud.
All of which led to the second question at the center of the scandal: Who had actually written the letter?
The Republican Party didn’t have much time to gain control of the story. They printed copies of Garfield’s denial and had them shipped to California “on a special car to San Francisco,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The trip across the continent will be much the fastest ever made by any train.” (No one noted that those crucial, speedy trains were likely to travel on tracks built by Chinese labor.)
Garfield lost California, by just 144 votes. But he won the election. Although he had a wide margin of victory in the electoral college, in the popular vote Garfield's margin of victory was the slimmest in the history of U.S. presidential elections: fewer than 10,000 votes separated the two candidates.
The scandal of the Morey letter dragged on for years after the election, though, even after Garfield was assassinated (for unrelated reasons) six months into his term. The journalist who originally published the letter, Kenward Philp, was put on trial for libel and forgery. Described by a contemporary paper as “a little fellow with a high forehead,” he'd been known as a political prankster, which didn't help his case.
But Philp was acquitted of the crime. The only person to go to jail was one of two witnesses allegedly paid off by the Democratic Party to testify that they knew H.L. Morey. But Morey did not exist and never had; eventually the two witnesses admitted as much. One was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to 8 years in Sing Sing. "In the author's opinion, which he cannot document, it was probably the prankster Kenward Philp who penned the Morey letter,” wrote the historian Ted C. Hinckley, in one of most thorough accounts of the scandal.
A contemporary investigation, published in 1884, blamed a different culprit, a lawyer with “an innate love of intrigue, and a craving for notoriety.” In the end, no one knows for sure who wrote the Morey letter, described by a Republican lawyer at the time as “the most extraordinary and infamous achievement in political fraud-doing ever perpetrated by any political party in this country."
It isn’t unusual to come across maps of fictional worlds or mistaken regions explorers once thought were real. But in the case of map above, the creator intentionally charts an entire land that—literally—only exists in his head.
On November 8, 1973, Israeli artist Michael Druks mapped Druksland, a cartographic display capturing his life story. Outlining the shape of his head, Druks’ conceptual map incorporates features you would see on a topographical map, including coordinates, bodies of water, and a map legend. Yet the map also serves as an unconventional self-portrait, the coordinates corresponding to major life events, significant people, and important institutions. Druks shows how the contours of a face could be a more complex terrain than any geology on Earth.
“In this work, Druks’s head turns into a topographic expanse,” wrote Galia Bar Or for the Michael Druks: Travels in Drukslandexhibit at the Museum of Art Ein-Harod. It’s “made up of spaces that contain the landscapes of his life with the inner (psychological) and outer (social) dynamic that shapes them on various levels of consciousness.”
Born in Jerusalem in 1940, the England-based artist had a lifelong interest in maps from his father, who was a librarian in the map department of a print house and library. In 1973 at the age of 33, he was inspired by his “physical, political, and mental isolations from the space around [him] in Israel,” he says.
To create his self-portrait, he projected a grid of stripes on his face, photographed himself, copied the image onto transparent paper, and marked out the contour lines. Printing each color separately through offset lithography made his face appear three-dimensional, similar to the sloping hills and deep valleys of the earth, explained Bar Or. Druksland was finished in 1974.
“Translation of three-dimensional terrain into the two-dimensionality of the map is no simple task, and this difficulty is intrinsic to cartography,” wrote Bar Or. “The solution that Druks found for this and the production technique that he chose are closely connected to cartography’s technological and historical contexts.”
Just like a topographical map, the lines and graduated hues show elevation, while the blue represents bodies of water and the brown indicates mountain ranges. “The eyes are like a lake,” Druks says. “The lips are a bit like a river. The blue can represent either air or water aiming either up or down—outside or inside.”
Druks splits Druksland into three major zones: a small region of the right side of his head is “Right Druks,” his nose, lips, and chin fall under the larger area of “Left Druks,” and his crown and forehead appropriately make up “Occupied Territory.” The legends also inform how Druks created the map. He describes age lines, vegetation, and the color scale of heights in millimeters.
An assortment of words and phrases are scattered across his face and head, referencing influential teachers, addresses of apartments, cities, names of family members, friends, schools, galleries, and owners. He also has points with the names of fellow artists, whom Druks thought were important contributors and detractors of the Israeli art scene, wrote Gil Stern Goldfine in the Jerusalem Post.
The ambiguous nature of Druksland stirs all kinds of interpretations, and Druks welcomes each one.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
He was talking about the Palácio da Alvorada, where Brazilian presidents have lived since the 1950s. Temer recently moved out, as he explained to the Brazilian magazine Veja, because of "ghosts" (or maybe just general bad feelings about the place).
"I felt something strange there," Temer said. "I wasn't able to sleep right from the first night."
Temer has since moved to Jaburu Palace, where Brazil's vice presidents stay—Temer himself stayed there when he was vice president. Both homes were designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer, a pioneering modernist who has no (known) ties with ghosts.
Yesterday, at 9:10 a.m., John Kucko, an anchor at WROC in Rochester, tweeted an image of a home off Lake Ontario in western New York that was completely covered in ice. A few minutes later, he posted the same photo (the one you see above) to Facebook.
In the ensuing 30 hours, the image spread quickly across the internet, a (correct) confirmation that, as an image, it is arresting to look at, because it's not everyday that you see a house encased in ice.
Still, Kucko said later that he was astonished by the reaction.
"Never imagined this would go global the way it has," he wrote on Facebook. "I knew it was a 'cool' story, but still (pun intended)."
It is a cool story, John, and also reminiscent of last year's famed "ice car," an automobile that was similarly the victim of a steady stream of windblown moisture from a Great Lake, in that case Lake Erie.
One mystery about the photo, though, endured briefly: why the house next door seemed relatively unscathed. But that house, Kucko explained this morning, had a retaining wall, which probably helped keep a lot of freezing moisture at bay.
The ice house, on the other hand, had "just rocks," Kucko said.
If you’ve ever wanted to live like a king, now's your chance, as Thornbury Castle in Bristol has gone up for sale. The king you might end up living like, though, is Henry VIII, known mainly for womanizing, and murder.
As Business Insider is reporting, historic Thornbury Castle, which dates back to the 10th century, has quite the royal history. According to the castle’s website (it is currently in use as a luxury hotel), it was originally built by Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, but after a servant ratted the Duke out for treason, the king promptly had him executed.
With the original owner out of the way, Henry was able to use the lovely estate for a ten-day stay during his honeymoon with this second wife, Anne Boleyn, who he would also go on to famously execute.
The castle was eventually given back to the Duke’s descendants, but it later fell into ruin, before being restored in the 1850s.
Today, the castle has been decked out in lush Tudor style, and features 28 bedchambers and a pair of restaurants, as well as beautiful gardens. It's now on the market for $10.4 million. Whoever buys the castle can decide what to do with it next, leaving it as a hotel, turning it back into private estate, or simply continuing its grim history of Tudor justice.
In Argentina, the polka-dot tree frog is common. But even though it is a species familiar to humans, the frog was hiding a special power.
It is fluorescent, as a team of scientists reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When UV light shines on a polka-dot tree frog, it reemits that light at a lower frequency, glowing a vivid green.
It’s rare to find fluorescent animals on land; the only other land vertebrates known to fluoresce are parrots. The scientists examining the frogs expected that they might give off a low and dull red light but were surprised when it turned bright green.
It turned out that the frog’s skin has a fluorescent compound not found in other fluorescent vertebrates (which include, besides parrots, marine turtles). This discovery opens up the possibility that there are many more fluorescent land animals, and one of the study co-authors, Julián Faivovich, told Nature that he now intends to examine 250 tree frogs to see if they also have a secret glow.
Over the past few years, humpback whales—normally solitary creatures—have been amassing in huge "super-groups," surprised scientists report in a recently published article in PLOSone. At dozens of different times, crowds numbering from 20 to 200 whales have been spotted congregating off of the west coast of South Africa.
"It's quite unusual to see them in such large groups," whale researcher Gísli Vikingsson told New Scientist. South Africa is also much further north than the whales usually venture in the summer—normally, they're way down south in the Antarctic.
If humpbacks usually like their privacy, why are they clubbing up like this? As New Scientist reports, experts are unsure—but they have a few ideas. Unlike many species, humpbacks have been doing pretty well over the past few decades, recovering from a severe whaling-age population dip. It might be that their increasing numbers are changing the availability of their prey. It could also be that they used to always have big parties like this, and now they finally can again.
The question of what they do when they get together is slightly easier to answer. While a human super-group brings together various talented musicians from different bands, a whale super-group is more for feeding, the researchers explain. They can tell the whales are chowing down because of "repetitive and consecutive diving behaviors... and the pungent, 'fishy' smell of whale blows," they write.
But some harmonizing is likely involved, too—these are whales, after all. I'm naming three of them Crosby, Krills and Splash.
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.
On March 5, 1973, a couple dozen people headed out to a farm in Ossineke, Michigan, to witness an unusual event: the burial of an estimated 30,000 frozen, family-size mushroom pizzas. The mood was somber, and a little cheesy. The Governor of Michigan, William G. Milliken, gave a brief homily "on courage in the face of tragedy," before bulldozers began shoving pizzas into an 18-foot hole.
"I guess by next fall there won't be anything but the cellophane," the farm's owner, Gary Johnson, was quoted as saying as he peered into the mass grave. Pile after pile of pies slid out of a line of pickup trucks and into their final resting place. When it was all over, the victims' creator, the frozen pizza magnate Mario Fabbrini, laid a two-colored flower garland on the grave: red gladioli for sauce, white carnations for cheese. He then offered slices to all of his guests.
The story of the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral is one of loss, terrible maladies, and spilled marinara. But it's also a classic tale of the strange obstacles immigrants can often face in new countries. In this specific case, it was bad mushrooms that interrupted Fabbrini's American dream.
In January of 1973, employees at United Canning in Ohio were checking their inventory when they noticed some of their tins of mushrooms had swelled up. Swelled cans are bad news, and sure enough, tests revealed that the cans were harboring Clostridiumbotulinum, the bacterium that causes botulism, which can lead to body-wide muscle weakness, low blood pressure, and, sometimes, death.
The FDA removed the affected products from store shelves, but to ensure a comprehensive recall, they had to make some calls up the supply chain. Various prepared food businesses used United Canning's mushrooms, including Mario Fabbrini, owner of Papa Fabbrini's Frozen Pizzas.
When Fabbrini got the call, "everything [went] dark," he later told the Detroit Free Press. Fabbrini was an immigrant, and the architect of his very own all-American success story. He had a visceral understanding of what he stood to lose, and a palpable fear of losing it. He had come to Michigan from Fiume, Italy, after World War II, having grown up under the Fascist regime—"They put the black shirt on me when I was six years old," he told United Press International. After he got to the U.S., he and his wife, Olga, adapted his family pizza recipe for American palates ("the pizza from my country no one here would eat," he told one reporter), and went from rolling dough to raking it in.
When he got the news about the mushrooms, Fabbrini stopped his shipments and submitted his mushroom pizzas to a crude contamination test: slices were fed to a couple of FDA lab mice, who promptly died. So Fabbrini recalled his 'shroom-topped pies, rounding them up from local restaurants and grocery stores. In order to get rid of them, he decided to throw a funeral—partly for the grand optics, but, one suspects, partly as a display of accountability, too.
By the time of the botulism scare, Fabbrini was a decade into his pizza-making career. He was churning out tens of thousands of pies per week, with the help of 22 full-time employees and a state-of-the-art factory. The scandal threatened to undo all he had worked for. "All I could think was, 'Oh my God. Not me,'" he told UPI.
Some people—at least 17, UPI reported—tried to make Fabbrini's nightmare come true, claiming they had taken ill from tainted toppings. His neighbors, though, rallied in support. One local fan, anticipating Fabbrini's bankruptcy fears, offered to put some stock up for collateral if it became necessary to save his business. A bank teller told Fabbrini that a nearby priest was leading prayers for him.
Besides the governor, dozens of community leaders attended the funeral, including Chamber of Commerce members and bank presidents. "It sorta makes you goose pimples about America," Fabbrini said to the UPI reporter. Governor Milliken later called Fabbrini "an example for all of us." The article's subhead, mincing no words, was "Immigrant Offered Help."
In the end though, Fabbrini's dramatic action was all for naught. In the two weeks between the recall and the funeral, the pizzas were let off the hook: Their mushrooms were untainted after all. The mice that died after eating them had apparently succumbed not to botulism, but to some other mouse malady. ("I think it was indigestion," Fabbrini told the Associated Press. "Maybe they didn't like my pizza.")
Fabbrini's sales took a bit of a dive—the pies buried at the funeral cost him about $30,000. According to legal documents, he lost even more money bringing new flavors to market, because his customers lost trust in mushrooms. But his business survived, and the tale of the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral harbors one final twist. Those legal documents only exist because, a few days before the burial, Fabbrini sued the canning company for a million dollars, and won a good chunk of it—an all-American ending to an all-American story.
Small town newspaper photography can be a thankless task, a never-ending parade of firefighter photo ops, the occasional crime scene, and, yes, parades. But Bruce Bishop, the photo chief at Elyria, Ohio's Chronicle-Telegram, brought his A-game when tasked with providing art for a story on what the paper says is a "real whodunit": the mysterious placement of steak-sauce bottles throughout the Avon Lake Public Library.
Bishop could've taken that photo anywhere in the library; only a pro chooses to stage it with the library's mysteries section subtly showing in the background. But a great story calls for great art, and the Chronicle-Telegram was on to a great story.
Someone, the paper reported Friday, has been hiding A-1 bottles on bookshelves since January. Twenty-eight of the bottles had appeared, providing the library's staff with a small collection and an enduring riddle.
No culprit has been found, despite the efforts of library staff, who told the Chronicle-Telegram they even drew up a map—like detectives hunting a serial killer—to see if any patterns emerged.
No patterns did, though the non-fiction section, the paper reported, appeared to be the most popular hiding spot.
On Tuesday, a library spokeswoman told Atlas Obscura that two more bottles had been found since the Chronicle-Telegram's story, but, despite the publicity, there had been no more new clues uncovered, "nor a culprit."
Drug scares are a dimebag a dozen, but the hysteria surrounding fake drugs is always fascinating to behold. Even today, mythical ways of getting high, from the gross-out nonsense that was Jenkem to the digital absurdity of “i-dosing,” are still popping up in the popular consciousness. But few of these viral blips approach the lasting influence, and outright silliness, of that time in the 1960s when people started smoking banana peels.
Rumors of bananas as narcotics began swirling around the hippie scene in the mid-1960s. “Young people in the '60s were looking for new ways to get high. It was a highly experimental era driven perhaps most by LSD and by growing pot use,” says the historian William Rorabaugh, who's written multiple books about the 1960s including American Hippies. “But pot cost money, and hippies had little money. Bananas were cheap, so if banana scrapings worked, this would be a really cheap high. That's why people fell for it.”
As relayed in an extensive 2012 article by the Local East Village about the history of the craze, the counterculture publisher Paul Krassner claims that the rumor began in the publishing offices of The East Village Other. According to Krassner's version of the myth’s origin, the editors of the paper were discussing the mechanics of LSD and serotonin in the brain, and then began to wonder if something more natural could produce the same effect. Realizing that bananas also contain serotonin, the eager hippies invented the concept of smoking bananas.
For the record, while it is true that bananas contain some amount of serotonin, it is too slight to cross the blood-brain barrier. Nonetheless, the rumor quickly gained traction based on word of mouth.
Coincidentally, in early 1967, the Scottish songwriter and recording artist Donovan’s song "Mellow Yellow"was making its way to the U.S., and at the time, many people assumed that it was about smoking banana peels. Donovan would later state definitively that the song was actually written about a yellow vibrator, but lyrics such as “Electrical banana / Is gonna be a sudden craze / Electrical banana / Is bound to be the very next phase,” didn’t help.
Wherever the hoax originally started, it was a short piece in a March 1967 issue of the counterculture magazine Berkeley Barb that seems to have kicked off the wider craze. In his column "Folk Scene," the writer Ed Denson presented a “Recipe of the week,” where he described a method of preparing banana peels for smoking by scraping out the white pith and drying it out in an oven before rolling it up in a joint. Densen reported that he’d heard about the recipe from members of the band Country Joe and the Fish, which he also managed. The lead singer of the band also claims to have been a father of the banana-smoking craze, having passed out 500 banana joints at one of their concerts.
In the same issue, a letter from a reader claimed to have noticed an increased police presence surrounding a co-op banana stand in Berkeley, California, lending even more credence to the banana hoax.
From there, the banana craze took on a life of its own. As noted in a recent article on the subject by Judy Berman at Extra Crispy, word of smokable bananas spread like wildfire thanks to the Underground Press Syndicate, which allowed small papers, such as the Barb, to freely share content with one another.
The Barbcontinued to report on the supposed effects of banana peels, running stories with titles such as “Pick Your Load, Banana or Toad” and “Mellow Yellow Future Bright,” which included spurious claims regarding the various substances contained in bananas that gave them psychedelic effects. Other hippie magazines began picking up the story, not to mention running ads for people selling banana-based "psychedelic turn-on bags" and the like. By the end of March, 1967, stories about the banana smoking trend were gracing the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Mellow Yellow (the fake drug, not the song) had arrived.
The craze became so widespread that both the scientific community and the government got involved. The FDA set up a machine that essentially smoked banana joints for three weeks straight. By May, they had determined what many people had already discovered first hand: smoking bananas did not get you high. A further study in November of that year, conducted by researchers at NYU, once again determined that bananas weren’t a drug. Still, the myth continued to stick. “The hoax was widely believed until one tried it and found it produced nothing. Of course, some people told friends that it worked just to watch their reaction when they learned the truth,” says Rorabaugh. “In any given setting, it did not last more than a couple of days, but having been had, it was easy to pass on the idea to others elsewhere in phone calls or letters, just to pass on the joke.”
Smoking banana peels continued to be a popular concept in hippie circles, mainly as a gag, for years. “Woodstock was about the last time it was mentioned. Most of the people there would have known it was a joke, but a few could be conned into trying it,” says Rorabaugh. But even after the passing of the Age of Aquarius, the myth of the hallucinogenic banana refused to die.
A recipe for turning banana peels into a drug was included in the book that sparked a million middle-school myths, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which was published in 1970. In author William Powell's recipe, which lays out a laborious process of making a paste from the peel scrapings that must then be reduced further into a powder, he claims that bananas contain something called “bananadine,” which is where the fruit supposedly got its psychedelic effects. This, too, was untrue, since bananadine does not exist.
While the concept of smoking banana peels today mainly exists as a cautionary tale about some of the sillier drug fads of the 1960s, thanks in large part to the internet, there are still those who believe that bananas can get you high. For instance, in 2013, inmates in a Maine county jail were caught smoking banana peels, and administrators said it had been a problem for months. A quick Google search for “smoking banana peels” will even present you with an advanced recipe for extracting "bannadine," which involves reducing 10 pounds of bananas. According to this highly suspect recipe, “you used to need 200 pounds, but the potency has gone up 20x in the last 30 years.”
Wild new drug myths will no doubt continue to be born so long as there are broke young people who want to get high, but they’ll probably never be as potent as smoking banana peels.
What did fake news and viral media look like during World War II?
It looked like my Uncle Johnny, a.k.a. “Baby Adolf.”
A photo and some newspaper clippings from my grandmother’s scrapbook chronicled how an innocuous family photo taken in Westport, Connecticut, ended up on the worldwide news wires and, eventually, on Hitler’s desk.
One sunny day in 1931, Harriet May Warren plunked her chubby two year-old son on a blanket outside their home for a photo shoot, out of which several adorable photos emerged.
Seven years later, having relocated to Lakewood, Ohio, Harriet was thumbing through a copy of Life magazine and saw a likeness she recognized, but which had been grotesquely altered.
Clearly, it was Johnny, but gone was his cute bonnet. In its place, a mop of matted, greasy hair, pasted to his forehead; his cherubic features made devilish and sinister by the work of a retouching artist. Kneeling in the grass with a bulldog stance and a James Cagney gangster-like set of the jaw, that baby looked like he was ready for a fight. And you’d be nuts to bet against him.
Apparently, an unknown anti-Hitler hoaxer calculated that if you want to tweak a thin-skinned fascist, one way to do it would be to spread a fake ugly baby photo of him far and wide. And it worked.
From the U.S., the photo ended up in Austria, Hitler’s native country, then was printed by a Dutch paper, which believed it was acquiring the picture from a reliable source. In the mid ‘30s the London Daily Herald scooped up the photo, and shortly thereafter, Acme syndicate distributed it widely throughout U.S. channels, including the Chicago Tribune, which featured it prominently in a long-form piece.
Hitler, who saw the photo and reacted with a “sputtering rage,” according to American news reports in 1938, ordered his minions to stamp out the rumor. The German consulate contacted the Tribune, demanding a retraction and clarification. They sent along a photo of the real baby Adolf as proof that he wasn’t nearly the little monster depicted in the article.
The Great Baby Adolf hoax had legs, though, and despite all efforts to stop the spread of the image, it continued to make the rounds through the press all over the world. Later versions of the touch-up presented an even more distorted and comical Weekly World News-style baby Adolf.
Nazi officials, seeking to wrest control of the anti-Hitler propaganda undermining his narrative during the war, published picture books showing the “softer side” of Hitler, including a volume written in Dutch for occupied Holland entitled “Want To Know the Truth?” (Sub-title: “Hitler - As They Have Shown Him to You, And as He Really Is.”) The “real” baby Adolf was featured next to the “fake” one, noting the sinister methods his enemies were using to slander him.
In an age where disinformation, distortion and outright fabrications can spread like kudzu over social media, it is quaint to picture my grandmother randomly thumbing through a magazine and discovering a retouched photo of her little boy presented literally as the face of evil. The enfant terrible of all enfant terribles. She promptly contacted Life magazine to set the record straight. The correction then made the newswires again, as half the mystery of the Baby Adolf Hoax had been solved. The forger was never identified, but that awful fake photo made the rounds once more.
I never knew my Uncle Johnny. He died, tragically, years before my mother was born, after taking a spill on his bike while riding home with a bottle of milk. The shattered glass pierced his heart. He was eight. Despite being merely a typical baseball-loving boy growing up in the Midwest, Time magazine noted his passing in the “Milestones” section of the August 1938 issue, just months after his identity as the real boy in the mythical picture was revealed.
After all, when your touched-up baby picture circles the globe and ignites the fury of the Führer, everybody wants to know your story.
While many New Yorkers (several Atlas Obscura staffers included) stayed home today, hunkering down in preparation for a potentially disastrous blizzard, a couple of Staten Island ponies embraced the stallion spirit and decided to frolic through the empty streets.
And though the devastating blizzard that had the city in a tizzy turned out to be not much to write home about, strong winds did manage to blow open the doors of the barn where the ponies were kept. As the New York Daily News reports, the pair of ponies escaped their enclosure and were taking a stroll through the Eltingville neighborhood of Staten Island when they were spotted by baffled locals.
One Staten Islander hopped in his truck to help corral the wild equines, and eventually joined forces with some police officers to apprehend the animals. They were able to use some tow rope to tie up the ponies while they figured out what to do next.
Eventually, though, they were safely returned to their owners, but they’ll forever have that magical day in the snow together.
Last Thursday, the California Highway Patrol in Truckee, California, posted the above photo to its Facebook page.
"Oh the things we find playing hide and seek in the winter!" they wrote without further explanation, blocking out the Jeep's license plate with an image of a toy police car.
The photo might have remained just that, a curious police Facebook object, injected with some classic police humor, except, on Sunday, the blog Truck Yeah!did some important reporting: they contacted the California Highway Patrol for the rest of the story.
The Jeep, it turns out, was empty, and found under 20 feet of snow near Donner Summit in the Sierra Nevada, a victim of the region's extreme winters. (As Truck Yeah! notes, the Jeep was possibly left behind by other, stronger Jeeps, which ate still other, more nutritious Jeeps to survive.)
Police, for their part, theorize that it had been abandoned by its (human) owners weeks ago. It was discovered only after a snow remover ran into the Jeep's rear, causing the damage you see above.
Local law enforcement said it will likely remain there until the snow thaws, something to gawk at for passersby. And, perhaps, just another cautionary tale.
Twenty-nine years ago today, a physicist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco decided to celebrate Pi Day, which comes but once a year on March 14—numerically rendered as 3-14, echoing the famous first three digits of the number pi, which are 3.14. Which is the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, which in fact does not stop at 3.14 but goes on infinitely, unpredictably, forever.
Here, for example, are the first 100 digits of pi:
Today, though, New Scientist reports that a "pi enthusiast" has managed to calculate the constant to 22,459,157,718,361 digits, or around 9 trillion more than we had before.
The enthusiast, a particle physicist named Peter Trueb, actually made his breakthrough in November, using a free computer program created by a developer named Alexander Yee. And it's not the first time Yee's program has been used to elongate pi, the purpose for which the program was designed.
“Imagine trying to multiply two numbers that are a trillion digits long on a blackboard," Yee told New Scientist. "It just wouldn't work."
It would be, at the very least, difficult.
But while the new pi is quite the feat, it isn't very useful, practically speaking at least.
"NASA only uses around 15 digits of pi in its calculations for sending rockets into space. To get an atom-precise measurement of the universe, you would only need around 40," New Scientist reports, "So computing trillions of digits of pi is mostly about showing off computer power."
The rats were cavorting in Paris yesterday: citing a variety of grievances, the city's ratcatchers spent Tuesday on strike. Several dozen workers gathered outside City Hall with a banner that read, "The staff are angry," Agence France-Presse reports. (They also laid a dead rat under the banner, for effect.)
Among their demands: reinforcements, and payment of last year's bonus, which was lost in an administrative shuffle. But mostly, The Local writes, they just want a little more respect. "They only want to be recognized," union representative Olivier Garret told AFP.
"They are the ones exposed to the most difficult tasks... they have always been forgotten, and they have always been the ones to do the dirty work," he continued. Many ratcatchers have quit over the the past 18 months, the union says.
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, plans to send each of the employees a personalized thank-you note.
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.
Therese Sallstedt, a geobiologist working with the Swedish Museum of Natural History, was examining an ancient fossilized microbial mat when she saw something incredible. Usually, she studies minuscule cyanobacteria, but in this mat there were slightly larger fossils, one even visible to the naked eye, as Popular Science reports. They looked “fleshy,” even.
These fossils, as Sallstedt and her colleagues report in PLOS ONE, appear to be 1.6-billion-year-old red algae. That makes them the oldest plant-like fossils ever discovered; the previous oldest algae was 1.2 billion years old.
It was, for Sallstedt, an amazing find. “I got so excited I had to walk three times around the building before I went to my supervisor to tell him what I had seen!” she said in a press release.
The algae came from an outcropping of rocks, the Tirohan Dolomite of the Lower Vindhya, in central India, near the town of Chitrakoot. There are relatively few spots on Earth to study the early development of life; they have to have survived billions of years of tectonic activities. The Vindhya outcropping is the rare spot where phospate has preserved microbial maps from the Paleoporterozoic Era; it is, Sallstedt writes, “a unique preservational window into this time period in Earth History.”
The discovery of these fossils could help scientists develop a more clear picture of how life on Earth developed, by adding to the timeline of when plant life first diverged from the other tiny organisms swarming the planet.
In central California, 168 years after the state's mid-19th century gold rush, people are still prospecting for gold.
And while many of the oldest techniques—hydraulic mining, in which high-pressure water blasts away at earth to expose gold, or dredge mining, in which large machines tried to extract gold from river dredge—are illegal now, that hasn't stopped a host of prospectors from trying anyway.
Now, though, these modern-day 49ers might be getting some new company, or at least fresh hope for riches, this time from an ancient source: the region's recent, widespread floods, according to the Chico Enterprise-Record.
With flooding comes mass movements of earth, and, gold prospectors say, the potential for new exposures of previously hidden gold.
All of which has caused a bit of stir at Adventures in Prospecting, a gold-mining shop in Oroville, California, where owner Joey Wilson told the Enterprise-Record that, “There’s always been gold in the Feather River"—the difference being that, this summer, it might just be a little easier to access.
So should you pack up your family and move to California? As the Enterprise-Record advises: No. But if you're in town maybe buy a gold pan and try your luck. As one prospector told the paper: "The odds are greater than winning the lottery."
In February, in San Francisco, the City Attorney accused the owners of a business on Kearny Street of running not, as advertised, a massage parlor but a “place of prostitution, assignation, and lewdness.” When visiting Queen’s Health Center, the city wrote in its legal complaint, investigators had seen workers half-dressed or fully naked, and undercover officials were offered sexual options ranging from blow jobs to group sex. The most unusual feature of the suit the city filed against Queen’s Health Center, though, was its legal basis: it alleged that the business had violated the California Red Light Abatement Law, which was passed more than a century ago.
The Red Light Abatement Law hadn’t been used in an effort to stop sex work for decades: the City Attorney’s office noted that its suit that this represented “the first time in recent history” the city had tried to use the 1914 law to shut down a place of prostitution. In the years before World War I, though, this same law was used to shut down dozens of brothels located just a few blocks from Queen’s, in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast neighborhood, one of many red-light districts operating in U.S. cities in the early 20th century.
Until the early 1900s, it was common for American towns and cities to have a red-light district filled with saloons, dance halls, brothels, and other venues that offered a continuum of indulgences in intoxication and sex. San Francisco had three—the Barbary Coast was the most famous—but, starting in the 1890s and ending in the 1910s, across the country cities large and small segregated their “sporting class” into neighborhoods designated for scandalous behavior. The United States' red-light districts were a blip in American city planning, a well-intentioned policy that failed to achieve its intended goals. Originally conceived by reformers and planners hoping to centralize vice, these districts were swept away in one short decade with a well-executed campaign to pass “red light abatement” laws in cities and states across the country.
“It’s a moment of city planning when people were trying to create pragmatic and moderate responses to what we’d now call victimless crimes,” says Mara Keire, a lecturer at Oxford and the author of For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States. “It might have continued, except the federal government shut the red-light districts down.”
America’s most famous red-light district might be Storyville, New Orleans, a rectangle of blocks just upriver from Congo Square, where, starting in 1897, prostitution was legal. But New Orleans wasn’t the only place that used city ordinances to define the boundaries of vice. In Shreveport, Louisiana, and in a few Texas cities, city councils passed similar laws. Most cities, though, didn’t bother with official limits; as Keire writes in her book, police officers and judges would use selective enforcement to gather “the sporting class” into particular places.
The rise of red-light districts in the 1890s didn’t happen by accident. These policies, “a distinctly American phenomenon,” writes Keire, were pushed by “mugwump” activists trying to break the connections made between working class people and Democratic political machines at neighborhood saloons and dance halls. Victorian-era reformers believed that it would be impossible to eradicate these establishments altogether, but by confining them to certain areas, vice could be segregated from the rest of the city and controlled. For a modern city, a red-light district was “a necessity like a sewer,” as one reformer once said.
The strategy, though, had the opposite of its intended effect: instead of containing a city’s more ribald instincts, these economic clusters strengthened the drinking, drugs, and sex industries. Since they were located downtown, red-light neighborhoods often blended at the edges into the more respectable parts of the business district. As Keire puts it, “geographic confinement did not equal cultural containment.”
By the turn of the century, a new class of reformers started taking a different view toward urban vice—that it was dangerous and should be eradicated. Sex workers were recast, from no-good, disgraced women to innocents lured into a life of evil. They starred in an increasingly popular narrative about “white slavery,” in which young women were said to be kidnapped or coerced into working as prostitutes and kept in bondage through debts supposedly owed to their madam. It’s hard to know exactly what the experience of every women at the time was, but it’s clear these stories relied on heated rhetoric for effect. “There was some evidence of coerced prostitution during this period, but very little,” writes the lawyer Peter C. Hennigan, in an article on the abatement laws. Some women likely were exploited economically and kept in debt, but that was true in other industries as well; if venereal disease was a risk, there were severe occupational health hazards in factories and sweatshops, too, Keire points out. “I like to give the woman the benefit of the doubt,” she says. “They were making rational choices, and some were able to get out of it.”
These stories, though, helped turn public opinion against the red-light districts, and early in the century, Progressive reformers started organizing a campaign to eradicate such neighborhoods. The first Red Light Abatement Law passed in Iowa in 1909, and by 1914 the American Social Hygiene Association was working to pass similar laws state by state. As Hennigan shows, the reform organization had a model abatement law that legislatures could use as the basis for anti-vice reforms, as well as a strategy for defending the laws when they were challenged in court. Local governments could even hire ASHA’s investigative team to report on the state of vice in their cities.
Abatement laws made it possible for almost anyone to bring a nuisance complaint against a place where prostitution was taking place; they didn’t regulate the behavior of people, but the use of buildings. That meant the most powerful opponents of such bills were often from the real estate industry, which benefitted from the high rents vice businesses could pay. But the reformers had won over the public. By 1916, ASHA could list 47 cities that had shut down red-light districts; a year later, the list had grown to 80. By 1919, 41 states had passed red-light abatement laws. The campaign against vice districts, Hennigan writes, was “the most successful use of public nuisance law in American history.”
As the red-light districts were shut down, the women who worked there moved to more tolerant cities or made their businesses more mobile and secretive. For the people who ran brothels, in particular, the campaign against red-light districts was financial devastating; after telling the local police chief to “go to hell,” one madam in Atlanta committed suicide, writing that she had "nothing left to live for."
Although sanctioned red-light districts continued on in some cities, including San Antonio, Texas, and Butte, Montana, vice districts died in most places in the U.S. after the federal government put its muscle behind abatement laws as part of the war effort. Soldiers didn’t need to be distracted by sex or laid low by venereal disease. A century later, this experiment in American urban districting has mostly been forgotten.
