To most pilots of floating craft, a massive ice floe is a obstacle to be avoided. To the stand-up paddleboarders of Vladivostok, Russia, though, it's something else: a challenge.
This past weekend, despite subzero temperatures, a few dozen athletes came out to paddle their boards around Ussuri Bay. But as one participant, Vladimir, later explained to SUPRacer, a shish kebab snack break on one of the many ice floes soon inspired a new plan.
"So many paddlers arrived that we thought, 'Why not try and paddle the ice floe like it's a giant board?'" Vladimir said.
Why not indeed? The paddle club, SUP Vladivostok, posted an action video on Instagram in which colorfully attired, psyched-up paddlers successfully set the (roughly) 80-foot floe to cruising. "A regular weekend in Vladivostok 🙈," reads the caption below one photo.
According to the Siberian Times, stand-up paddleboarding, or SUP, has been gaining popularity in eastern Russia. "Many Vladivostok surfers continue paddling even in winter despite freezing temperatures," the Times writes. Or maybe, one gets the feeling, because of them.
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 May 21, 1930, the world's biggest airship, the Graf Zeppelin, floated over the Cape Verde Islands and slowed down over an unusual target: the Porto Praia post office. When the ship had maneuvered to just the right spot, its crew threw something out of the gondola, attached to a small parachute. As frightened crowds gathered below to watch, the mysterious object fluttered down from the sky and landed right on the building's roof. It was a big sack of mail.
Over the next few weeks, the Graf Zeppelin would complete its first Pan-American tour, flying to Rio de Janeiro, Ohio, and New Jersey, and then back over the Atlantic to Spain and its home country, Germany. Although much glitz and glamour accompanied the airship's comings and goings, its journey was funded by something more mundane: those sacks of mail, via the stamps affixed to the letters inside.
At 775 feet from nose to tail—about as long as the Golden Gate Bridge is tall—the Graf was the largest flying machine the world had ever seen. Its operating costs were proportionate, clocking at about $4 per mile (or $54 per mile in today's money). Although passengers paid steep ticket prices, especially on early flights, the ship could only hold about 20 of them at a time, limiting that revenue stream. And despite the fanfare that greeted its every move, attempts to charge admission to view it on the ground didn't go over well with the public, who were generally hurting from the Great Depression, and who wanted their close-ups for free.
Instead, the Graf's parent company, German Zeppelin Airship Works, decided to recoup costs by commissioning special stamps from the countries on the tour route. Only letters with these stamps on them would be accepted onto the airship, which would then deliver them to their destinations. This was the only commercial transatlantic air mail option available at the time, and was days faster than sending a letter by boat. Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, and Spain all made the Zeppelin stamps, and 93 percent of the proceeds from each stamp was funneled back into German Zeppelin Airship Works.
After some debate, the U.S. Post Office decided to get in on the game as well, designing and printing a run of Graf Zeppelin stamps in a matter of weeks. They called this a gesture of goodwill toward Germany, and pledged to also contribute 93 percent of the revenue to the Airship Works. Secretly, though, they expected that an enthusiastic population of American collectors would snap up most of the stamps, keeping them out of circulation, and ensuring that the Post Office held onto most of the money.
So on April 19, 1930, the USPO issued three stamps, each with a different design and for a particular amount. The first, a 65-cent stamp, was green, and showed the Graf cruising eastward above the sea. This stamp would get a postcard over the ocean once, from the U.S. or Brazil to Spain or Germany. The second, a $1.30 stamp, was brown, and featured the zeppelin heading west over a cropped map of the world labeled with the tour's three main cities (although New York, here, stands in for New Jersey). That one would get a letter across the sea.
The last stamp, in a bright sky blue, cost $2.60, and displayed the Graf high in the clouds, superimposed over a small globe. This one was more fun than practical—it would get your letter round-trip, over to Europe and then back again. (One young boy from Ontario sent himself a letter this way, and made the papers.) The stamps' release was trumpeted in newspapers from New York City to Santa Cruz.
The joke, though, was on the post office. The economic hardship that led so many Depression-era Americans to be buoyed by the sight of a massive airship also made it difficult for any of them to pay $4.55—50 times the cost of a loaf of bread—for a set of three collectible stamps. The U.S. printed 1,000,000 of each color, but only sold about 227,000 zeppelin stamps total, most of which actually did end up on mail delivered by the Graf.
The Post Office eventually destroyed the remainder of the stamps, making collectors, who quickly accused them of creating artificial scarcity, even angrier. But that's what happens when you try to cross the world's biggest zeppelin.
Stamp of Approval is an occasional column that explores the designs and backstories of the world's strangest stamps. Have a stamp you want investigated? Send it along to cara@atlasobscura.com.
The device pictured above is a cannon that was built to use pressurized air to fire coconuts. The coconut cannon, designed by the artist Julian Charrière, was intended to be unveiled in Antarctica, where Charriére hoped to use it "to highlight the importance of international demilitarization agreements, such as the 1959 Antarctic Treaty that suspends sovereign claims, reserving the continent for peaceful scientific inquiry," as he explained recently to Artnet.
But a possible misfire earlier this month has scuttled those plans, after German police confiscated the cannon in Berlin following a close call with a coconut and a dog walker, police said recently on their Facebook page.
There was, initially, some question as to what happened. Artnet reported on March 10 that the one-ton cannon had been confiscated for no obvious reason during a raid in the "early hours" on March 2, while Charriére was away in New York City. Around a week later, police said why: the previous day, a man walking a dog had heard a bang before seeing something—possibly a coconut—fly past him.
The cannon was to make its debut later this month at the Antarctic Biennale, but for now it is in the hands of German police, as they investigate whether its existence violates any laws.
Charriére's exhibition in Antarctica will now likely be a "documentation of the confiscation," according to Artnet.
If your neighborhood is going to be called Catford, one can expect it to have at least one giant fiberglass cat. But the Catford district in Southeast London was recently in danger of losing theirs, before a local petition that helped save it.
Installed in the 1970s, the giant black and white feline that sits atop the Catford Shopping Centre sign isn’t just a cheeky reference to the name of the district, it’s also become a popular local symbol … at least to some. The cat is sculpted so that it is reaching down to paw at the “F” in the sign, wearing a mischievous grin.
But according to Time Out London, the Lewisham Council has been talking about having the cat taken (or put) down for years as they work to develop and improve the town center.
That prompted many Catford locals who rallied to keep the statue, including hundreds that signed a Change.org petition for the fiberglass feline.
And on Monday, Lewisham Council said in a tweet that the cat would be going nowhere.
"The Catford Cat WILL STAY in Catford for generations to come," the council tweeted.
Which also means you can no longer sign the petition. Instead, where one usually would, it now just says, "Victory."
In a plot of forested land in Austria, not too far from the Danube River, but not close to anywhere in particular, there stands a stone pillar, a little more than four feet high, with writing on all five of its sides. Strass. Etsdorf. Engabrunn. Feuersbrunn. Gösing.
The pillar sits on a stone base shaped as a pentagon and, according to the court book of Etsdorf, was placed here on May 10, 1678. For almost 340 years, it has marked the boundary between five 17th-century parcels of land whose borders met at this obscure point. If a small group of geodesic experts and their allies have their way, it could one day be part of a World Heritage site.
This unusual pentagonal monument features in a project begun by the Austrian Society of Surveying and Geoinformation that's since extendedto eight additional countries. Its aim is to create a unique World Heritage site around boundaries and boundary markers in Europe. The work and science that went into measuring out and marking land borders, the group argues, is a marvel of human ingenuity, “an enormous technical, legal, and organizational performance,” and the result—a precisely measured net of property lines dividing the world into neat parcels—a “man-made world wonder.”
The idea of imagining boundaries around a piece of land and marking them off with stones is an old one: as the project’s working group writes, the Bible warns against removing a neighbor’s landmark. But starting around the 16th century, European rulers started employing newly professionalized surveyors who had to pass tests and take an oath of impartiality, according to Roger Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, authors of The Cadastral Map in Service of the State. Surveying could be a dangerous profession, too. As Kain and Baigent write, the treasurer to Emperor Charles V “received death threats from villagers, who realized how much they stood to lose.” After a new survey was complete, “their suspicions were fully justified,” the scholars write. Rents went up.
Cadastral maps weren’t used only to raise rents, though. States used them to assert control over large stretches of land, to attract interest from investors in underdeveloped places, and, yes, to raise taxes. Cadastral surveys could also help resolve ownership disputes. But the very technical accomplishment of mapping land divisions, argue the leaders of the European boundary heritage project, represents a much bigger achievement. “Surveying and documenting all boundaries of parcels is a giant work, a huge and very tiny task, important for a country's social peace between neighbors and for peace between states, for peace in the world,” says Peter Waldhäusl, an emeritus professor at TU Wien, who originated the project. “It’s a typical UNESCO topic.”
The idea of creating a World Heritage site for boundary markers grew from a 2004 report by the International Council for Monuments and Sites on gaps in the World Heritage canon, including wonders of civil engineering. Waldhäusl, whose expertise is in geodesy—the measurement of the Earth—and surveying, ended up serving as an evaluator on a proposal to add the first heritage site recognizing a geodesic accomplishment, the Struve Arc. (Created in the early 19th century by a Russian scientist, the arc is a chain of triangular surveying calculations that stretches through ten countries, from Norway to the Black Sea, and was the first accurate meridian measurement.) The idea to propose a World Heritage site of a “Network of Boundaries and Boundary Marks” sprang from that work.
The Austrian Society of Surveying and Geoinformation started working on a proposal centered around Austria’s boundary system, which was regularized in the early 19th century under the Habsburg Monarchy. It is, says Waldhäusl, “one of the oldest and best” land administration systems in the world, notable in its scope and its documentation. A UNESCO heritage site, the group thought, might include a few of the most interesting boundary markers, distinguished by their location, history, design, or shape, along with other landmarks of cadastral history, such as the south tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, which was used as a reference point by surveyors.
As the project progressed, its scope increased. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre advised the group that their project would work better as an international application. They're now cooperating with eight additional countries, including Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, to craft a proposal. If the application is accepted, they expect the project to grow even more, as other countries join on.
Even in this initial group, there’s a wide range of cadastral history. “The oldest examples [of stones] we will include in the application date back to the 16th century and have been designed by artists,” says Gerhard Navratil, a professor at TU Wien who’s working on the project. In some of the formerly Soviet countries, cadastral monuments that old were stolen or destroyed. “In this case, the first stones placed after the communist era could have a tremendous cultural importance for the country even if they do not have a significant design,” Navratil says.
Creating a new World Heritage site can be a very long project. The Austrian working group started in 2011; the larger group now plans to have its project on the Tentative list of UNESCO sites in each of the nine countries involved by 2018, at the earliest. After that, the group has to prepare nine parallel nomination files. If the project is approved, it wouldn’t be until early next decade, 2022 or even later.
“We are not in a hurry,” says Waldhäusl. “Everything has to be done properly with a lot of research concerning the different parts of our proposal. The response is great, but the administrative workload is enormous for such projects—and each step needs a lot of time.” There is some worry that these isolated stone markers might be stolen or removed under development pressure. But many have stood in the same place for hundreds of years, marking the lines that men once imagined crisscrossing the ground. They will remain in place, the group hopes, until UNESCO is ready to recognize their charm and the massive achievement they represent.
One side of the die has some pipes coming out of it, and the dots on each side are surprisingly white. It’s about six feet by six feet, and not long after it appeared, city workers came through to remove it.
Locals speculated about the origins of the mysterious die: it seemed clear that someone had added the white decals to an otherwise unremarkable box.
This wasn't the first time Sam Gridley, a man who splits his time between Hawaii and Coeur d'Alene, has seen the sizable object.
Gridley says it's an old storage tank that washed up near his Driftwood Bay property in 2008 and stuck around.
One year, he said, someone put circles on the tank to give it the appearance of a die. He believes the recent flooding was enough to wash it back into the lake.
Because of rainfall and snowmelt in the area, Lake Coeur d’Alene is at unusually high levels for this time of year; there’s currently a flood warning in the area. There’s no telling what else might turn up—possibly another die to make a pair?
Quick: what's the most colorful type of whale? Blue? Orca? Amazon river dolphin? You probably didn't say "the gray whale," which, as its name suggests, is mostly gray.
But one Oregon gray whale belied this reputation last week when it shot a full rainbow out of its blowhole.
In a video from Youtube user GoldenGuelch, whale watchers traveling through Depoe Bay ooh and ahh at the massive cetacean, who lingers next to the boat, just below the surface. He then rises up slowly and blows, leaving a colorful band in his wake. The rainbow hovers for a few seconds before it dissipates—and the gray whale returns to the murky sea.
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.
Before he became known as one of the world’s most prolific bridge jumpers and quite possibly the first ever viral celebrity, Lawrence “Larry” Donovan had already lived many lives. Apart from a brief time away during a stint in the U.S. Army, as a young man Donovan worked as a printer and typesetter for a number of publications in New York City. He also dabbled in poetry.
When he returned from his service in 1882, Donovan started working at the New York Police Gazette. The publication was a sort of Maxim for 19th century-New York, covering topics such as crime and sports alongside racy images of scantily clad women. It was during his years there that Donovan would develop his taste for jumping off bridges, thanks in part to the support of the Gazette’s editor, Richard K. Fox. As an editor, Fox had an eye for feats and record-breaking, often offering rewards to those who could perform them. One site devoted to the history of the Gazette likens Fox to Howard Stern.
By the mid-1880s, a dangerous game of one-upmanship had begun in New York, as a succession of people attempted to be the first to jump off of the newly completed Brooklyn Bridge. The first person to attempt the feat was the swimming instructor Robert Emmet Odlum, in May of 1885. He died shortly after being pulled from the water. The next person to attempt the jump, in 1886, was Steve Brodie, a gambler and race walker looking to make a name for himself. There's some dispute as to whether he actually made the jump, but the fact that he survived garnered him enough fame that he was able to open his own saloon. His last name even became shorthand for anyone attempting something foolhardy, as in, “to pull a Brodie.” It was in the shadow of these previous attempts that Donovan first decided to try his hand at bridge jumping.
According to an interview with Donovan in the Te Aroha News in February 1888, Donovan had never had any interest in jumping off of bridges prior to Brodie’s attempt:
We do not read, even in the imaginative newspapers, of his own country of the newly short-coated Donovan climbing onto the back of a chair whist his nurse’s back was turned, and from that dizzy eminence precipitating himself into the abyss of the footbath. [...] But if any juvenile experiences befell him, no particulars of them have been preserved, and the champion jumper himself has no anecdotes to tell of juvenile trials and triumphs, or of the ups and downs of infancy.
Early in the morning of August 28, 1886, Donovan made the plunge from the Brooklyn Bridge, jumping from a point 29 feet higher than where Brodie claimed to have jumped from, according to The New York Times. He wore weighted shoes to help keep himself upright as he fell, and padded leggings to protect himself on impact. As an added bit of flare, he also put on a black derby hat.
Donovan made the jump successfully, and two rescue boats filled with friends and members of the Gazette staff picked him up when he surfaced, supposedly also collecting his hat along the way. The only injury he reported was a slight stomach pain.
Since the stunt was unauthorized, police promptly scooped up Donovan. The judge charged him with disorderly conduct and fined him $10 for obstructing traffic on the bridge. Fox paid the fine.
The Gazette published a glowing article the next month titled "A Dizzy Leap," declaring Donovan the “champion bridge jumper of the world.” The paper sang Donovan’s praises, touting him as the Gazette’s home-grown hero. Other news outlets soon picked up on the story, with The Times dubbing him“Crank No. 3.” In that same Times piece, Donovan was also said to have made $200 off of friendly bets, although according to an 1888 article in The Manning Times of South Carolina, he placed a $500 bet with an unknown party, thought to be Fox. Whether the idea to jump from the bridge was his own, or was spurred on by Fox to create a story for the Gazette, Donovan had caught the fame bug, and bridge-jumping was now his thing.
By all accounts, Donovan wanted to continue capitalizing on his newfound fame, and he soon made an abortive attempt to stage a jump into the Genesee River in Rochester, New York, but was arrested before he could pull off the stunt. No sooner was he released than he headed to Niagara Falls, planning his next leap off of the now-defunct Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge. On the morning of November 7, 1886, Donovan performed a successful bridge jump off of the Niagara bridge, falling an impressive 190 feet into the waters below. Again, he wore his derby hat.
In a post-jump interview with the Times, Donovan claimed he hadn't made a cent from the Niagara jump, saying that he had instead done it “out of respect to the newspapers of the United States which have treated me handsomely since my Brooklyn Bridge jump." His injuries included a broken a rib and bruised a lung. The New York Clipper would call him the “Aerial Hero of Niagara.”
In February 1887, Donovan leapt off of the Chestnut Street Bridge over Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. Once again, he injured his chest in the fall, but survived. By now, the media attention had started to wane. It's unclear whether Donovan made any money off of his third daredevil act.
Donovan returned to New York, where he made appearances at dime museums to get by. In April of 1887, he announced that he was going to dive off the Brooklyn Bridge again, but this time, head first. Worried, his mother, who had been in attendance during his first jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, informed the police of her son's plans. As officers pulled Donovan from the carriage that had taken him to the bridge, he claimed to have just met the driver, and that it was all an innocent misunderstanding.
The judge also made him promise never to jump off of a New York bridge again. After he was released, Donovan decided that maybe the audiences in America had seen too much of his act, and he headed to England. Arriving on June 1, 1887, Donovan announced his arrival in the country by jumping off the London Bridge on June 5. But the response was tepid. As it was described in an 1888 edition of The Referee, “his feats found but little favour, and were only looked upon as a species of foolhardiness.”
Undeterred, Donovan made plans for a leap from Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, to honor the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. He later claimed that he'd expected to meet the queen after successfully completing the stunt. But before he could make his devotional leap, Donovan was once again arrested on the bridge and given jail time for attempted suicide.
He stayed in England after his release, at one point jumping off of the small Waterloo Bridge dressed as a comic strip character for a promotional event. In March of 1888, he supposedly made a second, successful attempt to jump from the Clifton Bridge, but accounts, even at the time, differ, and it is unclear to this day whether he actually made the jump.
His path to fame having run aground, Donovan struggled for months, and by August of 1888, he'd bottomed out. On August 7 of that year, Donovan made his last bridge jump, this time off of the Hungerford Bridge over the Thames. Broke and down on his luck, he'd gone out drinking the night before with some friends he'd met at the public house where he was staying. According to an account in the New Zealand Herald, they'd teased him about his Clifton Bridge jumps until he accepted a measly £2 bet to perform an impromptu jump from the Hungerford Bridge. Whether out of pride, poverty, or sheer drunkenness, Donovan accepted, and drowned in the attempt. The Times reported that the fall was 100 feet down.
Fox, who'd had a large hand in starting Donovan down his doomed path toward notoriety, died in 1922, and is remembered for popularizing boxing and sports journalism. Donovan is mainly remembered as the man who followed Brodie’s famous leap, or by those who stumble upon his well-researched Wiki. More than 100 years on, Donovan’s tale of fleeting, foolish stardom echoes the all-too-common rise and fall of today's constant stream of viral Internet stars, unprepared for fame. Hopefully it doesn’t kill them too.
We know that polystyrene is bad for the environment, that it’s frequently mistaken for Styrofoam, and that it’s kind of a crappy way of shipping food to people.
Even so, polystyrene's existence—and persistence—dates back decades, and was inextricably linked to Styrofoam when, in 1941, an engineer at Dow Chemical named Ray McIntire combined polystyrene and isobutylene in an attempt to create a rubber-like substance. The discovery was anything but rubbery, but proved useful anyway, immediately getting used during the war as material for life vests and similar flotation devices.
Dow also gave it a name: Styrofoam, which, soon enough, also became a victim of its own success, after the public began incorrectly calling a lot of things non-Styrofoam things, at Xerox-like levels.
And, even now, that still sticks in the craw of Dow, which has trademarked the name for more than 60 years.
In a 2013 Washington Post article, for example, Dow’s business director for building solutions in the Americas, Tim Lacey, sounded like he was at the end of his foam-laced rope.
“We’re doing everything we can to make sure that it’s used properly,” Lacey explained. “We don’t really know why everyone wants to land on the name Styrofoam, and why it serves as something people want to misuse.”
That’s because, when you’re using the vast majority of cups, plates, and other things you might think of as Styrofoam, what you're actually using is something called expanded polystyrene, as opposed to real Styrofoam, which is extruded polystyrene. And as Dow Chemical and Owens Corning, the two primary manufacturers of extruded polystyrene, will tell you, it’s not a small or modest difference.
In a lot of ways, the process used to make a cup, versus building insulation (the primary modern use of extruded polystyrene) is the difference between a million pieces of foam and a solid brick. The coffee cup you grabbed from the Shell station? That’s built using a molding process, in which relatively malleable balls of polymer are pressed into a specific shape after those polymers have been filled with gas. (Larger balls might be used for coffee cups, smaller ones for foam trays.) We call this form expanded polystyrene.
As a result, there’s a lot of air in there, which makes the cup lightweight and flexible, while still gaining the insulation advantages that come with foam.
The problem is, there are cases where you can live with a little more weight and a little less flexibility, because you want the resulting material to be a lot stronger. That’s where the extrusion process of pushing an object through a tube comes into play.
A good way to explain this is to consider to the way cheese curls are made, because those also use an extrusion process, except with flakes of corn instead of polymers of styrene oil. But there are some differences, however: You want air in your cheesy poofs, so you pop them straight out after they’re ready to puff up.
But let’s say you want to extrude something that was more crisp, closer to a tortilla chip than a Cheeto. You’d have to figure out a way to more tightly control how the extrusion process manages air to achieve more concentrated results. With Styrofoam, the extrusion process is managed in this way, designed to minimize the amount of air that gets through the material, so as to make the material very tough.
The result of this is that the material you get with extruders is designed for longer-term uses, like in houses. This clip from Owens Corning does a good job explaining why extrusion is desirable in the case of building materials: Simply, it’s tougher, because there’s less air than you’d find in expanded polystyrene. And because there’s less air, it’s very difficult for water to seep in through such material.
All of which makes it great for building materials, which are meant to hold up for decades or longer. Single serving food? It only has to hold up as long as your delivery driver takes to get the Ethiopian food delivered to your door without the driver getting tsebhi birsen all over their vehicle.
The problem is, of course, it lasts a lot longer than that.
Expanded polystyrene wasn't always ubiquitous as it is today, though it may have started with a Michigan company called Dart Manufacturing, which first came upon its most famous use: for packaging. In 1960, the company began selling its (soon-to-be famed) foam cups using the expanded polystyrene process. The company later changed its name to the Dart Container Corporation and took over the food-packaging industry.
Environmental complaints about the packaging came about not long after its use exploded. McDonald’s, for example, was an early target of such complaints, particularly due to the McDLT, a burger that used polystyrene to separate the veggies from the meat and gave Jason Alexander an early acting gig. The chain, facing pressure from the Environmental Defense Fund, gave up the foam packaging in the early ‘90s.
And an early adopter of foam bans came, also in the '80s, in Berkeley, California, which then banned both foam cups and foam food containers. “Berkeley alone doing this is not that significant,“ noted Berkeley City Councilwoman Nancy Skinner, “but if we do it and it causes other cities to do it, and causes companies to change things, that’s significant.”
(Not all companies went with foam, even in its heyday: Starbucks, for one, opted for paper cups because its cup supplier, Solo, only made the domed lids designed to protect froth for its paper cups, according to Bon Appétit.)
Still, though, there are places where polystyrene simply does the job better than anything else—like for shipping meats through delivery services like UPS.
In a 1985 issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, associate editor Dan Moreau, who was tasked with reviewing a wide variety of mail-order foods, noted that his Omaha Steaks weren’t any worse for wear despite the long gestation process. “The steaks and flounder came in a two-inch-thick foam plastic carton with dry ice and were still frozen rock hard even though they were shipped through regular UPS service and took several days to arrive,” Moreau noted. You should buy it for the packaging, obviously.
The thing with polystyrene is that, even with all the environmental costs that come with it—one 2007 protest in New York City, led by an up-and-coming city councilman named Bill de Blasio, pointed out that the city’s schools were at that point throwing away 4 million polystyrene trays per week—is a massive business, and one that companies like Dart Container Corporation want to do everything they can to protect.
Expanded polystyrene in particular is horribly expensive to recycle, in part because of the very benefits that make it so attractive in the first place—because the material is 95 percent air, it’s incredibly bulky, and converting it back to its original form is challenging. Essentially, you’re trying to put a genie back into a bottle.
One attempt that’s been gaining attention in the Canadian market is a service called Polystyvert, which solves the problem of recycling polystyrene by putting a machine that recycles the plastic on the premises of a firm that uses a lot of polystyrene—solving the problem of transporting it. The machine then dissolves the material using essential oils, and separates out the polystyrene so it can be used again for packaging.
It’s still a relatively new concept, but the Montreal-based business has already raised a significant amount of funding.
There’s a lot of polystyrene out there—just think of how many people order Grubhub on a given night, and in towns where a foam packaging ban isn’t even on the radar. It’s daunting, but efforts like Polystyvert could someday make a big dent.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Curling isn’t exactly an extreme sport, but some people in Russia might be trying to change that, recently playing a version of the sport with full-size cars.
As reported on RT, the weird game took place on a skating rink in the city of Ekaterinburg. Goal marks were painted on the frozen ice, and the cars were pushed by small teams hoping to bounce their opponents’ cars out of the way. Only one brave team member was made to ride in the little car, hoping to steer as much as possible.
The game was played with a variety of Soviet compact cars from the 1970s called, Okas. For safety, the windows were removed and the engine was also taken out to make the automobile pucks lighter and easier to glide on the ice.
The event’s organizer, an auto insurance dealer, said that he wanted to curl with cars as a way of reminding people about the dangers of reckless driving. The winner of the match walked away with a cool $1,600, which probably didn’t hurt either.
If you strapped a chair to a lot of helium balloons and flew into the sky, would it be fair to compare yourself to the Wright Brothers?
Daniel Boria, a 27-year-old man who, last year, did just that over the city of Calgary, thinks so.
Boria's stunt, which you can watch above, captured the attention of city residents, in addition to police, who promptly arrested him when he landed. He later pleaded guilty to dangerous operation of an aircraft, and was sentenced Friday to a $26,500 fine in Canadian dollars, or around $20,000 in U.S. dollars, according to the CBC.
Most striking, in this case, is the level of dissonance between the reactions of the presiding judge, who called Boria's stunt "unconscionably stupid," and Boria, who disagreed.
"Why climb the highest mountain?" Boria told the CBC. "Why 85 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why do the Oilers play the Flames? I chose to fly a chair, not because it is easy but because it is hard. Because that goal served to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
Boria also noted that they "didn't charge the Wright Brothers," which is true.
Frank Folsom, a cabbie in Augusta, Maine, picked up a passenger Tuesday who was also carrying some unexpected cargo: five baby alligators.
The alligators were in an open box, but somewhere along the ride they escaped, crawling about the car and, at one point, biting Folsom's shirt.
Folsom later stopped at a convenience store to get a closed box for the tiny beasts, which is where they were stored when authorities seized them a short while later.
That's because at some point during the trip, Folsom told the Kennebec Journal, someone—perhaps a convenience store worker—reported the alligators to police.
When Folsom and his passenger (and the alligators' owner), a 20-year-old college student named Yifan Sun, arrived at their destination, authorities were waiting.
“These don’t belong in Maine,” one officer told Sun, according to the Journal. “I know the movie Lake Placid says otherwise, but these don’t belong in Maine.”
The officer was referring to the 1999 "monster horror comedy film," as Wikipedia describes it, which stars a massive crocodile and takes place in Maine, not Lake Placid.
Sun told authorities that he'd gotten the alligators from a friend, and had kept them for two months on a diet of water and dog food. He was charged with importing or possessing wildlife without a permit. The alligators are now in a nearby refuge.
Two years ago, an archivist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum was looking through the collection’s film reels, when she came across a series of films labeled “Kodacolor.” As the Washington Post reports, the films look black and white, but they had unusual lines on their frames. After the archivist, Lynn Smith, did some research, she realized that these were color films, that need a special filter to show their full potential.
Now, the library has had those reels preserved and digitized. The result: it’s now possible to view what may be the first color footage of the White House ever taken.
The films were shot by First Lady Lou Hoover. Her husband’s often thought of as a stuffy technocrat who failed to stop the Great Depression, but the Hoovers were ahead of their time in many ways. Lou Hoover met Herbert (who she called "Bert") while studying geology at Stanford; she was the first woman to graduate from the school with a geology degree. They spent their early married life in China, where Hoover was working as a consulting engineer for the Chinese government, until the Boxer Rebellion forced them to flee the country. Lou Hoover was the first presidential wife to drive her own car, give a radio address, and set out a policy agenda for herself. She also, as the Post notes, had an interest in photography.
The footage Lou shot shows a different side of President Hoover. He’s shown on the White House lawn, playing a version of “bull in the ring” with a six-pound medicine ball, a variation that would come to be known as “Hooverball.” The footage also shows the president on a deep-sea fishing trip and the first couple’s dogs, Weegie and Pat, and their grandchildren.
The most notable part of the film, though, may be the shots of the White House itself, which looks lush and pleasant—the perfect setting for a energizing game of Hooverball.
Last Tuesday, Paris's exterminators plopped a dead rat outside of City Hall and agitated for reinforcements, unpaid bonuses, and appreciation. This week, there's a different European worker/urban animal conflict: dolphins are pissing off fishermen in Italy, and the fishermen are going on strike.
The complaint? The dolphins are eating all the squid. As The Local reports, about a hundred each of dolphins and small fishing boats share the water around the Aeolian islands, just north of Sicily. While an average fishing boat used to haul in around 25 pounds of squid per day, the take is down to about three pounds due to hungry dolphins.
It's gotten so bad that the fishermen, normally comfortable at sea, have become afraid of the dolphins. "We hear the snorting of the dolphins and begin to shake," Vincenzo Giuffre, who has been fishing for 25 years, told the Repubblica Palermo. "There are no more fish for us. They come out from the water and show us their grins."
Some solutions are in the works—starting in May, some boats will get pinging devices designed to drive away the dolphins—but there's no guarantee of their effectiveness. The local fishing consortium, Co.Ge.Pa, is calling for the dolphins to be removed from fishing areas and put somewhere else.
"Every night in the sea, there is a war for survival," consortium vice-president Giuseppe Spinella told Reppublica. "We have nothing against the dolphins, but we must find a solution."
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.
In many ways, Oswego, New York, located on the shore of Lake Ontario near the Canadian border, feels quintessentially American: the residential streets lined with tall houses with wooden siding, the yards wide and green. There is a movie theater downtown, a bookstore, a weekly farmer’s market. The winters can be harsh, but the sunsets are breathtaking, and during the summer families flock to the rock beaches to enjoy ice cream and hot dogs smothered with chili.
In 1944, when Oswego was selected by the U.S. government to shelter refugees from Europe, it was chosen not for its Americana but for its practicality. Oswego’s Fort Ontario—which had been established by the British in 1759 and used throughout the Revolutionary War, the French and Indian War, and the War of 1812—had since been deactivated. Given that the fort had been an important part of the local economy, the townspeople were fighting to have it reopened just as President Roosevelt issued his invitation for 1,000 World War II refugees to come to America. It was kismet.
In the end, 982 refugees made the trip from Bari, Italy to Oswego’s Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter. From above, the fort is shaped like a five-pointed star, surrounded by verdant grass and closely bordered by Lake Ontario. From inside, it more closely resembles a cozy village, if it was usual for a village to have barracks, guardhouses, and a powder magazine surrounding a circular courtyard instead of houses and stores.
Upon arrival, the refugees also couldn’t fail to notice the fence around the fort, which surrounded them on all sides. Refugee Alfred Rosenthal, who was 12 years old when he got to Fort Ontario, recounts seeing it for the first time: “I remember that a lot of—not so much the children, but the adults—were kind of shocked because it was reminiscent of what they had just left.”
Rosenthal, his mother, and his sister—his remaining immediate family after his father was killed in the Holocaust—had made their way to Oswego through a combination of struggle, perseverance, and luck. The family had been taken to a concentration camp in Yugoslavia and held until they could be shipped off to Germany. One night, the Nazis hosted a celebration at the camp’s headquarters, and the guard got drunk and fell asleep. There was a door that separated the main camp from the building where the bathrooms were housed, and the guard had forgotten to latch the chain.
“Several brave souls,” Rosenthal says, “including my mother, God bless her, took me and my sister and we actually, with a number of other people, very quietly escaped from that concentration camp.”
There was a curfew, however, and every second that the family spent on the streets made them more conspicuous. Rosenthal’s mother knocked on friends’ doors, hoping they would take her family in, but the Nazis had already made examples of people who sheltered Jews. Nobody was willing to take the chance.
“And at the end of the search,” Rosenthal says, “my mother said, well, there’s only one person left that we can go to and he’ll either turn us in or help us.” The man was a former colleague of Rosenthal’s father, and rumored to be a sympathizer of Fascism. But when Rosenthal’s mother went to his home, “he miraculously opened his door.”
It was through that connection that Rosenthal’s family was ultimately smuggled out of the country by the Yugoslav Partisans, an anti-Nazi resistance group led by Josip Tito and the Communist party of Yugoslavia.
Through the Partisans’ efforts, Rosenthal and his family landed in Bari, and were taken to a holding camp created by Allied forces. “My mother found out that a group of a thousand neediest refugees were being rounded up to go to America,” Rosenthal says, “so she made an immediate application, and of course having just gotten fresh out of that Holocaust horror, were were accepted as part of the thousand people to go.”
The refugees represented 18 different countries, ranging in age from a newborn baby to an 80-year-old man. Many were family groups like Rosenthal’s. They boarded an Army transport ship, the Henry Gibbins, where they would travel for two weeks as part of a convoy across the Atlantic Ocean. The journey was precarious, and took longer than it should have due to the need for stealth as Nazi planes patrolled the skies. But it could also be joyful, led by the intrepid Ruth Gruber, a journalist and Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior who had been appointed the refugees’ guide.
After that harrowing journey, the Henry Gibbins finally docked in New York. “Because we were in a heat wave there, I was wearing shorts and a polo shirt or t-shirt and sneakers that we had been given,” says Rosenthal. “That was my possessions as I entered the United States.”
Although they were officially “guests” of the country, the refugees’ first glimpse of freedom was a qualified one. They were placed under quarantine, which meant that they were not allowed to leave Fort Ontario, nor were visitors allowed to come in. And meanwhile, there was that fence, reminding them of everything they had just left.
“People from Oswego totally, totally lined up at the fence,” Rosenthal says. “It was an open-wire fence to the extent that you could put two, three fingers through each hole and we would actually touch each other and say an official hello.”
A new school year began shortly after the refugees’ arrival, and one of the first organized efforts from the residents and advisors at the shelter was to get the children enrolled. Rosenthal recalls spending both his seventh- and eighth-grade years at a local middle school, which was part of SUNY Oswego’s teaching college.
Eventually, the restrictions at the fort were lightened, and the refugees were able to sign out with a pass and explore the city. “We wanted to go to Woolworth’s five-and-ten and all the American kind of things that we had not seen in the homeland,” Rosenthal says. “Wherever we met any Oswegoans, they could not have been any more welcoming or more gracious. My memories of Oswego are absolutely terrific.”
As the war was ending, however, the joy at seeing the fall of the Nazis was tempered by anxiety about what was to come next. One condition of the refugees being invited to the States in the first place, after all, was that they signed a document saying that they understood they were to return to their countries of origin when the war was over. But for many of them, including Rosenthal, there was nothing to return to.
“Many organizations in various states offered to take displaced families and care for them and get them started in a new life,” Rosenthal says. “In fact, I remember at the time they came to visit the camp and make offers in person, and I remember Texas—I think it was the Dallas area—came up and said they wanted to take up to 20 people and care for them.”
It would be President Truman—having been sworn in after the death of Roosevelt in April 1945—who would eventually decree that the refugees could stay. To make it official, they were bussed across the Rainbow Bridge to Niagara Falls, Canada, where immigration officers presented them with the necessary papers, and then were bussed back to Fort Ontario, where they were officially admitted to the United States.
The tight-knit group from Fort Ontario, which became known as “Safe Haven,” went their separate ways at that point. Rosenthal and his family settled with a relative in Brooklyn. Some did return to their homelands, or go abroad, but many stayed and started lives in the States, scattered from coast to coast but connected by their shared experience.
The fort itself is now a historic site and museum, celebrated as much for those 18 months it served as a shelter for Holocaust refugees as for the centuries of military service. What makes the story of Oswego special is not how extraordinary the city was in response to the refugees, but how ordinary. Its residents pushed their fingers through the fence and opened their arms to residents from halfway across the world, fleeing persecution.
There is no telling how many other cities across America might have done the same, had they been given the chance.
A flight out of Miami International Airport was delayed yesterday after a swarm of bees decided to attach itself to one of the plane’s wings, either looking for a free ride, or just trying to mess with some foolish humans who thought they knew about flying.
According to Miami News 7, a midday American Airlines flight out of Miami International Airport, headed to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, had to remain grounded when thousands of bees were discovered on the wing.
An American Airlines spokeswoman told CBS News that they couldn’t take off while the bees were still on the wing because, “Obviously, you don’t want the bees in the air.” There was also a concern for the safety of the workers around the cargo area, who were in danger of getting stung.
The airline contacted the city, which was able to get in touch with a beekeeper who was able to come out to the airport and remove the bees. The keeper’s arrival took several hours, delaying the flight in the process. One onlooker, who shared an image of the bees, also said the beekeeper got stung multiple times in the process of removing the bees.
Eventually the bees were removed and the airplane was able to take off. It is still unclear why the bees swarmed on the wing in the first place.
Before an assembled crowd of friendly members of the Intelligence Community, Reagan felt comfortable enough to start with what he called “an ethnic joke.”
Take it away, Reagan!
While not his best material (he did admit he stole that one from Bush), in the Gipper’s defense, that wasn’t even the funniest thing he said that day.
First, there was this great line showing just how Reagan felt about the airport that would later bear his name …
and second, this absolute knee-slapper suggesting that - in 1982 - the days of CIA wrongdoing were well in the past.
During a recent highway expansion near Ramla, Israel, around 13 miles outside of Tel Aviv, excavators unearthed a lot of artifacts from bygone eras, including some tools that are thought to be 250,000 years old.
Ron Toueg, an excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said they also found buttons and buckles there, but what stood out was the booze.
"We were surprised to discover that, along with broken crockery and cutlery, there was an enormous number of soft drink and liquor bottles," Toueg said. "In fact, about 70% of the waste that was discarded in the refuse pit were liquor bottles. It seems that the soldiers took advantage of the respite given them to release the tension by frequently drinking alcohol."
Which is a reasonable deduction—British soldiers camped in the area for nine months as they awaited orders to move further north, according to a researcher quoted by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
And a fair amount of that time was spent, apparently, having a drink.
The Crimean Bridge Information Center has announced that, as part of its underwater excavations, it has found the giant terra-cotta head seen above.
The head of the underwater unit of the Russian Academy of Sciences says it’s “probably the image of an ancient Greek deity,” made in Asia minor in the 5th century B.C. It was found in Cape Ak-Burun and is a unique find for the northern coast of the Black Sea.
The Crimean Bridge project is a Russian effort to make Crimea a functional part of Russia, after the country forcibly took it over from Ukraine. As NPR reports:
After Russia seized Crimea, Ukraine blocked most road and rail traffic to the occupied region. There was no land connection to the Russian mainland, so goods had to be delivered by sea or air, driving up costs. The Russian tourists who are crucial to Crimea's economy had to wait in long lines to ride a crowded ferry.
So, now Russia is building a bridge to connect Crimea to Russian tourists. The statue head may be part of a larger sculpture; all archaeological finds are going to the Eastern Crimean Historical and Cultural Museum and Reserve, according to TASS, the Russian news service.
Yesterday, it was Bud Light in Long Island. According to CBS News, around midnight on Wednesday, a tractor-trailer collided with a car on the Long Island Expressway, at the junction of Walt Whitman Road. (As the great man might say, "I loafe and invite my soul.")
Photos posted to the Melville Volunteer Fire Department Facebook page show a flipped car, a crumpled truck, and enough cases of Bud Light to really get something going. "The service road was closed for hours as crews cleaned up," says CBS.
Both drivers were treated for minor injuries at a nearby medical center. No word on what happened to the beers.
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.
