Maud Lewis, now one of Canada’s most famous folk artists, lived her life in poverty and obscurity. Before she died in 1970, her paintings sold for just a few dollars; now they’re worth tens of thousands.
Recently, one of her paintings showed up in the donation bin of the Mennonite Central Committee Thrift Center, in New Hamburg, Ontario, a small town about two hours west of Toronto. The painting came with no fanfare, but one of the center’s volunteers recognized Lewis’ style. The painting, which is titled “Portrait of Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy, Lobster Fishermen, Bay View, N.S.,” has since been authenticated by outside experts, reports the New Hamburg Independent.
The painting is 11 inches by 13 inches; Lewis used beaverboard, a kind of fiberboard, as her canvas. Lewis lived in a one-room house in Nova Scotia, and she’d often paint on boards like this one, which she’d cover first in white paint.
The newly found painting will be on display from April until May in the town of Kitchener, while it’s being auctioned off.
In the reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researchers might spend hours carefully paging through a 16th-century pamphlet or the only surviving quarto edition ofTitus Andronicus. ("If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.") But they also have access to another unusual—if more informal—collection. Behind the reading room desk there is a vault where the staff keeps a small lending library of handmade shawls.
Three of the shoulder coverings are knitted and two crocheted. The blue one is longer and lighter; the brown one, the newest addition, has pockets. One circular shawl has rings of different colors, and another with light, spring colors is a little bit thicker and larger. The original shawl, the one that started the collection, is a sandy brown. All five are the work of Rosalind Larry, the room's head of circulation, who made them, often on her lunch hour, during her many years at the library.
Larry started knitting the first shawl in the 1980s, after the library was remodeled and the reading room expanded. Not long before, she had seen a colleague making baby booties and thought she might like to learn to knit. “She showed me how, and at first I was terrible at it,” Larry says. But soon she grew more ambitious, and when she had some yarn she wanted to use up, she thought she might make herself a shawl, since it always felt cold in the reading room.
“That was a learning experience, knitting that shawl,” she says. It was a repeating pattern, on a circular needle—a challenging project for someone still learning to knit. “Finally, I got the hang of it. It worked out fine.”
Larry wore her new creation as a shawl or lap rug, and found herself often lending it to chilly colleagues or readers. The temperature and humidity in the reading room have to be kept within a certain range to protect the rare books studied by researchers and other sensitive materials stored there. And because the reading room consists of two high-ceilinged spaces connected by a large opening, it’s difficult to control the temperature. “One room will get warm and the other will get cold,” says Larry. (Or, as one recent patron put it, “absolutely freezing.”) When the air circulators turn on, they sweep a cold draft through the room.
The library’s regulars know to bundle up, but other readers may not be prepared to layer. Seeing how much use her original shawl had gotten, Larry started building a small collection by knitting or crocheting through her lunch hour. “For me, it’s just a way of relaxing,” she says. “It’s my little way of trying to be creative.”
Now, if a librarian notices a shivering, underdressed patron, she might offer them one of Larry’s shawls, and another reader might inquire if there’s another available. One time, Larry recalls, someone stayed for almost a month and used the same shawl every day: “I’ll have my books and the shawl!” Repeat researchers often ask if they can use the same one they wore last time they were at the library.
So far, the collection of five shawls has met the demand. On a typical day, there could be 15 or 20 people in the reading room and, as far as Larry knows, all five shawls have never been in use at once. She has no plans to add to the collection, but it’s always possible she’ll have some extra yarn she needs to use up.
It’s 8:30 p.m. in Kolka, Latvia, and there’s only one place with its lights on. The Tops market sells some staple groceries and produce, but mostly, it sells beer, rows and rows of malt liquor sold in plastic liter bottles. Outside, a cluster of young Kolkans drink it on the edge of the shadows.
Situated on the cape where Latvia juts into the Baltic Sea, Kolka used to be a busy fishing town, and one of the cultural homes of the Livonians, the country’s indigenous inhabitants. As recently as the mid-20th century, you could hear them speak Livonian, a sonorous tongue immediately distinguishable from Latvian.
But hardly anyone fishes in Kolka now. The town is mostly pensioners; the young people have left to find work in Riga, Latvia’s capital, or elsewhere in the European Union. And no one here speaks Livonian.
The last native speaker, Grizelda Kristiņa, died in Canada in 2013, rendering the language extinct by most definitions. The handful of people who still speak it—estimates range from 25 to 30—are linguists and enthusiasts. Among them is Valts Ernštreits, a professor at Tartu University in Estonia. When asked what Livonian sounds like to the unacquainted ear, he refuses to describe the language.
“Just listen,” he says. “It’s very hard to describe it. You can do it in very scientific terms, in a very boring half-hour lecture, which, in the end, there’s no point. If you want to know how it sounds, just sit down and listen.”
You can hear Livonian in the video below.
Unlike Latvian, an Indo-European language most closely related to its Baltic sibling, Lithuanian, Livonian is a Finno-Ugric tongue, belonging to a small family that includes Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. Latvians often describe Estonian as “musical,” and indeed, Livonian shares its sonorous, loping cadence. Spoken by Ernštreits, it sounds almost Italian.
Livonian’s fingerprints are all over modern Latvian: for example, Latvian inherited its first-syllable stresses from Livonian. Denying Livonain’s influence on Latvian, Ernštreits says, is like “adding salt to the soup and then you just say, what salt? I don’t know what salt is.”
Livonian is his passion and profession. Invigorated by the Soviet Union’s exit in 1991, he stopped studying architecture and took up Livonian at Tartu. He has since devoted himself to speaking, writing and studying the language.
But Ernštreits is just one of a handful of speakers, and one of only 250 people who identify themselves as Livonian in government surveys. He can write poetry in it, but he can’t buy a loaf of bread.
“Practically, the language is over” says Baiba Šuvcāne, a Kolka resident and author of three books on Livonian history. “And it’s never coming back.”
She remembers her grandparents speaking Livonian, and even her mother. It was a difference in years: parents stopped teaching their children Livonian in the 30s, she reckons. She was born in 1945, and while her mother was fluent in Liv, she taught Šuvcāne Latvian.
Now she watches Kolka fill with tourists in the summer, and empty for the long, dark winters. She names a few residents with Liv blood who can speak pleasantries, but that’s it.
“The last blow was the Soviets,” she says. “The last, but hardly the only one.”
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Kurzeme coast—known also by its Anglo name, Courland—was home to a handful of busy Livonian fishing villages. But during World War I, when the Kaiser’s army swept into Latvia and fortified the coast, the Livs were moved inland. Most returned, but some had already resettled elsewhere.
Years later, when the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht out of Latvia, a pocket was trapped on the Livonian home turf. Once again, the Liv villages were emptied as the Nazis braced for Soviet attack from land and sea.
When the Third Reich fell, Latvia became the western boundary of the USSR, and the iron curtain fell over Kurzeme. The Soviets fortified the coast, blocking off the beaches and extinguishing the fishing industry. Fewer Livs returned to their villages; many had already resettled in Latvia’s capital, Riga, to feed their families. Only Kolka, which faces the Gulf of Riga, was able to keep its industry alive.
The fall of the Soviet Union ignited a Latvian nationalism, and even spurred a brief blaze of Livonian identity. It was short-lived, says Šuvcāne, whose mother tried to make a living teaching the language. She had a handful of students the first year, Šuvcāne says, but only two the next. Then one. Then she quit.
When Latvia joined the European Union in 2004, she says, Kurzeme’s fate was sealed. There was no longer any reason for Livonian youth to remain. They fled across open borders to Ireland, England, Germany, following the jobs. Why would they stay? Livonian won’t earn them a job, says Šuvcāne; better to learn English.
Linda Zonne speaks English, but Livonian is her passion. A 30-year-old Riga resident, Zonne grew up speaking Latvian; a child with dark features, her parents called her their “little Livonian.” As a student of archeology, she was always curious about history and heritage, and when a friend mentioned a radio advertisement for Livonian courses, Zonne decided to give it a try.
Now she’s a Livonian evangelist. She runs the Facebook group “Livo Kel,” which posts a Livonian word of the day for its 1,277 followers and hosts content that seems primed to go viral (see the video in which Zonne’s toddler counts to 10 in Livonian, taking breaks for giggle fits). And every summer, she teaches the language to children at the Livonian Union’s summer camp in Kurzeme.
But however much progress her students make, they speak Latvian at home, and their Livonian skills unravel over the winter. Come July, it’s back to Tēriņtš—hello.
“To change something, you must first know the basics, to have those right,” Zonne says. “You have to have that right.” And without more teachers, she says, the pool of possible students will always be limited.
Still, with more converts like Zonne—digital natives who realize and sustain a latent passion for their heritage—Livonian could maintain its foothold as a cultural curiosity.
But, as Šuvcāne says, a comeback seems unlikely. Even Ernštreits isn’t this optimistic: if you can’t use Livonian to get a job, he says, nobody will speak Livonian.
“It’s a pretty obvious answer when everyone in your village speaks Livonian,” he says. “But then you’re living in a big town like Riga, and you simply can’t communicate. It’s hard to explain why anyone would need the language.”
Rather, Ernštreits wants to preserve the language with online translators. They aren’t perfect, but they’re improving. And with enough work, he says, scholars can build a Livonian grammatical database rugged enough to serve as a sort of linguistic ark: “If not for our sake, then for generations to come, maybe.”
“For me, it was never a dead language,” Ernštreits says. And when he speaks, you believe him.
Eddie S., of Compton, Los Angeles, has Mondays off work. So yesterday, LAist reports, he did what he always does with his free time—went down to MacArthur Park, walked to the northern edge of the lake, and set up a couple of fishing lines.
Shortly after—following about ten minutes of blaring bait alarms, a nerve-wracking reel-in, and a netting process that soaked his shoes—he posed with his catch: a 50-pound carp. (The biggest carp ever caught in California was 52 pounds.)
This was not beginner's luck. Eddie, who has been fishing since he was nine years old, is a founding member of MacArthur Park Lake's premiere angling society, California Ghetto Carping. LAist profiled the group about two weeks ago, after another founding member, Big Serg, pulled in a 35-pounder. Eddie's catch required a fair amount of local knowledge—as he was reeling in, he switched positions onshore to avoid snagging his line on a sunken shopping cart.
There are about a hundred Ghetto Carpers casting their lines in public parks around LA County. All members practice catch and release, and many like to teach neighborhood kids about the benefits of fishing.
MacArthur Park Lake is one of their most sought-after destinations. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has regularly stocked it with carp and trout since the mid-1990s, in an effort to encourage residents to fish.
It's clearly working. "I just landed the biggest fish of my life, today. Oh my god," Eddie told LAist. "I've seen all kinds of species and all kinds of fish, but I've never seen fish get that big."
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 the United States, the most popular last name is Smith. As per the 2010 census, about 0.8 percent of Americans have it. In Vietnam, the most popular last name is Nguyen. The estimate for how many people answer to it? Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s population. The 14 most popular last names in Vietnam account for well over 90 percent of the population. The 14 most popular last names in the US? Fewer than 6 percent.
In the U.S., an immigrant country, last names are hugely important. They can indicate where you’re from, right down to the village; the profession of a relative deep in your past; how long it’s been since your ancestors emigrated; your religion; your social status.
Nguyen doesn’t indicate much more than that you are Vietnamese. Someone with the last name Nguyen is going to have basically no luck tracing their heritage back beyond a generation or two, will not be able to use search engines to find out much of anything about themselves.
This difference illustrates something very weird about last names: they’re a surprisingly recent creation in most of the world, and there remain many places where they just aren’t very important. Vietnam is one of those.
The existence of last names in Vietnam dates to 111 BC, the beginning of a lengthy thousand-year occupation of the country by the Han Dynasty in China. (There were a few short-lived attempts at independence before the Vietnamese kicked the Chinese out in 939 AD.) Before this time, nobody really knows how the Vietnamese handled names, due to lack of written records. In fact even the name “Vietnam” comes from the Chinese; “viet” is the Vietnamese version of the word the Chinese used to describe the people southeast of Yunnan Province.
It is likely that the Vietnamese, prior to Chinese domination, did not use last names, (or family names, which we should call them, given that in Vietnam and many other places, this name does not come last). This does not make them unusual at all. Prior to the 18th century, much of the world did not use family names. More common would be what’s called a “patronymic” name, meaning your full name would literally translate as something like “Steve son of Bob.” Patronymic names refer only to the generation immediately before and remain common in much of the world, especially in Scandinavia and the Middle East. (Keep an eye out for “surnames” ending in “-sson” or including “Ben” or “Ibn.” Those are patronymic names.)
The entire idea of a family name was unknown to most of the world unless you were conquered by a place that used them. Those conquerors included the Romans, the Normans, the Chinese, and later the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans, and the Americans. It was the Chinese who gave Vietnam family names.
The Chinese have had family names for thousands of years, sometimes indicating occupation, social status, or membership of a minority group. Well before the time of China’s occupation of Vietnam, the Chinese had a sophisticated system of family names for a pretty basic reason: taxes. “Under the Chinese colonial rulership, the Chinese typically will designate a family name to keep tax records,” says Stephen O’Harrow, the chairman of Indo-Pacific Languages and head of the Vietnamese department the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. “They used a limited number of family names for the people under their jurisdiction.”
Basically, the Chinese (and later the Romans and Normans) conquered all these places with all these people, and they needed some way to keep track of them so they could be taxed. But most of these places didn’t have family names, which made them a real pain to monitor. How can you be sure that you’re taxing the right Dũng, when there are a dozen of them in the same village and they’re referred to as “Uncle Dũng” and “Brother Dũng”?
So the Chinese just started handing out last names to people. They assigned these surnames pretty much randomly, but the original pool of last names largely came from Chinese last names, or Vietnamese derivations of them. Nguyen, for example, came from the Chinese Ruan. “My guess is, senior Chinese administrators used their own personal names to designate people under their own aegis,” says O’Harrow. This kind of thing happened a lot; the tendency of the imperialist to just bestow his name on the people he conquered can be seen everywhere from the Philippines (which has tons of Spanish last names) to the U.S. (where black Americans often have the names of the owners of slave ancestors) to the Indian state of Goa (Portuguese).
Ruan itself might come from an ancient Chinese state of the same name, or maybe from the ancient lute-like instrument also called a ruan. Who knows? Either way, it seems likely that some mid-level Chinese bureaucrat, in seeking to figure out who actually lived in his newly conquered Vietnamese territory, simply decided that everyone living there would also be named Ruan—which became Nguyen.
Oh right, let’s take a minute to discuss the pronunciation of Nguyen. If you search, you’ll find dozens of extremely confident declarations about the correct way to say the name. These are not wrong, necessarily, but a central problem is that, well, there isn’t really one correct way to say Nguyen. Vietnam has a few different dialects, with the biggest division between them being geographical, namely north-south. Southern Vietnamese tend to clip some of their sounds, so Nguyen would be pronounced something like “Win” or “Wen.” Northern Vietnamese would keep it, giving a pronunciation more like “N’Win” or “Nuh’Win,” all done as best you can in one syllable.
This has all been further complicated by the Vietnamese diaspora. In the interest of easier assimilation, Western given names are pretty popular—you may know a Katie Nguyen or a Charles Nguyen—but Nguyen, with a spelling that would immediately confuse Westerners, remains difficult. That “Ng” beginning is not a sound that Westerners are use to as an opener to a word. So there is a tendency to kind of let pronunciation slide, creating a whole new range of acceptable ways to say Nguyen. (After all, if someone named Katie Nguyen says it’s fine for you to pronounce it “NEW-yen,” who are we to argue?) But the key is that pronunciation of Nguyen varies pretty widely.
Back to taxes and bureaucrats. None of that explains why Nguyen is such a popular family name in Vietnam. After all, there were tons of those mid-level bureaucrats handing out family names. Why did this one become so popular?
Though last names in Vietnam are, thanks to that early period under Chinese control, much older than they are in most parts of the world, the Vietnamese never seemed to much care about them. They just never became a fundamental way that Vietnamese people referred to each other or thought about themselves.
“Vietnamese has no pronouns, like he or she or you or they,” says O’Harrow. Instead, the usual way to refer to somebody else is with something O’Harrow calls a “fictive kinship term.” Essentially, you refer to someone by their given name, and add some kind of family-based modifier which indicates the relationship between the speaker and listener. If you’re talking to our good friend Dũng, and he’s about the same age as you, you might call him Anh Dũng, meaning “Brother Dung.” To indicate age or gender differences or respect, you might substitute something like “aunt,” “grandmother,” or “child” in for “Anh.”
The last name, in Vietnam, is there, but just isn’t that important. And when it’s not that important, you might as well change it if a new last name might help you in some way. This may or may not be a continuation of the way names were used before the Chinese came—we really don’t know—but ever since, Vietnamese people have tended to take on the last name of whoever was in power at the time. It was seen as a way to show loyalty, a notion which required the relatively frequent changing of names with the succession of rulers. After all, you wouldn’t want to be sporting the last name of the previous emperor.
“This tradition of showing loyalty to a leader by taking the family name is probably the origin of why there are so many Nguyens in Vietnam,” says O’Harrow. Guess what the last ruling family in Vietnam was? Yep, the Nguyễn Dynasty, which ruled from 1802 to 1945. It’s likely that there were plenty of people with the last name Nguyen before then, as there were never all that many last names in Vietnam to begin with, but that percentage surely shot up during the dynasty’s reign.
Even this tendency to take on the last name of the ruler is not totally unique to Vietnam. The same thing happened in Korea with the name Park, originally the name of King Hyeokgeose Park, the founder of the thousand-year dynasty of one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Theoretically, all the Parks in Korea trace their ancestry back to that king, but after a peasant revolution in 1894, many peasants adopted the last name Park as a symbol of the abolishment of the caste system.
For Vietnamese-Americans, which number over 1.5 million, having the last name Nguyen is a complicated subject. “It's a signifier for being Vietnamese, but when 40 percent of the Vietnamese population is Nguyen, it doesn't really mean that much,” says Kevin Nguyen, a friend of mine who works as the digital deputy editor of GQ. “If I have kids, I don't really care if their name is Nguyen, because it doesn't really attach them to anything besides, maybe, 'non-white.'"
Kevin can’t really trace back his history using 23andMe or Ancestry.com or any of those sites, either. For one thing, 23andMe has such a tiny number of Asian DNA samples that it basically can’t get any information beyond “Asian,” which is not very helpful. “Even if I wanted to sign up for an ancestry-lineage type site, I don’t think it would get very far, because there’s just so little to go on with my last name, and there are no records of anyone past my grandparents in Vietnam,” says Nguyen. “I’d be interested, but I just don’t think there’d be a way to learn much more.”
But that tendency to trace one’s name has baggage attached to it that not all Americans will have considered. My own last name doesn’t seem to have existed before my great-grandfather came to the U.S. in the early 20th century; searches stop abruptly at the ship’s manifest.
“It's funny, when people are really specific or proud of their last name or heritage, it's almost a form of privilege,” says Nguyen. “Like sure, everyone cares about their last name, until you're persecuted and that line is broken.” Nguyen as a last name is a signifier of that persecution, from trying not to be seen as an enemy of the royal dynasty all the way back to the actions of a probably disinterested Chinese bureaucrat.
The rickety old Wild West outhouse with a crescent moon cut out of the door is one of the most enduring symbols of the era. It’s one of those images that you remember, but can’t place exactly where you first saw it. Which isn’t surprising, since it probably never existed.
From cartoons to films to modern-day replicas of historic toilets, the cut-out shape of a crescent moon in an outhouse door seems like something that is so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, that it must have existed in real life. But it doesn’t seem to have been much of a historic reality. “I have never—with my own eyes—seen a crescent moon shape in an actual outhouse I could confidently date to earlier than about 1960,” says Dr. Adam Davis of the Missouri Folklore Society. While there's not a great deal of scholarship on the origins of the crescent moon outhouse, Davis wrote a piece on the subject in 2007. “I have seen more photographs of outhouses where I suspect the decorations to be authentically pre-mass-media that have half-moon cutouts (that is, semicircles) although, interestingly, those are never the icons one sees in cartoons. Similarly, I have seen photos of crescent moons which are entirely horns-up, as if ready to catch water, but that’s not the icon either,” he says.
Having a hole cut out of outhouse doors was definitely a real thing, providing ventilation and light into the stall, but no one is sure exactly where the idea that they were commonly crescent-shaped came from.
The most commonly held theory, and the one you are most likely to find via a cursory Google search, posits that it was once the sign for a woman’s toilet. As the story goes, in the 1800s and earlier, literacy wasn’t widespread, so the common symbol used to differentiate between a men's privy and a women's was that the men's door carried a sun or star symbol, while the women's stalls were marked with a moon. According to the book Outhouses by Holly Bollinger, this cosmic dichotomy was devised based on ancient imagery. “With the crescent moon signifying Luna or Goddess Diana it became known as a feminine symbol, therefore welcoming womenfolk,” Bollinger writes. This might seem like a lofty reading of bathroom symbolism, but the moon has long been associated with a female aspect, and it's not unreasonable to think that this would have been general knowledge.
So how did the women’s room symbol come to represent all outhouses? Bollinger’s book goes on to suggest that men's outhouses were not as well kept up, so eventually, to conserve resources and labor, male stalls were taken down, and the remaining moon-doored stalls became a symbol of unisex bathrooms, and outhouses in general. One version of this theory, shared in the 1989 book The Vanishing American Outhouse (as quoted by The Straight Dope) says that it was during the mid-1800s that the general public forgot the original meaning behind the moons, and just began seeing them as the symbol for an outhouse.
This version of the moon-door’s origin (or something close to it) can be found all overthe place, but the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of hard evidence to back it up. “For folklorists, one of the earmarks of the improbable is, it’s highly articulated, and yet without precedent or source. It springs into the world full-grown,” says Davis. The provenance of the gendered account doesn’t seem to stretch back very far either, with The Straight Dope only tracing it to a 1972 book called The Little Red Schoolhouse: A Sketchbook of Early American Education, which describes male/female outhouses with the sun/moon symbols.
Davis, in his 2007 examination of the symbol, contends that while there is evidence of moon-shaped cut outs in historic outhouses, they are little more than a decorative motif that “seems to have been media-generated, then provided with a fictive, back-formed pedigree to explain it.” Davis also notes that in most cases of pre-1900s hardscrabble living, building two outhouses just for gender considerations was not likely a priority given the resources it would require.
The precise origin of the outhouse moon is probably lost to time, since detailed records on historic bathroom design aren’t exactly in great abundance. But whether it was a formerly gendered symbol that developed into an icon or a simple flourish that came to define our thinking, outhouse crescent moons are abundantly used on modern outhouses. Today, you can find them on farms, in recreated historic villages, and in Elk Falls, the self-proclaimed “Outhouse Capital of Kansas.”
“Mass media originated the practice of tying yellow ribbons as symbols of a wished-for homecoming, and that is most definitely now an authentic folk behavior,” says Davis. “So here’s a cool case of a folk practice being picked up and made iconic by mass culture and then sent back down to the folk—I expect most people who are moved to carve ornamental vents in their outhouses nowadays will opt for the crescent.” Whether it was ever a commonly used symbol or not, it is certainly the reality now.
It's not everyday one sees a leashed Kangaroo on the streets of Detroit, so the person who filmed a Snapchat video of just that could be forgiven for expressing some animated surprise.
The video, which was quickly picked up by local news, shows a man running down the street, being led by what is, unmistakably, a hopping kangaroo.
CBS Detroit managed to track down the identity of the man in the video, Javon Stacks, who runs a traveling zoo. His fully-licensed zoo brings exotic animals to the inner city, performing free shows at schools and libraries, and the kangaroo, whose name is Darwin, is just one of his charges. Apparently, they had been working a birthday party, and Stacks wanted to give Darwin a stretch.
The Detroit Zoo was not as enthused, though, telling CBS Detroit that the kangaroo was likely acquired via the shady exotic animal trade.
Still, it made for a strange sight, as evidenced by the shocked remarks from the woman filming, and while it’s no Robocop, Detroit may have just found a new viral icon in the making.
Libraries can get pretty serious about getting their books returned, even if stealing a library book (usually by checking it out and not returning it) remains a disturbingly easy form of petty crime.
But sometimes wildly overdue books do get returned, even years after the fact, by either the original borrowers or do-gooding citizens. It could be a mother, for example, who didn't realize her son squirreled away The Mouse and the Motorcycle that summer two decades ago, when life was different. Or, take the patron of the library in Great Falls, Montana, who recently returned a copy of Richard Matheson's 1975 novel Bid Time Return after 35 years on loan.
Library officials did not name the man, according to the Great Falls Tribune, but they were grateful to see the book, a science fiction romance, returned. The "thief" also included a $200 donation and a written apology, which stated that he was "hoping for a chance for redemption here."
He had read the book at least 25 times, he wrote, and also had the volume restored and signed by its author before Matheson's 2013 death.
“It’s one of the, if not the, greatest sci-fi/romance stories ever written," he continued. "It's absolutely fascinating."
That is a strong recommendation for any book, let alone one that isn't even Matheson's best-known work, I Am Legend (the basis for the Will Smith movie of the same title). Let this be a guide for any other petty library thieves out there with a conscience: If you're going to come clean, do it with hat in hand and maybe some cold hard cash.
The Indochinese tiger, a tiger subspecies native to southeast Asia, is a rarity in today’s world. There are fewer than 250 of them in the world, reports the BBC, and they’re endangered by poaching and habitat loss, as the forests they live in fall to logging and population pressures.
But a survey conducted with the support of conservation and anti-poaching groups has found a new population of Indochinese tigers in eastern Thailand—only the second known breeding population of these tigers in the world.
The survey used camera traps to document the tigers’ presence in one of Thailand’s national parks. The traps captured evidence of at least six cubs living there. It’s still a tiny population of tigers, but given the challenges these animals face, it’s incredible that they’re there at all.
Most subway trash is there and gone: vacuumed up by a cleaning car, whipped away by an oncoming train's power, or incinerated in a small track fire.
Some subway trash, though, sticks around—and steals our hearts. Such was the case with a lone, balding basketball, which sat on the uptown 1 train tracks at West 18th Street in Chelsea for weeks, and enamored a journalist so much that it inspired a 22-paragraph ode in yesterday's New York Times.
The Chelsea subway station where someone's basketball has now spent nearly 2 weeks on the track. pic.twitter.com/CXjWErvqPJ
Reporter Jacob Bernstein tracked the basketball's presence on Twitter, posting several photos of it over the course of the month. Then he started reporting in earnest.
The basketball "first made its appearance on the southern end of the station sometime around March 1," Bernstein wrote. "...this means that the ball managed to narrowly escape being run over roughly 4,300 times."
A lonely basketball has now spent more than two weeks on a Chelsea subway track. pic.twitter.com/hLTiwCJMId
Bernstein spoke to several locals who hadn't noticed the ball. He also put some hard questions to subway sanitation experts, who explained that the cleaning cars are built to swallow up small, floaty bits of trash, like boxes and coffee cups—not hardier, more stoic ones, like basketballs.
After about 3 weeks, the basketball disappeared. Godspeed, basketball—and our condolences to Mr. Bernstein.
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 a clear day, somewhere between 1914 and 1918 (the exact year has been lost to time) a crowd of American military men assembled in a field strewn with wildflowers. They were dressed in the official garb of the time: brimmed hats and pants that ballooned around the thighs and were tucked into high boots. They had come to fly a kite—but not just any kite. The apparatus they had was a chain of large kites, and strapped to the final kite was a man, sitting on a wildly precarious-looking seat like a children's swing, chomping on a cigarette and holding an unwieldy box camera on his lap. His companions, gripping the rope tightly, let each kite into the air until, finally, they allowed the man to go aloft as well. He sailed hundreds of feet above their heads, a tiny dot in the air.
This might sound like a stunt performed for entertainment, a one-off for daredevils. But in fact, around 1900, so-called “man-lifting kites” were gaining in popularity throughout the U.S. and Europe and had especially piqued the interest of militaries, who thought they’d make dandy surveillance tools.
Far from just a novelty for kids, kites were already being put to lots of practical uses, including by scientists studying the atmosphere. Such was the mania for kites, British inventor George Pocock patented a kite-powered buggy dubbed the “Charvolant” in 1826. (One CalTech researcher even successfully backed up a hypothesis that Egyptians had used kites to build the pyramids by erecting an obelisk with one in 2001.)
“You could lift instruments to test the air, you could really have a lot of power in these,” says Scott Skinner, a kite designer, founder of the Drachen Foundation, a non-profit devoted to kite advocacy and history, and author of several books on kites. “You could lift cameras. The next logical thing became, why not use the kite as a lifting mechanism for a military observer?”
Although there were several versions, a basic design entailed a long string of large kites hitched together in a chain, with a final kite fitted with a seat for its passenger, often a basket. Men on the ground would typically let out rope via winch, and both the ground team and the passenger helped steer the kite. Once airborne, the passenger could use a radio phone or signaling device to relay information about the enemy’s position, and even take bird’s-eye photographs.
But perhaps one of the most colorful and well-remembered proponents of man-lifting kites was Samuel Franklin Cody.
“He truly was a self-promoter and a carnival barker,” says Skinner. “Really on the border of being a shady character.”
Cody was born Samuel Franklin Cowdery in Davenport, Iowa in 1867. As a young man, he acquired the skills necessary to join a traveling circus as a Wild West showman. He entertained U.S. crowds lassoing, shooting and riding horses. He adopted the name of much more famous showman, Buffalo Bill Cody, and dressed the part. He sported flowing long hair, an audacious mustache that pointed up at the ends, fringed jackets, big hats, and vests. Eventually, he split with the circus and crossed the Atlantic to Britain, where he began touring with his own show, a Wild West play called “The Klondyke Nugget” based on his (potentially false) claims that he had mined the Yukon. The play was a hit and included equine stunts so explosive that they prompted at least one person to lodge a complaint with the local newspaper. “The marvellous feat of the horse falling through a bridge at distance of 13 feet, is so accomplished—although intended to appear dangerous to the public—as to be perfectly harmless,” harrumphed the show’s general manager in an response to the same paper.
“While touring Great Britain he became enamored with kites,” says Skinner. Kite enthusiasm in Europe was flourishing; serious hobbyists and scientists alike read kiting magazines and gathered at annual fetes. Cody built and flew them, and finally decided to throw his effort into designing a man-lifting kite that could be turned into dollar signs and prestige.
By 1901, Cody had patented a version of a man-lifting kite, and according to biographer Garry Jenkins, was flexing his entrepreneurial muscles. “By then he has already written to the war office, offering them first option on ‘SF Cody’s Aroplaine [sic] or War-Kite: A boy’s toy turned into an instrument of war,’” he wrote in Colonel Cody and the Flying Cathedral.
The military was interested in kites; they had a strong advantage over the balloons they used for surveillance, which had to be inflated, were cumbersome in strong wind, and easier for snipers to spot.
“They were really very, very sophisticated,” says Skinner. “And as we build replicas today we find these were really amazing kites built to fly in high winds—very sturdy, very strong and reliable. They had to be very quick to erect, break down and easy to carry from one point to the next.”
Nonetheless, the British Armed Forces didn’t bite on Cody’s early advances. Undaunted, he persisted in his experiments: He sent a man a startling 14,000 feet into the air (a height bested only by a previous flight conducted by the Blue Hills Observatory in Massachusetts that vaulted a man 15,000 feet in the air), he participated in scientific kiting contests, and in 1903 he sailed a kite-powered boat across the Strait of Dover. Finally, the military extended a contract to Cody in 1905 and appointed him Chief Instructor in Kiting.
It is difficult, according to Skinner, to pin down how frequently such kites were used on the battlefield. Cody’s kites, although used by the army and navy in Britain until the beginning of the first World War, were not deployed operationally. Such kites seemed to be most popular with the French military, says Skinner. And of course, their obsolescence loomed as flying technology advanced. Cody collaborated with the army on developing flying machines, and on October 16, 1908, became the first person to pilot a powered airplane in Great Britain.
Such recognition probably meant a lot to Cody, who remarked bitterly to the London Standard in 1909 that, “I have been subjected to a great deal of ridicule and derision—laughed at, scoffed at, and been generally made a butt. Now it’s my turn.”
His contract with the military would end that year, but he continued to build and fly early airplanes. It was during one of these flights in 1913 that Cody met his demise. His craft broke up in the air, and both he and his passenger, a famous cricket player, were killed.
A friend recalled Cody for an obituary in the London Standard, writing bluntly even in Cody’s death about his complicated relationship with the military.
“The authorities countenanced him if they did not encourage him, but even they, I fancy, did not regard him very seriously,” wrote his acquaintance. “But Cody had genius, and to genius he added craftsmanship, a good deal of practical business ability, and an unconquerable determination to go through with what he took in hand.”
But the authorities clearly had some respect for the kite master—upon his death Cody received a full military funeral and burial in a military cemetery, even though his formal relationship with the armed forces had come to an end.
Today, says Skinner, it is important to marvel at the feats Cody and his ilk accomplished with the tools of the day.
“I think the thing we forget as modern kite fliers is that they were using materials that they were all very much used to—cotton, linen, bamboo,” he says. Today’s kite fliers have the advantage of working with rip stop nylon, carbon fiber and fiberglass.
Far from being a thing of the past, kite enthusiasm is thriving. Some builders have even undertaken the task of building modern man-lifting kites. Skinner described watching such a feat in Denmark in the early 1990s, when a group successfully lofted a man on high from a beach.
Skinner himself is headed to a dry lakebed near Las Vegas in April to “kite buggy”— the sport of being propelled swiftly across the land in a small cart powered by a kite.
“I would love to fly in a kite system, just because I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” he says. “But on the other hand, my sense come to me and says, mmmmmmm, maybe not!"
Unboxer extraordinaire Lamarr Wilson, for example, was so freaked out by this cup that he took a baseball bat to it. (That did the trick, by the way.)
Of course, the secret to this cup is that it’s really two cups—there’s a suction cup at the bottom that holds it up.
And there was once a time when suction cups, on their own, generated a similar kind of amazement from the American public.
The first reference to the devices in the New York Times, circa October 1925, sounded amazed by the suction cup’s ability to stick to any clear surface.
“The suction cup holds it fast to anything the cup is stuck to, whether it be the wash basin, the shaving mirror or the side wall of the bathroom,” the brief, discussing a shaving brush holder explained. “The sanitary side of the device of the device is stressed, it preventing the brush from being tipped over, knocked to the floor or otherwise dirtied.”
The article suggested that the device would “take a good deal of the trouble out of shaving, especially on Pullman cars.”
And in a lot of ways, the idea of suction still surprises us in big ways and small.
Last summer, for example, Michael Phelps decided to take to the pool in Rio with some noticeable marks all over his body. It turned out that the individual with the most Olympic medals of all time had been introduced to the Chinese art of cupping, a style of therapy involving heated glass cups that create a suction effect, and had been using it as part of his training process.
“I’ve done cupping for a while before meets,” Phelps explained, according to Time. “But I haven’t had a bruise like this for a while. I asked for a little help yesterday because I was a little sore and I was training hard.”
Whatever the case, it was good advertising for the technique, which is said to increase circulation.
“I’ve already gotten emails from a bunch of people saying, oh I need to make an appointment, I saw cupping last night,” Erika Weber, a licensed cupuncturist, told Fortune.
All suction works more or less the same way, by forcing out or limiting air, creating a vacuum effect, which holds the cup in place because of atmospheric pressure. It's a technology that ends up getting used in all sorts of interesting ways, like, for example, in LASIK surgery, or to help hold your phone in place as you drive.
It's also something that's made at least one person pretty rich.
Maybe the most famous suction cup is something that you probably associate with a bad memory: the rubber plunger, most often used to unclog your toilet.
“My invention has for its object to furnish a simple, convenient, and inexpensive device for clearing the vents or discharge-pipes of wash bowls, stationary wash-tubs, &c., should they become accidentally stopped,” Hawley wrote in his patent filing.
(As the Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog notes, Hawley’s most notable claim to fame came in the candy industry.)
We're even still trying to make better ones. Researchers at the University of Alaska Anchorage are currently working on prototype suction cups designed to work on rough or wet surfaces, with its approach inspired by the clingfish, an animal that’s naturally accustomed to such suctioning.
One guy who might be interested in that news is named Bill Adams, who has banked his entire career on high-quality suction cups.
Adams didn’t decide one day to start manufacturing the tiny vacuums, but in the late 1970s, while attempting to build a business centered around a device called the “window blanket"—essentially a piece of bubble wrap that homeowners would attach to attic windows—he struck accidental suction-cup gold. Window blankets were a thing at the time, but Adams’ solution was a failure, leaving him with a whole lot of bubble wrap and even more suction cups.
“I got the idea for suction cups when I saw that many businesses had signs in their window held by duct tape,” Adams told the Ellwood City Ledger last year. “I would stop and show them how the suction cups and tacks could hold their signs, look good and leave no mess when they were removed.”
So he ended up focusing on suction cups instead. Soon, his company was selling the tiny vacuums at retail, with things picking up after he started selling to a buyer for True Value. Good start, but there were problems with the original design. A Mercedes owner pointed out that his company’s suction cup damaged his vehicle because they unwittingly worked like magnifying glasses.
“It was then that he realized that not only must suction cups be perfectly made in order to work, but they also should be re-engineered to do no harm,” the Adams' company says on its website. “He redesigned the suction cups to disperse, rather than focus, light.”
So they kept at it, and by 1992, Adams Manufacturing had become the largest manufacturer of suction cups in the country, selling 50,000,000 of them that year, according to the Associated Press. Adams noted at the time that he would get fan mail from people who used the suction cups in unusual ways—including one guy who used it to put down his toilet seat, for the sake of his frustrated wife.
“He rigged up a contraption that would drop the toilet seat after a minute and a half,” Adams told the AP. “It may not have commercial possibilities, but it was a good idea.”
Among other things, the company also clears up one mystery on its website: whether adding moisture—perhaps, I don't know, by licking—to a suction cup helps its seal. The company says that “a tiny dab of Vaseline or cooking oil” will, in fact, improve the seal, a recommendation buttressed by the company's claim to having a "PhD in Suction Cup-Ology."
All of which is hard-earned experience, though Adams says he got lucky.
It is hard to miss when taking the train in Tokyo. White-gloved employees in crisp uniforms pointing smartly down the platform and calling out—seemingly to no one—as trains glide in and out of the station. Onboard is much the same, with drivers and conductors performing almost ritual-like movements as they tend to an array of dials, buttons and screens
Japan’s rail system has a well-deserved reputation for being among the very best in the world. An extensive network of tracks moving an estimated 12 billion passengers each year with an on-time performance measured in the seconds makes Japanese rail a precise, highly reliable transportation marvel.
Train conductors, drivers and station staff play an important role in the safe and efficient operation of the lines; a key aspect of which is the variety of physical gestures and vocal calls that they perform while undertaking their duties. While these might strike visitors as silly, the movements and shouts are a Japanese-innovated industrial safety method known as pointing-and-calling; a system that reduces workplace errors by up to 85 percent.
Known in Japanese as shisa kanko, pointing-and-calling works on the principle of associating one’s tasks with physical movements and vocalizations to prevent errors by “raising the consciousness levels of workers”—according to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, Japan. Rather than rely on a worker’s eyes or habit alone, each step in a given task is reinforced physically and audibly to ensure the step is both complete and accurate.
In the rail context, when train drivers wish to perform a required speed check, they do not simply glance at a display. Rather, the speedometer will be physically pointed at, with a call of “speed check, 80”—confirming the action taking place, and audibly confirming the correct speed. For station staff who ensure the platform-side tracks are free of debris or fallen passengers, a visual scan alone is not sufficient. Instead, the attendant will point down the track and sweep their arm along the length of the platform—eyes following the hand—before declaring all clear. The process repeats as the train departs, ensuring no bags—or passengers—are caught hanging from the train’s closed doors.
It is such an integral part of Japanese transportation that direction boards at the Kyoto Rail Museum even feature characters in the classic point-and-call stance.
The system is in place across a number of industries in Japan. Originally developed by the now-defunct Kobe Railroad Administration Bureau in the late Meiji Period (the early 20th century), pointing-and-calling is known to reduce workplace errors by up to 85 percent, according to one 1996 study. While some workers point-and-call more enthusiastically than others, even those who are more blasé benefit from the increased awareness that comes from physically reinforcing each task.
For such a simple but effective method of improving workers’ error rate, the system continues to find itself largely confined to Japan. Indeed, it is one of the many quirks of the Japanese workplace that fall flat with Western workers. In the case of pointing-and-calling, Japanese commentators have theorized that Western employees feel “silly” performing the requisite gestures and calls.
A notable exception is New York City’s MTA subway system, whose conductors have used a modified point-only system since 1996 after then Chief Transportation Officer Nathaniel Ford was fascinated by the point-and-call system during a business trip to Japan. In the MTA’s case, conductors point to a fixed black-and-white “zebra board” to confirm a stopped train is correctly located along the platform.
According to MTA spokeswoman Amanda Kwan, conductors were quick to adapt to the new system, and within two years of implementation, incidents of incorrectly berthed subways fell 57 percent.
Japanese workers are also not immune to feeling self-conscious when it comes to pointing-and-calling, although with training it soon becomes an accepted part of the job. A spokesperson for Tokyo Metro noted in a statement that new employees “ recognize pointing-and-calling as necessary for safe rail operations, and therefore do not feel embarrassment."
Mosquitoes are one of nature’s most annoying creations, and also one that we are still learning about. In fact, we weren't even actually sure quite how they get off the ground until just this week, when a newly-released paper revealed tests showing that have shed some light on their bizarre wing movement.
Given the size and shape of a mosquito, they shouldn’t really be able to fly the way they do. A paper published Wednesday in Nature revealed that instead of flapping their wings the same way a similarly-sized insect like a bumblebee might, mosquitoes twist their wings while they flap, creating a mini-vortex to keep them in the air.
In addition, the arcs their wings trace is also surprisingly small, covering just 44 degrees in each flap (an article on Quartz compares this to the 180 degrees of a butterfly’s flap). Because of this, mosquitoes have to move their wings incredibly fast to achieve lift. To quote the SCIENCE from the Nature paper, “their long, slender wings flap at remarkably high frequencies for their size (>800 Hz) and with lower stroke amplitudes than any other insect group.” It’s also this speed that gives them their telltale buzzing sound.
This discovery has an impact on the study of aerodynamics and insect biology, but unfortunately does nothing to make mosquitoes more tolerable.
Dennis Goslow keeps hens in Echo Bay, Ontario, near the Canadian-American border and the city of Sault Ste. Marie. Last week, according to CBC News, he made a surprising discovery: the biggest egg he's ever collected from one of his hens, weighing in at nearly half a pound.
Goslow hasn't cracked the egg open yet, but he wonders if the giant egg is in fact an egg within an egg, which result from a failed egg-laying, after which a second egg forms around the first.
Whatever the case, we can agree that Goslow's egg is still, by the rules of eggs, an egg, even if it is not the biggest chicken egg ever found. Guinness World Records says that one was laid in 1956 in New Jersey, and weighed just over a pound.
Goslow said he doesn't know which of his hens laid it, but he thinks of said hen with a mixture of pity and awe. "You can imagine, the poor thing coming out," Goslow told the CBC. "It looks like an egg, but it's a little rough."
But he has at least one suspect.
"I was looking for the one that didn't have any butt," he said. "When I was in there it seemed like one chicken was all light and happy."
Earlier this month, the social studies classrooms of Boston Public Schools underwent a slight but significant change in decor. Down came the Mercator Projection—a common choice of world maps for schools—which distorts the size of each land mass but keeps continental shapes intact. Up went a different map, the Peters, which stretches out the world in order to give each continent a proportionally accurate amount of room. On the Peters, Canada—so huge on the Mercator—shrinks to its proper size, while Africa, which the Mercator shows shrunk and jammed beneath a too-large Europe, stretches out.
Boston educators are celebrating the choice. "It was amazingly interesting to see [the students] questioning what they thought they knew," social studies director Natacha Scott told NPR after the Peters was introduced. And news articles about the swap tell a tidy story, in which a more enlightened representation of the world rightfully replaces an outmoded one.
But many map historians are privately disheartened—not by the switch itself, but by the resuscitation of the Mercator-Peters rivalry, a conflict that has bedeviled public-facing cartography for decades, and which they see as a manufactured, false choice.
"News of Boston public schools' decision to go with the Peters projection has gone viral over the past week, and my teeth have not stopped itching," Jonathan Crowe writes on his blog, The Map Room. "It is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded to say it should be one or the other," says Mark Monmonier, author of Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Even Ronald Grim, curator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, had concerns: "In my mind, both the Mercator and the Peters are controversial projections," he says in a phone interview. "But we were not asked to be part of the decision."
Choosing between map projections is a necessarily difficult task. The Earth is resolutely three-dimensional, and any attempts to smooth it out are going to add a certain amount of warping. It's a balancing act: the more accurate you make the continents' relative area, the more you have to distort their shapes, and vice versa. The art of cartography lies in choosing to privilege one or another of these accuracies—or finding a sweet spot between them that serves your particular purpose.
That said, no one is too sad to see the Mercator go. It's over 400 years old, and its flaws are legion. The Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who came up with the projection, was trying to enable sailors to plot a smooth, straight course across the ocean. To accomplish this, he had to sacrifice accuracy in other areas, namely, the relative sizes of the continents. In the Mercator Projection, land masses near the equator—such as Africa and South America—are squished, while those near the poles, like Alaska and Northern Europe, are stretched out. Meanwhile, Antarctica is rendered so large that map publishers often don't bother to include all of it. In the process, they generally recenter the world vertically on Europe, rather than the equator.
In the past, white supremacists have celebrated these geometric incidentals. "[The Mercator] has been used by some pro-Western, pro-Imperial types in the 19th and 20th centuries to map the world, as Europe and North America look much bigger than they are vis-a-vis the more tropical areas they exploited," writes Matthew Edney, a professor of cartographic history at the University of Southern Maine, in an email. Others argue that by enabling exploration in the first place, the Mercator is an inherently colonialist map. And in the present day, its ubiquity contributes to a virulent strain of racially inflected geographic ignorance—for instance, it makes Africa appear to be the same size as Greenland, when it's really about fourteen times bigger.
It's this last issue that Boston Public Schools, which serves a student population that is 74 percent black, is responding to. “We were primarily concerned with the notion of decolonizing our curriculum,” says Hayden Frederick-Clarke, Director of Cultural Proficiency for the school district, and the person who decided to make the switch. Schools across the country are working to combat the racism that often persists in older textbooks and other classroom materials. To Frederick-Clarke, swapping the Mercator for the Peters was an opportunity to address this imbalance—a first step in what, over the next three years, will become a much larger lift. "It's a systems test, as well as a symbolic representation of what we'd like to do to our curricula writ large," he says.
To other experts, though, trading the Mercator for the Peters isn't a step up. Instead, they say, it swaps geographic distortion for a kind of historical ignorance. When the historian Arno Peters came up with his projection, in the 1970s, he was unwittingly copying a much older map, the Gall Projection, which was invented by a Scottish minister in the 1860s. (The Peters projection is also known as the the Gall-Peters, for this reason.) On its own, it was never particularly popular. "Arthur Robinson famously said that it looks like long underwear hung out on a clothesline," says Monmonier. "Most cartographers were not big fans of it."
Peters' main success, then, was in rebranding. In order to push for his map's adoption, he constructed a careful case, based primarily on comparing it to the Mercator. The Mercator "over-values the white man and distorts the picture of the world to the advantage of the colonial masters of the time," Peters wrote. Only his own equal-area map, he said, avoided these problems while still preserving accuracy and clarity.
The gambit worked. Oxfam, UNICEF, and UNESCO all eventually began using and distributing Peters' map. The media, excited by the idea of an academic map battle, eagerly covered the rivalry. Even the television show TheWest Wingtalked it up, via an imaginary association called Cartographers for Social Equality.
Actual cartographers, though, remained—and remain—unimpressed. "Arno Peters concocted a veritable farrago of lies to sell his map," writes Edney. "He came up with a number of properties so that he could say, 'only two maps meet all properties properly, Mercator's projection and mine—and Mercator's suffers from all these political problems, so use mine!' All of his properties are complete B.S."
Peters's contemporaries called him "absurd" and "cartographically naïve," and his map "pretentious and misleading… nonsense."
"I'm surprised at the Boston school board and committee," says Monmonier. "I think they were sold a bill of goods."
Even without this backstory, Edney, Monmonier and others say there are plenty of better equal-area maps than the Peters. Edney recommends the Ecker IV projection, which preserves the continents' proportionality and positions without sacrificing too much of their shape. Monmonier thinks anyone concerned with geographic fairness should be using demographic base maps, in which each country's size is based on its population. Grim thinks the more, the merrier: "If they asked me, what I would advocate is that they have many maps, or several at least," he says. He is working on an editorial to this effect, which he hopes to publish sometime soon.
Frederick-Clarke—who says he considered a number of projections before settling on the Peters—is sticking by his choice. "It's a fact that the Peters map is the map that presents the size of the countries in the most accurate form," he says. If people are surprised at what that looks like, all the better.
Solomon Warner went west in 1830s. A tall man—6’6”—from upstate New York, he traveled to California to find gold, before settling in Tucson and setting up a business selling goods to people passing through on the Butterfield stage coach. When he died in 1899, he left behind a wooden trunk full of possessions that became family treasures, including a Bible, a saddle blanket, and a pair of old jeans.
Those jeans, a pair of Levi’s, may be the oldest pair of unworn jeans still in existence, reports Fox Business News.
Jock Taylor inherited the trunk and when he found the jeans, he started wondering about them. He took the jeans to an auctioneer, who started decoding the clues to their age.
They had exposed rivets (which dated them before 1937), suspender buttons (pre-1922, when belt loops appeared on the jeans), and a single back pocket (pre-1901). The auctioneer dated them around 1893. They were so large, with a 44 waist and a 37 leg, and so old, that they likely belonged to Warner himself, who would have needed long pants to fit his tall body.
To connoisseurs, vintage denim is incredibly desirable, and the fact that these pants were never worn makes them that much valuable. Taylor has been offered $50,000 for them by Levi’s, but for now he’s holding onto his treasure.
Massachusetts is destroying its toll plazas. By the end of this year, every single one on the Massachusetts Turnpike will have been demolished. Drivers will still pay to use the road—they will zoom through the metal arches of electronic tolling infrastructure—but the routine of slowing down, stopping to grab a ticket, and waiting for the barrier to rise will be gone.
Massachusetts is being more aggressive than most places about sweeping away its old tolling infrastructure, but all across the country, from New York to Florida, Texas to California, road authorities are switching to all-electronic tolling. While it’s too soon to declare the tollbooth dead, it’s easy to imagine a future in which roads are unencumbered by boxy plazas and simple gates.
If toll plazas are an endangered species of infrastructure, though, no one seems worried. Most of the time, when familiar landscapes are altered, people who have become accustomed to them kick up a fuss. But in this case there’s little love lost. When toll plazas are gone, will anyone miss them? Will future generations think ours shortsighted for letting this piece of history be demolished? Is there anything about tollbooths worth preserving?
It’s not that Americans are entirely lacking in nostalgia for toll-collection infrastructure. Along the historic roads of the United States, it’s possible to find toll houses dating back to the 1830s. “Especially when you go to the 19th century, there’s more interest in the toll houses than the road itself,” says Paul Daniel Marriott, who specializes in preservation planning for historic roads. The original toll houses of the National Road, for instance, were built by the federal government before it handed over operation of the country’s first major artery—from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois—to the states. Each toll house had a hexagonal second floor with windows on all six sides, so the toll keeper could look up and down the road for travelers.
But it’s rare for preservationists to pay attention to more modern toll structures. A representative of the Society for Commercial Archaeology, which is devoted to preserving motels, neon signs, and other aspects of the 20th century’s “commercial landscape,” asked around but could find no member who’d done any work on tollbooths. In fact, there may have been only one major preservation effort to save a 20th century toll plaza—a 1988 campaign to save the tollbooths of Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway.
As high-speed roads go, the Merritt is extraordinary pleasant, a leafy, tree-heavy drive that meanders under dozens of bridges, each with a unique design. The parkway, which was completed in 1940, was meant to be more than “another highway catering to the burgeoning commuter population,” writes Bruce Radde in The Merritt Parkway. “It was lauded by design professionals and critics for its excellent engineering, it respect for the natural environment, and its inherent beauty.”
The tollbooths were added to the parkway before its second half was finished, and were designed by George Dunkelberger, who was also responsible for the road’s iconic bridges. The booths looked like log cabins that might not be out of place in a National Park. Like most newly imposed tolls, this one was celebrated by public officials and met with some public skepticism: A contemporary news story describes how one Matthew E. Scully sped through a new toll booth at 30 miles per hour and tossed his 10-cent fare at the attendant. (He was arrested immediately by a police officer waiting on the other side.)
Almost 50 years later, though, after highways had become bigger and faster, those tollbooths began to evoke a certain nostalgia. “I had fond childhood memories of Sunday drives on the Merritt, slowing down and dropping the dime into the little log cabin,” says David Carris, who was working at the time as a preservationist in New Haven, Connecticut.
By 1988, parts of the original Merritt Parkway had been converted into more modern interstate, and the rest was under threat. “You could see it was already being chipped away,” Carris says. When the Merritt tollbooths were slated for removal, he and a coalition of other preservationists decided to fight for them. They began trying to convince the government to keep demolition crews at bay and looking for museums or parks that might agree to adopt one of the old toll plazas.
They didn’t encounter opposition, exactly. “If somebody wants to preserve [the tollbooths], I have no problem with that … Just get them off the darn highway,” the president of a commuters’ group told the Hartford Courant. The government was also happy to let preservationists have the tollbooths. Carris, along with the Committee to Save the Merritt Parkway and other preservation organizations, found a home for part of the Merritt’s first toll plaza at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan. Another tollbooth went to Connecticut’s Boothe Memorial Park, an eclectic collection on the site of the Boothe family estate. The campaign was, overall, a success.
Often, in cases like this, the leader of a successful preservation project will hear from other people waging similar campaigns. But as far as Carris knows, this is the only preservation effort of its kind. “I’ve never heard of anyone else trying to save tollbooth,” says Carris. “They disappear, and you don’t even really notice it.”
The effort to save the Merritt tollbooths wasn’t only about the actual toll infrastructure. Carris and the rest of the coalition saw their campaign as part of a longer fight to save the historic landscape of the Merritt from being folded into a modern highway. To the extent that tollbooths catch preservationists’ interest at all, it’s often because they’re part of larger projects.
“Many toll facilities were associated with significant engineering undertakings,” says Marriott, the historic road specialist. “It’s there where you find the higher level of investment and tollbooths that are part of the overall design and aesthetic.” One toll plaza that caught his eye, for instance, is the one on the Golden Gate Bridge, where not just the bridge but the lighting, the booths, and other details were carefully considered. When people like him try to capture a breath of the past, these details help complete the picture, he says.
Tollbooths, though, are so overlooked that they’re usually badly maintained. Both Carris and Marriott mentioned the New York State Thruway toll plaza—a “piece of international modernist infrastructure strung out over I-95,” in Carris’ words—as striking and worthy of more attention. “They’re not taking care of it,” says Marriott. “It’s really shabby. There’s missing letters. It’s not been cleaned or cared for, for a long time.”
The Thruway toll plaza represents a recent-enough past that few people probably think of it as in need of preservation. Further, when infrastructure is badly cared for, it becomes less noticeable and attractive—and therefore less likely to receive the outpouring of affection that preservation campaigns often depend on.
Even unloved tollbooths, though, may one day be missed if they disappear. “Why care about tollbooths? I can make the case,” says Carris. “They make you stop. We have a 12,000-year history of city-making and one of the unique experiences of entering and leaving a gated city was going through the city gates. In a way, there was a ritual associated with tollbooths of entering and leaving the city, and it’s an important human experience that we’re losing in this age of E-ZPass.” Tollbooths help mark the boundaries of place, and they can be monuments to human achievement.
“When the interstate system was so magnificent and futuristic—the Thruway tollbooth captures that,” says Marriott. Today, our highways are more likely to be worn and in need of repair. Maybe it would be worthwhile to remember the moment when we cared enough about them to make even the toll plazas a little bit magnificent.
Why did the dinosaurs cross the bridge? After two of the large, prehistoric creatures were spotted sauntering over the Thames this past Monday, much of London is searching for the answer to this riddle.
The dinos took their stroll around 4 pm on Monday, "leaving the capital's tourist and office workers bemused," writes the Evening Standard. Photos and video footage show the two carnivores easing on down the bridge's pedestrian sidewalk, tiny arms swinging.
"It is not clear why the dinosaurs were on the bridge" the Southwark News reports—although several commenters suggested some kind of viral marketing campaign, possibly tied to an upcoming museum exhibit.
The most obvious answer to the riddle, of course, is that dinosaurs can do whatever the heck they want. Oh, and also, to get to the other side.
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 most professions, all it takes to form an after-work bowling league is an overly long email chain and some beer money. As a declassified memo recently unearthed in CREST shows, in the CIA, it’s a lot more complicated.
To cope with these rather unique challenges, the Agency formed the Employee Activity Association (EAA), which, in exchange for membership dues, would ensure that next weekend’s fishing trip would have a plausible cover story.
The activities themselves are ranked by tiers of plausible deniability to CIA affiliation, from Glee Club (least suspicious) to Football (most suspicious).
Note that Men’s Basketball was a tier less suspicious than Women’s Basketball.
Depending on a member’s current assignment and cover concerns, the EAA would evaluate which tiers they could participate in - which might mean that golf game will have to wait until after you’re done overthrowing that democratically-elected government.
In turn, members were expected to keep the existence or non-existence of the ping-pong team a secret and to attend security briefings.
Yes, you read that right. CIA agents had to be briefed before bowling.
Also included was the Director’s response to the memo, which was tepid, to put it politely - to him, the whole thing stank of a membership drive for the EAA.
Regardless, the EAA continued on for decades, eventually getting its own facility and even a store. Which, apparently, was constantly being stolen from, but that’s a story for another day.
