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A Forgotten Desk Drawer Hid a Poetic Pop Culture Gem

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There was nothing remarkable about the faux colonial escritoire, or writing desk, made from pressed wood and veneer, that Patrick Lyon bought in 2002 during a furniture purge at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. But several years later, during a move, he noticed some seemingly fragmentary scribbles in red ink on the underside of one of its drawers. They were short poetic fragments, some signed clearly, others cryptically: MICHAEL STIPE, G. Lee PHILLIPS, J. McK. “95”, t.g.

GINGER VODKA
LAVENDER TEA
LIFE IS GOOD BEYOND THIS
MICHAEL STIPE

Lyon thought them interesting, but didn’t get around to investigating further until 2016. He had been considering retiring the aging, battered desk, and told his girlfriend, Cristin O’Brien, a police detective, about the markings. She consulted her brother, Param Anand Singh (who changed his name after converting to Sikhism), to help uncover the social history of the desk.

Leon Theremin’s Ashes
Blown from the speakers
Broken conductors
G. Lee PHILLIPS

Singh, himself a poet, recognized Stipe as the lead singer of R.E.M., and speculated that the fragments might be song lyrics. “G. Lee PHILLIPS,” he reasoned, could be Grant-Lee Phillips, the singer-songwriter from the band Grant Lee Buffalo. With a little digging on the internet, he found that R.E.M. and Grant Lee Buffalo had played two shows together in 1995 in Landover, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. On Stipe’s Wikipedia page, Singh found a reference to filmmaker Jim McKay, the “J. McK” on the drawer. His sister found a handwriting sample from Stipe online and compared it to the text. And a search for lines lifted directly from the drawer led them to a book called the haiku year. The poems didn’t fit the precise form of traditional Japanese haiku, but they shared its brevity and interesting juxtapositions. It turns out Singh had stumbled upon an artifact of the first night of a literary phenomenon. “I barely got to sleep the night that we figured out where the drawer had come from,” he says.

Stale smoky sweatshirt
covers the lampshade
like a finished party
J. McK. “95”

Last May, Singh posted a blog on the online literary magazine Real Pants to ask for readers’ help to connect him with the haiku authors so he could return what belongs to them. Days before he published the essay, the desk was blown from the back of Lyon’s pick-up truck and destroyed. But the drawer survived. 

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 A collector immediately reached out to Singh about buying the drawer, but he wasn’t seeking reward or payment. “I felt like to sell the thing would be to cash in the magic,” he says. “I just didn’t want to be on that side of the moment.” In his essay, Singh wrote of imagining the poetry itself “exerting an inherent attractive power to reunite the poem with the poet.” 


The essay soon was passed on to filmmaker Tom Gilroy (the drawer’s “t.g.”), who forwarded it to Stipe and McKay. “It was like a great detective novel poem,” McKay says. “The way the twists and epiphanies kept coming and coming.”

The radio landscape
colors the room
like fog
t.g.

In 1995, Gilroy and a group of friends that frequently collaborated on creative projects had gathered at the Four Seasons and made a promise to write one haiku a day for a year and mail them to each other. They sealed their promise by inscribing their inaugural haiku on a piece of furniture. “I’ve been writing on the bottom of hotel room drawers for a very long time,” says Stipe.

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Gilroy recalls, “The truth is we were so blasted that we were lying on our backs on the floor with the lights out. If we were lying on our stomachs you’d be writing an article about a guy who found a bathmat with haiku written on it.”

The friends dispersed, and kept their vow. Scrawled on tiny scraps of paper, the backs of discarded envelopes, and torn matchbook covers, these intimate poetic missives passed between friends, and eventually grew into a book project that was published in 1998.

the haiku year (Soft Skull Press) was an instant hit—fueled by the notoriety of its contributors: Stipe and Phillips, Gilroy and McKay, as well as novelist Douglas Martin, actress Anna Grace, and activist Rick Roth. The project spawned community haiku-writing circles and spin-offs, inspired authors such as Ellis Avery to produce their own collections, and further elevated a form of classical Japanese poetry in the mainstream pop vocabulary. The book even won a Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults award from the Young Adult Library Services Association in 2001.

Though popular interest in haiku has faded, every once in a while, a reader surprises Gilroy by referring to the book. “Now that surprise has been replaced by ‘of course,’” he says. The book inspired O’Brien, who does not usually write poetry, to take up a year-long haiku challenge, and start a haiku-themed fundraiser for the Child Advocacy Center in Watertown, New York.

“I’d thought of that night many times, about how it started the haiku journey. But I’d never once ever wondered what happened to the drawer,” says Gilroy. “I started crying. Of course. It was supposed to be found by a guy who would figure out what it was and return it to us. When those things happen you just have to give up to the awe.”

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On a rainy Saturday morning in late 2016, Singh and Lyon made the five-hour drive from their town near Syracuse to Renssealerville, New York, to deliver the worn wooden drawer to Gilroy. “It was one of those merciful moments when the universe offers some unwarranted pleasantness,” says Singh. They talked about Brexit, filmmaking, bands, fame, Athens, Baltimore, Bernie, gun control, and upstate New York, and walked through the woods, past the ruins of an old mill. Gilroy gave them a box of objects printed with haiku—a bundle of broadsides, a screenprinted bandana and dishtowel, and a hardcover copy of the haiku year signed by all of its contributors. And though Gilroy quietly suggested—more than once—that Singh could keep the drawer if it had some talismanic poetic value to him, the discoverer seemed intent on the idea that, says Gilroy, “the journey should end with us and not him."


Listen to the Strange and Wonderful Sound of One of Earth's Best Whistlers

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Sometimes, when Molly Lewis tries to explain her work as a whistler, she calls herself a human theremin. The tone and sound of whistling, she thinks, are similar to the unearthly vibrations of the early electronic instrument—a sound that people tend to recognize. “But whistling has a human quality, which I think is important,” she says. “It’s a mixture of natural and out of this world.”

Usually, though, she explains herself by whistling. Most people can whistle, but before hearing a serious whistler practice their art, it can be hard to understand that a human whistle, like a human voice, can be a beautiful instrument.

Lewis is one of the few musicians in the world who raise whistling to an art. In Los Angeles, where she’s based, she performs live, as a session musician and on film soundtracks, though she doesn’t always like to call herself a professional whistler, since it makes something she loves seem like too much like a job. “People don’t understand what I do, unless I say I do it professionally,” she says. “But it’s so much more.” There’s a quote she likes, from Fred Lowery, a whistler from the 1930s: “Whistling is a magical gift, and there’s always a place in this world for magic.”

“It’s very apt,” she says. “You can’t really study or learn whistling, but it is kind of magical to see and hear.” 

Lewis first realized there are virtuoso whistlers in the world after her parents introduced her to the 2005 film Pucker Up, which follows four whistlers through the competition of the International Whistlers Convention (IWC), and gave her an album by Steve “The Whistler” Herbst. She can’t remember now if her parents gave her these gifts as a joke, or because she whistled so much even then, but her dad was serious enough about her talent that he’d promised to take her to the IWC, should she ever want to go. In 2012, they showed up in small-town Louisburg, North Carolina, where the IWC had been held since 1973.

Although at the time she might have called herself an “aspiring whistler,” even on her way to the IWC, Lewis herself didn’t quite take the pursuit seriously.  “The competition was a hilarious outing, more a chance to see this obscure world and take part of a real-life Christopher Guest movie experience,” she says.

Serious whistlers are a small group, spread across the world, and for decades the IWC was their gathering point. Unlike other musicians, whistlers are rarely taught to develop their gift. Often, they have no idea that there are other people who love to whistle, or who whistle with such skill, until they stumble across the IWC. Every year, a few dozen people gathered in Louisburg, and over the course of three days each had the chance to take the stage at the high school where the competition was held. “You’re watching everything from pretty bad whistling to world-class improvised jazz whistling,” says Lewis. “It’s diverse and strange.”

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One of the most compelling features, for her, of the competition was being able to talk to other whistlers about whistling. There’s no standard set of whistling exercises or a famous whistling curriculum. At the time it was helpful for her to hear even small tips. Make sure to drink water. Use chapstick. Before she went to the competition, she had emailed Geert Chatrou, the hero of Pucker Up, who won the 2004 competition, his first, and has since performed with orchestras all around the world. She wrote thinking that this big celebrity whistler, one of the most incredible whistlers she’d ever heard, wouldn’t have time to answer. He wrote her back a couple hours later.

Besides passing on the advice about Chapstick, he tipped her off about popular songs: the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute, for instance, is a whistler go-to. She ended up performing Puccini’s O mio babbino caro and Patsy Cline’s Crazy. She didn’t win an award that year, but she had whistled on stage. "It gave me confidence to try that again," she says. "It was the catalyst for doing other whistling things: I wasn't just someone who whistled—I was a competitive whistler."

Lewis moved back to Los Angeles, where she grew up, to work in film, but she also had the thought that she might be able to get work whistling on soundtracks. It was one of her dreams, and she knew there might be a need. Quentin Tarantino uses a lot of whistling; Ennio Morricone, too.

After she arrived, she started meeting more musicians and other people excited about harnessing her talent. She whistled in a studio for the first time. Word of the whistling musician spread, and soon she was getting more work whistling than ever before. In 2015, she won first place in the women’s live band division at the Masters of Musical Whistling competition in Pasadena, California, which was created by Carole Anne Kaufman, the Whistling Diva, after the sponsor of the IWC announced that it would no longer support the competition. She describes the trophy she took home as “the gaudiest trophy” and a “great artifact.”

These days, Lewis manages to maintain her sense of cheeky humor about whistling and the whistling world, while actually taking her own music more seriously. Recently, she performed on a film score, which required her to whistle like a little girl would, with a bit of hesitation, working to find the melody. She wants to start a monthly act with a pianist friend, and she even has a venue in mind, an old bar in North Hollywood with a stage and a dedication to live music. She’s looking for grant money to visit the few places in the world that have languages based on whistling. Her plan is to document the whistled words and use those languages in her music.

I never take whistling too seriously—I take it seriously enough to love it,” she says. “It’s the weird and the wonderful, and that’s why I love it."

You can see Molly Lewis whistle in Los Angeles on Obscura Day—May 6, 2017—at Casa Larissa After Dark, when a "living, breathing cabinet of curiosities" will be opened up for a night of exploration and performance.

Found: An Ancient Tick Preserved in Amber With Fossilized Mammal Blood

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A specimen of amber, found in the mines of the Cordillera Septentrional, a mountain range that runs through the Dominican Republic, contains a very unusual specimen. Inside the amber is a tick, along with blood cells from the tick’s last meal—the first fossilized red blood cells from a mammal ever discovered.

This discovery, reported in a new paper in the Journal of Medical Entomology, comes from George Poinar, Jr., an entomologist and professor emeritus at Oregon State University. If an insect preserved in amber along with ancient blood cells sounds like a scenario out of Jurassic Park, that’s in part because Poinar’s research helped inspire the premise of Michael Crichton’s famous book.

How were these blood cells preserved with such clarity? The tick has two puncture marks on its back, which could have come from another creature picking the tick off its victim. That’s consistent with the grooming behavior of monkeys known to be living 20 to 30 million years ago in the area where the fossil was found. Imagine this sequence: the tick bit a monkey; another monkey picked the tick off while it was still full of blood; the tick landed in a bit of tree sap; the tree sap fossilized into amber.

Because the blood cells were so well preserved, Poinar was able to observe another feature: inside the blood cells, there are ancient parasites. Being able to study this ancient parasite, which is still around today, can help scientists understand the evolution and longevity of these diseases.

Don't expect (or worry) about an effort to reanimate ancient monkeys from the blood cells' DNA, though. Poinar told Gizmodo that while he'd love to extract DNA from the cells, the procedure would ruin the specimen.

The French Government Is About to Destroy $106,000,000 Worth of Cigarettes

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Over the past year, France has passed a number of new laws designed to make cigarettes less appealing. Last April, it was decreed that tobacco shops had to package their wares in plain, dark green cartons, with brand names printed in a small, preselected typeface, and no logos. (The cartons also have very visceral health warnings, often featuring actual viscera.)

This January, they cracked down on "glamorous" cigarette names, telling Vogue, Corset, Allure, and other brands that they'd have to find new monikers within a year.

Apparently, these efforts have worked: The Local reports that the French government is going to have to cough up about €100,000,000 or $106,000,000, to buy leftover branded cigarettes from tobacconists around the country.

"There were 250 tons of branded cigarettes—made up of 15 million packets of cigarettes and loose tobacco packets—that were deemed unusable according to the new law," The Local writes.

Forty workers from the Logista distribution company are now going through the recalled cigarettes and paying back the stores that had to give them up. When they're all sorted out, the government will burn them—hopefully somewhere far away.

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.

This Century-Long Photo Project Documents Montana's Shrinking Glaciers

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There are lots of high-tech ways to document climate change, but at Glacier National Park in Montana, a simple tool has been put into play: a camera.

It’s tough to comprehend the vastness of the offerings at this Montana landmark: the over 1 million acres of wilderness encompass 762 lakes, 175 mountains, almost 2,000 species of plants, 71 species of mammals including wooly mountain goats and lumbering grizzly bears, and—oh yes, the stars of the show—glaciers. But those glaciers are disappearing. In 1850 it was estimated the park (nicknamed “The Crown of the Continent”) had 150 glaciers. Today it has 25 glaciers considered active—large enough to be moving. It has been predicted that all of the park’s glaciers could melt as soon as 2030.

In 1997 Lisa McKeon, a physical scientist with the United States Geological Survey who works in the park, came across a pair of historic photographs depicting the glaciers she studies. Over the years, countless photos of the majestic park have been snapped, and many of those have become part of the park’s official archive, spanning over a century. It was a lightbulb moment: Why not use the old photos to create a timeline of the morphing glaciers, and add new photos every year? The Repeat Photography Project was born.

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“Since 1997, the project has taken other twists and turns and become really popular with people who use them to illustrate the effects of climate change,” says McKeon. “It’s kind of taken on a life of its own.”

The most dramatic differences exposed in the photos are the shrinking size of the glaciers, but there are other shifts, such as the encroachment of alpine greenery where once there was ice. Unlike data, the photos are a visceral and immediate way to communicate to the public the vast changes taking place.

The images, which reside in the public domain, have been transformed into a traveling museum exhibit, used as teaching tools and in standardized tests—they once even found their way into an Italian rock-climbing magazine.

To date, the park has repeated over 70 historic photos from 28 glaciers, and this is no simple feat.

“All the photos, you have to hike to the site and some are day trips and some are multi-day trips into the backcountry,” says McKeon.

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Some glaciers don’t even have historical images, because they’re so hard to access. Add to this the fact that McKeon and her fellow staffers can only photograph the glaciers during a small window that begins at the end of August after the snow has melted and lasts about a month before it starts falling again. That window is even slimmer in years when the snow persists or the smoke from forest fires blankets the landscape. Some years they get one shot, some years they get 10.

Lining up the shot can also be a challenge—there’s no X-marks-the-spot to tell photographers where they should stand. To get the perfect picture, McKeon uses guesswork based on old images, bushwhacking through the park to find just the right angle. Technology has helped a little with that—now she uses Google Earth and satellite imagery to approximate locations and GPS coordinates from the comfort of her office before striking out on foot.

“Sometimes it’s really obvious as you approach,” says McKeon, “You’re like, oh, there’s a giant rock that the original photographer put their giant wooden tripod on.”

McKeon marvels at the difficulties her predecessors contended with. Early park documentarians traversed the steep inclines and valleys of the park with heavy glass plates and other now-antiquated photography equipment. Naturalists and scientists shot the park, as well as photographers hired by the Great Northern Railway, which advertised the area as the “Playground of the Northwest”. And some of the photographers worked on behalf of the USGS. Re-tracing their footsteps 100 years later is part of the appeal for McKeon. Once, while hunting around the rugged terrain, she stumbled across a long-obscured path. Following it, she found the horizon line in front of her matched the one in the old photo. Who could know how long it had been since some intrepid explorer had last snapped a shot from that forgotten trail?

One thing McKeon has discovered about photography after 20 years of heading up the project is that no matter how pretty or important the landscape depicted is, people like pictures of people. That’s why if there’s a person in a historic photo, they’ll try to have someone pose in the same position. One photo that seemed unlikely to be repeated was a 1932 image of Boulder Glacier. In the foreground are a group of men with horses, looking like extras from a cowboy movie in their brimmed hats and rustic attire. In 1998, McKeon and her team set out to find the spot, without any equine extras on hand to create a perfect copy.

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“And then we finally found it and we look up and lo and behold, here comes a guy walking along with two mules,” says McKeon.

She raced up the slope and asked the man and his friend to pose in the photo. They agreed. Grinning, attired in modern hiking gear, the pair became part of official park history.

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Repeat photography is not unique to Glacier National Park. Denali National Park in Alaska also has a repeat photography project. Researchers are repeating photos in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and there are groups that connect “citizen scientists” with repeat photo opportunities throughout North and South American and South Africa. Repeat photography has been used to document shifting urban landscapes, as well.

McKeon hopes to begin enlisting the help of volunteers, too, and continues to try to expand the park’s database of images, a task on which there is a time limit.

Daniel Fagre, a research ecologist with the USGS, minced no words when he stated in a 2016 NASA blog that within decades the park's remaining glaciers will become “small insignificant lumps of ice on the landscape."

The photo archive may soon become the only way to view the glaciers for which the park is named.

'Miami English' and the Linguistic Oddness of South Florida

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Florida is weird.

That much probably goes without saying; in its flora and fauna, its cultural history, its politics, its singularly bizarre criminal elements, and its natural ecosystems, there is nowhere else like it. So it should come as no surprise that, though it theoretically is part of the American South, pretty much any discussion of Southern linguistics comes with a caveat: “Well, except South Florida.”

South Floridians do not have the pin-pen merger, which makes the word “ten” sound like “tin.” They do not “front their O,” which turns a word like “boat” into “beh-oht.” They do not turn simple sounds into complex ones, like “friend” into “free-ay-ind” (this is also known as a Southern drawl). These are standards throughout the American South, and they are almost completely absent from South Florida.

So, well, what do South Floridians sound like? And how did this weirdness happen?


South Florida is not any one thing—how could it be, with a mix of Cubans, whites, Haitians, Colombians, Jews, Nicaraguans, Jamaicans, Bahamians, Barbadians, Puerto Ricans, and about a dozen others—but it’s actually always been like that.

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“Even in the pre-Columbian sense, South Florida is in the Caribbean, whether people want to admit that or not,” says Phillip Carter, a linguistics professor at Florida International University and one of the foremost experts on the dialect of Miami and South Florida. As far back as we can reach, the tip of the Floridian peninsula has been a site of interchange: even the most famous of Florida indigenous groups, the Seminoles, was a heterogeneous conglomeration of tribes that didn’t even get to Florida until the early 1700s.

Links between South Florida and the islands of the Caribbean before Europeans arrived are fiercely debated, but as soon as the Spanish showed up with their nice ships and drive for exploration (and other less good things), Florida became inextricably part of the Caribbean. Pirates, treasure hunters, slaves. But South Florida remained extremely sparsely populated until the 20th century.

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Miami is a young city; in 1900, fewer than 2,000 people lived there. South Florida, unlike North Florida and the rest of the South, never really had enough people in it to become part of the rich tapestry of its region. South Florida was, mostly, a swamp, seen as an unforgiving backwater, suited maybe for some farms but not much else. That couldn’t, and didn’t, last: by 1930, buoyed by cheap land prices, people from North Florida and Georgia began moving down to the Miami area, increasing the city’s population to over 100,000.

By 1950, that population had more than doubled, to about 250,000, but the new Miamians weren’t, for the most part, Southerners. The promise of endless sunshine coupled with the new invention of air conditioning finally reached the North, and migrants from the Rust Belt and Northeast began coming down in droves. Italian-Americans and Jews from the New York area took their place alongside Southerners.

But that all changed soon. White flight, the movement of Anglo whites from cities, began in the 1950s and 1960s. The populations of, for example, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, all took huge hits. But Miami’s didn’t: it kept growing. That’s all thanks to Cuba.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 found a young Fidel Castro taking over the island nation so near to Miami. Cuba’s wealthy elite, newly targeted, fled en masse. In 1960, only 4 percent of Miami was Cuban; by 1970 it was 24 percent and by 1980 it was 36 percent. The success of Cubans in Miami, as well as Miami’s familiar climate and substantial numbers of Spanish speakers, made it a hub for people fleeing Latin America: Colombians, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, and others chose Miami as their city as well.

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The same thing happened with non-Spanish-speaking Caribbeans: there was already a base from the old slave systems, but Haitians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Bahamians, and Trinidadians came over as well. Today Miami is 70 percent Latino, about 20 percent black (mostly those Afro-Caribbeans), and only 12 percent white.


The fact that this happened so quickly has made Miami unusual, linguistically. The Miami dialect is not a second-language accent, like you’d hear from a Cuban immigrant whose first language is Spanish. It is an American English dialect like New York City English, Southern American English, or any other dialect in this country: spoken by native-born Americans who speak English either as a first language or fluently along with the language of their parents. Which doesn’t stop the accent from seeming foreign to others: Carter says that his students will sometimes find themselves in a neighboring county, only to be asked what country they’re from.

There’s a whole bunch of things that set Miami English apart from other dialects. Much of it comes from Spanish: words or sounds that are pronounced in a certain way in Spanish will eventually show up in English. An easy one is the word “salmon,” which in Miami is pronounced with the L: “sall-mon.” That comes directly from the Spanish word for the fish, which is, well, salmón. (Spanish has no silent letters.)

But that letter L gets even weirder. It turns out Spanish and English have different pronunciations of the letter, which are referred to as “light L” and “dark L.” English actually has both of them: a light L is found in words starting with L, like the word “light.” A dark L is found sometimes at the ends of words, as in the word “feel.” Say that out loud: can you hear how, in “feel,” it sounds almost like “fee-yul”? That “ull-” sound as the first part of the L sound, that’s a dark L, and it’s made with a slightly different shape of your tongue in your mouth. In Miami, all L sounds are dark, so a word like “literally” sounds more like “ull-iterally.”

Vowels also show some impact from Spanish. Elsewhere in the country, English speakers have a tendency to “front” some vowels. “Front” and “back” refers to the position of your tongue in your mouth, so “ee” is a front vowel, whereas “oh” and “ooh” are back vowels. In the South and Mid-Atlantic, English speakers will move their back vowels a little to the front, so “boat” sounds like “behh-oht.” But in Spanish, that’s absolutely not done, and that carries over to Miami English. Keeping “oh” in the back isn’t unique to Miami, but it is unique to Miami within the Southern U.S.

Another vowel thing: much of the U.S. does this weird thing with the “ah” sound in words like “hand.” When that vowel comes before a nasal consonant—M or N—it becomes kind of nasal and more complex, turning into more like “hay-and.” Miamians, though, don’t do that, so “hand” has the exact same vowel as “cat.” Try saying it out loud. It feels strange, right? Almost British-y.

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Miami English also has lots and lots of calques, which are loan phrases: essentially direct translations of Spanish phrases. In Atlanta, New York, and Seattle—actually, basically anywhere besides Miami—you get out of a car. In Miami, you get down from a car, because “down from the car” is a direct translation from the Spanish, bajar del carro. There are dozens of these: in Miami you don’t get in line or wait in line, you make a line. You don’t get married to somebody, you get married with them. When talking about money, you don’t say “five ninety-nine” for $5.99; you say “five with ninety-nine.” If you’re not up to anything much, you might say “I’m eating shit,” the basic equivalent of “I’m not doing shit.” “Some of those English calques are based on Cuban Spanish, and my strong suspicion is that kids are learning the local variety of English unaware of the sources of the loan words,” says Carter.

The verbs “come” and “go” are also different in English and Spanish, and thus different in Miami English. “In English, the verbs ‘come’ and ‘go’ are really peculiar,” says Carter. “If you invite me to your house, I’ll say ‘I’m coming over now,’ even though what I meant to say is ‘I’m going over now.’” These words are based on “deiksis,” the relationship between the speaker and listener. Theoretically, “come” should mean heading toward the speaker or listener, and “go” should mean heading away from the speaker or listener. Come to where I am, go to this other location. But in English, it’s not that simple; we often get those totally wrong. Spanish speakers, and Miami English speakers, never get those wrong. An invitation to a birthday party in Miami might say, “Go celebrate Maria’s 10th birthday party at the zoo.” Sounds weird, but is actually correct: neither the sender nor the receiver of the invitation is at the zoo, so it should be “go.”

One of the hardest to nail down is in the actual rhythm of speech. Spanish is syllable-timed, meaning that each syllable is spoken for the same length of time. English is not; it is stress-timed, so certain syllables, especially one-syllable words, are shorter than others. (Think about “for,” “and,” and pronouns like “he” and “she.”) Miami English isn’t exactly syllable-timed, but it’s more regular than other English dialects, which makes it sound...different, somehow. “I have heard parodies of Latinos, or Latino characters who are putting on being Latino, where you’ll find them speaking in a very fast way which gives that impression,” says Carter. It’s not that Spanish-speakers speak more quickly, just that their timing is different than English. We don’t quite know how it’s different, but speaking very quickly can sort of trigger our conception of Spanish rhythms.

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Miami English is not, though, the same as other Spanish-influenced dialects of English, like Chicano English in Southern California. Some of those calques, for example, are specific to Cuba or the Caribbean and not found in Mexico. One of the most telling examples of a Southern Californian accent is turning “ing” and “ink” endings into “eeng” and “eenk,” so “thinking” becomes “theenkeeng.” These are not found at all in Miami.

Miami English isn’t only spoken by Miami Latinos, though they are the predominant group that has this dialect. Carter has found that many Anglo whites in Miami will use this dialect—but not always. Miami English coexists with Spanglish and flat-out Spanish in Miami, and speakers will often switch between those depending on who they’re speaking to. A white teenager might use the Miami English dialect with friends, and a Northeast-like accent with parents—after all, there’s a good chance the teen’s parents hail from the North.


A major part of what makes Miami English special is how quickly and thoroughly immigrant groups have come to dominate the city. In, say, New York, even the biggest immigrant groups—Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese—are still comparatively minor parts of the whole. But Cubans, and then other Spanish-speakers, became the dominant force in Miami so quickly that, essentially, stranger calques and pronunciations and rhythms have been free to become the norm.

Typically, a small population of immigrants surrounded by people from elsewhere would have stuff like that ironed out. “But here, basically because of the numerical profile, nobody is here to say ‘No, it’s get married to someone, not with,’” says Carter. The norms reinforce each other. If everyone around you speaks in a certain way, it won’t be “corrected.” Miami English has been permitted to live on its own weird little linguistic island, evolving in its own utterly charming way.

The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains

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

While Kenny Rogers' “Islands in the Stream” partner Dolly Parton found success with a theme park, Kenny Rogers agreed to let his likeness become the face of an entirely different operation: a rotisserie chicken chain.

The chain began in 1991 thanks in part to former Kentucky Gov. John Y. Brown, who had turned KFC into an international success. And, at first, Kenny Rogers Roasters was on the same track; by 1994, the company already had 109 locations.

But the chain's reputation never quite lived up to its predecessor, so much so that at one point in 1996 one New York City lawyer put a sign directly above the store with a simple message: "Bad Food." (The incident also inspired one of Seinfeld's best episodes.)

So it wasn't a surprise then, when the chain eventually faltered, and, by 1998, Rogers himself was trying to disassociate himself. The company was sold in 1999 to Nathan's, the hot dog chain, and after years of declines, the chain—which once had over 300 locations—closed its last location in North America in 2011. 

The real story, though, is what happened just before that. Because while Kenny Rogers was winding down its U.S. operations it was doing the opposite in Asia, having been bought by a Malaysian firm in 2008.  Three years later, the chain was earning $100 million in revenue—nearly all from overseas—despite the fact Kenny Rogers is presumably less of a draw in Asia than he might be in the U.S. 

And, last year, the chain opened up its first Indian location, with the goal of reaching $10 million in sales and 40 to 50 locations in India alone by 2021.

Now, there are more than 400 locations worldwide—topping its ‘90s peak and, in the process becoming one of a number of chains that have faltered domestically but gone on to have strange, often lucrative second lives, whether they exist, like Kenny Rogers Roasters, as successful American exports or whether they persist, like the last remaining Chi Chi's restaurants in Belgium and Luxembourg, as a wildly diminished if improbably stubborn reminders of a chain's former greatness. 

Take the case of Miami Subs, a struggling chain that had dwindled to just a few dozen locations by the late 2000s before rebounding and, with the help of the hip-hop icon Pitbull (who, early in his music career, used a Miami Subs location as a makeshift office), expanding aggressively overseas, this time rebranded as Miami Grill.

“I know I am in good company with international music sensation Armando Christian ‘Pitbull’ Pérez as an equity partner,” a franchisee in Myanmar said after opening a shop there earlier this year.  

Other chains persist in different forms, like Wimpy, a popular burger spot in the U.S. before World War II. It later effectively died in 1977 along with its owner, Edward Gold, but, outside of the U.S., it was a different story entirely. Having sold the international naming rights to J. Lyons and Co in 1954, the company was a major hit in the U.K. (though is in decline), and remains particularly prominent in South Africa.

Or take the Mexican restaurant chain Chi-Chi’s, which was largely shut down in 2004 after a hepatitis A outbreak—which came after the company had already filed for bankruptcy—damaged the brand so severely that Outback Steakhouse bought the chain essentially for its real estate. But the name, at least, lives on as a grocery salsa brand, as well as in a number of international locations, particularly in Belgium and Luxembourg.

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Still, sometimes chains don't rebound—there are no second or third lives, or relaunches overseas, or lingering salsa brands. There's just strategic mistakes and failure, as in the case of Rax Roast Beef.

The Ohio-based chain began life at a time when many similar chains were coming out of the state, including Wendy’s, Arby’s, and Arthur Treacher’s.

But Rax's founding story was a little more complicated than its peers. Originally called JAX, it was founded by Jack Roschman, who launched the chain after Ray Kroc declined to let him exclusively operate McDonald’s because of his young age. 

When JAX turned out to be a success, Roschman quickly sold the brand to General Foods in 1969, though General Foods proved to be a poor corporate parent. By 1978, the chain—which had hit an early peak of 195 stores in 1977—was in disarray, with all but 10 stores closing, until one franchisee, Restaurant Administration Corporation, classed up the joint a bit and changed its name to Rax Roast Beef.

Then, they went national, ballooning to more than 500 locations. And while Rax never quite threatened Arby’s, which had some 2,100 locations in 1989, it was for its era, pretty innovative, becoming, for example, the first chain in the country to fry its french fries in vegetable oil, rather than using animal fat, according to Lost Restaurants of Columbus, Ohio.

Like a lot of other restaurants of its time, though, Rax made one huge mistake: it got caught up in the salad bar trend, quickly becoming far more known for its unusual menu additions than for its roast beef sandwiches.

A 1985 ad featuring late Garfield voice actor Lorenzo Music, for example, really nails down the problem: The company’s menu was all over the place, promoting chicken, shrimp, and taco salad, all in the span of a single commercial. By 1991, the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, mostly—though not entirely—closing for business in the early ‘90s

The few remaining Rax restaurants—mostly in southern Ohio—have returned their focus to roast beef, after a humbling that few companies could endure. 

“I think it’s a great concept,” Rich Donohue, the chain's current owner, told the Columbus Business Journal in 2009. “I think it’s been beaten down a little, but it still has a pulse."

Rax, in other words, is a cautionary tale for fast-food executives—as if they needed one—that the restaurant business is tough, and that chains come and go. 

Just last month, for example, the Chipotle-owned Asian chain Shophouse, which poured heaping helpings of peanut sauce and Sriracha onto many an office-slave’s cruddy week in DC and NYC, closed its doors , mostly because Chipotle couldn’t figure out a way to take the chain national.

For all of the risk, though, the upside of creating a massively popular fast-food restaurant remains bigger than ever. If you pull off even 5 percent of McDonald’s global revenue—$6 billion last year, by the way—that’s still a massive business.

It's no wonder, then, why Kenny Rogers wanted in.

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

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Motorcyclist Meets Flying Mattress and Somehow Survives

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For many highway drivers, seeing a truck hauling massive logs, or even a mattress precariously tied to the top of a car is enough to trigger a minor anxiety attack, lest the debris become unmoored and, you know, kill you. But if some recently-released footage of such an accident in Australia is any indication, it might not be that bad.

The video, shot last week, shows a truck carrying a loose mattress through a tunnel in Brisbane, Australia, before, suddenly, the mattress catches air and flies off the back of the truck into the road, into the path of an oncoming motorcyclist, according to the Queensland Times. 

The motorcyclist, Aaron Wood, was going 50 miles per hour as he collided with the mattress, but instead of launching the rider into the tunnel wall, the mattress got wrapped up under the front wheel of the bike, and Wood was able to ride the front wheelie to a safe stop. As Wood told the Queensland Times, he was fine save for some cuts on his hands from gripping the handles so hard.

The driver of the truck, meanwhile, did not stop, or return for the mattress. As for Wood, he said he's just happy to have come out of it relatively unscathed. 

"The police are amazed that I am alive," he told the Queensland Times.


Jack Kerouac's Last Home to Be Sold

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In 1964, when Jack Kerouac moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, he probably didn't know that he was going to spend the rest of his life there. The core member of the Beat Generation had relocated with his third wife and his mother to a modest one-floor house, where, according to the Tampa Bay Times, he did some writing. And sometimes he frequented local establishments such as Haslam's Book Store and the Wild Boar, a bar in Tampa. 

But in 1968 Kerouac's years of heavy drinking caught up with him. He died from cirrhosis after heaving up blood at the home. Nearly 50 years later, the house is still part of his estate, though John Sampas, the author's nephew, recently told the Times that it would be sold to caretakers with the hope that it would eventually be turned into a museum. 

The condition of the interior of the house is a bit of a mystery at the moment, but whoever buys it will inherit a few problems noticeable from the outside, such as the overgrown lawn and missing mailbox, which had apparently been stolen. No price has been named and no buyer selected, but Sampas said the goal is less profit than preservation. "The value of the property is its history," he told the Times. "It is not about the highest bidder. I want to find a group or person with a good vision for the house who can execute the plan."

The Most Interesting Camel in the World

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On April 27, 1934—squeezed between items about liquor taxes and club baseball—readers of California's Madera Tribune were treated to an unusual obituary. "LAST AMERICAN CAMEL IS DEAD," mourned the headline. "Topsy was the last survivor of the camel herds that once carried packs across the mountains and lava beds of Arizona and southeastern California," the article beneath explained. "...Some of the survivors were later captured and sent to zoos and among them was Topsy."

Not a bad public tribute for a camel—most don't get obituaries at all. But Topsy's life was far too storied to fit into a couple of column inches. From what experts can tell, Topsy wasn't just the Last American Camel, but one of the first. Over the course of her 81-odd years, she was an immigrant, a soldier, a builder, a miner, and a movie star. She had a hoof in everything from the U.S. Army's ill-fated Camel Corps and the construction of what would become Route 66 to the rise of Hollywood and the circus industry. Taken together, her exploits make her something of a Forrest Gump of camels.

Topsy's early years, which she likely spent in Egypt, are lost to us. What we know of her tale begins in the 1850s, when the United States Army began exploring their options for westward travel and realized there really weren't any. Several concerns—including an influx of prospectors and frontiersmen heading West, escalating conflicts with Mormon towns in Utah, and the possibility that a foreign power might attack California—convinced the Army that it was time to start building a route that led through the wilderness and to the coast.

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The Army began to hire human civilians to help build this road, but they quickly realized they would need to provide an unusual type of four-legged support. "Mules and horses just didn't last long in the wilderness—the deserts you get after you leave Kansas and Nebraska," says Forrest Bryant Johnson, author of The Last Camel Charge: The Untold Story of America's Desert Military Experiment. A different sort of steed was needed.

Throughout the 1830s and 40s, various Americans had floated the notion of using camels in the American Southwest. Eventually, a Pennsylvanian named Josiah Harlan—who had served as a military commander in Afghanistan and returned to the U.S. as a consultant to the War Department—brought the idea to the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. Riflemen in Afghanistan often rode camels, Harlan told Davis, and the animals were exemplary: They ran fast, stayed calm in battle, could carry heavy loads, and, of course, needed very little water.

Davis thought it was worth a shot, and in 1855, after about a year of trying, he managed to convince Congress to give him a $30,000 camel budget. Soon after, a retired U.S. Navy ship, the USS Supply, set out for Tunisia, Egypt, and Turkey. Overall, the ship picked up about 35 camels, who enjoyed a spacious stable with glass portholes, a fresh air hatch, and harnesses for rough weather, all especially installed for the trip. They were brushed daily and fed gallon after gallon of oats and hay, though that didn't stop them from eating the whitewash off the ship walls.

The Supply made it to Texas, unloaded the camels, turned around, and went back to the Middle East to pick up a few dozen more. It's unclear exactly which trip she came in on, but one of these camels was Topsy, a Bactrian, or two-humped, variety known for their speed, and their tolerance for difficult weather.

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It's hard to say whether Topsy and her companions were happy to be in America, but according to eyewitness reports, they were certainly pleased to be back on land. "Feeling once again the solid earth beneath them, they became excited to an almost uncontrollable degree," wrote one of their handlers, Lieutenant David Dixon Porter. "Rearing, kicking, crying out, breaking halters, tearing up pickets, and by other favorite tricks [they] demonstrated their enjoyment."

Soon after, the camels set out on their first march, from the Texas coast to their new barracks in Camp Verde, near San Antonio. They were led by several Greek, Arabic, and Turkish handlers who had been hired overseas for their camel expertise, including Hadji Ali, nicknamed "Hi Jolly." Hi Jolly and Topsy would stick close together for decades to come.

For a few months, the camels enjoyed an easy life on the corral. But eventually, it was time to get to work. Lieutenant Edward Beale, who had been put in charge of the road building project, selected 25 camels that looked construction-ready. (Based on where she ended up later—and her association with Hi Jolly, who also went on the trip—it's likely that Topsy was one of these.) Moving through Arizona, the camels wreaked gentle havoc as they passed through small settlement towns, spooking horses with their unfamiliar smell and eating the locals' cactus fences.

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Their human companions, though, were charmed by their personalities and hauling skills. "As individual units became familiar with the animals, they were really quite fond of them," says Johnson. As the expedition moved along, Topsy and her fellow camels lugged supplies and tools, and the humans cleared rocks and brush out of a continuous ten-foot swath, laying out what was then known as the "military wagon road." This track would eventually become the westernmost part of America's most famous highway: Route 66. "You can attribute Route 66 to the camels in this way," says Johnson.

The Army, impressed with their new recruits' performance, retained hope that they would be an asset in military situations as well. The camels' endurance and speed—especially compared to that of the horses and mules that had accompanied them on the road-building journey—convinced the army that they'd found "a new superior weapon," says Johnson. But before the camels could prove their worth in this way, a more pressing conflict boiled over: the Civil War. The resources that the Army had dedicated to the camels were needed elsewhere, and the project was disbanded.

After the breakup of the Camel Corps, the group's veterans scattered. Many of the camels that stayed in Texas were captured by the Confederate army and used for entertainment purposes—in Johnson's words, "to ride the pretty girls around." Some were set free and lived out their days in the deserts of the Southwest, mystifying cowboys and frightening cattle. At least one, named Old Douglas, was adopted by a southern regiment, and eventually killed by Union soldiers at the battle of Vicksburg. ("All who saw the murder were highly incensed," wrote one observer after the fact.)

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On February 26, 1864, most of the California camels were auctioned off by the government. It's unclear exactly where Topsy ended up during this time, but it's possible that she, like many of the Bactrians, set out with Hi Jolly for a ranch in Nevada, where camels were put to work hauling salt and firewood at the Comstock Lode silver mines. After Nevada outlawed the use of camels on highways, citing their tendency to spook horses, most of this herd moved on to Arizona to do similar work.

Although her exact mining credentials remain unknown, there was another popular camel career track Topsy definitely pursued: show business. By this point, Americans were more than willing to hand over cash to see what the papers of the time described as "prehistoric animals with gangling limbs and long, arched necks," and Topsy was a natural. She performed with the Ringling Bros. Circus, marched in street parades, and even got some onscreen gigs with Fox Film Corporation, where she helped set the scene for various desert romances.

Tragically—and ironically, considering her earlier pursuits—it was this particular straw that proved backbreaking. While traveling to a showbiz job, Topsy was involved in a train accident. She injured both of her humps, and her mate, whose name remains unknown, was either killed or badly burned in the crash.

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After the wreck, Topsy was taken in by the Griffith Park Zoo, in Los Angeles, where she lived out her last years. As Hadley Meares details in an article for KCET.org, she was the zoo's most popular resident during the 1920s and early '30s. The press, too, treated her with some reverence: "From comfortable quarters in old Griffith Park… old Topsy, a veteran Bactrian, watches the visitors go by," wrote the Baltimore Sun in 1931. "She observes them with an eye of tolerance, having seen much and traveled far in a colorful and eventful career."

According to the Sun, Topsy shared her cage with two whippersnappers: a 6-year-old male named Prince, and a 7-year-old female named Vanity. As she aged, her injuries worsened, and in April of 1934, at roughly age 81, she was put to sleep. She was cremated, and about a year later, her ashes were sent to Quartzsite, Arizona, where they were buried alongside her old friend, Hi Jolly.

Now, 83 years later, the Griffith Park Zoo has been abandoned. Many of Fox Film Corporation's reels, containing Topsy's starring moments, were destroyed in a fire. Route 66 is decommissioned and crumbling, and the tourists who still choose to drive it likely know little about the road's many two-humped progenitors. 

The West, though, is full of people. Next time you find yourself there, take a moment to remember Topsy, the camel who helped make that possible.

You can see the ruins of the Old Griffith Park Zoo on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017, and hear more about Topsy's time there at the Abandoned Zoo Ruins tour in Los Angeles.

Missing March Madness? Try Small-Town Ice Betting

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While their southerly neighbors are still hung up on March Madness, the good people of Hatfield Point, Canada have moved on to a far better game. Every year, residents of the small town, which sits right at the head of Belleisle Bay, place bets on when the local ice will break.

The competition, known as the Belleisle Bay Ice-Break-Up Contest, is hosted by the Belleisle Watershed Coalition. Competitors buy $2 tickets and write down the date and time, to the minute, that they expect the ice to give.

Then... they wait. "There is a tripod set up on the ice with a flag," Sharon Cunningham explained to the CBC. "We monitor it with a security camera." When they see a shift, they figure out the winner, who gets half the proceeds. (The other half goes to the Watershed Coalition—which seems fair, considering that the athlete here is basically the river.)

Although this is only the contest's third year, Hatfield Point residents have been paying attention to the ice's timing for centuries, providing records that date back to 1897.

"It's the most exciting thing that happens here," Cunningham said.

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

Found: An Invading Snail That Slings Slime at its Prey

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In 2009, the USNS Vandenberg was sunk into the ocean not far from the Florida Keys. The ship was meant to be an artificial coral reef—a place where divers could explore without endangering the delicate and suffering coral reefs of the area.

In 2012, while examining the reef, scientists spotted three strange snails there. They were members of the worm-snail family, with long, tubular shells that attach to a hard surface and stick there. Two years later, there were tens of thousands of them living on the ship’s hull.

Now, in a new paper published in PeerJ, a team of scientists reports that these worms are a species previously unknown to science, which they have named Thylacodes vandyensis, after the ship’s nickname, the Vandy.

T. vandensis is “kind of cute,” LiveScience reports. On average, the worm-snails are about the length of a finger and are brightly colored, often orange. Their most notable feature, though, may be their mucus glands. "I first got interested in these guys when I saw their giant slime glands," Dr. Rüdiger Bieler, Curator of Invertebrates at Chicago's Field Museum, said in a press release.

Most snails use slime as a glide path to move. But these snails aren’t mobile, once they settle in, so what did they need the slime for? It turns out that they use their glands to launch a web of mucus into the water, catching microorganisms in their slimy net and sucking it back in. The snails eat their own mucus along with their prey and recycle it for another slimy go-around.

Bieler and his colleagues studied specimens in museum collection and used DNA sequencing to determine that the Vandy snails were previously unknown. They’re most closely related to species that live in the Pacific, which indicates that they’re likely not native to the area where they were found. Two other invasive species have already been found on the artificial reef: these species probably hitch rides on ship hulls from far away and find places like a newly sunken ship a welcoming home, untroubled by predators or preexisting neighbors.

“These shipwrecks might be acting as stepping-stones for the settlement of invasive species,” one Florida scientist told National Geographic. But they could also be places where scientists could spot early warning signs of an invasion and try to limit the migration of new species into the area, before they start slinging their mucus nets all over.

How Fiji’s Official Iguana Guardian Protects 12,000 Lizards

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The first clue that you shouldn’t mess with Eroni Matatia when it comes to Fiji’s reptiles is found on his Facebook page. In his profile picture, Matatia is holding baby turtles, arms crossed out front like a gangsta posing with wads of cash. The second clue comes from his heritage. Matatia is a third-generation crested iguana ranger and one of the few paid wildlife rangers in Fiji to guard against poachers picking off the island nation’s numerous endemic species.

“My grandfather once told me that the love for the environment, for animals should come from my heart,” says Matatia, 30, who goes by “Mata” for short. “I love this job and it comes from my heart, to be honest.”

Like his grandfather and his uncle before him, Matatia watches over the tiny and uninhabited island of Yadua Taba in Fiji’s north (well, it’s uninhabited except for about 12,000 crested iguanas). Other than a scattering of other smaller colonies around Fiji, the crested iguana, known locally as “vokai,” exists nowhere else in the world except on Yadua Taba.

It is listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, and numerous organizations and governments are pitching in to boost the iguana’s numbers. Those low numbers, coupled with bright green skin and white stripes, make the crested iguana like catnip for exotic animal collectors.

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Matatia grew into the role as official iguana guardian, assisting his grandfather and then his uncle, who had a stroke a few years ago and could not continue. The family lives on Yadua, the island next door. There, a small village of about 200 people lives mostly off what they grow on the land and catch in the sea. There is no running water for showers and one of the few places for a bar of cell phone reception is near the village mango tree.

Generations ago the village residents on Yadua began keeping their goats on Yadua Taba and allowing them to roam around the island, Matatia says. The goats would eat all the ground vegetation and then took to munching on bark, killing the trees that iguanas use to hide from their main predator, the peregrine falcon. “They [the goats] would ring-bark the trees,” says Matatia. Goats have caused similar problems in other Fiji iguana sanctuaries.

Now, “the biggest problem is smuggling,” says Matatia of his role as iguana ranger. At least three days a week, Matatia takes the short trip in his 75-horsepower boat out to Yadua Taba. He combs several small beaches looking for footprints that could hint at poaching activities. Then there’s scanning hours of CCTV footage from numerous security cameras set up around the island. When the occasional sailboat moors in one of Yadua Taba’s bay, he searches it for stolen iguanas.

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A few years back, Matatia was on one side of the island while uncle was in the bay spearfishing. The uncle watched as two kayakers paddled from a boat to the island and began stuffing iguanas into backpacks. When he approached them they claimed not to speak English and fled. When some crested iguanas showed up in Europe a year later, they were likely the ones stolen from Yadua Taba, according to Robert Fisher, a biologist with the United States Geological Survey. The USGS assists the National Trust of Fiji, which leased Yadua Taba from the reigning chief so it could remain a crested iguana sanctuary.

Poachers have proven hard to catch. In the same way that shoplifting isn’t a crime until you leave the store, it’s difficult for authorities to make an arrest unless the smugglers are caught taking an animal out of the country, says Fisher. In 1997 Fiji signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, which outlaws the international trade of endangered species.

In recent years, Fiji authorities have only caught one crested-iguana smuggler, a German man who tried to leave the country in 2011 with a pregnant female. Another man attempted to smuggle banded iguanas, also a native Fijian species, using a hollowed-out prosthetic leg. “These animals have a high value in the European black market,” says Fisher. The smuggler with the prosthetic leg had previously sold four banded iguanas for $32,000, the Fiji Sun reported.

Just as poachers lurk around Yadua Taba, they also lurk online. A few months ago, Matatia accepted a Facebook friend request from someone he didn’t know. It turned out to be a well-known poacher. The poacher, who goes by numerous aliases, was referred to as “Benjamin Bucks” in the book Stolen World, according to Fisher. Stolen World takes a deep look at smugglers and how they operate. “Robert Fisher emailed me to say ‘You need to unfriend that person. He is one of the smugglers,’” says Matatia.  

If anything, the poachers have guts. A few weeks later that same smuggler turned up at an iguana specialist conference in Fiji, according to Fisher and Matatia. When he was recognized, “he ran away from us,” says Matatia. Lacking evidence, Fiji authorities could not arrest or fine the poacher.

“The animals have no conservation value to these people,” says Fisher. “It is just a novel thing and it has a monetary value."

Listening to Icebergs' Loud and Mournful Breakup Songs

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In March 2000, the iceberg B-15 broke off from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It was the largest iceberg ever documented, with a surface area of more than 4,200 square miles—more than twice the size of the state of Delaware. After it started breaking up, the largest of its pieces, B-15a, drifted along the coast of Antarctica, lingered on a shallow seamount, and collided with an ice tongue, before running aground and breaking again. Late in 2007, the largest remaining chunk floated out into the South Pacific where, in the warmer water, it began to disintegrate.

For the whole of the next year, the ocean was noisier than usual. All the way up past the equator, 4,350 miles or so away from where B-15a broke apart, hydrophones that scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had suspended underwater were picking up strange signals. Another set of hydrophones, this one in the Juan Fernández Islands, off the coast of Chile, picked up the noise, too, even louder. When the scientists used the two sets of data to determine the source of the noise, they found the most likely culprits: B-15a and C-19a, another giant iceberg.

Twenty years ago, not so long before B-15 broke off from Antarctica, “we didn’t even know that icebergs made noise,” says Haru Matsumoto, an ocean engineer at NOAA who has studied these sounds. But in the past few years, scientists have started to learn to distinguish the eerie, haunting sounds of iceberg life—ice cracking, icebergs grinding against each other, an iceberg grounding on the seafloor—and measure the extent to which those sounds contribute to the noise of the ocean. While they’re just now learning to listen, the sounds of ice could help them understand the behavior and breakup of icebergs and ice shelves as the poles warm up. 

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The U.S. military has been listening to the ocean, for the sounds of subs and ships, for decades. Even after the existence of program was made public in 1991, access to the data was still restricted. In the mid-1990s, scientists at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory deployed their own low-power hydrophone arrays to monitor the noise of ocean—they were interested, for instance, in listening to underwater earthquakes. By the end of the decade, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization also began to monitor the sounds of the ocean, for illegal nuclear explosions. They went on to share their data—including the recordings of B-15a from the Juan Fernández Islands—with NOAA scientists.

The underwater sonic data revealed an assortment of unidentified noises, including Bloop, a single, cheerful, powerful plop recorded in 1997. The mysterious signals came from the south, and NOAA scientists thought they might be icebergs. As they collected more data and started working with instruments placed in the Southern Ocean, they started hearing similar sounds over and over and soon learned to identify them. Bloop-like sounds were icequakes, made by the cracking and fracturing of large icebergs. When an iceberg splits in half or two icebergs collide, it makes what Matsumoto describes as “a very loud noise.”

“It’s—bang, bang, bang, bang,” he says. “And it happens continuously for sometimes one hour.”

An iceberg can make entirely different sounds when it scrapes the bottom of the ocean or against another iceberg. It starts vibrating, sometimes for a couple of minutes or longer—a half hour, an hour, four hours, even. It’s a ringing, soul-chilling sound that could have come from the soundtrack of an alien encounter. “That’s very distinct, and it’s very easy to tell, okay, this is an iceberg,” says Matsumoto.

One of these harmonic tremors led Douglas MacAyeal, a glaciologist at the University of Chicago, to start documenting iceberg sounds at the source. A colleague had been studying the tremors, which MacAyeal calls “strange, mournful noises,” and found that the source was a giant iceberg, C-16, that MacAyeal happened to be studying. Instead of listening from the water, MacAyeal planted four seismometers on the iceberg itself. The mournful noises, he found, were produced when C-16 scraped against another giant iceberg (B-15a, as it happened). “When icebergs scrape against each other, it’s like running your finger around the rim of a wine glass,” he says. “They’re so massive that they’ll scrape against each other for hours.”

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Now that they’ve been able to locate and document the sources of these noises, to catalog and classify them, the scientists are using them to learn about the behavior of icebergs and ice shelves. The noises can provide hints about what’s happening beneath the surface of an iceberg or inside its vast mass—places that might otherwise be difficult or impossible to study safely—to create a fuller picture of what happens as the ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland disintegrate.

“For us to figure out why the icebergs are coming off the ice shelf, we have to see and hear them coming off and know exactly when it happened,” says MacAyeal. “We know we can’t study it with satellites. Satellites look at Antarctica every six hours, and it takes a few seconds for the crack to finish. The only way to catch that crack is listening to everything all the time.”

By listening more closely to icebergs, scientists are also coming to understand just how much noise they contribute to the ocean. In one study, Matsumoto and his colleagues tracked the breakup of one iceberg and were able to show that the sound from icebergs could be contributing more to noise levels in the Southern Ocean than man-made sounds (which are extensive). The iceberg noises also occupy the same sonic bands that certain whales use to communicate, which could mean that iceberg breakups could impact marine mammals, too. It’s clear, Matsumoto says, that iceberg noise is proportional to the volume of ice in the ocean, but the scientists still aren’t exactly sure how that volume might change in the future. In other words, it’s possible that the ocean could be getting a lot noisier due to the climate change, but too soon to know for sure.

Right now, the study of iceberg sounds is still a small field, and scientists don’t even know how far the noises travel. NOAA’s northernmost hydrophone array is located at about a little north of the equator, west of Panama. “But the sound doesn’t stop there,” says Matsumoto. “It propagates northward, which means that iceberg sounds from Antarctica can be heard in the northern hemisphere as well.”

The bangs and moans of icebergs are another indication of the connectedness of Earth's oceans. MacAyeal once found that an iceberg in Antarctica broke up, in part, because of a storm in the Gulf of Alaska more than a week earlier. When the waves from it eventually arrived in Antarctica, the iceberg flexed and bumped up and down against a shoal until it broke apart. What happens in one part of the ocean can impact the other side of the planet; if Antartica's icebergs start making more noise, the whole ocean will feel it.

How the CIA's Psychics Described Albert Einstein

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A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

In 1988, as part of the Agency’s ongoing research into weaponized ESP, CIA psychics were tasked with identifying a photo of a famous individual inside of an opaque folder. That individual was Albert Einstein.

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So, how’d our psychic spooks do? Well, out of the gate they pegged the subject as an funny old dead leftist, none of which isn’t true.

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Then they called him a pipe-smoking hippie, which is kinda a stretch for a guy who loved his knit sweaters, but hey, sure.

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Then they identified him as a smart guy who worked a lot, which nobody would argue with …

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but although he did dabble in psychology, that’s a bit like describing Jack White as an upholsterer.

Then things go a bit off the rails (including a rather lenient benefit of the doubt from the evaluator) …

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before scoring a solid win in the “statues and magazine covers” category.

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Alright, so, putting that altogether, the subject is …

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Eh, close enough. And according to the evaluation of the exercise, the CIA agreed, marking this down as a success reading.

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Though to be fair, it does sound like there was some coaching going on. Insert your own charades joke here.

Read the full report embedded here.


Found: Some Old Boxes With Human Remains Inside

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Recently, Joe Morgan, who owns property on Tiki Island, Texas, near Galveston, found three boxes that had washed up near his dock. On each box the words "Rest in Peace" were scrawled, along with a name. Inside each was a flower wreath and some ashes—apparently the remains of the person whose name was written on the outside, according to KTRK.

Morgan called the discovery "eerie," but local officials were not as disturbed, with police declining to even take a report on the matter because, they say, it is not clear that anything criminal has happened. 

"Tiki Island Mayor Goldie Telchick said there is nothing to investigate and there's no reason to be concerned," KTRK reported Tuesday.  

So this means that Morgan alone was left to wrestle with the consequences of his discovery—which sounds a little like the first act of a "haunting"—even if he did his best to pay his respects after the remains were uncovered. 

"I dropped to my knees and gave a little prayer," he said.

Latin Graffiti Appears in Cambridge, England

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Graffiti may not usually be a huge problem in Cambridge, England, but when it is, sometimes, it’s in Latin. But, just like in that famous scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, in this case, it's pretty bad Latin.

According to the BBC, someone recently vandalized a handful of newly-built luxury properties in the city. The vandals painted across two of the unsold homes in white paint, creating what are two short slogans or one long sentence in Latin. Take together, the words read, “Locus in domos loci populum!”

The problem is that any way it’s cut, the Latin doesn’t translate very smoothly. As the BBC says, the writing could be meant to read as two sayings, roughly meaning, “room in the house” and “local people.” Combined, it’s possible that the sentence was meant to read something like, “local homes for local people," a reading backed up by a small bit of other graffiti that simply says, “local lives,” in English. 

Still, whatever they were intending, their general meaning has come through. According to the BBC, they probably aren’t happy about the expensive new homes the graffiti was painted on, which will make a place that already has the third most expensive home prices in the country a bit pricier. 

The graffiti, in other words, was just a (criminal) way to make their point.

Records Reveal Hidden History Between Black Chicago Residents and Police

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It’s no secret that the Chicago Police Department has a troubling past. In January, the Chicago Police Department’s questionable behavior, including a pattern of using excessive force, unlawful force and later-discredited accounts of police shooting incidents, was brought to light by the Department of Justice. This has resulted in a consent decree between the city’s police department and the Justice Department.

But a culture that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel publicly referred to as a “code of silence” does not happen overnight. A new collection of records on display at the Chicago History Museum gives insight into the city’s race and policing relationship from an often-overlooked perspective—black police officers.

The Chicago History Museum has opened records, including lawsuits, investigations, and reported instances of police brutality from the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, a group also known as the African-American Police League. The AAPL was founded to advocate for fair treatment and the advancement of black officers in the 1960s and ’70s. The records, donated by AAPL founding member Renault Robinson and former president and executive director Harold Saffold, are now publicly available for free in the museum’s research center.

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They were released to clear up misconceptions about the AAPL’s work and provide the public with a chance to see for themselves what kind of information the AAPL possessed, says Saffold. With the ongoing dialogue surrounding police and government accountability, the release of these AAPL records demonstrate that the police brutality is not a new issue and allows them to be seen by more citizens, Saffold says.

“There’s a lot of misconception about what the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League was really about, and we just want people to read for themselves what those records say,” says Saffold, who served as a patrolman in the Chicago Police Department from 1965 to 1991.

According to Julie Wroblewski, archivist of Archives and Manuscripts at the Chicago History Museum, the collection includes 331 boxes worth of files. The museum has partnered with ProQuest to digitize the files and make them available to those who have access to the ProQuest database. The digitization process is set to begin later this year.

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The AAPL kept an ongoing log of police harassment brutality complaints from citizens. Grievances with the police ranged from alleged purse snatching and searches without warrant to using excessive force on citizens.

One such letter, sent by a Chatham neighborhood resident on the city’s South Side, reads “I called your office in regard to frequent calls made to the Central Office to make police calls to my home in the middle of the night...I am a middle-aged black woman with a teenage son and we live in my home alone. These ‘raids’ on my home are very distressing ... The last such call to my home was made on 2.30 a.m. March 21, 1971. I have also had my telephone number changed three times with[in] the last year. I had been severely harassed by phone.”

A testimony from a Chicago nurse, dated June 16, 1971, described the alleged beating of a group of kids near Presbyterian Hospital. “I watched one of the officers put a black glove on. He told three boys in a black car to ‘get your black asses out of the car.’ I saw that officer, Schmidt is his name, hit one of the boys. I also saw him hit Andrea Kidd on the shoulder when she tried to speak with him. I accompanied several of the other nurses to the jail where the boys were taken and to the County Hospital. As a nurse, I would definitely say that Herman Picket, one of the boy victims, was beaten between the time he left the scene and when I saw him at the hospital.” The mother of the boy who had reportedly been beaten described her son as “bleeding from his mouth and ears.”

Other documents illustrate the tension between black officers, elected officials and fellow Chicago police officers. A letter dated February 4, 1977, to former President Jimmy Carter, called out the lack of blacks involved in policymaking decisions and urged the President to involve the National Black Police Association as a tool for combating nationwide crime. (The AAPL joined other similar organizations to form the National Black Police Association in 1972).

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In addition to logs of police complaints from citizens, letters to elected officials and internal documents outlining the inner workings of the AAPL, there are other disturbing details about police shootings, including the 1971 shooting of Lamont Knazze. Knazze, a police officer, was reportedly shot while in plain clothes by a white officer within his own unit, the documents asserted.

“The shooting was called an accident even though the white officer, John Pappas, fired without proper justification and in violation of the Police Department rules and regulations,” according to a letter sent to the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc.

From the calls for better community-police relations, the discussion on “black-on-black crime,” to the allegations of widespread police brutality, the documents show parallels between policing controversies during the AAPL era and today’s Black Lives Matter movement, which centers on police brutality but also calls for better educational, social and economic resources within the black community.

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The records, Saffold says, are meant to not only to educate the public about the AAPL, but to also help provide context when evaluating historical events. With the ubiquitous nature of technology, it’s easier for youth to record and keep track of what’s happening within the community than when the AAPL operated, he adds.

The release of the records reveals an in-depth account of how far back Chicago’s policing problems go. For young activists, aspiring public servants, future officer and the public in general, the records could provide historical guidance toward policing-community relationships that work, Saffold says.

“The history, the repeating of what’s going on is not new. It’s just how many ways can we expose and how many people can be included,” Saffold says. “Young people that are getting ready to go into professions of law enforcement, being a lawyer, elected official that sits on the bench as a judge or being a reform person working through the penal system, I’d would say try to learn from history what worked and what didn’t."

Found: Roman-Era Mosaics Dating Back to the First Century

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Centuries ago, the town of Uzès, a community of about 8,200 people in the south of France, was known as Ucetia. In the first century B.C. Romans invaded and built a small settlement here: it’s well-situated by the river that supplied water to nearby Nîmes, which even 2,000 years ago was notable city, of more than 50,000.

Uzès isn’t necessarily known for its Roman remains, but archaeologists with the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, a French government agency, have been excavating a site in the town in advance of a new school construction project. Among their discoveries are Roman-era mosaic floors.

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In one large structure, LiveScience writes, there’s a colonnade and four rooms. In one of those large rooms, the floor is paved with mosaic tiles.

The tiles are arranged into two large mosaic patterns of geometric designs surrounding a central medallion. One of the mosaics also features animals—“an owl, duck, eagle and fawn,” according to Inwrap.

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The building, according to the archaeologists, dates from the first century B.C. and stood for over a century, when it looks like the building and the area around it were redeveloped.

Norway Is Building a Huge Tunnel for Ships

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The Stad peninsula, which juts out of the Northwestern part of Norway, has long made sailors' lives more difficult. Getting around it means wrangling with choppy seas, weird currents, and the highest winds in the country. Even the Vikings didn't like to do it, often choosing to port their ships over land instead.

Now, after centuries of planning, Norway has committed to a solution: they're going to carve a ship-sized tunnel into the peninsula, Digital Journal reports. After all, if you can't go over it, you can't go under it, and you can't go around it, you've got to go through it.

"The Stad tunnel for boats will finally be built," Norwegian Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen said in a statement. This plan, he continued, would ensure "a safer and more reliable passage of the most dangerous and harsh waters for the transport of goods along the Norwegian coasts."

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The tunnel will be about 100 feet wide and one mile long, and will burrow through the narrowest part of the peninsula, between Moldefjorden and Kjødepollen. In mock-ups from the Norwegian Coastal Administration, it looks a lot like a car tunnel, complete with eerie blue lights and the occasional emergency phone.

Norse engineers have floated the idea of such a tunnel regularly since 1874. After a number of cost-benefit analyses, the government officially signed on yesterday, as part of the larger National Transport Plan. Construction is expected to begin in 2019—at which point being a Viking will be easier than ever.

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.

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