In the 1500s, the King of England’s toilet was luxurious: a velvet-cushioned, portable seat called a close-stool, below which sat a pewter chamber pot enclosed in a wooden box. Even the king had one duty that needed attending to every day, of course, but you can bet he wasn’t going to do it on his own. From the 1500s into the 1700s, British kings appointed lucky nobles the strangely prestigious chance to perform the king’s most private task of the day, as the Groom of the Stool.

This is not the glamorous job you normally would imagine in a palace, but being Groom of the Stool—named for the close stool, the king’s 16th-century toilet—was actually a highly coveted position in the royal house. Every day, as the king sat on his padded, velvet-covered close stool, he revealed secrets. He asked for counsel, and could even hear of the personal and political woes of his personal groom, and offer to help.

The job likely began as a rather less prestigious position. In The Private Lives of the Tudors, Tracy Borman quoted the earliest mentions of the job: a written order from 1497 for Hugh Denys, “our Groom of the Stool,” which included “black velvet and fringed with silk, two pewter basins and four broad yards of tawny cloth” for him to construct a close stool. Borman also points to instructions from 1452 in the Book of Nurture for “The office off a chamburlayne,” which included a little rhyme to help new grooms to the task:

See the privy-house for easement be fair, sweet, and clean;
And that the boards thereupon be covered with cloth fair in green;
And the hole himself, look there no board be seen;
Thereon a fair cushion, the ordure no man to vex.
Look there be blanket, cotton, or linen to wipe the nether end,
And ever he calls, wait ready and prompt,
Basin and ewer, and on your shoulder a towel.

During the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500s, the king’s closest men of court were given the title, often as a group. Prestigious gentry and noblemen hung out with the monarch in his privy room, acting as his personal secretaries with his undivided attention while he sat on his close stool. Later kings, including Henry VIII, appointed one person to the task, who would travel with the king and his portable stool if he went on a journey. Only monarchs in exile were denied a Groom of the Stool, though they did get grooms who helped with the general bedchamber.

The Groom of the Stool was in charge of all the activities and affairs of the king’s bedchamber and other private rooms; making sure the king was well-dressed and bathed, his bed was made, and even that his personal finances were in order. Borman wrote that sometimes the grooms had control to spend cash. Before private rooms and privacy became associated with actually being alone, monarchs were surrounded by servants and attendants at all hours of the day, often sleeping in the same room as attendants. Some kings kept their close stool in “more private” rooms than others, but even private rooms would allow a handful of people, with the Groom of the Stool always among them.

Grooms of the Stool were often feared by other members of court; they held highly confidential knowledge about political and personal affairs and, importantly, the king’s ear. Sir Anthony Denny, groom to Henry VIII*, was even given the responsibility of Henry VIII’s stamp, which acted as his signature for documents. Lucy Worsley wrote in If Walls Could Talk that the Groom of the Stool got a special golden key attached to a blue ribbon to handle, of which no other copies could be made, just for the king’s personal rooms. Personal attendants in general were proud about their status symbols as such, she added, and often bragged about it—but to be the king’s groom was most coveted of all.

In the early 17th century, Sir Thomas Erskine was King James I's captain of the yeoman of the guard, and eagerly combined this job with being Groom of the Stool, which, as Keith Brown wrote in his book on noble power in Scotland, gave him “crucial influence over the king.” Grooms were sometimes embroiled in other areas of political power, too—Henry VIII’s groom Sir Henry Norris was politically involved with the queen, Anne Boleyn, and was executed along with her after she fell from her husband’s favor. According to Worsley, both James I and his successor King Charles I were so swayed by their grooms’ counsel that in some respects, political discussions of the king’s privy helped fuel the 17th-century English Civil War.

In Sovereign Ladies, Maureen Waller noted that queens tended not to employ this royal particular service, though they could marry into a powerful position through a Groom of the Stool. A woman named Katherine Ashley held the position for Queen Elizabeth I in the 1500s, though she was actually Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, and attended to the queen in her private day room, helping her bathe and wash her hair. In modern times and as of 2006, the queen often has her own private bathroom, Waller added.

During the mid 1700s, using a Groom of the Stool at the close stool itself began to fell out of favor. Sir Michael Stanhope for Edward VI was the last to perform the full job; the last Groom of the Stool was technically James Hamilton for the Prince of Wales in the 1800s, though by then the position had shifted to dressing duties, and was renamed“Groom of the Stole” referring to the latin word for clothing, stola. Victorians, it seems, were a little more interested in true privacy.

*Correction: This story initially referred incorrectly to Henry III—it has been updated to the rightful Henry VIII.

On January 10, 2016, as news broke of David Bowie's death, fans around the world took to the streets to mourn. New Yorkers gathered outside what had been his Manhattan apartment. Californians went to his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Some Londoners made their way to Heddon Street, the site of the Ziggy Stardust photoshoot, or to the Beckenham Bandstand, where a young Bowie played a legendary early show.

But anyone who was close enough headed to Bowie's birthplace, Brixton, where a huge mural of his face decorates the side of a department store. There, people cried, sang, and laid thousands of flowers, notes, and other offerings against the wall, beneath the musician's painted chin.

Among those visitors was Dr. Paul Graves-Brown, of the University College London. A Bowie fan to be sure, Graves-Brown is also an archaeologist, and had set out to investigate a particular question. David Bowie was dead—but would he, as it were, rise again? Or, to reconfigure a question posed in the 1990s about Elvis: Is Bowie a god?

Graves-Brown started his career studying prehistoric humans, but he soon found his interests lay more in the present, and he now digs into more contemporary relics. Many of his recent projects—such as an archaeological examination of this Sharpie graffiti, scrawled by Johnny Rotten on the walls of the Sex Pistols practice space—relate to British rock 'n' roll.

His examination of Bowie shrines—recently published, with Hilary Orange, in the journal Material Religion—is part of a larger project for which he has been studying a number of similar memorial sites in London. There's Freddie Mercury's former studio, covered in etched tributes to the singer. There are the trees across the street from Amy Winehouse's onetime apartment, fluttering with notes and draped with flowers. For a while, there was even the sycamore that T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan crashed his car into, which was eventually festooned with so many baubles and trinkets that it, too, died. (It has since been replaced with a plaque and statue, which continue to attract offerings).

Such shrines, Graves-Brown writes, "are the product of collective and democratic popular activity." They live and die not by any official authority, but by the sheer will of the people who keep them going. As flowers die and notes blow away, people keep bringing more. This makes them ideal for studying exactly how, and how much, people care—and whether it's enough to transform a human into something more. "We're interested in how long people will carry on leaving offerings at these shrines," Graves-Brown says.

Plenty of people have noted the parallels between religious worshippers and really, really big music fans. In his 1998 essay "Is Elvis a God?," the cultural theorist John Frow catalogues some of the ways in which Elvis's acolytes have made these similarities particularly explicit. Elvis fans still go on pilgrimages to his erstwhile estate, Graceland, and leave offerings along the wall outside.

They also make dioramas depicting scenes from Elvis's life, or pay to spend time with people dressed up like him. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, thousands of such pilgrims hold a candlelit vigil around Elvis's grave. Some even swear he never died at all—an allegation that brings to mind a more famous resurrection.

In studying these more recent celebrity deaths, and the shrines that gather in their wakes, Graves-Brown hopes to determine whether any of these musicians are destined to join the King in immortality. But he also wants to investigate what he sees as a more widespread phenomenon of spontaneous, gift-based public mourning.

"It seems to me to be a relatively recent thing, historically," he says. "It's manifested in all kinds of different ways: the proliferation of roadside memorials to people who have died in accidents, the way in which people leave offerings at the sites of terrorist attacks."

Even his local graveyard, which he has been observing for decades, is suddenly full of carefully chosen items. "There is amazing stuff left on the graves—garden ornaments, lanterns," Graves-Brown says. "This very elaborate material activity." One of his theories chalks this trend up to changes in belief systems: "Rather than believe in some sort of afterlife," he says, "people are leaving items that are more about the person's life."

In the case of Bowie, this means the life the public knew: images of his many alter egos; illustrations of his most touching lyrics. 

And "it all seems to revolve around Brixton," Graves-Brown says. On the one-year anniversary of Bowie's death, thousands gathered there for a singalong. The site still hosts a consistent stream of pilgrims, who leave balloons, flowers, and messages such as "you were my best friend during the hours of darkness," and "thanks for saving me when I needed you most."

What kind of afterlife all this material adulation will eventually procure for Bowie is still unclear, though. "A small handful of stars and public figures experience this adoration that raises them beyond the human plane," writes Frow, who goes on to offer up a few diverse examples: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao; Bruce Lee, Kurt Cobain, James Dean. All these figures inspire not only adulation, but deification—their fans tend to think they are literally gods, or at the very least, saints.

#Bowie lives on in #Brixton

— Jonny the Pilot 🛫 (@Jonnykthepilot) February 28, 2017

In Graves-Brown's view, Bowie is not quite at this level—at least, not yet. (He thinks that of all the figures he's tracking, Winehouse is the most likely to reach it.) "It would appear that Bowie is a source of spiritual sustenance," he writes, "but at least for now, his apotheosis is not impending."

But over the next few years, he, at least, will continue returning to Brixton, just to find out for sure.

Playing the lottery is unwise and not something you should waste your time and money on, unless of course you realize it's unwise and not something you should waste your time and money on, and you decide to play anyway, mostly because your life has reached a point where you're familiar with making a poor decision or two, and why not make one more, because, for a short while at least, you will feel something like hope, before, inevitably, you once again revert to your ordinary state of ennui, now tinged with a small new regret. 

But imagine, for a second, being Douglas Fink, who just won the lottery for the third time, officials in Canada announced this week. Fink's prior wins came in 1989, when he split a $93,000 prize with four friends, and in 2010, when he and his wife Barbara won $75,000. The Finks' latest win easily dwarfed those: around $6 million. 

They won the money in February using the numbers 9, 21, 25, 26, 31, and 41, and plan to use their pile of loonies conservatively: caring for family, a new house, maybe some travel. You know, non-flashy choices for a couple who might reasonably think they have a chance at winning the lottery yet again. 

And lest this story inspire you to now go out and again try your luck with some fresh numbers—deeply under the sway of the gambler's fallacy—consider the sheer, astronomical unlikelihood of the Finks' multiple wins, and perhaps buy a candy bar instead.

There are all sorts of stories associated with the inventor Nikola Tesla, some truer than others. One of the more minor rumors about Tesla’s career, but one that remains surprisingly tenacious, is the story that he invented the neon sign. While this is not technically true, he did invent a wireless lighting concept that still hasn't caught on.

The creation of the modern neon sign is credited to Georges Claude, who was one of the first people to devise a method of harnessing industrial amounts of neon, through his air liquefaction business in France. He famously displayed a pair of 38-foot-long neon tube lights at the Paris Motor Show in 1910, and the age of the neon sign was on its way.

But the true origins of what we consider a neon sign goes back a bit further. Developed in the 1850s by the scientist and glassblower Heinrich Geissler, the Geissler Tube was one of the first lights that operated by illuminating pressurized gasses in shaped, glass tubes (known officially as a “discharge tube”). Neon wasn’t discovered until 1898, but Geissler tubes produced similar effects to our modern neon signs by using rarified gases such as argon. Like the neon signs we see today, they were powered by electrodes on either end of the glass chamber that would run a current through the gas inside, causing it to light up.

Geissler tubes were mainly produced and displayed as curious decorations and scientific novelties, but they could be found in a number of laboratories, including Tesla’s. “This was actually the beginning of Tesla’s interest in wireless power,” says W. Bernard Carlson, author of Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, and a professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Virginia. According to Carlson, Tesla had a selection of Geissler tubes in his lab, and one day when he was fiddling with one of his Tesla coils, the scientist noticed that his Geissler tubes began to light up in succession as he tuned the coils to different frequencies. They were reacting to the electromagnetic energy being transmitted by the coils.

One of Tesla’s major interests throughout his career was in developing a system of wireless energy, and these wireless lights became a terrific display of his concept. In fact, his end goal was to create artificial sunlight. The origins of his discharge lights are most often traced back to the World’s Columbian Exhibition, a world’s fair that took place in Chicago in 1893 (the Tesla coil was patented in 1891).

According to the book Tesla: Man Out of Time, among the inventions the titular scientist brought to the fair were a group of discharge lamps that lit up without the help of electrodes or wires. While the account does not go into greater detail about their shape or design, it does reference a later expert who states that they may have inspired the creation of the commercial fluorescent bulb, another invention for which Tesla has been erroneously credited.

The image most often associated with the story that Tesla invented neon signs does look pretty convincing at first blush. It features a collection of thin glass tubes shaped into swirls and designs, surrounding one that is shaped into the word “light.” While they look like what we would today consider neon signs, they were likely filled with a combination of gasses other than neon. “These things look like neon lights, they function like neon lights, in that they have a small amount of gas in them,” says Carlson. But the important distinction about Tesla’s proto-neon lights was that they were not directly connected to any power source. “His vision was that we’d have electric lighting with no wires. And that’s what this picture is about.”

The picture, above, is also most often cited as having been taken at the Columbian Exhibition, but Carlson thinks that it likely dates somewhat later, around 1899. “That [square-design] in particular is something he came up with when he was trying to convince John Jacob Astor into putting money into a wireless lighting system,” he says. “This whole display with the signs is later than the Chicago exhibition. He didn’t have anything near as complicated.”

So while Tesla didn’t actually invent the neon sign as we know it today, he was certainly working in similar science, and his early innovations, along with those of Geissler and others, undoubtedly contributed to the neon sign’s eventual boom. Today, neon signs are about as commonplace as your standard Edison-derived light bulb, but we have yet to master Tesla’s vision of the wireless light, although this has more to do with our inability to implement a system of wireless power than anything else.

Carlson notes that while we still don’t have freely available wireless lighting and power, Tesla’s inventions still resonate. “I always like to say, he’s negotiating with society. He’s saying, ‘Hey maybe the technology’s not totally done yet, but look what it could be!’"

Hear more about Tesla and neon on Obscura Day—May 6, 2017—at the Lite Brite Neon Studio in Brooklyn. Neon lighting experts will be on hand to discuss the famed inventor's contributions to their craft, and attendees will see a demonstration of how neon lights are made today.

In many Japanese cemeteries, including the vast Okunoin–the country’s largest, located south of Osaka–there are statues of varying sizes that stand out for their bright red bibs and little knit caps. Mixed in with the grey tombstones and domed stupas, some of these figures even have cheerfully made-up faces, pink with rouge and smeared with lipstick.

These playful and poignant icons are Jizos, or Jizo Bosatsu, named for a Bodhisattva divinity of Buddhism that has been part of Japanese culture for centuries. As with many divinities in Asian pantheons, Jizo Bosatsu is a multi-tasker: The figure can be a he or a she, and is a guardian of both travelers and lost souls. But it is the role as protector of children—especially unborn children or those who have died at a young age—that accounts for the spirited dress, a modern adaptation of Jizo that is unique to Japanese Buddhism.

Cemetery visitors bedeck the figures at Okunoin with offerings, as do the monks who are charged with tending the graveyard. But the most poignant gifts and adornments come from parents, either in mourning for the loss of a child or in thanks for a young one saved. Caps and scarves are added to protect the divinity from the elements, and bibs, in turn, to symbolize Jizo's protection of children. 

The story of Jizo originates from the 14th-century tale of the Sai no Kawara (“riverbed of the netherworld”), a place much like the River Styx in Greek mythology, or even purgatory in the Christian tradition. According to legend, children who are miscarried, stillborn, or die before their parents enter a limbo, or kind of hell, at the banks of a rocky river. Here they are forced to build towers from stones to atone for the sin of causing such grief, and to help add to their parents’ merit in the afterlife. Demons then turn up every night and destroy the towers, forcing the children to constantly rebuild. Jizo is the one Bosatsu who turned down enlightenment in order to provide an escape from this Sisyphean task, by hiding children in his robe sleeves and taking them to the Buddhist equivalent of heaven, a duty he has promised to fulfill endlessly.

Although many hues are found in the Jizos' adornments, the most common shade is red, the color in Japanese mythological tradition that is often traced back to the ancient practice of repelling demons, themselves often colored in shades of bright ruby or vermilion. Over time, red has come to represent both death and life, as seen in Japanese symbols from the torii gates of Shinto shrines to the Rising Sun of the national flag.

A more contemporary adaptation of the Jizo has emerged, as the figure has come to preside over the Mizuko-Kuya, or fetus memorial service, as a way to ritualize the grief of miscarriage, abortion, or still birth. The performance of these ceremonies has expanded in recent years, seen as a way to ease parents’ pain and mourn this singular loss. It is done throughout Japan, and has been reaching into the West as well, as the traditions of Japanese Buddhism have spread.

At the back of the burial grounds, nearly slipping into the forest, there is a large pyramid entirely made up of small, child-like Jizo statues. It is a muen-zuka, or “Mound of the Nameless,” a piling for spirits who have no family or anyone to individually care for their graves. The structure isn’t that old—only 30 or 40 years, according the monks who tend the cemetery—but with the bottom rows dressed, and bibs slowly creeping up the sides over time, it is a visually powerful way to remember and honor those lost, and otherwise forgotten.

It’s official. Science has decided that old books smell “smoky,” “earthy,” and more than anything, “woody.”

That's based on findings released today by Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič, researchers at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, who have been working to capture, analyze, and catalog historic and culturally important scents. The scientists collected the responses of visitors to St Paul's Cathedral's Dean and Chapter library in London, asking them to describe the smell and later compiling the results in a document they're calling the Historic Book Odour Wheel. 

Part of the challenge, they said, was that everyone's smell vocabulary is a bit different.

“Since the members of the public who took part in the odor evaluation of the unlabeled book smell were not trained, they tended to come up with terms that made sense to them, but were not easy to generalize (for example, ‘my mother’s room’)," they say. "Those terms do not appear in the wheel, and range from ‘hard work for people’ to ‘Victorian garments.’”

Their solution? The odor wheel, developed to have a common set of terms that could be used as scientific data.

“For the historic paper odor wheel we used established smell types and categories, and adjusted them to the character of the objects and space we were dealing with,” they say. “For example, ‘old room’, ‘musty’ and ‘dampness’ were grouped under the main category Earthy/Musty/Moldy. When no existing categories from the [wheel] encompassed the descriptions, a new category was created.”

They also had participants in a different experiment take a whiff of a historic book from 1928, and were initially surprised to find that many of the people described it as “chocolate-y." That ended up making sense, in a way, they said, because from a "chemical point of view," coffee and cocoa contain "identical" compounds to those in decaying paper. Other descriptions included, “coffee,” “old,” “rotten socks,” and “mothballs.”

Now, Bembibre and Strlič are on to other important "heritage smells" worth recording, like those at Knole House, a massive and old English country estate, or the smells of leather gloves worn during the coronation of King George IV, among other items.

Their noses, in other words, never stop.

Someone who lived in northern England around 2,000 years ago had good taste.

Recently, Northern Archaeological Associates has been excavating a stretch of road—part of Britain’s longest highway, the A1—in advance of improvements, and they’ve turned up a series of artifacts hinting at a settlement that would have been one of the earliest and wealthiest Roman towns in Britain, as LiveScience writes.

Among the finds were a silver ring shaped like a snake and a fragment of an amber figurine depicting a “toga-clad actor,” Historic England says. These are the possessions of a wealthy person, and along with the other discoveries—shoes, cups, keys, coins, shoes, a pen and ink pot—they indicate that this area was likely a more important center than was previously realized.

One of the items discovered was a plumb bob, which would have been used in road construction to keep a project on course. "It is fascinating to discover that nearly 2,000 years ago the Romans were using the A1 route as a major road of strategic importance," a representative of Highways England said in a release.

When David H. Burr, the first Surveyor General of Utah Territory, showed up in Salt Lake City in July 1855, Brigham Young, then territorial governor, was almost certain he was a spy for the federal government. “Burr has been watching for evil ever since he has been here,” Brigham Young wrote to Utah’s representative in Congress.

Young, also the spiritual leader of Utah's Mormon settlers, did not have a high opinion of federal officers in general. He called them “dog and skunks ... sent here by the authority of Government to rule over men as far above them as they are above the low and vicious animals they so faithfully represent.” But Burr posed a particular threat. He had made his name mapping states further east, but his task in Utah was a very different kind of job. He and his men were meant to parcel out the land of the territory into plots that could be sold or settled, and to the Mormon communities who already lived on some of the land, that work was a threat. Once the federal government had measured the ground beneath their feet, there was no guarantee they'd be allowed to stay.

In 1850s Utah, “no conflict created more distress than the battles over federal land surveys,” writes historian and professor emeritus at Brigham Young University, Thomas G. Alexander. For two years, Burr and his team were harassed, spied on, and accused of fraud. At the time, Burr was sending distressing reports back to Washington, warning President Buchanan that Utah’s Mormons were preparing for battle.

Just two years after they arrived, having surveyed 2.5 million acres—a small fraction of the territory—Burr and his team fled the territory in fear for their lives, and Buchanan sent in 2,500 troops to install a new governor.

Mormon settlers had first come to Utah in 1847, after the church's founder, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob in Illinois. Smith's followers had settled in Illinois after the governor of Missouri, their previous home, had ordered them "exterminated." Young, the group's new leader, decided to move west, to the isolation and freedom of the desert. Not long after the Mormons settled by the Great Salt Lake, though, the United States took possession of the area as spoils of the Mexican-American War, and the church's followers were once again pushed into negotiations and clashes with unsympathetic and often prejudiced American politicians. 

Even though some settlers had been living in the territory for close to a decade, they had little claim to the land they occupied. The federal government still recognized, to some extent, the land claims of local tribes, but ultimately considered itself the owner of all land in Utah. Although the Utah legislature had created land-use laws and authorized county surveys, settlers were still living outside of any framework that would allow them to make legal land claims, so the Surveyor General’s work was a source of great anxiety to them. 

Young and his allies weren’t wrong to be suspicious of Burr, even if they did use underhanded strategies to confirm their worries. They intercepted Burr’s mail, and found that he was sending complaints to Washington. Salt Lake City, he communicated, was larger than a town it was allowed to be under federal law. Burr also worried about the power and influence of the Mormon church. The territory gave control of scarce resources—such as the timber that grows only in canyons—to prominent Mormon leaders, who were supposed to manage them for the public good. Also, about a third of the church’s members had to give what legal rights they could claim to their land to Young and the church, an arrangement that Burr saw as a dangerous merger of church and state.

After reading Burr’s mail, a group of territorial officials, including the acting attorney general and the territorial marshal, confronted him. He needed to stop writing these letters, they told him, and “they would always know if he did so again,” according to Alexander, the historian.

At the same time, Mormon leaders were waging their own epistolary campaign against Burr. The Surveyor-General, according to Young, “was never anything else than a snarling puppy, snapping and biting at everything that comes in his way .... swindling the Government extensively, all the surveying that has been done by his party is not worth a groat.” Though they were supposed to be marking the survey lines with permanent monuments, Young wrote, “they stick down little stakes that the wind could almost blow over ... . Not a vestige of all they do will be left to mark where they have been in five years.”

If Burr and his team weren’t doing their best work, it may have been in part because of the obstruction they faced from settlers. One surveyor, Charles Mogo, had his oxen stolen, and had to go out on one job with a team of guards. They received reports that Mormons were trying to turn native tribes against them by saying that they were coming to take away the land—which was not inaccurate, even if it was not the stated purpose of the survey. In some cases, according to Burr, hostile Mormons simply removed the markers his team had set down.

Soon these tensions escalated into violence. Another of Burr’s surveyors, Joseph Troskowlawski, was beaten almost to paralysis. Sunday sermons started to mention Burr and his men by name and inveigh against them. Burr soon left and federal troops came in. The resulting conflict, the Utah War, was not exactly a show of strength by Buchanan's government. After a two-year standoff with Young and his people, negotiations ended the conflict and brought in a new territorial government. It was a black eye for the president, who was accused of acting in haste and ignorance, or of failing to sufficiently supply the troops he had sent.

The staff Burr left behind did not fare well either. Mogo was accused of stealing horses and was almost stoned to death by a Mormon mob. He fled—without his pregnant wife. (Their newborn son would later die on a cold and snowy journey to join him.) An office clerk, C.G. Landon, was beaten with rocks and clubs but managed to escape. A mob found him two days later at home, in bed, nursing his wounds, and he had to jump out of a second-floor window to escape. He headed, barefoot, out of Salt Lake City and disappeared. For months no one heard from him, and he was presumed dead before he finally showed up months later in Placerville, California, hundreds of miles away.

Back in Washington, Burr tried to explain himself and even asked to return to his post after the war. But the General Land Office fired him and had his replacement, Samuel C. Stambaugh, investigate the accusations of shoddy surveying. In his report, Stambaugh was not kind. He found Burr guilty of “great remissness ... in not providing proper checks upon his deputies,” and the surveys themselves faulty. All the work had to be done over. Although tensions had dissipated somewhat, the new surveyor was not much friendlier to Mormon interests than Burr had been. He recommended the federal government not sell any land until Congress could “induce other than Mormon emigration to the Territory.”

It would be another nine years before the federal government opened a land office to facilitate sale of land to settlers, well after neighboring territories. Utah didn't then become a state until 1896, again, years after the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Even then the federal government remained suspicious of the state's Mormon population: Utah was let into the union only on the condition that the church's official support of polygamy be abolished.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade—everyone knows that. When life gives you 1,250 gallons of spoiled mayonnaise, though, the instructions are a little less clear.

Michigan State University found themselves in just this situation last December, when freezing temperatures compromised 500 containers of dining hall mayonnaise, each of which held 2.5 gallons. The solution? They turned it into energy.

After "students in the cafeteria complained," and the local food bank turned it down, the mayonnaise needed a new home, writes The State News. So Carla Iansiti, a school Sustainability Officer, dreamed one up: they fed it to the university's anaerobic digester, which is used to power some farms on the south side of campus.

The 500 2.5 gallon containers of mayonnaise were dumped in the anaerobic digester on Dec. 2, 2016 https://t.co/SIU1iPbyFN

— The State News (@thesnews) April 6, 2017

In the anaerobic digester, microorganisms eat biodegradable waste and produce biogas, which can then be combusted into heat and electricity. Iansiti figured the tiny critters, which thrive on sugar and fats, would love mayonnaise.

After a few hours during which 12 volunteers poured gallon after gallon of smelly white stuff into a giant dumpster, all of the mayo was taken care of. "It was a perfect situation to turn what could have been a catastrophe into something positive," said Sustainability Officer Cole Gude. You might even say the may-o became will-o.

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.

Agate gemstones are known for their amorphous, fluid patterns and colors created by the slow accumulation of sedimentary layers. But in the case of the obscure "gems" known as "motor agate" or "fordite," instead of sediment and minerals, the layers are made of car paint.

Pieces of fordite certainly look as though they could have been fashioned deep within some colorful part of the Earth. Largely, though, fordite was created well above ground in the auto plants of Detroit, Michigan.

Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, American automobiles began being painted via spray techniques that produced large nuggets of excess paint, built up in layer after layer of color. When the cars’ coating would be heated to harden, these overspray deposits would harden right along with them, bringing them to an almost stone-like hardness. A 2013 article about fordite in The New York Times refers to this excess as “enamel slag.”

Once these globs were sufficiently large enough to get in the way of the factory line, they would be broken off the bars and skids they were hanging from, and generally tossed away as waste. “Most of the good stuff is already buried in landfills,” says Cindy Dempsey, an independent jewelry creator and owner of Urban Relic Design, who has been working with motor agate for over 20 years.

According to a history of the material on Fordite.com, a site created by Dempsey, some auto workers with an eye for upcycling these colorful remnants cured them even further and cut them just like gem rocks. With a quick polish, chunks of motor agate became just as lovely as any naturally occurring mineral. And certainly more colorful.

The auto worker who originally gave Dempsey her first piece of fordite called it “paintrock.” On her site, Dempsey writes that she came up with the name “fordite” from a combination of Ford and the common mineralogical suffix “-ite.” “I thought I did, but I don’t know, because it ended up out there in the world,” she says. “I tried to trademark the name years ago, but Ford blocked my trademark.” As an alternative, she devised the name “motor agate.” 

There are those who try to sell fake fordite. According to Karla Piper of Siesta Silver Jewelry, which makes jewelry and accessories out of pre-cut pieces of the material, people have tried to pass off recently fabricated fordite and even polymer clay as true Detroit agate. “Buyer beware,” she says.

Due to the nature of how vintage fordite was created, building up from layer after layer of different colored car enamel, fordite is often differentiated by the plant it came from, and the era in which it was created. Dempsey, who works with rough chunks, cutting and polishing cabochons from raw slag, looks to the color and even the smell of the material to identify true vintage fordite. “I can tell when it’s automotive paint,” she says. “There are certain eras of paint that have a certain sweet scent to them.”

Dempsey’s site identifies four varieties of motor agate, based on the way the layers end up falling and the way the colors are layered. One stand-out variety features layers of color that are separated by layers of grey primer. There are degrees of color-on-color fordite featuring more or less color variation, as well as layers of color that bleed into one another. For Dempsey, the heyday of fordite production was the 1970s, thanks to the wide variety of car colors on offer. After that, "the color of American cars really started to change and get more and more bland,” she says. “Now you notice, almost every car is silver, black, many colors of grey or gun metal, maybe dark blue, there’s an occasional weird orange. It’s very bland!”

By the 1980s, new painting processes began replacing messier, hand-held spray techniques, and once-abundant hunks of raw fordite became much more rare. But over the decades, both collectors and factory workers saved large amounts of the paint slag.

While the name “fordite” implies that the paint gems came mainly from Ford plants, it has also come to encompass any gem made of layers of hardened paint. Piper says she’s seen stones that were made from boat paint and appliance paint, though they don’t have the same mystique as true motor agate. “People would rather have a piece of a car than a piece of a refrigerator,” she says.

No one knows how much vintage fordite still exists, sitting in a box in someone’s garage or hoarded by some private collector. But it is widely available from sellers such as Dempsey and Piper, the latter of whom supplies the Detroit Institute of Arts with her wares. Fordite is literally a piece of American history that just accidentally dried in place, and for people like Piper, that’s what makes it special. "Being from Michigan, an automotive state, it’s part of our history."

On October 30, 1919, Tony Pizzo arrived in New York City chained to his bicycle. He had pedaled 3,000 miles in five-and-a-half months, attached to his bike by a three-and-a-half-foot chain and handcuffs welded shut around his wrists. These restraints had been sealed in Los Angeles the previous spring by Fatty Arbuckle, who had wagered that no man could ride a single-speed bicycle across the country, and offered to pay $3,500 (around $50,000 in 2017) to anyone who could—as long as they arrived in New York City before November 1.

At Hotel McAlpin in Manhattan (known as the Herald Towers apartments today) among onlookers, press and local politicians, New York Mayor John Hylan cut Pizzo free of his shackles. Pizzo told the New York Times, as he eyed his bike with disgust, that he wouldn't make a trip like that again for a million dollars.

Six months later, Tony Pizzo left New York City, chained to his bicycle, bound for Los Angeles.

The New York Tribune called it "a foolish but daring endurance stunt."

This time he was to ride from New York City to Los Angeles, then turn around and ride back to New York City to claim the $5,000 purse a Chicago-area bicycle club had put up. He rode with advertised support from Fisk tires, Morrow brakes, and supposedly Crown Bicycles, though in photos taken during his ride he is clearly on an Iver Johnson. A staged photograph in the magazine Our Navy shows Pizzo aboard a clean Crown bicycle with bright whitewall tires and bedecked with the appropriate advertising. But a bike without scratches and dents and worn off paint is not found among the more candid shots of Pizzo visiting cities.

It is not until his third expedition that the Crown bicycle appears. His goal on this trip was to visit each capital of the 48 states in the union, and on October 5, 1921, Colorado Governor O.H. Shoup sealed Pizzo’s handcuffs before he rode south to New Mexico, headed to Austin, Texas.

The details of how Pizzo came under the initial bet are fuzzy. One newspaper claimed he was a failed actor and was friendly with Arbuckle. Another claimed his wife was a working actress. Others claimed his riding partner and later tour manager, C.J. Devine, was at a card game with Arbuckle and knew Pizzo would be the guy to take up such a feat. Regardless, so it goes that on 18 May 1919, Pizzo and Devine were handcuffed, chained, and welded to their bicycles, to be released upon their arrival in New York City.

Modern bikes are light, even cheap ones, and made with aluminum or lightweight steel or carbon fiber. They have many gears. Pizzo road an Iver Johnson that likely weighed around 40 pounds unladen, and with only one gear. Multi speed, derailleur bikes existed, but were largely unpopular and wouldn’t gain favor until the late 1930s. Pizzo carried a trunk with his gear. He wore a navy sailor's uniform. He pedaled some 75,000 miles in all, on soft-soled leather shoes. The bike's saddle was hard leather around a wiry frame, suspended by steel coils.

He had slick tires, smaller in diameter than is common today, and little more than about an inch wide. He rode this over unpaved roads, not usually maintained, and full of hazards like loose sand, mud, ruts, and rocks. Highway systems in those days were not much more than interconnected trails for adventuring motorists, marked only by colored bands on telephone poles. Pizzo crashed many times when his front wheel stopped suddenly in mud or sand. He fractured—at least once—his wrists, arms, collarbone, and shoulder blades.

Leaving Venice, California, en route to Riverside for the first time, Tony Pizzo and CJ Devine proceeded east through the Mojave desert towards Williams and Flagstaff, Arizona wherein they were shot at by border patrol agents, detained, and released once credentials had been handed over and verified.

On the road outside Flagstaff, Devine fell and broke a collarbone, returning to Flagstaff for treatment with Pizzo. They pedaled to the Grand Canyon where Devine nearly fell off a cliff when his bicycle went tumbling over the edge and pulled him down face-first to the dirt. He was saved when Pizzo grabbed hold of Devine's legs to stop him sliding over the edge. Devine was able to reel his bike in and stand up when it was back on level ground.

Pizzo and Devine had to do their mundane, daily routines while chained to their bicycles. Eating, sleeping, brushing their teeth, bathing, was all further complicated in that it had to be completed within two feet of a bicycle to which they were chained. Bicycles to which they would mount each morning and pedal 110 miles on average.

Before his second adventure, Pizzo was going to be discharged from the Navy, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, more commonly known as consumption in the 1920s. It’s a condition associated with rapid weight loss, which is also a common symptom of riding a bike 100 miles per day for 170 consecutive days. His massive rides turned into a marketing campaign for the navy, which, looking to boost recruitment, kept him on as a recruiter and booked him for a number of speaking events around the country. As one might suspect, Pizzo was misdiagnosed. He didn't have tuberculosis. But his stunts had turned out to be fairly lucrative, and he kept at it. Governors and mayors and naval administrators had Pizzo ferry letters and accolades around the country.

Accurate enlistment data from this time is hard to come by, and official numbers from the Defense Manpower Data Center only go back as far as 1954. However, the U.S. Navy was a bit thin after WWI, having been used lightly, to say the least, and ships would not be built in earnest until the mid ‘30s. They needed whatever clever recruitment tactics they could find. Whether marketing Pizzo’s navy-bred toughness and endurance had a marked difference on recruiting is hard to judge.

Riding across the country in the early 20th century was not as rare as one might think. There are a few dozen rides documented or mentioned throughout the 1920s and 30s. Though no one who decided to take on the challenge, whether solo or in tandem, was a prisoner to their bike. Many cyclists had to abandon their rides because of mechanical problems, injuries, or bad weather. Pizzo was not immune to these sorts of setbacks, and in fact Devine had to withdraw from the first trip while recovering in a Kansas City hospital from a crash that broke his arm and shoulder. He would not return as a rider, but instead became Pizzo's tour manager and publicist, booking appearances with mayors and governors, and presentations to the public either for Navy recruitment or entertainment. Pizzo's adventures turned quite lucrative as well, with prize money and postcard sales providing a salary for Pizzo and his wife to start a family.

As for the arduous task of riding hundreds of miles a day while chained to his bike, "It ain't so bad as it sounds,” said Pizzo. “When I ride into town everybody turns out to look me over. At first they take me for a prisoner. I am, in a way. But my bicycle is my only jailer. We get to be chums because where it goes I go."

See if you can guess which of these cars is a luxury car and which is a cheaper, mass-market car, just by the name:

ES350
A8
Yaris
LT200
Spark
Velozes
C300
Fiesta

Chances are, you picked the alphanumeric names as the luxury cars and the name-names as mass-market cars. You did this even though there are at least two cars in there you’ve never heard of, because I just made them up.

How did this happen? Why do alphanumerics read “fancy” to us, when applied to a car? Why do the least appealing names refer to the theoretically most appealing cars?

In the early days of gas-powered automobiles, many used either alphanumeric names or extremely literal names. The alphanumeric names weren’t meaningless strings of letters and numbers, not at that point; they could refer to all kinds of things. Ford, for example, created the Model A, then the Model B, and so on down the alphabet until they came to the most famous of all, the Model T. (Not all of those models became anything more than prototypes, but still.)

Other cars were simply named with the make of the car and then a word like “Sedan,” “Touring,” “Roadster,” “Coupe,” or “Delivery.” These might seem more like name-names than alphanumeric names, but in fact the baldly descriptive titles are actually in the same family as the C300. Alphanumeric names generally, up until the 1980s, served as a sort of spec sheet: they described the number prototype the car was (Model T), or how many horsepower it put out (Flanders 20), or some other description of the car’s internals (Packard Twin 6, named for its dual six-cylinder engine).

“In the 1910s you started seeing more cars with brand names, especially in the luxury sector,” says Andrew Beckman, the archivist at the Studebaker National Museum in Indiana. Studebaker was emblematic of this sort of incremental change: Studebaker produced a number of cars with “Six” in the name, indicating a six-cylinder engine, but after Big Six, Light Six, Special Six, and a few others, basically ran out of adjectives. The Big Six, in 1928, was renamed the President.

As World War II approached, the American carmakers began shifting to more name-names, partly to differentiate their models in the marketplace and partly because name-names can be modified in all kinds of ways to give off the kind of vibe you want your customer to get from your car. By the 1930s and 1940s, the American carmakers were going for a kind of regal-airship tone: “You had the Commander, the President, the Continental, the Zephyr, and, in what would prove to be a poor choice a few years later, the Dictator,” says Beckman.

The American cars stuck with names moving forward, adjusting with the times. In the 1960s, the jet age and space race led to all sorts of astronomical names, like the Galaxie, Comet, Meteor, and Satellite. Shortly after, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, came an explosion in Spanish names: Eldorado, El Camino, Bronco, Cimarron, Caballero.

But while the American carmakers were insisting a car could be called the Dodge Dart Swinger, the European carmakers had never abandoned alphanumeric names. There are exceptions, but much of the prestige of the alphanumeric name can be traced back to one of the oldest car companies in the world, Mercedes-Benz. Karl Benz is widely credited with having created the first automobile that can recognizably be classified as such, with an internal combustion engine, in 1885.

The first cars under the Mercedes-Benz name came out in 1926, and the company quickly became a legend in auto-racing as well as somewhat more questionable industries. Hitler drove around in a Mercedes-Benz 770K, named for its gigantic 7.7-liter engine. The majority of the European carmakers didn’t cross the Atlantic into the U.S. market until after World War II, but they came in rapid succession beginning around 1950. Jaguar and Alfa Romeo came in the late 1940s, and the Germans came in soon after: Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen.

Studebaker was initially the key distributor of Mercedes-Benz cars in the U.S., but by all accounts bungled the job pretty solidly; the cars weren’t like American cars, they had weird old-timey alphanumeric names, and the salesmen didn’t know how to convey how good these cars were to American buyers. (Clark Gable seems to have liked them, though. He drove a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing, which sold a few years ago for $1.85 million.)

In 1965, Mercedes-Benz decided enough was enough, and bought out its contract with Studebaker, establishing dealerships, a home office in New Jersey, training schools, and a new ad campaign pitching Mercedes-Benz cars as something different than Americans were used to—something better. The new strategy worked. “Mercedes in particular and European brands in general are kind of the progenitor of alphanumeric names,” says Beckman. “As their prestige rose in the market, I think other companies tried to emulate them.”

By the late 1970s, Mercedes-Benz was nudging European cars into competition with Cadillac for America’s favorite luxury automobiles. BMW, Audi, Volvo, Saab, Jaguar, and more performance-luxury cars like Ferrari and Porsche followed. All used alphanumeric names either primarily or exclusively, which helped alphanumeric names come to be associated with luxury for American buyers.

In the mid- to late-1980s, a trio of Japanese carmakers decided to all get into the luxury game. Honda, Toyota, and Nissan were making serious inroads into the American mass-market sector, but none could ignore the success of the European luxury brands. In 1986, Honda launched Acura (which took a few years to switch from name-names to alphanumeric names), and 1989 found the creation of Lexus (from Toyota) and Infiniti (from Nissan). I couldn’t get anyone to precisely confirm this, but everyone I talked to agreed that the naming strategy of those three brands was heavily influenced by the European brands. And it wasn’t only the Japanese brands. In 2000, Cadillac scrapped most of its cars and began using alphanumerics; current models include the ATS, CTS, and XTS. Chrysler, after it was torn down and hastily reconstructed following the 2008 economic crash, started selling luxury sedans like the 200 and 300.

Today, all 10 of J.D. Power’s list of the 10 most popular luxury cars in the US come with alphanumeric names.

But why? “Many luxury carmakers focus on their parent brand to carry a lot of the equity, the cachet, and sort of the lifestyle badging that is associated with many luxury brands today,” says Penelope Davis, a senior director at Interbrand, a brand consultancy company. Davis helps manage the naming practice at Interbrand’s New York office; she asked me not to reveal specifics, but she and her team has had a hand in coming up with quite a few car model names you’d recognize.

The idea with alphanumerics is that it’s the make of the car, and not the specific model, that matters. It’s a Mercedes; whether it’s a 300 or a 350 is less important than the fact that you own a luxury German automobile. And it’s also a bit more subtle, a very specific listing of a car’s specs that doesn’t try to hammer you over the head with trends or cutesiness the way a Toyota Yaris or a Smart ForTwo does. In general, Mercedes-Benz’s car naming scheme gives you information, not a vibe: it tells you the displacement of the engine, the level of trim on the car, the body style, and as of 2014, what kind of drive style it has (electric, gas, diesel, hybrid). “It's a very clean and efficient and sleek way of helping people choose,” says Davis.

And alphanumerics don’t age. They don’t capture the imagination the way names like Mustang or Explorer or Camaro did, but they also won’t seem horrendously outdated like the Zephyr. Alphanumerics aren’t memorable, which means you’ll neither regret them nor remember them fondly.

At this point, there are car-enthusiasts who are screaming at their computers or smartphones while reading this. There are many, many exceptions to these rules. Rolls-Royce has always used name-names like the Silver Shadow and Phantom. Same with Bentley (Flying Spur, Continental.) Porsche sells the 911, but also the Carrera. Some of the bigger Italian makers use name-names, including Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Maserati. (Ferrari is still a mix.)

“One of the big philosophies in naming is that that name helps me make a choice, and says something about me,” says Davis. It’s sort of obvious, but any choice of naming scheme is done to try to convey something about the company and the product, and to imply that any purchaser of that product will attract some of that something by osmosis. If a buyer wants to think of themselves as classic, opulent but conservative—maybe a Rolls-Royce Phantom. A Lamborghini Aventador indicates flashy, attention-grabbing exoticism.

A Lexus LS500 or a Volvo S90 or a Mercedes CLS550? Nothing insane, nothing even especially exotic, but nice. Fancy. Those names indicate precise Teutonic luxury. Even though only one of them is actually German.

The island of Sazan, a little over three miles off the coast of Albania, was for years a mystery to the general public—home to a military base that used to shelter more than 3,000 soldiers and was designed to be a safe haven in case of a nuclear attack.

But after the end of the Cold War most of the soldiers left, and now Sazan is largely deserted, though with its network of bunkers and tunnels is mostly intact.

Tourists have been forbidden from the island for the most part, but the government allowed a few to visit in 2015 in an attempt to boost the country's economy and make Sazan a destination for the adventurous. 

This week, according to the Associated Press, Albanian officials said that they are going to allow tourists to visit the island again this summer. The goal, like last time, is to make a new tourist destination. Economy Minister Milva Ekonomi said it would be "an important event for the Albanian economy," which relies heavily on tourism. 

This could also be a sign that, geopolitically speaking, things aren't what they used to be. During the Cold War, the Soviets considered Sazan key to controlling the Strait of Otranto, the passage between the Albanian coast and Italy's heel. 

These days, Sazan is manned by just two soldiers, who keep watch over a deserted fortress that is beginning to show its wear, its days of secrecy and strategic significance now gone. Cold War rumors about the island—such as whether the Soviets used Sazan to manufacture chemical weapons—persist, and the Albanian government might be thinking that, for a particular type of tourist, that only makes it all the more alluring.

April Fool’s Day is a real pain for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that if something crazy happens to you, it’s going to be hard to convince people that it really happened. That’s why, when a British Columbia man got run over by a deer on this most recent April 1st, he had to get some security footage to prove it.

At around 8:30 last Saturday, aspiring hip-hop artist Cary McCook was getting out of his truck, when out of nowhere, a young deer crashed into him, trampling over him into the night. As he told the CBC, he was able to see the deer for a second before the crash, noting that it was being chased by a dog.

McCook was able get up and dust himself off, relatively unharmed, more or less immediately posting about it on Facebook. 

Still, no one believed him because, well, it sounded like a joke.

Luckily for McCook, he was able get his hands on the hotel security footage that perfectly recorded him getting assaulted by the deer. Naturally, McCook is now semi-famous, or, as he said on Facebook, "shout out to that deer for my success!!"

When the writer Deborah Fallows toured smaller and midsize communities in the United States in 2016, she made sure to make the same stop in every city and town: the local public library. Libraries were never just plain old book-lenders, she learned, and they certainly aren't now. Most provide residents with internet access, educational opportunities, and even refuge during times of meteorological or civic crisis. They use their archives to hold onto local history, and their programming and decor to reflect a vision of the future.

A town or city's Main Street or Chamber of Commerce reveals its body politic, writes Fallows, but "the visit to the public library reveal[s] its heart and soul." These days, many of these hearts and souls are full of unexpected stuff—including stuff that, if you want, you can take home with you for a few weeks. In the spirit of civic introspection, here are some of America's most surprising current circulating collections, from art to umbrellas.

Fine Art

The Carnegie Library, Braddock, Pennsylvania

The entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie, who eventually built thousands of libraries in the United States, chose Braddock, Pennsylvania, as the site of his first. He always imagined it as a community space—when it opened, in 1889, it had billiard tables on the first floor and a bathhouse in the basement, and later additions brought in a music hall, a swimming pool, and a two-lane bowling alley.

Although the building has gone through cycles of ruin and repair, over the past two decades, this communal spirit has returned to the forefront. The bathhouse is now a ceramics studio, and in 2013, the library put together an Art Lending Collection, which allows members to check out framed artworks for three weeks. The works, all of which were donated by artists, are hung on hinged walls, which patrons can page through as if they were looking at a large book. "It allows people to live with contemporary art the way that mostly just collectors and museums are able to do," says the collection's curator, Dan Byers, in an explanatory video. Due to the program's success, the Braddock will also soon be lending out puppets. 

St. Clare Seed Library Seed Exchange now open to the public! https://t.co/Cixp00xDt3#garden#seeds#librarypic.twitter.com/mduv6D9Znd

— Franciscan Sisters (@FSLFMN) March 24, 2017

Seeds

Various libraries

If you're ever at the Orono Public Library in Orono, Maine, be sure to pull open one of the card catalog drawers. Once full of Dewey Decimal System cards, the drawers now house a new type of knowledge repository: packets of locally-grown seeds. Green-thumbed patrons "borrow" the seeds, and plant the vegetables or flowers in their own backyards or plots. Then, at harvest time, they bring a new crop of seeds back to the library.

Orono isn't the only library that encourages this particular vegetative state: "Community seed libraries are taking off in Maine," the Bangor Daily News reported in March, listing examples in Portland, Dexter, and Northeast Harbor. Although seed sharing is illegal in some states, more and more are adopting legislation exempting non-commercial ventures. If you're interested in learning more about existing seed library programs in your area, this website is a great resource.

American Girl Dolls

Ottendorfer Library, New York City, New York

Libraries are supposed to serve a variety of constituents, some of which have unique needs. After listening to some of their patrons, one librarian at the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library took it upon herself to provide a scarce resource: American Girl Dolls.

According to Amy Geduldig of the NYPL's Media Relations Office, it all began when Children's Librarian Thea Taube found a Kirsten doll in library storage, a long-ago donation from the American Girl Doll Company. Former employees had left the doll boxed up, considering her too expensive to display. As an experiment, Taube put Kirsten on her desk—and after enough kids inquired after her, the library began lending her out.

Kirsten now leaves the library regularly, and returns with new hairstyles and clothing, and handwritten tales of exciting trips. When Kirsten had to visit the company doll hospital a few years ago—she needed treatment for a variety of adventure-related injuries—repeat customers threw her a get-well-soon party.

After Kirsten received extensive media coverage, people began donating new and used dolls to the library. Geduldig says there are currently three dolls available for checkout, and each typically gets taken home about once per month.

The cake pan section at a local library! pic.twitter.com/OjoibbT7

— Leanne Masters (@theleannem) June 11, 2012

Cake Pans

Various libraries

Even libraries aren't immune to trends, and one that has swept the nation over the past decade or so is that of the cake pan collection. You can check out an unusual cake pan everywhere from Keokuk, Iowa (which has three different rabbit-shaped pans), to Coventry, Rhode Island (which boasts a wide-ranging Disney-themed set) to Albuquerque, New Mexico (which has a new 3D Skull). Many of the pans are donated by older patrons, who give them away when their kids leave for college. Borrowers must wash the pans before returning them.

In a 2012 interview with Library Journal, Cindy Thornley of Maryland's Charles County Public Library explains the appeal. "People still think books," she says. "When we tell people what we are doing it captures their attention." Plus, it makes for some good, nerdy jokes: “When we floated the idea, the catalogers were giddy," she says. "They said, ‘How do we categorize them? Is it a ring or is it a bundt?’"

Synthesizers

The Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Like its cousin in Braddock, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has a rich history of artistic and community endeavors. But one new circulating collection is resolutely contemporary: the library now lends out synthesizers. "Pittsburgh has a creative and diverse electronic and emerging music scene," explains Tara Goe, a librarian with the Music, Film and Audio Department. "It occurred to us that this might be an audience that has traditionally not visited the Music Department."

After polling local musicians about what they would most like to see in a collection, they bought a bunch of Moogs, Korgs, drum machines, and recording gadgets, and started circulating them this past February. They also have a few in-house instruments that Goe says "get a lot of love," including a miniature theremin—so if you're looking for a groovy library experience, you know where to go.

Fishing Poles

Albany Public Library, Albany, New York

Especially in busy cities, libraries can be havens—places to escape all the hustle and bustle and take a moment for yourself. Thanks to circulating collections at two branches of the Albany Public Library, patrons can now find this peace and quiet elsewhere, too. In partnership with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the library has amassed 20 fishing poles, which it lends out along with its books.

"It seemed to be a need in the community," says Bob Resnick, a librarian at the Washington Avenue branch, which has ten poles. "We're in an urban setting, but within that setting are a few lakes and ponds, and we found that some of our patrons did not have the equipment necessary to go fishing." Now, he says, warm-weather weeks see the poles flying off the shelves, and patrons bring in pictures of their catches. (The library, true to the spirit of borrowing, promotes catch-and-release.)

Hand-Knit Shawls

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.'s Folger Shakespeare Library is known for its old, rare books and folios. But as Atlas Obscura's Sarah Laskow reported in March, they also have a younger collection: comfy shawls hand-knitted by Rosalind Larry, the library's head of circulation. There are five of them, each available for use in the reading room—which, with its high ceilings and finicky circulation, can be somewhat chilly.

As Larry explained to Laskow, she started knitting on her lunch break in the 1980s, and never stopped. Although researchers can't take the shawls home, they often develop special relationships with them. One asked for the same shawl every day for a month—a romance that lasted much longer than Romeo and Juliet's.

Umbrellas

Green Tree Library, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh's Green Tree Library lends out plenty of fun stuff: wifi hotspots, virtual reality viewers, Kindles. (They, too, have American Girl Dolls.) "We're always interested in small collections—things that are different, and that people might not have readily available at home," says the library's assistant director, Shannon Barron.

But for their newest collection, the library went with something just plain practical: umbrellas. "The weather in Pittsburgh is iffy at best," explains Barron. "Lots of people come in and get stuck here because it's raining. They need to get to their cars or walk home, and they would ask us if we had umbrellas."

As of April 4, 2017, they do: one white and one black, propped up in a handy stand. It's been sunny for the past few days, Barron says, so they haven't gotten much use: "Right now they're just sitting by the door waiting for someone," says Barron. With April digging in its heels, that someone will surely pick one up soon, and inaugurate America's latest unusual library collection.

In the world of mass food production, the sheer scale of food being processed means that, on occasion, some creature that’s not supposed to be in the food gets in the food. Spiders are found quite frequently hanging out in bags of grapes; mice turn up in Subway sandwiches and Popeye’s chicken orders. But it’s rare to find a bat.

Recently, though, two Floridians bought a box of Organic Marketside Spring Mix from Walmart and started eating it, only to find a dead bat hiding in their leafy greens.

The bat was not in great condition. “The animal’s decayed state prevented a definitive test of whether it had rabies,” the Guardian reports.

It’s very unlikely that anyone would get rabies from eating a dead bat—or salad touched by a dead bat—even if the dead bat did have rabies. Still, the two unfortunate Floridians were treated for rabies. (They’re both doing fine.)

Right now, it’s still unclear how that bat ended up in the boxed salad; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating. Meanwhile, the company who made the salad, Fresh Express, has recalled that batch of salad mix. If you have such a salad with a clear container and the code G089B19 on it…probably a good idea to toss it.

Hamzeh AlMaaytah rarely sleeps, but when he does, it’s usually on the mattress hidden behind a screen in the back of his bookshop. Hamzeh, 36, is one of Amman’s most dedicated bookshop owners, and certainly its most eccentric. He tends to leap instead of walk, is prone to poetic pronouncements, and speaks most often in Fusha, the literary form of Arabic, rather than the Jordanian dialect typically used for daily speech. He reveres the written word. In response to text messages or Facebook posts he will send back a picture of his handwritten answer. “There is so much intimacy and knowledge in the handwriting of a friend,” he says, bemoaning that his practice has yet to catch on.

A fourth-generation book owner, Hamzeh describes his work as a calling. “I run an emergency room for the mind,” he explains, while sipping coffee near the entrance of the shop late one morning. He wants to ensure there is always a place in Jordan where one can access the healing power of books, no matter the hour or the price. Hence the mattress in the back. Hamzeh keeps his store open 24/7, a practice he inherited from his father, who moved the family bookstore from Jerusalem to Amman before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He’ll occasionally get late-night relief from two former employees, a pair of Syrian brothers who fled their native Homs. All of his prices are negotiable, and he has both a generous loan policy and a robust book exchange program, where patrons can swap any book they bring in for one in the store.

The shop, al-Maa Bookstore or Mahall al-Maa in Arabic, is nestled right against the ancient Roman Nymphaeum public water fountain, down the way from the Grand Husseini Mosque and the local Sugar Market, on a street that was once the Amman River. Al-maa means “water” and, like the once-public fountain, Hamzeh wants his books to be as accessible as water. An underground well still bubbles at the entrance.

For the uninitiated, al-Maa looks like any other of the many book kiosks and independent shops that dot nearly every corner of downtown Amman. But for hundreds of students, poets, and book-lovers the world over, al-Maa is a haven, one of the few places on earth where nothing matters more than a love of books.

“Sometimes, I come here in the afternoon and stay for two days,” Hussein Alazaat, a graphic designer with a special interest in Syrian books and children literature, says. “There is nobody like Hamzeh. We can discuss all the issues in the world.”

Eric Boodman, a journalist living in Boston who met Hamzeh when visiting Amman for a few weeks in summer 2015, was most struck by his warmth. “Visiting Hamzeh is like entering another world,” he wrote me. “My friend Angus and I went back almost every day after we first met him, so we could drink tea and talk and hear him recite poetry while accompanying himself on the oud or the synth.” For tea, Hamzeh would loop his pot onto a string and lower it into the shop’s well, collecting the gurgling water.

Locals and visitors alike have a love for al-Maa that is palpable. Ahmed Murad, 19, takes comfort in knowing there is a place where he will always be greeted with enthusiasm, a place that is never closed. “I come late at night, and sit with Hamzeh discussing literature,“ he says one afternoon, after discussing Kafka, the art of 19th-century correspondence, and his preference for Russian writers over French. Murad, who finished school through ninth grade and lives in a nearby orphanage, is currently finishing a novel about life in the orphanage, and working to improve his spelling and grammar. “No other bookstore has this exchange program,” he says. “I exchange a lot of books here.” As we speak, a man enters with two shopping bags of his own books, ready to exchange them for Arabic poetry and English-language business manuals.

Hamzeh loves his customers, like Murad, but remains anxious about the strict education in his orphanage and that of other local schools, which he fears is too radical. He wants his bookstore to be an oasis away from some of the hateful opinions he sees accepted too often in broader Jordanian society. For this reason, Hamzeh censors his book collection, and adamantly refuses to sell the type of literature that makes the surrounding bookstores so profitable.

“If I were a merchant,” he says, “I would sell conspiracies, magic, genealogies, and anti-semitism.” Such fare is pretty standard in the area. When a friend and I wander into a nearby shop and ask for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, we are enthusiastically given a copy, along with two additional books about other Jewish Zionist conspiracies that, in the words of the bookseller, “predicted with remarkable insight the Zionist takeover.” The shop a few doors down has Mein Kampf displayed alongside biographies of Gandhi and Tolstoy. While many Jordanians might express love for Jews, such conspiracy theories are widely accepted. Hamzeh not only refuses to sell such books, but spurns donations that glorify any type of hatred or violence. He shows me a graphic novel, which I flip through and politely describe as beautiful. He stops at one panel, where the man is hitting his wife and yelling at her. “You see that?” he says. “I would never let just anybody buy this book. Ideas can be dangerous.”

Alan Elbaum, a medical student in Berkeley, CA, says he once gave Hamzeh a copy of The Wind and the Wall, a 1979 collection by Nazarene poet Jamal Qa’war. Hamzeh refused the gift after noticing a line that described Israelis as “the butcher.” Elbaum, who first met Hamzeh during a summer stay in Jordan studying Arabic, has maintained a close friendship with him, and Hamzeh recently gave him six volumes of the Talmud in Arabic.

Al-maa holds about 2,000 volumes, with over 10,000 stored in a nearby warehouse. Outside his own inventory, Hamzeh makes sales by matching people with book-owners around Amman. He is intimately aware of local private collections and surrounding bookstore inventories, and people will often stop by with specific requests.

“I’ve seen him do this over a dozen times,” Elbaum says. “Somebody will come in looking for something, and he’ll leave and then come back a few minutes later, or sometimes the next day, with the book.”

Founded in Jerusalem in the 1890s by Hamzeh’s great-grandfather Salman, the family bookshop was known as al-Jahith’s Treasury. In 1921 the shop passed to Salman’s son Khalil, who would later buy the libraries of departing British officials in an auction bid, gaining a massive inventory that still fills Hamzeh’s shelves, from books on the Commonwealth to Latin primers. Khalil died in battle in 1947, and his son Mamduh moved the newly acquired books to Amman. There he would eventually marry and reopen the store. Mamduh died when Hamzeh—the youngest of his 10 children—was only 12, leaving his oldest son Hisham to manage the store.

“My father was a doctor for the soul,” Hamzeh says, describing how he would spend late nights with his father at the shop. “Anybody could walk in, and after a few questions he would know exactly what book to give you. He was always reading. I am not yet like this.”

In 2016 Hamzeh, who had operated his shop as a branch of the family store, split formally from the al-Jahith’s Treasury brand, ceding the title to his brother Hisham, who runs a more typical bookshop a few blocks away. Hamzeh had bought the British Mandate collection from his brothers already in 2012. While they remain on good terms, it seems that his near-fanatical reverence for all things written had begun to wear on the business relationship with his brothers, though Hamzeh sees himself as acting within his father’s spirit. “There can be no set price for a book,” he says. “It depends on the book, the person, and the author—when you put a price on something, you change the relationship between person and book. You say ‘this is 10 dinars, this is 20 dinars’ and then the person thinks one is better than the other. But how can I know how much somebody needs a particular book in a certain moment? Which book is the best for that person?” For Hamzeh, a first-edition Virginia Woolf could hold the same value as a 1933 biology textbook.

For Boodman, the Boston journalist, this attitude reflects Hamzeh’s deep belief in the power of words and learning. “He showed me a coloring book that doubled as a field guide to American deciduous trees right before pulling out a dusty old Ottoman dictionary,” Boodman recalls of one late-night visit to the store. “These books were as equally precious to him as the classical poetry he recited, and he wanted to share it all.”

When I ask Hamzeh if he has a favorite book, he clasps his heart in performative shock. “A favorite book! No! That is extremism! To say one book is the best, better than any other…no, I could never do it.” He loves all the books in his store equally and fiercely, and that is that.

But love alone can’t keep a store alive. In the past year, a bad illness and some poor investments have made the future of al-Maa precarious, and Hamzeh has already scaled back his public book fairs and other projects. A few of his dedicated customers, spearheaded by Alan Elbaum, have started an initiative to save the store, raising thousands of dollars in donations from academics, students, and professors, but Hamzeh is unsure if he will be able to stay open. The fundraising campaign is halfway toward its goal of $15,000, with donations coming in primarily from the U.S. and the UK, but contributions have started to slow down. His clientele is dedicated, but not wealthy, and Hamzeh may have to leave al-Maa, though for many it is impossible to imagine him doing anything but sipping tea at 3 a.m., cross-legged in a corner of his shop, providing literary guidance and carefully curated book suggestions to all who stop by.

As the afternoon winds down, an older man walks in, blind in his right eye. He is looking for books for his three children. Hamzeh springs into action, grabbing books from shelves and expertly teasing out volumes from piles around the store. The man considers the stacks and finally chooses a few novels. He hesitatingly proffers some bills. Hamzeh accepts at once, encouraging him to return when he needs more. “Here on the shelves, the books are dead. The most important thing is that the children read them,” he says.

As the man leaves, Hamzeh shows me a children’s book in Arabic about the Wright brothers that he had pulled down, a copy of one of the first books he ever read. He starts singing “I believe I can fly,” thumbing the pages and telling me how his father had taught him to read during those late, quiet nights at the shop. “Maybe this would be a favorite book,” he says, cautiously. “Everyone thought the Wright brothers were crazy, but they believed in the impossible and chased it. They taught us that man can fly."

Over the past week, divers from Italy's Civil Protection Agency have been scouring the bed of Lake Nemi, a peaceful oasis just outside of Rome. They're working off an unusual tip: According to local fishermen, when nets go down into the lake, they often come up full of ancient artifacts.

These trinkets, the divers think, might be coming from a tantalizing source: the last, lost pleasure boat of the Roman emperor Caligula. Crews are using sonar to search for the rest of the ship in the lake's mucky bottom, the Telegraph reports.

Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41. Infamously fickle and image-obsessed, he would often become obsessed by strange projects, and spare no expense in their achievement.

For example, early in Caligula's life, a soothsayer predicted that he had as much of a chance of becoming emperor as he did of riding horses over the gulf of Baiae. Years later, he used massive pontoons to build a two-mile "floating bridge" over that same gulf, and spent several days riding his favorite horse back and forth over it.

When Caligula was emperor, Lake Nema was sacred, and no ships were allowed to sail on it. Despite this, he ordered the construction of three massive barges on the lake. Each was decorated in gold and marble and equipped with hot water, plumbing, and purple silk sails. Caligula likely hung out on them often, drinking dissolved pearls and carrying on his many affairs.

Soon after Caligula was assassinated in A.D. 41, though, the ships were ballasted and sunk. No one saw them again until the late 1920s, when dictator Benito Mussolini had the lake partially drained in order to reveal them. These efforts uncovered two ships, which were moved to a museum—but this museum was destroyed during World War II.

Now, divers are searching for the lost third ship. “We know from documents from the 15th century that one of the boats went down in an area of the lake different to where the other two were found," said local mayor Albert Bertucci.

“If it’s down there, and it’s that long, then we are talking about the world’s first luxury cruise ship," Bertucci said. Caligula would have wanted us to use it.

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.

When James Madison wrote in the First Amendment that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech," surely he knew that one day the owner of a video-game store would cite his words in a lawsuit challenging the government's right to ban a giant inflatable Super Mario. 

Scott Fisher says the town of Orange Park, Florida, threatened to fine him $100 per day last summer if he kept the promotional Mario outside of Gone Broke Gaming, according to WJXT.

Fisher complied, but said that not having Mario out front has hurt business—and violated his free-speech rights. So, on Thursday, with the help of a conservative legal organization named Institute for Justice, Fisher sued Orange Park, arguing that the town's ban on inflatables such as Mario is unconstitutional because it allows some inflatables—those erected for the holidays, for example—but not those that are intended to promote a business. 

"The best idea wins," Fisher told WJXT. "There could be three or four video game stores in the local area, but if I happen to have the idea to put a Mario in front of mine and it draws more business, that's exactly what the First Amendment is there to protect."

Madison would probably have to agree. Censored political speech is nothing compared with the right to display a 9-foot Nintendo icon that's full of hot air.

Ultra-fast roller coasters are cool and all, but you always forget about the birds. One rider of the newest (and fastest) coaster in Europe recently got a swift reminder, however, when a pigeon flew into his neck during one ride, even if it did not seem to impede the rider's enjoyment much.

The unidentified rider got the rude awakening when a pigeon collided with his neck while he was riding on the Red Force coaster at Ferrari Land, a theme park which opened Friday near Barcelona, according to Mashable. The collision appears to have been deadly for the bird, which ran into a coaster capable of reaching 111 miles per hour in five seconds.

The bird clung to the man’s neck for a few moments before he tossed it aside, giving his companion a bewildered look in the process. After a beat, the man threw his hands back in the air, apparently cognizant that life, for him at least, must go on.