For more than a century, the British were able to boast that the sun never set on their enormous empire.

But in the mid-19th century, colonists ruling over the Indian subcontinent became painfully aware they had little  idea what their portion of the empire actually entailed, from the number of people to the number of rivers. More pressingly, they knew even less of what lay beyond their border—beyond the Himalayas.

They likely never would have discovered the secrets of South Asia, if not for the help of Nain Singh.

Singh took detailed records of his trips, taken on foot through forbidden lands, often under cover of darkness. At the end of each years-long adventure, he returned his hard-won intel to his employer, the British Crown. He was among the most legendary of the “pundits,” a British corruption of the Hindi word “pandit” for learned person, and the term the British used for their cartographer-spies. Tasked with measuring the terrain, as well as describing its resources, notable features and the best way to cross it, he also analyzed its people, trade and military.

At that time, the British were banned from many countries in south and central Asia.  Neighbors like Tibet had banned all foreigners in 1850 to protect themselves as Britain and Russia clashed over their competing desire to control the region. Still desiring to map Tibet, Afghanistan, and other regional powers, the British turned to their Indian subjects, who could convincingly play the part of a local trader or devout Buddhist.

Armed with the few tools that wouldn’t undo their disguise—namely a 100-bead rosary for counting steps and a prayer wheel for storing secret messages—the pundits made best use of what they had. “[The British] tried to make [the pundits] as inconspicuous as possible,” says South Asia historian Ian Barrow, “by suggesting they were just pilgrims walking naturally across the road.”

What they lacked in technology, they made up in ingenuity. For every 100 steps that Singh took, he moved one bead on his rosary, called a mala. Every 2,000 steps added up to one mile, so every mala marked five miles. Thousands of repetitions added up to the width of the Himalayas and the distance between home and foreign kingdoms not seen by British eyes.

Though the mala and the wheel were both devices for espionage, they advanced Singh’s cover story that he was a humble Buddhist, not a Hindu spy. Had he ever been truly interrogated, however, the rosary would quickly have been revealed a fake (real malas actually have 108 beads) and the wheel an elaborate hidey-hole, full of notes written in code.

These men were asked to risk their lives because “the British always needed information,” says geographer Matthew Edney. From their earliest days on the subcontinent in the 1600s through to their departure in 1947, they felt constantly behind and desirous of every detail that might make them stronger rulers.

Every new battle and every ensuing treaty expanded the colonists’ reach, but a true understanding of the topography—as well as the people, cultures and economies that existed on their new territory—remained elusive. Over time (and three different, competing surveys of India), the colonial government slowly developed a sufficient understanding of its own land. Instead of resting easy, this simply allowed them to develop a new obsession, this time with what hid behind their mountainous northern border.  

In the mid-1800s, when the pundit program kicked into high gear, the British were particularly troubled by their neighbors in Afghanistan, Nepal and Chinese-held Tibet, all countries English men, women and children were denied access to. “British official maps at this time show Tibet as one huge white blank,” wrote the late historian Peter Hopkirk, “as though the whole area was obliterated by snow.”

These bans on English entry were particularly stringent on British travelers bearing geographical survey tools, which at the time could be as large as grandfather clocks. That’s because “there’s no good reason for mapping [another] person’s territory,” Barrow says. Recording every peak and valley in a foreign land almost always means you’re preparing for an invasion. That’s why the British were driven to enlist locals who better blended in, train them to use inconspicuous mapping tools and disguise them as monks and wise men.

In this vein, Singh walked across the Himalayas, secretly tracking each step on his rosary. At the end of the long, cold road, he finally gained entry into Tibet’s mysterious capital Lhasa. This made him among the first British loyalists to record the fine details of the geography and culture of the region in years and to send his secrets back to headquarters.

But Singh was just one of dozens of Indians tasked by the colonists with such harrowing and strategically important reconnaissance. His colleague Kinthup used the same covert methods in the 1880s to attempt to trace the headwaters of the Tsangpo River, which had long been disputed. On his return from China in 1878, another Singh—Nain’s cousin, Kishen—counted his horse’s steps to track the mileage when he could not walk himself. Together, the pundits mapped tens of thousands of miles of politically and climatically inhospitable earth by foot.

The data they collected for their maps wasn’t as accurate as British surveyors using their best and newest tools would have been. But “without them, there would have been no surveys,” Edney says of every Indian who aided British cartographers over centuries of colonial rule. “They’re absolutely responsible.”

In addition to providing important information, such as the political climate in Tibet and the best path through the Himalayas, the international intrigue shrouding their efforts in secrecy enlivened the stuffy colonial government. It also furthered the Brits’ belief in their own enlightened rule. “I think that’s why it kept going and why their reports were published,” Barrow says. “[T]hey were supposed to be private—but it was great propaganda.”

So great, in fact, it’s inspired numerous successive works of literature and historical review over the ensuing century.

Perhaps most notable is the inspiration it lent to the infamous imperialist author Rudyard Kipling. In 1901, he published the novel Kim based on the stories of the pundits. Charting adventures across India, the Himalayas and Tibet, the book captures the industrious—and often racist—spirit of the era, while summing up colonial thinking on cartography quite well: “There is,” Kipling wrote, “no sin as great as ignorance.”

A New Zealand family was shocked Sunday to find that the shimmering waves that had begun to cover their local soccer field were in fact one giant spider web.

According to the Otago Daily Times, the 66-foot web is located in Papamoa, about 140 southeast of Auckland, New Zealand.

"We thought surely there are no spiders inside that," Tracey Maris, who discovered the web with her daughter, told the Daily Times. "We walked further up, and our feet started getting stuck in the cobwebs and then we noticed little black things on top.

"So, as you do, we screamed really loudly," Maris added. "Oh my God, they were everywhere; literally thousands of them."

According to a local spider expert quoted by the NZ Herald, the tiny arachnids normally live in the grass, but recent flooding in the area had caused them to create the giant web for higher ground. The activity, called “ballooning” or “spider bum parachuting," sees the spiders point their spinners in the air and shoot their silk upwards, where it is caught by the wind, which lifts and carried the spider. When thousands of spiders do this at once, it creates one giant web.

Delicate, and surprisingly pretty, the web had all but disappeared by Monday, but the spiders are still there in the grass, so who knows when it might happen again.

For hundreds of years there have been reports of people hearing the sound of meteors—shooting stars—as they streak across the sky. As early as 1714, astronomy Edmond Halley (yes, that Halley, of comet fame) dismissed these accounts of hissing, sizzling, and popping as figments of the imagination. After all, sound travels much more slowly than light—see: every thunderstorm ever—so any sound from the meteor breaking up in the atmosphere would arrive long after the streak of ionized gas has faded from the sky. But hearing and seeing a meteor at the same time is not a scientific impossibility. A new hypothesis published in Geophysical Research Letters might explain just how it happens, and why the described noises sound a lot like radio static.

When a meteor hits the atmosphere, at between 25,000 and 160,000 miles per hour, it releases electromagnetic radiation, including both light and what are known as very low frequency radio waves. Twenty-five years ago, scientists demonstrated that these waves, which travel just as fast as light, can cause objects, especially metal ones, to vibrate in a way that produces sound.

“The conversion from electromagnetic waves to sound waves … is exactly how your radio works,” Colin Price of Tel Aviv University, coauthor of the new study, told Science. The study proposes that these waves come from an electrical current generated as the meteor interacts with the atmosphere. Though it involves coma ions, an ambipolar electric field, and Hall current, it’s the simplest explanation for the phenomenon yet.

On April 14, a Saskatchewan rancher and her husband noticed a bunch of heifers on their property moving in a peculiar way. When they investigated further, they saw this: 

That, in case the video is too blurry, is a beaver leading around 150 heifers on a path to—apparently—nowhere in particular. "He was out and about, I think looking for a new place to build a beaver lodge, and they were following him," the rancher, Adrienne Ivey, told the CBC.

Heifers are female cows that haven't borne a calf yet. Ivey compared them to "teenagers," meaning that they are young and impressionable and prone to following the crowd when perhaps they should be charting their own paths. And, as teenage behavior often does, the heifers beaver-following also made for great video. Ivey, for her part, said that it was "so Canadian" that Canadian cattle chose to follow—of all animals—a beaver, the country's national symbol.

Better late than never: Couple cashes in coupon for free stay at Brandon hotel after 17 years https://t.co/0Lf4qG1EO9pic.twitter.com/1Zv0idxm1D

— CBC Manitoba (@CBCManitoba) April 15, 2017

In September of the year 2000, railway worker Dennis Cowan got his first stamp on a bright yellow Super 8 Motel "10th Night Free" card, later accumulating eight more stamps and giving it to his daughter Kimberly Cooke as a present. 

Last week, over 16 years after that first stamp, Cooke finally received the coveted tenth—and a free night at the Brandon, Manitoba Super 8. (The CBC, if you're wondering, seems to have rounded up the card's age.)

The coupon completed a long, arduous journey before it finally achieved its life's purpose. "My wife just carried it in her wallet for years," Cooke's husband Will told the CBC. "She's probably bought 10 new wallets and transferred it 10 times."

It has even been kidnapped: in mid-2015, Cooke's wallet was stolen, only to show up 10 months later in her mailbox, the punch card still hanging on inside. 

Last week, the Cookes finally had a chance to stay at the Super 8—which, after a small bit of hemming and hawing, honored the coupon. There, the couple presumably enjoyed "Newly Renovated Rooms," "Business Friendly Accommodations" and "Complimentary Breakfast."

"It was great," Will said.

So the next time you think about throwing that punch card away, think twice. It might be there when you need 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.

So you want to build a world? Here’s the recipe, at its most basic: Take some topography, then add water. 

That was Martin O’Leary’s approach when he decided to build a program to spit out imaginary landscapes. "Essentially, I generate a random bumpy surface so the program has something to start with,” he says. "And then I run an erosion simulation over that.”

Some of the results of that combination—just a small sample of potentially infinite possibility—make up the worlds of the Uncharted Atlas, a Twitter bot O’Leary made to produce a new map every hour, each with its own array of mountains and rivers, fjords, island archipelagoes, and deserts. 

The landscapes are rendered in the pen-and-ink style of maps printed at the front of certain fantasy novels à la Tolkien, complete with alien names: “The Pez-mes-Lüch Coast,” “The Confederation of nos-Us,” “Outer Háukwuénoé.” (O’Leary built a language generator, too). But the plain style covers the true-to-life intricacy of the maps. O’Leary—a glaciologist by day—wanted his world-building program to mimic the way landscapes evolve as a result of forces acting over time: Mountains around a river valley, the wide plains sloping to an undulating coastline, thimble islands scattered across the water.

There are less involved ways of generating landscapes, of course. These typically make use of something called “fractal noise”—basically, a pattern of disorder that tends to occur in natural forms, from the complex wending of a river to the craggy silhouette of a mountain. And while it's a quick way to counterfeit real landscapes, fractal disorder on its own cannot touch the deeper order that organizes a landscape. 

"What tends to happen,” O’Leary says of that approach, "is you get something which looks very good at the small scale, and then there’s no large-scale structure to it.” Picture a river valley, with nowhere for the river to go when it reaches the end. 

Uncharted Atlas churns through its meticulous calculations—each map takes about 90 seconds of processing, O’Leary estimates, which is not nothing for modern computing—every hour, and its rivers always reach the sea. “They’re not 100 percent geologically accurate,” says O’Leary. "I would like to go back to it and play with some other stuff. You could do glacial stuff properly, get some proper coastal stuff—I didn’t really do any coastal erosion.”

O’Leary has a habit of turning his “what if” ideas into internet art. Other examples include Botston, an algorithm that fills in new verses for Gaston’s song in Beauty and the Beast (you know the one, and if you don’t, don’t look it up unless you’re prepared to have it stuck in your head for days), and a scale-model of the entire continent of Antarctica in Minecraft. But perhaps the project that shares the most DNA with Uncharted Atlas is called Landsat Bot, which randomly selects a square of satellite imagery every hour and tweets it in all its full-color, painstaking detail. From above, the landscapes can seem just as fantastical as O’Leary’s invented ones, bound together by an astronaut’s-eye perspective.

"I think it becomes hard for us to conceive of how landscapes were thought of before. We’re used to seeing everything laid out on a map with incredible precision,” says O’Leary. Thanks to satellites, "we just take it for granted that you can look at everywhere at once."

John Alexander Dowie was not America’s first faith healer—but he was the first to get rich doing it. Dowie, a Congregational minister originally from Scotland, discovered his unusual gift in 1876, when he was 29. A small girl dying of diphtheria was miraculously cured after Dowie prayed at her bedside.  

A year later he launched his healing ministry. After stints in Australia and California, Dowie moved to Chicago and opened a church near the site of the 1893 World’s Fair. Sadie Cody, who was in town to see her uncle Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show at the fair, went to see Dowie about a tumor in her back. After he laid his hands on her, Cody later said, she “felt a new life” inside her. The tumor vanished, and word of Dowie’s seemingly miraculous healing powers spread quickly.

In his lifetime, Dowie claimed to cure scores of serious afflictions, including smallpox, cancer, broken limbs, and blindness, as well as lesser ailments like asthma and arthritis. Medical doctors and mainline Protestant ministers, however, dismissed Dowie as a charlatan, noting that many of the illnesses he claimed to cure were psychosomatic, while the most dramatic healings were obviously staged.

Nonetheless, Dowie’s flock multiplied rapidly, and by 1901 he had amassed enough followers to establish his own version of utopia, a biblical city built from scratch on 10 square miles of farmland 40 miles north of Chicago.

He named the city Zion and proclaimed it a theocracy governed by “the will of God.” Dowie was scornful of the U.S. Constitution, which, he noted, was “capable of amendment and improvement in a Theocratic direction.” Dowie owned everything in Zion: the lace factory, the general store, the bank—even the homes his followers lived in. It was the ecclesiastical equivalent of a company town.

Zion’s residents were required to comply with Dowie’s strict interpretation of the scriptures. “Billboards at the cross streets caution one that swearing or smoking or bad language of any sort are not allowed,” one visitor noted. Also banned: saloons, pork, medical practices, gambling halls, drug stores, and fraternal lodges. Zion’s residents were also required to tithe 10 percent of their income to Dowie.

With his bald head and flowing white beard, Dowie certainly looked like a biblical prophet, and he played the part with aplomb. He appointed himself “General Overseer,” first over Zion, then over all Christendom. “The time has come,” he announced; “I tell the church universal everywhere, you have to do what I tell you … because I am the Messenger of God’s covenant.”

Dowie proclaimed himself Elijah the Restorer, sent by God to prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. Since his mandate was catholic—that is, universal—Dowie named his church the Christian Catholic Church. (The C.C.C. was in no way affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, which Dowie considered irredeemably apostate.)

By 1902 Zion’s population had swelled to 10,000, and Dowie claimed 150,000 followers worldwide. He had also amassed a fortune in excess of $10 million. His annual income from tithes alone was reported to be $250,000. One contemporary scholar has dubbed him a “religious robber baron.” Dowie was not ashamed of his wealth, and he lived in unabashed luxury. “Jesus came to make His people rich,” Dowie preached. Not in the “life to come,” but a “hundredfold now in this time.”

With Zion established, Dowie aimed for new worlds to conquer. He dispatched missionaries to Africa, and he set his sights on America’s undisputed capital of wickedness: New York City. In November 1902 he unveiled a plan to “restore New York” and to “sow New York knee-deep in Zion!” In autumn of the following year, he would bring his “full gospel message of salvation, healing, and holy living to the Gothamites.”

At the time, New York certainly could’ve used a little salvation. Manhattan was so mired in decadence that it was nicknamed the Island of Vice. As Richard Zacks explained in his book of that name, “New York reigned as the vice capital of the United States, dangling more opportunities for prostitution, gambling, and all-night drinking than any other city in the United States.” As a New York police commissioner, even Theodore Roosevelt had been powerless to tame the city. But John Alexander Dowie was determined to succeed where the hero of San Juan Hill had failed.

Three thousand Zionites eagerly volunteered for the crusade. All through the summer of 1903, they immersed themselves in planning. They pored over New York maps and travel guides. Some studied foreign languages so they could evangelize in immigrant neighborhoods. A guidebook published for the crusaders included helpful tips: “Do not make a confidant of a stranger, no matter how agreeable he or she may be. If in need of information on the street ask a police officer.”

On Saturday, October 17, 1903, eight trains carrying Dowie and his “Restoration Army” converged on New York City. While his followers traveled in coach, Dowie rode in a lavishly appointed private Pullman car.

Dowie’s evangelists were instantly recognizable by the black leather satchels they carried and the greeting they habitually uttered: “Peace to thee.” They canvassed tens of thousands of homes in the city, as well as countless saloons, gambling halls, and brothels. They preached on street corners, and handed out pamphlets promoting rallies and healing services at Madison Square Garden, which Dowie had rented for two weeks.

But dissolute New Yorkers were in no mood to be lectured by a horde of bible-thumping hicks from the Middle West. Almost everywhere they went, the Dowieites were greeted with jeers. The rallies at Madison Square Garden were a catastrophe. Dowie’s longwinded and incoherent sermons were frequently interrupted by catcalls and hisses. One especially unruly meeting was cut short by police who feared a riot would erupt. Amid cries of “Blasphemer!” and “Imposter!” Dowie was forced to flee the arena for his own safety.

The healing services were equally shambolic. All candidates were carefully screened before entering the “healing room.” Those granted an audience with Dowie were asked to surrender their wealth to the Christian Catholic Church if they were healed. Revolts ensued. “The indignation of the invalids was intense,” a reporter said of one botched healing service. “Many of them were on crutches, others were blind, while a few left the beds to test the treatment.”

“Those who go to Dowie for healing and are not healed,” another reporter noted, “are simply accused of being short on faith, and Dowie lets it go at that.”

The New York papers were scathing in their contempt for the crusade. The Examiner dismissed Dowie as “a coarse-grained, low-minded, shame-bereft, money-greedy adventurer.” His followers, the paper added, were “weak-framed, dull-witted creatures who crave a master as a dog does.”

The criticism infuriated Dowie, who was accustomed to nothing but fawning audiences. He did not take kindly to being called a fool, and he responded with vitriol. In his sermons at the Garden he denounced his critics in the press, in the mainstream ministry, and in the audience as “dogs,” “flies,” “rats,” “maggots,” “lice,” and “pigs.”

The New York crusade was an unmitigated disaster. The Christian Catholic Church gained just 125 new members. More ominously, the enterprise cost the church an estimated $300,000, pushing it to the edge of bankruptcy. Soon more financial problems arose. An investigation determined that Dowie had been using Zion’s bank “as his personal piggy bank.” There was discontent in the flock. Dowie suddenly appeared fallible in the eyes of his followers.

In 1905, one of his top lieutenants, Wilbur Voliva, orchestrated a coup, charging Dowie with “extravagance, hypocrisy, misrepresentations, exaggerations, misuse of investments, tyranny and injustice.” Voliva was installed as the new leader of the church, a position he would hold until his death in 1942. By then, Zion had become thoroughly secularized, just another sleepy suburb of Chicago. The old religious laws were either repealed or ignored. Utopia was dead.

After he was deposed, John Alexander Dowie went abroad to escape his creditors. He died in 1907, just two years after his fall from grace. He was 60.

Dowie’s enduring influence, however, is undeniable. Despite his unorthodoxy, he is still considered one of the founding fathers of modern American Pentecostalism, the branch of Christianity that emphasizes faith healing. His conspicuous consumption paved the way for modern televangelists like Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen, who preach a so-called prosperity gospel. Dowie is also the spiritual antecedent of unsavory faith healers like Peter Popoff and Oral Roberts, “miracle workers” who have been exposed as frauds.

Dowie’s legacy also endures a long way from Zion, Illinois. One of the missionaries he dispatched to Africa, Daniel Bryant, was an especially efficient evangelist. In 1904 he converted a Zulu chief named Joseph Kumalo; thence Dowieism spread like a brushfire. Today, an estimated 15 million people in six nations in southern Africa belong to so-called Zionist Christian churches. These churches continue to adhere to many of Dowie’s teachings, particularly a belief in faith healing.

It’s likely that few members of these churches are even aware that the Zion in their denomination’s name refers not to the biblical Zion, but to an American hamlet on the windswept shores of Lake Michigan.

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

Over 120 years ago, in 1895, a businessman named Sigmund Fechheimer had the terrible luck of getting a paper cut on his tongue while licking an envelope.

What happened next, The New York Worldexplained, was a tragedy:

S. Fechheimer died here yesterday from blood poisoning, as a result of cutting his tongue while licking an envelope.

Mr. Fechheimer’s death was a singular instance of the dangers of blood poisoning, and his case is almost unparalleled in medical history. Saturday night, in sealing an envelope, he pressed the mucilaged portion of it across his tongue. The edge of the envelope was sharp and cut his tongue so that it bled a little. The next day, his tongue began to swell and pain him. The symptoms of a serious case of blood poisoning were manifest to the doctor who was called to Mr. Fechheimer’s hotel Sunday.

The story was reported widely at the time—The New York Times even featured the situation in a small blurb—giving rise to all sorts of wacky misconceptions about lickable adhesives over the years, including whether envelope adhesive has gluten (it doesn’t), whether it’s made from animal byproducts (nope, it’s vegan—at least in the case of stamps), and whether it’s a way of distributing cockroach eggs (it isn’t, though such adhesives are actually a fairly nutrient-rich option for cockroaches, according to PETA).

Still, why, over a century later, are we still subjecting ourselves to this indignity? Consider that, when it comes to stamps, we've largely solved this problem, since most these days are self-adhesive, no licking required. The lickable envelope, on the other hand, lingers, a 19th-century innovation that was amazing before it was (briefly) deadly, before becoming what it is now: a cost-effective, pedestrian option notable only for the familiar taste and other corresponding connotations, like unpleasant trips to the post office. But in part thanks to the direct-mail industry, they just might be here to stay.

In the 1830s, when we first started using lickable adhesives on envelopes, they were, actually, a pretty big innovation. 

That's because while sending a letter isn't a big deal these days, in the 19th century, it was, like many things then, horribly complicated, with postage in the United Kingdom, for example, that calculated postage fees by distance, instead of requiring a single stamp. 

Fortunately, a man with an interest in both adhesives and simplifying the mail saw a way forward. His name was Rowland Hill, and in 1837, he released a booklet titled Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, which would prove hugely influential.

One of Hill's big ideas? An adhesive stamp. From his booklet (highlights mine):

Persons unaccustomed to write letters, would, perhaps, be at a loss how to proceed. They might send or take their letters to the Post Office without having had recourse to the stamp. It is true that on presentation of the letter, the Receiver instead of accepting the money as postage, might take it as the price of a cover, or band, in which the bringer might immediately inclose the letter, and then redirect it. But the bringer would sometimes be unable to write. Perhaps this difficulty might be obviated by using a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash, which the bringer might, by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter, so as to avoid the necessity for re-directing it.

This idea, as we know today, would be one of Hill's most lasting, making it possible for a letter-sender to pre-pay for postage.

And, a few years later, Hill's idea got its moment in primetime, with the debut of the Penny Black, a tiny illustration of Queen Victoria that was, like many stamps to come after it, lickable. During the first year alone, 68 million Penny Black stamps were applied to pieces of mail throughout the United Kingdom.

And while there are some other claimants to the title of earliest adhesive stamp, the Penny Black was a turning point for both stamps and the idea of licking paper to apply it to another piece of paper. The Penny Black ushered in the concept of “gumming” stamps, most commonly with substances like dextrin (a derivative of starch), and polyvinyl alcohol.

(If you do find yourself licking a stamp or a pile of envelopes, by the way, odds are that you might be consuming a couple of calories in the process. Per the Food and Drug Administration, gum arabic, a substance commonly used in stamps and envelopes, has around 1.7 calories per gram, which, by some estimates, equates around 0.1 calories per lick in the U.S. Not a ton, but it’s not the same everywhere. The U.K. Royal Mail, in one estimate to The Guardian, says that its stamps range from 5.9 calories to 14.5 calories. Don’t fill up on stamps.)

Considering all that, it seems weird that in an age where we have so many better options for adhesives that envelopes are still mostly stuck in the days when tongues do most of the work. Many stamps, for example, became self-adhesive long ago, first in Sierra Leone, where the humidity was so high that traditional stamps didn't work so well, but also in the U.S., where it took a couple of tries before an attempt in 1989 finally stuck. 

Back to lickable envelopes, though. Why are they still here? The biggest reason: the direct mail industry, which loves remoistenable adhesives, since they work really well for machines that ship out direct mail en masse.

Or, as the Envelope Manufacturers Association explains: “Remoistenable front seals reactivate with moisture and are the most common in use today due to their suitability for automatic inserting machines."

These machines, perhaps unsurprisingly, are complicated, and, for direct mailers, a lot of variables go into creating perfect pieces of mail in bulk, like how much the seal curls, how well the seal handles humidity, and how the adhesive bonds to the paper.

And not all approaches are created equal. As the book Adhesives and Sealants: Technology, Applications and Markets explains, a process called hot-melt extrusion—which involves placing a hot adhesive directly onto the letter—has gained prominence within the industry because the end result is often more professional looking than simply moisturizing the adhesive on the envelope, as the goobers do it.

“Hot melts can be applied much more precisely than water-based systems and give a very polished and professional look with no curling of paper,” according to the book. “Conversely, water-based adhesives often look dull, have rough edges, and tend to curl the paper because moisture is added to only one side of the sheet.”

The consumer market, too, has long benefited from solutions that take some of the annoyance out of a truly tedious task. The Life Magazine ad above, for instance? It’s from 1941. But mass-mailers have completely different needs, which means we’re not going to get rid of licking envelopes anytime soon—even if there’s not a whole lot of actual licking going on.

And the truth might be that the reason why such envelopes persist in the consumer market is because they imply a personal touch, even if, in recent years, companies like Thankbot and Bond have come along to challenge our thinking about what constitutes hand-written. Lickable envelopes will probably, in other words, be around for the foreseeable future, or at least until the letter itself dies, at which point we'll likely have fully submitted to our electronic destiny.

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

Atlas Obscura's sixth annual Obscura Day—the special day we set aside each year to celebrate our mission of discovery and exploration—is just a couple of weeks away, May 6, 2017. For those of you still trying to decide how to spend the day, here's a few updates and ideas to get you started:

Option 1: Join us at an event

We're hosting over 170 events in 36 states and 25 countries

Which means the odds are quite good there's one happening near you. Some of the Obscura Day events we're particularly excited about this year include: 

• Berlin: A classical concert in an abandoned hilltop spy station
• Portland, Oregon: An underground excursion & cocktail hour inside the infamous Shanghai Tunnels
• New York City: A celebration of the first jazz record inside NYC’s oldest members-only club 
• Arizona: A visit to an experimental city dedicated to architecture and ecology
• Johannesburg, South Africa: A secret sunrise and sunset rooftop photography tour
• Philadelphia: A day of taxidermy & diaphonization demos at a preserved Victorian history museum
• Beijing: A scavenger hunt inside an abandoned hospital and Catholic school
• Costa Rica: An overnight hike venturing deep into some of Costa Rica’s least accessible forests
• Montreal: A tour of Concordia University’s solar simulator, being used to revolutionize solar power
• Milwaukee: A day of bowling, beer, and history at America’s oldest bowling alley

Browse the full lineup of events by location here, and follow our ongoing Obscura Day-related coverage here.

Option 2: Pick your own destination to explore

No events scheduled near you? There are thousands of ways to celebrate

Choose from the more than 11,000 places in the Atlas and get out there! Discover a curious and wondrous place near you here. 

And finally, don't forget: once you make your plans and set out to seize the day, use the #obscuraday hashtag to share your adventure with entire Atlas Obscura community.

Still have questions? Email us at events@atlasobscura.com.

This is a story about climate change, and a glacier in the Yukon, and a muddy lakebed full of miniature hoodoos, but it's going to start with a brief detour, to more than 200 years ago, some 3,600 miles to the south. 

In the late 1790s, Stack Island, about 2,000 acres in the middle of the Mississippi River on the border of Louisiana and Mississippi, got a reputation as a haven for outlaws—in particular counterfeiters and river pirates. It is said to have been frequented by one Samuel Mason, who turned to banditry after fighting in the Revolutionary War, and Wiley “Little” Harpe, one of a pair of brothers thought to be America’s first serial killers. River piracy, which continues today in some parts of the world (including on the Mekong and Danube), involves stopping passing boats and killing the crew, or perhaps negotiating to buy some of their goods (at an advantageous price, one would assume). Stack Island was strongly associated with this brand of criminal activity back then, a chapter that didn't really end until a group of boatmen raided the island in 1809, killing or capturing a couple dozen outlaws and their associates.

Rivers are inconstant. They wiggle like a steady trickle flowing down a window, forming and wiping out meanders and oxbows and levees and islands. This is happening all the time, but sometimes a sudden event can rewrite how rivers flow in an instant. The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 wreaked havoc on the Mississippi—it temporarily flowed backwards and a fluvial tsunami collapsed banks and nearly scoured Stack Island away entirely.

Fast-forward to the Canadian Yukon, today, and river piracy of a different sort. There, the gigantic Kaskawulsh Glacier pours—slowly—out of the St. Elias icefield. The toe of the glacier has, for centuries, discharged its meltwater into two rivers, the larger Slims River and the Kaskawulsh. But now, because of climate change, the glacier has retreated a mile up its valley, which has in turn caused a geological event, also called “river piracy,” in which the flow of one river “steals” water from another. In this case, the Slims River is essentially no more—almost all of the meltwater from the glacier is now flowing into the once-smaller Kaskawulsh River. A team of geoscientists, led by Dan Shugar of the University of Washington Tacoma, more or less saw it happen. A change that might normally take centuries—or a major tectonic event—happened in a matter of months. 

“Geologists have seen river piracy, but nobody to our knowledge has documented it happening in our lifetimes,” Shugar said in a statement. “People had looked at the geological record—thousands or millions of years ago—not the 21st century, where it’s happening under our noses.”

Slims River used to fill Kluane Lake, which is now all but gone, leaving behind a muddy bed covered in small spikes—tiny versions of the geological formation called a “hoodoo,” formed by the way wind erodes sediments. For the environment there, a lot of things are going to change. Sediment flow, chemistry, fish populations, and wildlife behavior all must adjust to a new, single-river reality, Shugar said.

“So far, a lot of the scientific work surrounding glaciers and climate change has been focused on sea-level rise,” Shugar said. “Our study shows there may be other underappreciated, unanticipated effects of glacial retreat.” Like making us rethink what “river piracy” is all about.

Around 3 a.m. the morning of Monday, April 17, Vickie Fought, the owner of a 15-pound Portuguese Podengo named Lenore, woke to hear her dog barking aggressively. Fought looked over to where the dog had been sleeping, at the foot of her bed, and saw what she initially thought was a larger dog. It was, she later told NBC Bay Area, a mountain lion. 

Lenore, meanwhile, had gone silent. Fought said she saw the big cat exit through some French doors. Lenore was nowhere to be found. "It's hard to fathom," Fought told the station, adding that she ordinarily left the doors open for the dog, but never expected wildlife to use them. "It's beyond what we thought."

Authorities later arrived at the home, in Pescadero, California, west of San Jose, and noted the presence of "paw prints" similar to those left by mountain lions, according to a press release from the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department. 

The state's Department of Fish and Wildlife has been notified, but so far no mountain lion has been identified in connection with the incident. The sheriff's department has urged residents to be safe in the future. "As a reminder," they wrote in the release, "lock and secure your home’s doors and windows."

Step into the Zymoglyphic Museum in Portland, Oregon, and you're immediately surrounded by impossible creatures. One case holds a couple of Scaly Eyeball Plants, contorted and peering out of jugs, and a Pond-Headed Cactus, its crown like a miniature fishbowl. In another small tank, multicolored crabs hide in the sand, and clams disguise themselves with oversized sunglasses. Elsewhere, in a place of honor, the Zymoglyphic Mermaid rests on a spiky coral throne, her sharp beak pulled into a smile.

Wander over to the museum's Xenophora Collection, and you'll see about a dozen other strange specimens—this time, a collection of surprising snail shells. Each is like a miniature undersea mosaic, artfully covered in smaller shells, rocks, and bits of coral. Some have entire sponges growing out of them. One even sparkles with a spare bit of sea glass.

But as well as these shells fit in with their fanciful neighbors, there's something a little different about them. The mermaid, eyeball plants, and other creatures are fictional constructions, built by a human artist as part of a constantly evolving, imagined world. But these impossible-looking shells are 100 percent natural. They are, indeed, shells from the genus Xenophora—artworks made by actual sea snails.

Jim Stewart, the creator, curator, and proprietor of the Zymoglyphic Museum, is always searching for objects that speak to him. As a child, he collected arrowheads, bird's nests, leaves, and stamps, carefully labeling and arranging them. Later in life, he began to collage these odds and ends together, creating tiny, strange worlds—a yellow crab next to a miniature gravestone, or a creaky-looking rainforest, with rusty wires tangling like vines. "I got interested in surrealism, and how the juxtaposition of things can make a more meaningful connection," Stewart says. "The objects take on a narrative."

The Zymoglyphic Museum—the result of decades of similar efforts—purports to showcase creatures and artifacts from various fantastical, fictional eras that Stewart has dreamed up, like "The Rust Age" and "The Age of Wonder." Just as ordinary items can, through combination, create drama and tension, the museum itself is a hodgepodge of visuals and ideas made even more meaningful by their proximity. These days, when Stewart is excited by a particular object, he tries to place it an exhibit, fitting it into an existing diorama or making it the centerpiece of a new one.

When he came across his first Xenophora shell at a shop in Florida—where it stood out defiantly in a sea of smoother, pinker specimens—he felt something different: kinship. "The idea of animals that seemed like they were doing assemblage art, that was really appealing to me," Stewart says. "They almost seem to have personalities."

Xenophora have been around since the Upper Cretaceous, an era better known for bringing us the Tyrannosaurus Rex and covering the land with flowering plants. As such, the snails have spent millions of years refining their artistic process—which, it turns out, is somewhat similar to Stewart's. As the malacologist W.F. Ponder explains in a 1983 paper, an individual snail will choose a particular object and lift it up, either with its foot or with its proboscis, a tentacle-like appendage that protrudes from the top of its head.

Once the snail has its newest decoration in a particular spot on its shoulder, it will cement it to its shell with goo from its mantle. Depending on the species, the snail might also take the time to clean its shell to make it ready for the new addition, or stuff sand and debris underneath it to make sure its sticks properly.

When the snail is younger and smaller, it sticks to proportionately smaller items. As it gets larger, though, it can handle bigger ones. Because mollusk shells grow in a spiral, the shell of a mature Xenophora serves as a miniature timeline of its life, with tiny souvenirs in the middle of its shell, and big ones on its outer whorls. Different species also tend to collect different things—as one expert, Kate St. Jean, details in a 1968 paper, Xenophora pallidula, of Japan, collects rocks, shells, and coral, while Xenophora peroniana, of Australia, generally sticks to just rocks.

These snails' habits have earned them a number of monikers, from "antique collectors of the sea" to "underwater masters of bling." (The name Xenophora is a nickname in itself—it's Latin for "carrier of strangers.") But although it may seem like they're showing off, experts say they're likely doing the opposite. "Everything they do seems to suggest means of eluding detection," writes St. Jean. Rather than sliding across the ground like land snails, they tend to hop or stomp along, so as to not leave a trail. They even bury their feces, like cats.

Their self-decoration serves the same purpose. Predators lurking above may mistake a Xenophora for a particularly artful pile of debris. And even if they don't, the prospect of chewing through extra rocks and shells may deter them from venturing a bite. "The Xenophora are the supreme camouflage artists of the mollusk world," writes St. Jean. (They're so good, in fact, that unsuspecting plants and animals sometimes grow on top of them—thus the sea sponges present on a couple of Stewart's specimens.)

Those Xenophora who have ended up in the Zymoglyphic Museum are long dead. But even in their new environment, their camouflage remains effective. "A lot of people who come in assume that I put them together myself," says Stewart. As all good collagers know, truth is occasionally stranger than fiction.

You can visit the Zymoglyphic Museum on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017, and see the Xenophora Collection for yourself—along with dozens of exhibits that are too good to be true.

Earlier this month, in Whakatane, about 180 miles southeast of Auckland, New Zealand, a bunch of old movies were discovered in a secondhand furniture store, according to The Courier.

The movies, shot on 8mm film, were from the 1970s and initially thought to have belonged to a local. The employee who found the movies, Allan Johnson, did some digging, but was unable to find anyone in the area with the name "Frain," written on a receipt found with the reels.  A name on another receipt looks like "L.M. Armstrong," but, The Courier writes, "it is difficult to read." This all suggests that the reels might really come from the address scrawled on the side of a box carrying them: 3a Fintry Road, Dundee, Scotland. 

Johnson says he will hold onto the movies for now, in hopes that someone might come forward to claim them. He intends to watch them for clues: They seem to show a family reunion or other gathering. As he told The Courier, "They’re someone’s history, though, so I’m not going to throw them away.”

Are these movies yours? If so, The Courier suggests emailing their reporter Ciaran Sneddon at cisneddon@thecourier.co.uk. That family history you thought you lost might, in fact, be found.

It’s morel mushroom season in the Midwest, and in Indiana, one teenager discovered a particularly giant specimen of the tasty treats.

Jayden Graber, 13, found a “ginormous mushroom” near the town of Linton, reports the Indiana Department of Natural Resource’s District 7. An average morel might have a cap about 2 inches wide and 4 inches tall; this one grew much, much bigger.

Usually, morels are snarfed up by deer or other animals before they grow so large, but they can grow as large was one foot. As large as this one is, it can be eaten like any other delicious spring morel.

Patrick the Wombat, crown jewel of the Ballarat Wildlife Park in Victoria, Australia, was a very special guy. He loved to ride around in a bright blue wheelbarrow and welcome visitors from around the world. Nearly every day, his keepers filled his official Facebook page with Patrick portraits, in which he cuddled with his friends, hid in straw, and offered "bucky-toothed kisses" to his many devotees.

But nothing gold can stay. According to said page, Patrick the wombat died peacefully on Tuesday, surrounded by loved ones.

Patrick broke a lot of records over the course of his long life. As far as anyone knew, he was the world's oldest wombat—last August, he celebrated his 32nd birthday, which makes him about 130 in human years. He was also the biggest, once bulking up to about 88 pounds. And he certainly had the most Facebook fans of any individual wombat, at over 56,000. 

Cuteness and celebrity are two of the contemporary world's most potent forces. To his many fans, Patrick was more than just a marsupial—he was a friendly-faced point of agreement in increasingly polarized times.

"He was such a bright spot in an otherwise dreary world," one acolyte wrote on Facebook. "I can never put into words how special it was to meet him, pat him, and give him some corn," wrote another.

Those of us who hadn't gotten that chance never will, now. But we can all do our best to keep the corny, cuddly spirit of Patrick alive. Rest in peace, you unlikely hero.

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.

Among the superstitious citizens of Argentina, one name keeps voices hushed: ex-president Carlos Menem, who ran the country from 1989 to 1999. Saying his name out loud—or worse, coming into physical contact with the man—can bring down sports teams, put people in the hospital, or even bring death. According to local legend, this real-life Voldemort, he-who-must-not-be-named Menem has a clear track record of suffering seriously bad luck, and many believe he brings those around him into his apparent curse.

As so many legends go, it’s tricky to pin down exactly when these beliefs began. Not only is Menem ill-remembered by many for the perception that he brought on Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, he’s also associated with leaving actual death in his wake. According to The Argentina Independent, shortly after Menem won the presidency in 1989, he appointed two new politicians to office; mere days after  accepting the job the Minister of Economics died of a heart attack-car accident combination; months later the Minister of Health followed due to an aerial accident.

But it wasn’t until the 1990 World Cup that matters began to look more actually cursed. Menem attended the game in Milan, and attempted (yet failed) to shake the hand of goalie Nery Pumpido; instead, Menem patted his knee, the Argentina Independent reported. Soon after, Pumpido broke his kneecap, debilitating him for the rest of the game, and Time Magazine conceded many labeled him a “jinx,” the Argentinian for which is “mufa.”  

“This is the darkest day of my career," Argentina’s team coach told United Press International. It should be noted that at the 1990 World Cup, according to the New York Times coverage of the game, Menem did more than pat the knee of more Pumpido; he also suggested a lineup change along with other game changes that caused significant distraction.

No matter the cause, the initial damage was done. Thereafter, Menem seemingly flitted from one personal delight to the next, leaving destruction in his wake. An avid sports fan, Menem played with local teams or attended games, after which the players would inevitably fail in the game or their career. This is assumed of tennis player Gabriela Sabatini, whose career supposedly plummeted after a match with he-who-must-not-be-played—though some teams seemed to interact with the then-president without disaster.

In 1991, The Independentreported that “Argentines fear their leader's jinx” after Menem met Ferrari's German driver Michael Schumacher and shook his hand, which some believe caused a near-loss. Following this, Menem was banned from watching his favorite soccer team play. After all, when he “shook the hand of Argentina's world powerboat racing champion Daniel Scioli in 1989, Mr Scioli's boat crashed and he lost an arm,” The Independent reminded its readers.

The list goes on in terms of danger when it comes to Menem; he was linked superficially to the 1989 San Andreas Fault earthquake. Even non-sporting celebrities are not safe, according to the lore. Menem’s love of tango brought him to the bedside of sick-but-recovering tango singer Hugo del Carril in 1989, and apparently after a visit from the then-Argentine president, he suddenly passed away; Astor Piazzolla fell to the same fate after a visit in the hospital from Menem, just a few years later.

Many a heart must have frozen, then, at the possibility that Menem might have run for a third consecutive presidential term in 1998, which would have required a court appeal process and constitutional amendment. (Argentina allows three presidential terms, but not when served consecutively.) Menem claimed not to want a constitutional change, and didn’t attempt one. A few years later, he entered the 2003 presidential election against another member of his own party, then withdrew—a move that some said was meant to cause trouble.

“Over his wildly fluctuating career, including a decade as president and many a scandal and probe, Carlos Menem has done his country some services and many disservices,” The Economist wrote at the time, referencing in part the many scandals surrounding money that Menem spent from public resources.

Argentinian politics are steeped in weird luck and possible curses, including one historic curse that supposedly prevents any governor of Buenos Aires from becoming president, despite being from a populous epicenter. Jill Hedges wrote in Argentina: A Modern History, that "it is popularly supposed that there is a sort of curse on the governorship of Buenos Aires, as no politician holding that important office has ever been successful candidate for the presidency thereafter.” She added that however enticing it may be to think that bad luck follows Argentinian leaders in general, the trouble might actually “reflect the virtual impossibility of governing so vast, diverse and problematic a province effectively.”

Menem’s supposed bad luck affects his own life too; he garnered public scandal for his unhappy marriage, and in a sad turn for Menem in 1995, his son passed away in an accident while flying a helicopter. Menem himself is convinced that a curse weighs on him, according to a December 2007 update on his life in Minuto Uno; the article claimed that “Dead relatives, sick people, depressions and forgetfulness are part of the misfortunes that Menem attributes to some spell against him.”

Occasionally Menem’s past comes back to bite him, either by insinuating another politician committed murder or in the form of a plain old court appearance. In 2013, Menem was sentenced to home arrest for smuggling weapons in the ‘90s, and in 2015 faced embezzlement charges from accepting bonus payments during his time in office; while these seem the result of bad choices rather than bad luck, Menem claimed he didn’t know that accepting the payments was ever illegal.

Argentines who believe in the curse often substitute“Mendez” or “Mendem”, or really anything similar enough to stand in for the former Argentine president’s actual last name. It’s up to you to believe what you will, of course—but if you’ve been reading this article aloud, it may be too late.

It's National Soil Conservation Week in Canada, and what is usually a "boring, quiet affair," as one official put it, is getting a little sexier this year. That's because Canadian officials are encouraging citizens to bury white, 100 percent cotton boxers or briefs in the ground to test whether their soil is healthy. 

After two months, if only the waistband remains, that means residents' soil is full of life, since earthworms and other organisms go after cotton "like steak," Kier Miller, a director at the Soil Conservation Council of Canada, told the CBC. 

If some of the cotton remains, they further advise, the soil may be suffering from overuse, and could use a rest. At this point, though, it's my journalistic duty to tell you the name the council has chosen for its campaign: "Soil Your Undies." Sounds like it's worth a shot if you want to make sure your hydrangeas are going to kill it this year.

In 1976, Edward Gorey put out one of his trademark works of everyday dread. Called Les Passementeries Horribles, or "The Horrible Trimmings," the book consists solely of illustrations of enormous, menacing tassels of all shapes. A velvety, tentacled clump looms over a child with a pail. A beaded braid chases a man in a wheelchair.

Twenty-four years later—just after the artist's death—Rick Jones, the director of the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, was poking around in the building's garage when he found a small shoebox. He opened it up. "Bingo, it was a shoebox full of tassels," says Gregory Hischak, the house's curator. Now dusty and crumbling, each one corresponded with a page in the book. Gorey had held onto his inspiration, years and years after he used it.

This wasn't unusual. When he wasn't writing, drawing, illustrating, and designing—and even when he was—Edward Gorey was collecting. Over the course of his life, the artist gathered, and kept, everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters. "We ask the docents not to use the word 'hoarder,'" says Hischak, grinning as he surveys the House's newest exhibit, which focuses on Gorey's pack rat tendencies. "But he really did hoard interesting things."

Gorey was the kind of guy who, despite preferring a different brand, owned a full set of Red Rose Tea figurines. His backyard was full of stray cats, and his office was full of orbs—"the ballroom," he called it. He had so many books, the upper floors of his house sag like hammocks. (As a result, Hischak says, rolling chairs now travel spookily from room to room, all on their own.)

In his spare moments, he would also create collectibles for others. While watching TV, he'd stitch rabbits and frogs, which he then stuffed with Uncle Ben's rice and gave away to actor friends. At least once, he tried to strong-arm someone else into creating something just so that he could collect it: "Speaking of postcards by one who collects them madly, I feel you should have a real selection of Lizzie Borden ones," he wrote to a dealer he often bought from. "People like me would buy every one available."

Gorey was famous for his macabre creativity, seemingly boundless in its ability to imbue ordinary objects and situations (like tassels) with dread. But many of his best-known works gain power from the tension between imagination and organization.

In The Doubtful Guest, a Victorian family plays by all the traditional rules of politeness, although a distinctly non-traditional creature has come to call. Throughout The Gashlycrumb Tinies—which begins, immortally, "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs"—the alphabet remains comfortingly in order, even as it's used to describe a litany of violent deaths.

Many of Gorey's less obvious assemblages worked on a similar principle, says Hischak. Sure, any one of the dozen or so wooden potato mashers he kept might not seem inspiring—but arranged properly, they're positively arresting, like a gathering of cult elders. Same with the salt and pepper shakers, which, in Gorey's hands, form a patina-covered city. The artist "could find a hidden image in a variety of objects," wrote his friend, the actor Kevin McDonald, in a book about the house. "Pliers became dragons, shears were birds in flight."

The sheer exhaustiveness of other collections is a boon to historians and fans. For example, Gorey was a devotee of George Balanchine, the co-founder of the New York City Ballet. During his years in Manhattan, Gorey made a point of going to every single show helmed by the choreographer. ("Even if they were just doing The Nutcracker—he'd go to The Nutcracker every afternoon," says Hischak.) The result: about 2,000 multicolored ballet tickets, as carefully kept as they are carelessly ripped in half.

Gorey also recorded every episode of his favorite television shows—Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (The House has 19 boxes full of VHS tapes, each cassette labeled in Gorey's spidery handwriting.) When he started a book, he wrote the date on the endpaper; he did the same thing when he finished.

He kept receipts from a month's worth of lunches at his favorite local restaurant, stuck them together, and framed the resulting collage on the wall of his kitchen. "You could make one giant Excel document and say, 'On this day, Edward worked on this, and he read this, and he watched this,'" says Hischak.

At least once, Gorey's hoarding tendencies even got him in trouble with the law. In the 1950s, he bought a mummy's head at an antique shop. Rather than displaying it right away, he decided to hang onto it for later use, leaving it in its brown paper wrapping on the top shelf of a closet. Decades later, when his friends helped him move his belongings to the Cape, they left it there.

The superintendent soon discovered the head, and Gorey got a call from an NYPD detective. "He said, 'Mr. Gorey we've discovered a head in your closet,'" Gorey later recalled. "And I said, 'Oh for God's sake, can't you tell a mummy's head? It's a thousand years old! Good grief, did you think it took place over the weekend?'"

The head was never returned to Gorey. But the House still has the other half of that particular collection—a mummy's hand, wrapped in old cloth and holding a large, glassy jewel. Gorey drew it a couple of times, and Hischak has placed the hand in a display case in front of one of its own portraits, in which various well-dressed people gather around, staring at it—a situation Gorey must have found himself in quite often.

Now, guests stare only with reverence—at the hand, the cheese graters, the postcards, the frogs, and all the rest.

You can visit the Edward Gorey House on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017, and comb through the illustrator's mirthful, macabre collections yourself.

A North Carolina jogger was nearly tripped up recently when she encountered a writhing ball of snakes along her path. And while it was a pretty startling encounter, the jogger was apparently interrupting them, since they were just trying to mate.

The jogger, Christine Proffitt, said that she was, not unreasonably, terrified. But a snake expert later put some fears to rest, telling NBC Charlotte that the bundle of snakes was not only normal, but also harmless. The snakes, the expert said, were common water snakes, which had just come out of winter hibernation, and were looking to procreate, meaning they were likely more focused on mating than they attacking.  

Snake sex probably isn’t something you think about often, but once you see a snake ball, it is pretty unforgettable.

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

We’ve written about the CIA’s frustrations with its cafeteria before, with grievances both petty and the stuff of nightmares. But as internal records unearthed in the CIA's Records Search Tool reveal, at least once that frustration exploded into a full-on mealtime melee.

The file, discovered by Mike Best, is simply entitled “Diary Notes,” and begins about as exciting as you’d expect it to be.

This turns out to be a bit of burying the lead, as here’s the very next entry:

A lot to unpack here, but the use of the term “additional employees” seems to imply that not only this wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it wasn’t even the first time people had been fired for it, but alas, no other recorded incidents of vittles-related violence could be found.

However, with considerable effort, and using up the very last of our favors within the intelligence community, we were able to get CIA security footage of the incident:

You’re welcome. The full diary entry is available here.