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Found: Medieval Manuscripts Stolen From Italy, Hiding in the Boston Public Library

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In 1392, the brotherhood of Our Lady of Mercy at Valverde was blessed with a new manuscript, beautifully illustrated. It was the Mariegola della Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia, and it laid out the organizing principles for the fraternal religious order, as the Boston Globe reports. Centuries later, in 1803, the brotherhood dissolved, and the manuscript went to the State Archives of Venice. For many years, it was displayed in the one of the archive’s rooms, until, in the 1940s, it disappeared.

Now, it’s been re-discovered, in the holdings of the Boston Public Library.

The 14th century manuscript, along with two other Italian works, one created circa 1420 and the other in 1590, is now being returned to Italy.

The public library started looking into the provenance of the 14th century manuscript after a medieval manuscript expert working on a digitizing project “noticed that the book was not in its original wood-and-leather cover, and the chapter numbers had been scraped away,” the Globe reports. It was clear that at some point in the past, these clues to its origins had been removed on purpose. The manuscript expert, Lisa Fagin Davis, started looking for more information that might explain where the book had originally come from, and finally found a copy of the cover page in a Harvard library.

The Boston Public Library obtained all three manuscripts from reputable dealers, but their rightful home is in Italy, where they are returning.


North Korea's Nuclear Test Site Spent the Weekend Hosting Volleyball

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All eyes have been on North Korea over the past week, as Kim Jong-un promised to launch another nuclear test, and various world leaders detailed how they would respond.

But analysts watching the Punggye-ri nuclear test site via satellite spotted a more vigorous type of activity: volleyball, being played in at least three parts of the facility.

Volleyball is opaque at the best of times, and this incarnation of it was particularly mystifying. "The volleyball games... were probably intended to send a message," the New York Times reports. "But what meaning the North wanted to convey is unclear."

Most analysts put forth two opposing theories at once. The first is that the games imply that the site is on standby. The second is that North Korea—knowing that analysts are watching—are trying to trick those analysts into thinking that the site is on standby. "We really don't know," one expert, Joseph Bermudez, told the Times.

Due to the nature of satellite imagery—and, presumably, their own priorities—analysts were also unable to answer another important question: were they any good?

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.

Antarctica Is Covered in Streams and Waterfalls

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It’s not that scientists didn’t know there were streams and waterfalls in Antarctica. Over decades of research on the frozen continent, researchers have documented the occasional stream of meltwater flowing across the icy surface. But no one had ever done a systematic survey of Antarctica’s meltwater systems.

When a group of scientists based at Columbia University looked through military photos dating back to 1947 and satellite images dating back to 1973, they found that our previous understanding of the Antarctica’s meltwater only included a fractions of the streams, ponds, and channels that cover the continent.

Antarctica, it turns out, is covered in meltwater that pools, trickles, streams, and roars across the ice. The study, the first to extensively map meltwater, found 700 seasonal systems of ponds, channels, streams.

Although these are longstanding, if previously unknown, features of Antarctica, scientists fear that as the climate changes these meltwater systems could increasingly contribute to the break-up of the Antarctic ice sheets. Meltwater from more stable parts of the ice sheet could flow toward the melting ice shelves on the continent’s edges and encourage them to break off.

On the other hand, in some places, drainage may be crucial to keeping the ice shelves intact. On the Nansen Ice Shelf, for instance, one group of scientists reports in Nature, a waterfall pulls the meltwater away from the ice surface, keeping it from pooling and damaging the ice shelf.

Jest Books Were the 16th-Century Version of Insult Comedy

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Don Rickles, the merciless “merchant of venom” who insulted anyone and everyone during a comedy career that began in the 1950s, passed away in early April. Throughout his years on the stage he was known for his offensive recipe kit of skits that targeted everyone from Mexicans to Jews.

Celebrated though controversial, Rickles was scarcely the first comedian to turn racially insensitive slander into slapstick comedy. In fact, it’s been a practice that dates as far back as 16th-century England, when the first jest book (or joke book) was printed in 1510.

Much of the humor that appears in English jest books is likely lost on a 21st-century audience. The books were written in times of England’s famine, war and starvation, and contained stories that lampooned the weak and needy.

“The terrible famine years of the 1520s and 1530s coincided with a literary craze for jest books,” wrote Linda Woodbridge in Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Pegged as humorous, jest books were influential for all the wrong reasons—the elaborate and lengthy stories compiled were often written at the expense of immigrants, the poor, or women.

Take, for example, a story published in one of the first English jest books from 1526 called A Hundred Mery Talys*:

“If thou be slow to speake, as one I knew,
Thou wouldst assure thy selfe my counsels true ;
Hee (too late) finding her upon her knees
In Church, where yet her husbands coorse she sees,
Hearing the Sermon at his funerall,
Longing to behold his buriall,
This sutor being toucht with inward love,
Approached neare his lovely sute to move,
Then stooping downe he whispered in her eare
Saying he bore her love, as might appeare,
In that so soone he shewed his love unto her,
Before any else did app[r]och to woo her,
Alass (said she) you labour is in vaine,
Last night a husband I did entertaine.”

Much like it is today, comedy was a white man’s game. In the early 1500s, educated white males realized they could turn a profit by printing popular songs and dances that had previously been shared verbally. The books sold for cheap, meaning the subjects of their mockery could easily afford them.

Intellectuals were rarely the subjects of these jests, but instead were the men behind them. Printing, manufacturing, and crafting a ballad took organizational skills, yes, but also an education — something second-class citizens lacked.

Many educated men would publish these jest books under pseudonyms or anonymously, taking names from actors or clowns, “so as to make the books popular and increase sales,” according to A Brief History of American Jest Books by Harry B. Weiss; over time, these men’s involvement became minor blips on their resume. Thomas More, the philosopher and famed author of Utopia, got his start with the jest book A Merry Jest how a Serjeant would Learn to Play the Friar, though it was dismissed as mere experimentation and inferior once some of his greater works appeared.

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The slow decline of English jest books in their original, discriminatory glory was due in part to an English law passed in 1549 that stopped production of pamphlets that had an “evil zeal for lucre” and were “covetous of vile gain.” By that time, however, the concept of the jest book had made its way across the pond to colonists settling in America.

For many years, Americans imported English jest books. It wasn’t until 1787 that the first American-printed jest book appeared in the pamphlet titled A Collection of Funny, Moral, and Entertaining Stories and Bon Mots issued by New Haven-based printer and publisher Daniel Bowen. That started a wave of American jest books, with several appearing that first year—though much of the humor was still patterned with an English slant, translated poorly by publishers for an American audience.

“Substitution, in some cases, of the names of American personages and places failed entirely to make them American jests and the supposedly humorous accounts are not associated with the fashion, beliefs, and customers of America,” wrote Weiss in Brief History of American Jest Books. It wasn’t until the mid 1800s that American lingo was integrated into the printed comedy scene.

An example, from Bowen’s Collection of Funny, Moral, and Entertaining Stories and Bon Mots:

A Bill was once brought in, in the assembly of a neighbouring State, for the purpose of organizing the Militia. A venerable old man arose and opposed the Bill, for, says he, our Militia have good Drum’s and Fifes, and therefore I think it needless these hard times to be at the expence of purchasing them Organs.”

The most famous jest book author in America would come a few years later; Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ earliest work was in the form of short stories and jests, though he later became known for his novels that captured the Americana spirit—written under the pen name Mark Twain.

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Like their predecessors, American jest books indicated the ethnic divide between two groups; in this case, the colonists, and everyone else. Not surprisingly, English colonists immediately crafted their impressions of Native Americans in disparaging language, a testament to the racial discrimination between the settlers and anyone who got in their way.

“Along with blacks and Native Americans, the Irish were the most frequent targets of ethnic humor,” writes Robert Secor in the section “Ethnic Humor in Early American Jest Books” from the 1993 collection of essays A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. “However, whereas the other two groups were objects of ethnic humor largely because the new Americans who told the jests were structuring their attitudes toward them in the New World, the Irish were butts of ethnic jests largely because the American settlers brought their stereotypes with them.”

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More often, as the jest books became popular in America, women were the core targets. One tale described in The Universal Jest Book: Being a Collection of Anecdotes, printed in 1829 by Geo. G. Sickels, victimized two of the most commonly ridiculed: immigrants and women. In the story, a Frenchman is chastised for speaking poor English when he misunderstands a woman and begins kissing her without her consent for the satisfaction of his fellow lads. The jest:

“A French gentleman, totally unacquainted with the English language, being introduced to a circle of young ladies and gentlemen in Boston, after the usual compliments had passed, seated himself along side of a beautiful young lady ; and being deprived of the satisfaction of conversing with her, he seized her by the hand—she requested him to be easy—which he mistook for the word baissez (kiss me) and began kissing her, to the great mirth of the whole company.”

It took about a century, but eventually American jest books got tamer. In the introduction to The American Jest-Book, which was published in 1833, the authors felt it necessary to explain the type of writing included. “Indeed, not a single volume, in the form of a Jest Book, has ever yet been published, that was fit to be read by any female without a blush, nor by young persons, of either sex, without some injury to their morals … The present volume professes to be superior, in every respect, to any of the kind that has ever yet been published.”

Not long after The American Jest-Book was published, the jest book saw a steady decline and eventually became obsolete. Though their legacy, as seen in Rickles’ popular standup skits, lives on.

*Correction: The story originally stated that Shakespeare penned some jesting words that were published in A Hundred Mery Talys. As the book came out before he was born, this is impossible. Shakespeare did, however, appear to reference A Hundred Mery Talys in one of Beatrice's lines from Much Ado About Nothing.

The Artists Who Depicted War in a Whole New Way

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In spring 1918, as hundreds of thousands of doughboys poured into Europe, one special group of eight American soldiers were brought together to provide an artistic take on the war. America’s first official “combat artists” roamed battlefields over the next year and produced a vast body of work—some 700 sketches and paintings—that captured the war experience for both the home front and the historical record.

The artists reported to the Committee on Public Information, an independent agency of the U.S. government, and simultaneously acted as historians and public relations officers. The images they produced and sent home were used to drum up support for American involvement in World War I—a war that President Woodrow Wilson had spent years pledging to keep the nation out of.

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The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) Combat Artists, as they were known, had been professional magazine and newspaper illustrators, and were called into service at the rank of captain. They had total freedom of movement, and roamed the lines with special passes and dedicated cars. On the front lines they made sketches, which were then transformed into finished works back at a studio in safer territory. The art they produced was unlike any wartime imagery the public had seen before.

“Prior to that, most war art was heroic representations done far from the battlefield, long after the fact,” says Smithsonian chief curator Peter Jakab. “So this was the first time that you really had artists there in situ, and the idea was to create art in the moment, by the participants.”

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Both the style and subject matter of AEF combat art were departures from previous norms. Stylistically, the collection is rough and industrial—nothing like the delicate oil paintings used to depict previous conflicts. And the subject matter emphasizes the individual soldier—in a way that doesn’t come through in grand depictions of historical armies.

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The collection reads, in many ways, like a visual diary, and it is easy to imagine one of the artists stumbling upon a memorable scene and stopping to sketch it in a notepad. Vast logistical systems, new technology, and the industrialized nature of war are reflected over and over in the collection. So, too, is destruction—both in human terms and as inflicted on the formerly picturesque French landscape.

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After the Armistice of 11 November 1918 ended conflict on the Western Front, the U.S. Army’s official war art went to the Smithsonian Institution for a special exhibit, but it hadn’t been back on public display—until now. For the centenary of the American entrance into World War I, the collection has been brought out of storage, and is on view at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

This (Very Cool) Photo of a Giant Iceberg Off Canada Is Also Now ... a Meme

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Earlier this week, Reuters posted some pictures of a massive iceberg off the coast of Ferryland, Newfoundland, in Canada. The iceberg appeared in what is known as Iceberg Alley, where chunks from Greenland's ice sheet routinely float by every spring. But one in particular this year stuck out, perhaps because it looks a little menacing, or perhaps because of the perspective of the photograph, which makes humans and buildings appear very small.

It's a good picture! And in a different world it might have become a poster in someone's den, with some words of inspiration about how size doesn't matter or something. Instead, we live in our world, where people make jokes on Twitter and produce memes.

We begin our roundup with some words about children:

Here is a similar joke, but this time the words are written on the image:

Others got more creative:

Have a look at this, which also anthropomorphizes the block of ice:

Still others resisted the urge to alter images and simply stuck to to making jokes on Twitter—otherwise known as tweeting.

And some just couldn't resist getting political and referencing Adele.

Catchy, that. Beyond climate activism, some—Atlas Obscura's own Cara Giaimo—just saw the future of the world in a large piece of frozen water. The future is not good.

I should probably leave it at that.

If you want to know more about Iceberg Alley and see a map of icebergs that were recently observed, Newfoundland and Labrador's official tourism website has you covered.

The Legoland Controversy Brewing in Australia

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Everyone loves Lego, whether that's thanks to nostalgia or the childlike sense of imagination and accomplishment you get when you finish building a Lego creation. But there are limits, and some adult Lego fans in Australia are discovering a few of them thanks to a Legoland attraction won’t let them in.

According to The Guardian, a number of adult Lego fans have been bounced from the Legoland Discovery Centre in Melbourne. The attraction is only open to adults if they are accompanied by a child under the age of 17, so when lone adults with childlike hearts showed up, they were turned away.

Outraged, some went to Facebook to see if they could “acquire a child for the day” to experience the attraction. Still others called the rule a case of age-based discrimination and threatened to take their grievances to local equal rights organizations.

Lego, meanwhile, released a (fairly reasonable) statement reminding people that the attraction is “designed to provide safe and fun environments for families with children aged 3-10.”

The case no one seems to be making is for a Legoland just for adults, which seems like it would be a lot of fun.

The Many Possible Reasons British People Hire Chimney Sweeps for Their Weddings

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Kevin Giddings, 54, is the owner of Milborrow Chimney Sweeps in West Sussex, England. Despite some big name clients, including Buckingham Palace, his job is reasonably straightforward. Most days, he and his employees do house calls, which involve fixing fireplaces, cleaning boilers, and, of course, sweeping chimneys.

A few times a month, though, Giddings's profession entails slightly different duties. On those days, he dresses up—in a top hat, black gloves, a cravat, and a dress jacket with tails (he puts the jacket on right over his boiler suit). He sits his black cat, Sooty, on his shoulder, and picks up an old-fashioned wooden chimney brush. He smears soot all over his face. And then, once he's all kitted up, he heads off to a stranger's wedding.

Everyone knows that a luck-seeking bride needs things old, new, borrowed, and blue. But in Britain, if you're trying to tip the scales toward wedded bliss, you'd best make sure you also have a genuine chimney sweep. For a small fee, often around £100, you can ensure that one shows up to shake the groom's hand, kiss the bride, take photos, and generally spread sooty cheer. "Our job is to wish good luck to everybody," explains Giddings. "It's one of the best parts of being a chimney sweep."

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"It's thought to be lucky to have a sweep at your wedding," explains Liz Leicester of Pete the Sweep in North Yorkshire, whose husband, Mark Leicester, makes such appearances. But as with most superstitions, the roots of this one are hard to trace. One common story, which Leicester and Giddings both told me, involves King George II, a puppy, and an errant horse.

Basically, they say, during a royal procession, a dog nipped at the legs of the king's steed, and the horse spooked. A chimney sweep then appeared out of the crowd, brought the animal under control, and disappeared again. "The king wasn't able to thank the sweep personally," says Leicester. "So he said that from that day onward, sweeps should be regarded as lucky."

There are other explanations, too. In a 1951 article for Folklore, the historian Philip Brown went through most of them, and didn't come to very many conclusions. It could have something to do with the ancient Roman association between soot and fertility, he says—Vulcan, the god of fire and forge, was married to Venus, the goddess of love—or an old tradition of sweeping out the fireplace on New Year's Day, for good luck.

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Certain 17th century May Day parades may or may not have been preceded by street sweepers, who may or may not have dressed like chimney sweeps. There's also another popular (and likely false) story, in which a chimney sweep falls off a roof, gets snagged on a gutter, is pulled through the window by a "young lass," and marries her soon after.

There could be a moral dimension, of humbling oneself on a somewhat prideful day—a bride dressed all in white takes a risk by giving a sooty sweep a peck on the cheek. Giddings puts forth a purely utilitarian argument: "Two hundred years ago, when a new bride became a wife, she became the mistress of the household," he says. "The mistress of the household had to be in charge of the cooking, the heating, the hot water… if she didn't get to know the chimney sweep, she couldn't look after all that." In other words, better to start strong from day one.

If you look at real-life British history, luck and chimney-sweeping make somewhat strange bedfellows. Beginning in the late 1600s—after the Great Fire of London decimated many of the city's old buildings, and people built new ones with skinnier chimneys—adult sweeps began hiring young boys, often orphans, to scuttle up inside of the chimneys to clean them.

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The insides of chimneys aren't very healthy places, and many of these so-called "Climbing Boys" ended up with burns, irritation, and respiratory diseases—or "Chimney Sweep's Cancer," a type of scrotal tumor that was the first occupational cancer ever diagnosed. Life was so bad for young sweeps that in 1864, Parliament passed a law banning the use of climbing boys.

The idea of the lucky chimney sweep survived this historical irony, though. "In the British Isle or on the Continent only a stomach-ulcered cynic… would not gladly welcome a chance meeting with a chimney-sweep," wrote George L. Phillips in 1951 in the Journal of American Folklore.

Lucky chimney sweeps show up in literature from Mary Poppins (in which a grumpy Mr. Banks refuses to shake a sweep's hand) to Ulysses (in which a minor character invokes "soot's luck"). According to Time magazine, on the morning of his 1947 wedding to Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip "popped out of Kensington Palace at 11 o'clock [and] shook hands with a chimney sweep."

Sweeps today love to keep up the tradition. It makes for a solid side hustle in the summer, generally a slow time for sweeping: Leicester says they'll do at least a wedding per week from about April through September, and at one point, Giddings estimates he was getting about 100 gigs every year.

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Lots of British chimney sweeping companies advertise wedding appearances, and although most stick with the standard Victorian getup, many try to differentiate themselves from the pack by offering souvenirs or special extras—champagne, official certificates, bags of genuine soot. Some work with the wedding parties to make sure they appear "out of the blue"—a chance encounter, even a choreographed one, is considered to be the luckiest.

Mark Leicester travels to gigs on a flower-decked bicycle, sometimes with a historically accurate assistant: "If he's got one available, he'll take along [a little boy dressed as] an urchin," says Liz. And Giddings has his black cat, which he trained from kittenhood to love crowds and to travel around on his shoulder. (Sooty is the latest in a long line: "Unfortunately, the cats are not lucky in themselves, because they keep crossing the busy road near us and getting run over," Giddings says.)

Besides the cats, though, everyone else tends to come out ahead. Wedding parties generally give good reviews—the best is when families become repeat customers, and the sweeps can check up on the couples they once helped out, says Leicester. And the ones who fare the best are probably the sweeps themselves, who get in, get out, and get paid. "It's a happy day," Giddings says. "I'm lucky to join in."


Colonial America Was Built on Lottery Revenue

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In the late 19th century, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the sixth Librarian of Congress, went looking through America’s early newspapers for the the earliest notice of a lottery he could find. What he found had been published in February 1720, in the American Weekly Mercury. This lottery was not the colonies’ first, Spofford cautions—only the first for which he could find a printed notice. The ad promised 350 tickets would be sold, for 20 shillings a piece.

The prize? “A new brick house, corner of Third and Arch,” in Philadelphia.

As Philadelphia came to surpass Boston as the colonies’ largest city, its growth was funded in no small part by lotteries. “It was looked upon as a kind of voluntary tax for paving streets, erecting wharves, buildings, etc., with a contingent profitable return for such subscribers as held the lucky numbers,” wrote Spofford in 1893.

Philadelphians used lotteries to build a battery on the Delaware River to defend the city, span creeks with bridges, and fund roads that led from the countryside into the city. But it was far from the only city in the American colonies that depended on people’s willingness to try their luck. In the 17th and 18th centuries, lotteries were a thriving business, both public and private, and without them, early America couldn’t have been built.

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The tradition of lotteries came to America from Europe, where they first started gaining traction in the 16th century. According to one scholar, the first lottery used to raise government revenue and offer a cash prize was held in Florence, Italy, in 1530. Soon France picked up on this innovative means of raising money, and the British crown adopted the lottery in 1569. By the 1700s, lotteries were a popular way to raise money for all sorts of projects and were seen less as a sinful pastime than a civic duty. In the early 18th century, The Independent reports, the Archbishop of Canterbury lent his good name to lotteries funding the British Museum and Westminster Bridge.

From the earliest days of colonial history in America, lotteries were essential to the project’s survival. In the summer of 1612, the Virginia Company held a lottery to raise additional funding for the struggling settlement at Jamestown. (A tailor named Thomas Sharplisse won the largest prize—4,000 crowns, a small fortune.) Three years later, the company tried the same gambit, with a focus on the greater good that would come from white people colonizing the New World. “As pitched by the Virginia Company, buying a lottery ticket was an act of charity that could save a savage’s soul," Matthew Sweeney writes in The Lottery Wars.

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Lotteries didn’t just save the Virginia Company’s settlers from starvation, though. When the colonies revolted against the crown, lotteries helped the new United States of America survive. In 1776, the Constitutional Congress held one to benefit the soldiers of the Revolution. (Since the value of the new country’s currency was fluctuating wildly, it was less successful than hoped.) Once the colonies won the war, the new states leaned heavily on lotteries to raise revenue, in part because they were not eager to tax newly independent citizens who’d just rebelled against taxation by a central authority. Lotteries funded the growth of the country’s earliest colleges, including the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), Dickinson College, Harvard, and Yale, of many, many churches, and of iconic buildings, including Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which needed to be rebuilt after it burned down in 1761.

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But in the 19th century, the popularity of lotteries waned as they were haunted by corruption. It was easy enough to announce a lottery, sell tickets, and abscond with the money without offering a prize. In New York and Massachusetts, lotteries were banned in the 1830s, and later in the century most states followed suit. Government lotteries wouldn’t become popular again until the second half of the 20th century, when states started using them once again—to raise revenue without raising taxes.

Found: A Unique, Handwritten Copy of the Declaration of Independence

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Before Danielle Allen and Emily Sneff found a copy of the Declaration of Independence in an obscure British archive, the only known 18th century, handwritten copy of the U.S.’s founding document was the one housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

In August 2015, though, the two Harvard researchers uncovered a copy of the Declaration created in the 1780s, in connection with the Constitutional Convention. They found it in the West Sussex Records Office, in Chichester, England.

Besides being an extremely rare copy of the Declaration, this document has an intriguing feature: the signatures of the men who put their name to the Declaration have been reordered.

In 2014, Allen, a professor at Harvard and a political theorist, published Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, and as part of her research, created the Declaration Resources Project, which collected different versions of the Declaration, as they were published in 18th century newspapers or as ornamental engravings, as The New York Times reports. Sneff, the project’s manager, came across an entry in a database of British archives for a parchment copy of the document and decided to investigate further. The two researchers went to Chichester to see the document in person and determined it was the real deal.

This copy of the Declaration, they believe, was commissioned by James Wilson, who both signed the Declaration and was a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He was a strong advocate for nationalism and argued that the country needed a stronger federal government to cement the union of states.

At the bottom of the 1776 copy of the Declaration, the 56 signers are grouped by the states they represented. But in this copy, the signatures are intermingled in no obvious order. The researchers, though, believe that the names were jumbled“with help from a well-known 18th-century cipher,” the Times reports. Wilson, they think, wanted to send a message about the need for national unity.

Why Scientists Drag Dead Whales to the Bottom of the Sea

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It was a calm day on the Pacific Ocean. Perfect conditions for a sunset sailing cruise, or maybe a kayaking trip. But on April 11, 2007, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) had no time for such frivolity. Their mission? To plant a whale carcass on the bottom of the ocean, creating what microbiologists call a “whale fall.”

The scene was absurd. A deal had been struck between The Coast Guard/Department of Fish and Wildlife and the MBARI researchers: if they could seize a dead whale before it drifted too close to shore (removing a beached whale is, apparently, very difficult), then the researchers were free to use it for their own purposes. Eventually they got the call—dead whale, floating in the water, up for grabs.

Because of their size and propensity for landing in deep parts of the ocean, dead whales present unique experimental parameters for researchers. For the last couple of decades, scientists have been studying fallen whale carcasses and the surrounding seafloor ecosystems where they eventually settle. But the ocean is expansive; the odds of finding a whale fall are slim, so when scientists get the chance to create one for themselves, it’s not something to pass up. MBARI researchers have sunk five whales in the last 15 years, at different depths.

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Above water, the majority of energy for all living things is created in the form of carbon, through the process of photosynthesis. Photosynthetic organisms (like plants) take in sunlight, and most animals get their energy secondhand by eating plants (or by eating animals that eat plants). But little, if any, sunlight penetrates the ocean with enough intensity to reach many of these sunken whale graves—without light, no carbon can be produced via photosynthesis, and all life needs carbon. So past a certain depth, there should be no life.

At least, that’s what the conventional wisdom said. That was before the discovery of extremophiles, organisms that dwell in the deep and rely upon their austere surroundings. Despite the dearth of carbon in these extreme environments, it is still generally the preferred food of extremophiles; hoping for a nutritious meal, these bacteria seek salvation from on high. Divine providence usually comes in the form of dead phytoplankton: microscopic, photosynthetic organisms that live near the ocean surface and sink to the bottom when they die (a phenomenon known as “marine snow”). But by the time phytoplankton reach the ocean floor, they retain very little in the way of organic carbon, having been picked over by other creatures living in the sea. For the sediment-bound microbes below, it’s a living off leftovers. That is, until a whale shows up.

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In 2007, the MBARI scientists, joined by microbiologist (and 2016 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient) Victoria Orphan, reached their whale before it had run aground and secured a line on its tail, dragging it back out into the open ocean. This particular whale, affectionately (and posthumously) named “Patrick,” unwittingly donated his body to science; you might say that Patrick became food for thought.

When a whale begins to decompose on the ocean’s surface, bacteria eat away at the fat, kickstarting the fermentation process. In the same way that yeast causes bread to rise by releasing air, these decomposers also release gas—but this gas has no way to escape, and remains trapped inside the whale, keeping it afloat. In order to sink the carcass, the scientists had to either release the gas, or fit the deceased with some, uh, nice new concrete shoes.

Lacking the materials to deflate a mound of blubber, they opted for the latter choice, attaching wheels from a train to the whale’s tail. Unfortunately, the makeshift anchor was not heavy enough to overcome the buoyancy of the entrapped gases. “It was this big dramatic thing. They pushed the anchor off and the whale bobs underneath and is hanging vertically in the water, just kind of sitting there,” Orphan says. “And everybody looks around; okay, well now what?”

The MBARI group went back to shore to gather more weight, attaching a GPS transponder to the whale so they could find it again. When the scientists returned to the site, they found their transponder gone and their whale nowhere in sight. They had misplaced the whale.

Luckily, they stumbled upon it six months later—by happenstance.

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When a whale is laid to rest in such a nutrition-starved community, it disrupts the natural order, serving as a bountiful buffet for many sea dwellers. According to Orphan, "people have done calculations of it being equivalent to many years, maybe even hundreds of years, of marine snow, all concentrated in one area.” The fat and blubber are eaten by sharks and other large scavengers, and smaller organisms (such as starfish and sea cucumbers) join in until nothing remains but a skeleton.

While skeletons are generally associated with death, decay, and lifelessness, they are positive omens on the ocean floor. Like a rainy season precipitates a robust harvest, a whale fall means good eating for the extremophiles that live in seafloor sediment—it’s nothing short of a miracle. Larger creatures can’t digest bone, but some bacteria are perfectly suited for a skeletal diet. Eventually, the skeleton will be buried under sediment, and the microscopic bacteria that spend their lives eking out a famished living in the dark will flourish.

Imagine a Costco warehouse was dropped into the middle of an arid desert. Populations would explode, and people would flock to the new metropolitan scene: call it CostcOasis. And for some time, the surrounding area would be unrecognizable, teeming with life in a once barren ecosystem.

And like the epicenter of an earthquake, the magnitude of CostcOasis’s impact would radially decrease—there would be a flurry of activity inside the warehouse, less activity within a one mile radius, and less activity still within a 10-mile radius.

But the natural world always returns to its natural state. Sooner or later, CostcOasis would run out of jumbo bags of Brussels sprouts, beets and bananas. With all of the food eaten, human populations would either migrate away, or dwindle back to their initial, small numbers. These humans would have left waste behind, and secondary consumers would flock to the area—it would be a fly paradise, with insects and all sorts of vermin picking over food waste and human fecal matter.

It’s no different for a whale fall—given enough time, nature uses everything. It can take a while for the community to fully digest a whale, but eventually, all of the carbon will be consumed. The bacterial communities that exist on whale falls can survive for up to 100 years (maybe even longer); for this duration, life will flourish.

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“It gives us insight, a speeded up movie of how organic carbon is processed,” Orphan says. “You have this additional advantage of knowing a ‘time zero,’ at least for the whales you put down there.” Researchers can observe the communities return to their baseline populations once all of the carbon has been extracted. This first happens at the epicenter, and gradually the surrounding communities, the whale fall suburbs, follow suit.

After he was laid to rest, Patrick was revisited by the MBARI team every few months, and an intensive longitudinal study of his corpse (along with the other sunken whales at disparate depths) followed this process. Over the past 10 years, scientists discovered new species of bone-eating worms and snails, and gained a better understanding of the alien environment that is the deep sea.

And while there is little of Patrick left, the sediment underneath his corpse is still paying dividends, providing the valuable extremophile bacteria samples that Orphan and other scientists use in their research.

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Bonita Lam, a researcher at the University of Southern California, uses these samples in her experiments on bacteria that “breathe rocks.” Breathing, to a microbiologist, refers to flow of electrons, not the intake of oxygen. In order to sustain their electron flow, all organisms need electron donors and electron acceptors—for most animals, this means receiving electrons from the glucose in food and passing them to the oxygen we inhale.

But extremophile bacteria live in oxygen-deficient ecosystems. To overcome this obstacle, they have adapted ways to use materials like methane gas and manganese rock as their electron acceptors. Whale fall samples help us learn more about these strange processes. The bacteria gathered from Patrick, for example, possess the strange ability to use a charged electrode as their electron donor—essentially, they can eat electricity.

A few decades ago, the scientific community didn’t think organisms could survive in the deep sea, let alone thrive. “It just shows how much we don’t know about these environments,” Orphan says.

On the surface, it may be a calm day on the Pacific; but don’t be surprised to find a frenzy of activity below. All you need is a dead whale, patience, and maybe some extra train wheels.

Postcard Reaches Destination After 53 Years

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In January of 1964, some children in Germany decided to do something nice for their grandmother, Frieda Lehmann. They bought a postcard with some Berlin landmarks on the front, and filled the back with questions about her life. "Dear Oma," they wrote. "Has the wool arrived yet? How was the slaughter fest?" They added her address, in Luckenwalde, and signed it "your children."

It appears those well-meaning kids never learned about the slaughter fest. As The Local reports, the postcard wasn't delivered until last week—53 years after it was sent, and long after Oma passed away.

The card was delivered to an office building in Luckenwalde, where it was picked up by a worker named Peggy Gerike. She first noticed the stamps, which each said "10 Pfennig." (The pfennig hasn't been in circulation since 2002.) The front, too, was clearly from another time.

Gerike asked around the neighborhood about Freida Lehmann, and learned that she had, indeed, lived there, but had passed on. Then she took the card to the post office, to figure out where it had been for 53 years.

They were surprised, too, and said it couldn't have languished in their sorting centers. Perhaps some good Samaritan picked it up at a yard sale, saw that it hadn't reached its proper destination, and threw it in the post again, they said. Better late than never.

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.

Seeing Earth From Between Saturn's Rings, Nearly a Billion Miles Away

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The Cassini Orbiter is about 5,000 pounds (minus its fuel, which is all gone, and the Huygens probe it dropped off on Titan in 2004) of science that’s been orbiting Saturn for nearly 13 years. It is, by any objective take, a vanishingly small speck in the vastness of space, and one of the subtle feats of its 12 sensors—including an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph, plasma spectrometer, and cosmic dust analyzer—is reminding us occasionally that the Earth is, too. Take one of the latest composite images that the probe has produced, of the Earth between Saturn’s icy rings, from nearly a billion miles away. Not that you’d be able to tell, but that’s the Southern Atlantic Ocean there, and the faint dot on the left is the moon.

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Cassini’s 20-year journey of scientific discovery and cooperation is almost over and it’s currently in its final act, orbiting lower and lower through Saturn’s rings. This September 15 it will go out in a tiny blaze of glory in Saturn’s atmosphere. The probe will continue beaming data back right up until that moment, and its last word—traveling at the speed of light—will arrive on Earth over an hour after it’s gone.

The Mystery Boom and the Bachelor Party in Michigan

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Last Saturday, April 15, near Grandville, Michigan, residents reported hearing a very loud boom, which spooked a lot of people and led to multiple calls to local police dispatchers. Sheriff's deputies initially couldn't find an obvious culprit, though, and the mystery persisted into Monday, when a tipster informed deputies of a possible source: a bachelor party.

By Thursday, according to WOOD, authorities had confirmed the tipster's claims. The boom, they found, was caused by Binary X, the brand name of a line of so-called "exploding targets"—or targets designed to blow up when shot, so that long-distance shooters know, more or less immediately, if they've hit the mark.

The exploding targets are composed of an oxidizer and a fuel. These powders are frequently shipped separately to comply with federal and state laws, because they can go boom when combined (in this case, with the help of a high-velocity bullet impact). Exploding targets are legal in most states, including Michigan, where authorities said that this particular party would not be charged with a crime.

"Detectives with the Sheriff’s Office were able to locate the person responsible for the explosion," the Kent County Sheriff's Office said in a press release, and later determined that, "the detonation and transportation of the materials used was done so lawfully."

If there's a lesson here, it might be that guns and bachelors and exploding things are dangerous items, so be careful out there.

A Painting of a Crying Boy Was Blamed For a Series of Fires in the '80s

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In the middle of the night in Thatcher-era England, a home in South Yorkshire succumbed to a fire. The lounge room was charred black, drapes and furniture reduced to ash. The owners of the home, Ron and May Hall, lost nearly everything to the blaze, except one item: a painting of a crying boy, his wide eyes looking out from the wreckage, not even blackened by smoke.

This wasn’t the first time a picture of a crying boy had been found amid the ashes of a torched home.

On September 4, 1985, British tabloid The Sun published “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy Picture!” a story about a very unlucky painting that caused fires, supported the comments of a local fire station officer. These paintings, the firefighter said, turned up mysteriously unscathed in fires across the U.K., all of which started spontaneously. It was well-known; he would never think of owning this cursed painting himself. “The couple had laughed off warnings” that their painting was cursed, wrote The Sun. Let all other heed the warning, and get rid of their own giant paintings of crying children immediately.

If the fact that paintings of crying kids were hung in the living rooms of multiple households makes you double-take, you’re not alone. The paintings, an odd relic of mass-printed art, were readily available in stores during the 1950s-1970s, and tended to appeal to young couples. While the paintings have not been reprinted for decades, their bizarre subject matter and backstory have kept the legend going, from copy-pasted internet legends to books of local lore.

The legend of the crying-boy painting seems to have begun with The Sun, fueled by the obscurity of the crying-boy painting’s artist. The artworks bear the prominent signature of one Giovanni Bragolin, but for quite some time no one could find information about the man. Rumors abounded; he painted hundreds of crying children, many of them street urchins, it was said, in either Italy or Spain. Finally, a 2000 book of creepy stories called Haunted Liverpool claimed that, in 1995, a “well respected” school teacher called George Mallory discovered that the painter was actually a mysterious figure named Franchot Seville.

The following backstory, from 2000, seems to be a mash-up of reportage from The Sun and Mallory: one of the urchins he painted was a boy named Don Bonillo, who accidentally started a fire in which his parents died in Spain. From then on, wherever the boy went, a fire followed, prompting his nickname, Diablo. Some believe the boy was adopted against the will of a priest, and was abused by the painter; in the 1970s the boy was consumed by fire as well, in an explosion caused by a car accident.

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According to journalist Dr. David Clark, who researched the crying boy legend for Fortean Times and on his website, this legend has more than a few holes. Giovanni Bragolin and Seville seem to have been one of a few pseudonyms for Spanish painter Bruno Amadio, and Clark could not find evidence that George Mallory nor Don Bonillo ever existed. Amadio likely painted 20-30 of these crying boys after training in Venice after WWII, prints of which were sold in department stores through the 1970s, wrote Clark. Another artist, Anna Zinkeisen, had a similar series of crying children paintings that were regarded as equally cursed.

In The Martians Have Landed, Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford reported that many people wrote to other newspapers in response to The Sun’s coverage, including one woman who couldn’t “think of a reason such a lovely picture could suddenly be thought to be jinxed,” yet wanted to toss it for safety’s sake. Despite skeptics’ responses to the public’s distress via interviews and open letters, the story held. A post on the website of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry says that The Sun added salient details, such as that the urchin was mistreated by the painter, with the explanation that “these fires could be the child’s curse, his way of getting revenge.” According to Clark, The Sun was competing for readers with the Daily Mirror when the opportunity to develop the story arose, and the internet further grew the tale.

Comedian and writer Steven Punt also explored the legend on his radio show Punt PI. He attempted to track down the homes involved, and found Jane McCutchin, who had hung the print in her living room in the 1980s. McCutchin, a mother of two, was cleaning her kitchen when she found that her hand-made drapes, blinds and curtains were suddenly ablaze. Her family escaped alive, but her home had been destroyed—except for a single painting hung in her living room, of the crying boy. “You could still see the little boy’s face on the painting,” she told Punt. Later, she heard a firefighter who saw the painting say: “Oh no, not another.” After what was described as a “series of coincidences” and bad luck, McCutchin speculated that the painting was the cause, prompting her to get rid of it.

Most of the fires had normal causes, like cigarettes, or unwieldy deep-frying pans. Since most of the myth surrounds the nearly unbelievable fire resistance of the painting, Punt bought a crying-boy picture of his own; after being inexplicably delayed on his destination several times, Punt began to feel a bit nervous about the possible curse. When he tested its fire retardancy by setting it alight with construction researcher Martin Shipp, they found that beyond the string it hung from, it didn’t really burn. While the lapel of the boy’s jacket was singed, and the painting suffered a hole, the damage stopped pretty quickly. This may have been due to a fire-retardant varnish, he and Shipp surmised, which would easily account for why the painting would remain little-touched in burned homes across the U.K. During his own investigation, Clark also discovered that the painting was printed on compressed board, making it difficult to burn.

Such explanations would not have sufficed in 1985. In the middle of the story’s initial heyday, The Sun decided to take the legend further, requesting that the public send their crying boy paintings to them to be destroyed. According to The Sun’s editor, the office “got swamped in crying boy pictures,” but the editor refused to display the paintings in the office himself. “Picture is a fire jinx”, the paper reported. A week after its first article on the curse, The Sun published “Crying Boy Curse Strikes Again”—though the painting under the headline was a completely different painting of a crying boy. The story was much the same; an ordinary fire turned creepy when an unscathed crying-boy painting was found hanging in the house.

The legend of the crying boy survived into the internet age, and even sparked fan clubs. If you search for this online today, you’ll sadly find that the fan club since dissolved—but evidence of its existence in 2002 is preserved on artist and coder Mario Klingemann’s former blog, where there were discussions of crying-boy painting sales and a Holland-based club. Klingemann first got into the legend through the art of Laura Kikauka, who replaced the crying boy’s eyes with red LEDs, and for him, the painting’s weirdness is the allure. “The legend is a nice add-on … I think as a child when we did holidays in Italy back in the 1970s, I had also seen those pictures sold at some street booths and I guess I found them quite peculiar back then,” says Klingemann, who also created a crying-boy tear generator. Klingemann has collected several of the paintings, occasionally fielding requests to sell or buy from enthusiasts. Despite his fascination with the story, Klingemann maintains that he does not believe in the curse.

According to Gail-Nina Anderson in her paper about art folklore, the crying boy legend grew quickly because everyone could participate—the paintings were cheap and easy to find. The Crying Boy painting legend became so widespread that it grew to include all versions of similar paintings by various artists, including "cursed" paintings of crying girls.

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The Sun capped most of its hype of the legend in a 1985 article on Halloween, with the headline “Crying Flame!” gracing the front page. The paper claimed to dissolve the curse once and for all with a bonfire, burning “sackfuls” of paintings, which were sent to them by the public in response to their call. The bonfire blazed near the River Thames, dissolving the curse into smoke. The Sun, ever-looking for reliable sources, quoted a chaperone to the event; a fire officer who said, with relief: “I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now.”


Google Maps and the Non-Existing Pizza Joint

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Thanks to an error on Google Maps, a home in Darwin, Australia was labeled as a pizza joint, and sure enough, the people came out.

The home belonged to 69-year-old Michael McElwee, who became aware of the mistake after people began showing up on his doorstep, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. McElwee says one person came to try to deliver magazines to his “pizza shop,” while another person came by looking for a job. McElwee’s neighbor also noted that their dog had been barking much more frequently recently.

In fact, the map marker was meant to locate a pop-up pizza joint that sets up every year in a nearby park; Google has since said that they are working to resolve the issue.

As for McElwee, he just hopes it'll be fixed quickly.

"I don't know how many people have turned up at my house thinking it was a pizza place," he told ABC.

Fear of a White Lighter

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There are all sorts of luck-related legends surrounding smoking. Some people turn one cigarette upside down in each new pack they buy, making it “lucky.” Others believe that lighting three or more cigarettes on the same match will bring on bad luck. And then there’s the notion that using a white lighter is supremely unlucky, a superstition that has managed to thrive among smokers of all kinds despite being, well, pretty silly.

Even in 2017, it's not uncommon to encounter smokers who not only won’t purchase white lighters, but won’t use them to light things even if they belong to someone else. Some people don’t even like being in the room when one is being used. But how did this legend get started in the first place?

The most common origin story behind this myth is actually tied up with another popular urban legend. The so-called “27 Club” includes young artists and musicians—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix—who all died at the age of 27. A number of superstitions revolve around the 27 Club, one of which being that those musicians, as well as a later addition to the club, Kurt Cobain, had white lighters on them when they died. They didn’t.

As told in a comprehensive debunking of the white lighter/27 Club legend on Snopes, the main reason this legend doesn’t hold water is that white disposable lighters largely didn’t exist at of the time of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison’s deaths. While disposable lighters weren’t unheard of, the lighter the legend is most associated with, the white Bic lighter, would not even be released until 1973. The Snopes article goes on to note that other than references to the myth itself, there is no mention anywhere of white lighters being present when these musicians died. In the case of Cobain, whose death was accompanied by a number of released photos from the scene, there were a couple of lighters, but neither of them was white.

“The people in the 27 Club certainly accelerated their own demise by their excesses, but as Aristotle said is necessary for any tragedy, the punishment is out of all proportion to the wrongdoing (if any),” says Dr. Adam Davis of the Missouri Folklore Society, who, despite never having heard of it before himself, looked into the white lighter legend at Atlas Obscura's request. “So at the core of the folk-belief, attached to furtive and not altogether wholesome pleasure, is a hint of carpe diem.” In other words, the white lighter legend, just like that of the 27 Club, holds a sort of mystique that makes the taboo behavior of smoking more romantic.

Another, more banal origin to the myth goes that in the early days of Bic lighters, they only came in two colors, white and black, and that the white versions more clearly showed evidence of illicit use. So when marijuana smokers would use white lighters to pack down their bowls, the lighter would get stained with ash and resin, which the cops could then use to bust them. Thus the lighters became bad luck.

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Problem is, Bic lighters seem to have come in more than just two colors even in their earliest days—certainly a yellow version, which closely resembled the color in the company's classic logo, as seen in this 40th anniversary press release Bic put out in 2013.

Whether or not there is any truth to the folklore surrounding the white lighter is not really the point, of course, because to those who believe the legend, it simply is true. References to the myth can be found inweed forums across the internet, and some businesses, such as the marijuana-based subscription box service Pufferbox, avoid including them. “Smoking is ritualized behavior,” says Davis. “Ask somebody older about the prohibition against lighting ‘three on a match.’ Inexplicable prohibitions are part of the process by which we mark things as significant.”

In the end, if the accepted reasoning behind the white lighter legend is all folklore, why did white lighters get singled out at all? “Why white? Why not?” says Davis. “Same reason a white panel van without commercial markings draws grim jokes about serial killers—it’s a reminder that the ordinary, the innocuous, the unremarkable —these are the conduits and vectors of harm.”

Found: ‘Extraneous Golf Ball Materials’ in Frozen Hash Browns

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Over the weekend, the company McCain Foods USA announced a voluntary recall of “Frozen Southern Style Hash Browns,” sold in in states at Roundy’s and Harris Teeter supermarkets. These two-pound bags of chopped potatoes, the company said, contained “extraneous golf ball materials…inadvertently harvested with potatoes.”

The obvious question here is: how does a golf ball end up in potatoes? As NPR reports, the company doesn’t say how the golf ball materials got mixed up with the potatoes.

But it seems that golf ball contamination is a known danger of potato agriculture. In 2002, the University of Idaho created a guide on “Managing Foreign Material for Quality Idaho Potatoes” in which golf balls were featured as a “common foreign material found in potatoes,” alongside bones, light bulbs, manure, shot gun shells and irrigation equipment.

As the guide explains:

“Golfing and hunting are popular activities in Idaho, but both of these activities can be a source of foreign material in potatoes. Golf balls are a particularly difficult problem in potato fields near urban areas. A golf ball can do a great deal of damage if it goes undetected into the cutting knives of a processing plant.”

At one point in potato harvesting history, golf balls may even have been turned into potato chips. As the writer Clive James explains, automated machinery could not always tell golf ball from potato, and golf balls would be harvested, sliced, fried, and packaged with potato chips. "Indeed statistics indicate that some people, when they chance across a golf ball crisp in a packet of potato crisps, eat it, thinking, well, that one was a particularly crunchy crisp," James writes.

The foreign material guide goes on to advise that employees at packing sheds and processing sheds should be asked “to keep a keen eye out for golf balls.” Apparently in this case, the offending golf ball—or golf balls—snuck through.

Was the Guy in 'The Scream' Afraid of... Clouds?

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Take a look at Edvard Munch's 1893 oil painting "The Scream," and any number of feelings may bubble to the surface. You might find yourself overcome by awe at the work's mastery. You could feel empathetic terror with the subject, who is looking out over the water, howling his head off.

And if you're like anything like meteorologist Helene Muri at the University of Oslo, you may also be struck by a question—what is that guy so afraid of, anyway?

Curious, data-minded onlookers have been trying to draw conclusions about this for years now, blaming everything from volcanic pollution to an anxious hallucination. As Agence France-Presse reports, Muri and her team presented their latest theory at a meeting of the European Geoscientists Union in Vienna, and they blame another culprit entirely: clouds.

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Munch drew or painted four versions of "The Scream." Each shows the frightened protagonist standing in front of a sky swirling with violent shades of orange and crimson. When Munch wrote in his diary about the day that likely inspired the painting, he described a "flaming sky" that "suddenly... turned a bloody red," and "hung like blood and sword over... the city." "I stood there trembling with anxiety," he wrote.

According to the meteorologists, this description and the resulting painting resemble nothing so much as nacreous clouds—swirly, thin blobs that can cover the sky in cold temperatures, and appear iridescent.

"We do know that there were mother-of-pearl clouds in the Oslo area in the late 19th century," Muri says. Although she emphasizes that this is a hypothesis, she puts it at "a high probability that it was an event of [nacreous] clouds which was the background for Munch's experience in nature, and for his iconic Scream." Expect a response from the Cloud Public Relations Bureau any minute.

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.

Why Is Iceland So in Love With Licorice?

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Step into any Icelandic gas station or grocer and you’ll find at least 75 percent of the candy contains black licorice. Licorice powders, chocolate-covered licorice gummies, licorice-coated raisins, and thick, lava-like licorice sauces lurk behind the glass at local ice cream shops. You can even order licorice soft-serve with licorice hard-shell dip, if that’s your thing.

While the divisive treat has a cult-like following in all of the Nordic countries (there are festivals), Iceland has made a name for itself for combining licorice with chocolate, and for consuming it in quantities that would keep a dentist awake at night. But how did this bizarre black stuff wind up in nearly every candy bar in the land of fire and ice? The roots of its predominance are at once political, epidemiological, horticultural, and economic—chief among them a climate more favorable to glaciers than humans, and decades of restrictions on candy imports.

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The first settlers to arrive on Iceland’s shores were Scandinavian, and had no shortage of cold-weather expertise. They quickly learned, however, that even hardy winter crops could barely take hold in the volcanic soil, sulphuric waters, and treacherously long winters. Grain was hard to grow, and was abandoned completely during the “little ice age” that began in the 14th century. Icelanders had such a hard time cultivating carbs, they took to buttering dried fish like it was bread and harvesting mosses and seaweed to make up for the dearth of starch.

Flowers and bees couldn’t flourish, so neither could honey. Trading ships had difficulty making it ashore in the icy Atlantic, so imports were unreliable. Licorice, on the other hand, did not need to flower to be viable—the edible portion is the root, which contains a compound 30–50 times sweeter than sucrose. In lieu of other sugar, this flavor began to predominate in the chilly climes of northern Europe, and Icelanders, too, came to rely on its strong flavor to satisfy their cravings.

But it also served functions beyond sugar fix. Considered a highly effective mucokinetic (a drug that clears mucus from the airways), licorice has been relied on by Icelandic pharmacists for centuries to combat the respiratory ailments frequently afflicting inhabitants of the subarctic, perpetually damp island. The pharmacists added it to their bespoke cough syrups and lozenges and served them to everyone from sick children to fishermen—a practice that lasted well into the 20th century, according to Icelandic food journalist Ragnar Egilsson.

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“Back in my youth … the only sweets you would find in the Icelandic apótek [pharmacy] were dextrose tablets with fruit flavor and apótekaralakkris [pharmacy licorice], which were these dense licorice straws with a concentrated licorice flavor,” Egilsson recalled. Nowadays, he says, those straws are used by Icelandic teenagers to slurp up sodas.

The effects of the climate on public health (and the subsequent licorice cures) do not stop there. For centuries, local produce was practically nonexistent and as a result, the bowels of the Icelandic people were in need of some help. Luckily for them, licorice root doesn’t just thin nasal fluids. The plant, found in modern-day aperient teas, is known for its laxative properties, a trait that surely comes in handy in a country where fermented shark carcass and lamb hot dogs are the cuisine de rigueur.

All of this explains why early Icelanders had to seek alternative sweets, but it doesn’t explain why their palates haven’t broadened as international trade has expanded and American candy proliferation has reached near-global saturation. To be fair, Icelanders can pick up American candy at their corner store now, but as recently as the late 1990s this was not the case.

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Between 1814 and World War I, Iceland was under Danish control and Icelandic currency was tied to the Danish krone. Iceland was able to procure some imported sweets during this time, and their selection of licorice treats surely multiplied (the Danes are also pretty fond of it).

After WWI, however, Iceland gained independence from Denmark, freeing up its currency and thereby crippling its spending power. The Great Depression followed, with fish (Iceland’s main export) falling victim to global market collapse. To counter this blow to the local economy, imports were restricted, especially in fields where Icelandic alternatives were available.

“The import of meat, dairy products, eggs, baked foods, candy, and many other things was prohibited,” says Icelandic writer and historian Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir. “There was a short period in the 1930s when you could only get apples and oranges if you had a doctor’s prescription for them, and when I was growing up in the 1960s they were mostly a Christmas treat.”

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The second World War brought American soldiers to Iceland, and with them opportunities to sidestep these restrictions. The Yanks came bearing snacks, providing reprieve from the local fare—but as soon as the war ended, Iceland fell into a deep deficit and immediately doubled down on the restriction of foreign foods again. Fish exports were recovering from their slump, but a nervous Icelandic government limited what foreign funds brought in by these exports could be used for. Candy wasn’t one of those luxuries, but sugar was, so Icelandic candy factories flourished.

It looked like trade restrictions might finally let up in 1970, when Iceland joined the European Free Trade Association (a trade bloc established for European countries unable to join the European Economic Community). For a brief, sweet moment, Icelandic kids were free to develop a taste for Hershey rather than lakkrits—until the red candy scare came along.

In 1971, Russian researchers at the Moscow Institute of Nutrition published a study claiming that Red Dye No. 2 (in everything from makeup to sausage casings to — you guessed it — candy) posed a carcinogenic risk. Their research was immediately debunked for shoddy methodology, but attempts to recreate the findings in the U.S. produced inconclusive results, prompting a widespread panic. The Food and Drug Administration came under frenzied consumer pressure and removed the dye from its list of safe products, effectively banning it. Despite never having used the suspicious dye, Mars ceased production of red M&Ms and Skittles—that’s how freaked out people were. And in the midst of all this confusion, Iceland sent foreign candies packing once more.

This time, the ban was on Mars products, and lasted until 1998. Isolated once again, Icelanders figured out ways to smuggle in M&Ms and Skittles—the country’s largest supermarket chain once incurred a fine for selling 20,000 bags of M&Ms illegally—but aside from the occasional protest treat, this ban left Icelanders with another 22 years to cultivate their necessity-based love of all things licorice.

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It’s been 20 years since the Mars ban was lifted, long enough for a generation of kids to grow up with a wide variety of international candy options. But with Icelandic candy manufacturers still cranking out licorice bars en masse, we can only assume demand has remained high. So are Icelandic children perhaps just born with a genetic predisposition to the mysterious confection?

According to one Icelandic salt harvester, the country’s people relied on salt for centuries to spice up lackluster food, leading to a compulsive sodium predilection. Others speculate that Icelanders’ preference for strong flavors trickled down from their Viking forebears, who subsisted on pungent fare like pickled sheep heads and whale blubber. There could be truth to both of these ideas—without grains or produce, Icelanders relied heavily on cured, fermented, or dried protein to last the year. Meat soaked for months in a whey brine would definitely teach you to like strong flavors, fast.

But then to what do we owe the current state of things, in which Icelanders of all ages are consuming sweets at higher rates than ever before? Maybe these trends aren’t mutually exclusive. After several lifetimes of stinky fish, brackish whale meat, and an austerity foisted upon them by government and climate, it’s no wonder Icelanders are hitting the sweets hard now. Given their ingrained taste for brine and a newfound insatiable sugar craving, the sweet-and-salty combination found in salty licorice (and chocolate-covered licorice) seems like the most natural progression.

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