For more than 30 years, Andrew Davies, chairman of the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsman Association, has spent his time out on the water in his coracle, a type of small Welsh boat. Recently, as Wales Online reports, he dredged up a surprising object—a corroded, 18th century sword of Asian origin.
The sword emerged from the River Towy, “between the two river bridges where coracle fishing takes place,” Davies told Wales Online.
It’s likely the sword was stuck in the mud for many years, which would have helped preserve it. The blade is rusted and corroded but the sword is still largely intact. The wooden handle is ornamented with a bird made of bone.
Carmarthen is a port, which may explain how such a sword came to be in a Welsh river, but unless someone out there is keeping close information about how exactly the sword arrived in the area and why it ended up in the river, the full story of this object will remain a mystery.
Something is lupine in the state of Denmark. After two largely wolf-free centuries, researchers say that a pair of the animals has moved into west Jutland, and that cubs are almost certainly on the way.
Over the past few years, four solitary male wolves have been sighted roaming the area's woods and farmland. CCTV footage from last autumn suggested that at least one of them had been joined by a companion, and DNA evidence from wolf scat now confirms it, the Copenhagen Post reports.
The female left a pack in Eastern Germany and traveled about 300 miles before hooking up with her current mate. "We expect that they will have cubs this year or the next," researcher Peter Sunde told the outlet.
Wolves, which once roamed all over Europe, were extirpated from the Western part of the continent thanks to centuries of hunting, much of it state-sanctioned. Over the past few decades, though, they have slowly returned, reclaiming their old territory country by country. In the mid-1990s, they spread out into France and Germany, and over the course of this decade, they've moved to Belgium and the Netherlands.
This newest foray both excites and worries wolf fans. "The question has to be asked: are people going to accept the wolves?" researcher Guillaume Chapron asked, in the Guardian. "When they realize that Danish sheep don't taste too bad, that may be a little problematic." In preparation, the Danish government has begun setting up a wildlife management plan, funding wolf-proof fences and compensating farmers for lost animals.
"It's just a matter of few years before we begin to see new wolf packs in Denmark," says Sunde.
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.
Moveable houses, portable saunas, and wearable tents are the subjects—among some 250—of the new book Mobitecture: Architecture on the Move, by Rebecca Roke. It’s both a paean to traveling light and an eye-catching look at all the ways a dwelling can move. The designs range from the functional to the outlandish, and cover an array of forms of transport, from tugboats to tractors.
Some of the examples are ideal for recreation, such as the compact-cute, California-made Golden Gate 2 camper, with a rounded timber frame, portholes, and a spot for a surfboard. For lovers of winter sports, the Nomad Sauna, which was built on a lake in Norway, includes an internal ice-hole for intensely refreshing breaks from the heat.
It is not all fun and games—others are designed for important, practical use. It can also be used to provide shelter during a crisis, or for protection in extreme weather. The Rapid Deployment Module is a temporary dwelling that can be assembled in an hour to provide shelter during a crisis or disaster, while the DesertSeal is an inflatable, lightweight tent that can protect inhabitants from extreme heat.
For portable architecture to actually move, it needs somehow to be stowed, carried, pushed, pulled, or towed, and this is the way that some of the portable shelters featured in the book get really get inventive. The Walking Shelter is like a tent on two legs (yours), and folds up neatly into the heel of high-top sneaker. Many of the designs are pedal-powered or designed to be towed in a more traditional manner. Some of those can be quite luxurious, such as the four-wheeled Collingwood Shepherd Hut wagon, with a shingled exterior and a cozy wood-burning stove.
And there are some creations that just defy categorization. The aptly named Portaledge, for example, is a small tent that rock climbers can affix to a rock face and sleep in (safely)—while dangling high above the earth. The experimental Camper Kart, created by artist Kevin Cyr, turns a shopping cart into a mini-home with a roof, sleeping desk and storage—all of which can be folded right back into the cart. It can also be considered an artistic statement on the perceived association between shopping carts and the homeless.
Have a look at some of these unique, useful, and sometimes thought-provoking shelters, and imagine what life on the move might look like. Just in case you have to jam.
At a safe distance, lightning can be one of nature's greatest shows, but big electrical storms are even more incredible when seen from space. Astronauts on the International Space Station get a very exclusive view, but NASA's new GOES-16 satellite is making that perspective available to everyone. It recently captured a huge electrical storm as it swept across the eastern United States.
The newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), launched last November, hangs out 22,300 miles over the Americas and collects weather data for agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It's still getting settled into its orbit, but the first video from its Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) is a strong debut. The short video captures an April 28–29 storm that spawned a whole lot of lightning, a couple of tornadoes, and a blizzard in Kansas. The GOES-16's infrared camera offers another view of the storm.
Most instruments on Earth only track cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, but the GLM can track cloud-to-cloud lightning, too, which can help meteorologists track storm severity. Better data can mean earlier warnings, and as anyone who has had to take cover or evacuate in anticipation of a severe storm knows, an extra 15 minutes can make all the difference in the world.
Take the man in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who, on May 3, tried to scare away an opossum by lighting some leaves on fire in his backyard. He ended up destroying his house. "His intention was to use the smoke from the burning leaves to hopefully scare away the opossum," assistant fire marshal Carl Everhart told Lancaster Online. "Unfortunately for him the exterior of the residence was made of wood, and the fire got out of control and spread to the residence."
The Associated Pressreports that the man, who was not named in news reports, "had problems with bees also." The fire was eventually contained by firefighters, but not before it had done $50,000 in damage to the now-condemned house.
There is no word on whether the opossum was in any way frightened, by the initial fire or the conflagration that followed, or whether bees remain an issue.
Deceased celebrities who grew too fond of prescription drugs left behind evidence of their habits, in the form of pharmacy bottles. These macabre artifacts now widely circulate at auction houses.
Fans collect the containers to better understand which chemicals coursed through the bloodstreams of the stars and in some cases ruined careers and lives.
In the last few years, Heritage Auctions in Dallas has offered bottles from the 1970s that originally contained Elvis Presley’s doses of valium, Dexedrine, tetracycline and the beta blocker Inderal. Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles has offered a smattering of Elvis’smedicationbottles from the 1970s, two of which sold for over $6000 each, as well as containers for Michael Jackson’s pain relievers, assortments of Truman Capote’s prescribed drugs and Marilyn Monroe’s barbiturates and anti-allergy pills. Vessels for non-lethal drugs prescribed for Jack Kevorkian have come on the market, too.
Auction lots in this niche field typically sell for a few thousand dollars each. (The three empty Elvis bottles auctioned by Heritage sold for $4,062.50, $3250, and $3,883.75.) They do not contain the actual meds—reselling those would be illegal. Museums, however, are allowed to keep vintage pills on hand—the Smithsonian, for instance, owns Charles Lindbergh’s stashes of barbiturates and anti-malarial quinine from the 1930s and Apollo astronauts’ sleeping aids.
Still, some of the bottles for sale are not entirely empty. A vial for William Burroughs’ methadone supply, which surfaced in 2013 at PBA Galleries in San Francisco, was adapted by a subsequent owner into a mini-memorial for the author. It is filled with dirt and pebbles picked up at Burroughs’ grave in St. Louis, plus a bullet shell from his gun (presumably not the weapon with which he accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951). The whole lot—pebbles, pill bottle, bullet shell, and all—sold at auction for $1,320.
Darren Julien, the owner of Julien’s Auctions, says some of the Elvis prescription containers on the market were originally brought to light by a fan who combed through the performer’s trash. When the clearly labeled bottles go on display at homes, museum galleries or auction sale rooms, he says, “people are mesmerized.”
The market has become so feverish that some living celebrities take precautions to protect themselves from any souvenir hunters scrounging in their garbage bins. When they throw out prescription medicine containers, Julien says, “they take off the labels.”
Margaret Barrett, the director of entertainment and music memorabilia at Heritage, owns two of Capote’s bottles, which originally contained the sedatives chloral hydrate and Tuinal. A cocktail of similar prescription meds was found in his bloodstream when he died in 1984, at 59. Ms. Barrett says “he added other drugs to both containers,” and he sometimes tucked handwritten instructions inside noting the quantities of each that he was supposed to take.
She keeps the containers on a bookshelf at her home, casually tucked alongside the books. Visitors at first often assume that the prescriptions were meant for her, and they try to avert their eyes, so they will not appear to be nosy about her health problems.
But she reassures her guests that “you cannot help but look.” She compares people’s curiosity about the Capote artifacts to just about everyone’s covert practice of checking on the contents of their friends’ medicine cabinets.
Other intimate medical artifacts of pop culture idols, including Elvis’ x-rays, have also drawn customers’ attention at auctions.
“It’s a weird world I’m in,” she says.
Scott Fortner, a major buyer and scholar of Marilyn Monroe’s former possessions who loans widely to museums, owns bottles for her prescription eye drops and anti-allergy pills. He has bought related paperwork, too, which he stores in a metal file cabinet that Monroe used in her homes. Her telegram to her Beverly Hills psychiatrist (at times she went to therapy sessions every weekday) wishes him and his wife a happy anniversary. An invoice from her Manhattan pharmacy lists one of her drugs as “renewed Double quantity.” Fortner has also acquired jars of her face creams, and in recent months he carefully salvaged strands of her hair that he found strewn on one of her favorite jackets in his collection.
Because of his focus on objects that she owned, he says, he is not much interested in medical records such as her chest x-rays that hospital staff may have taken home. And he would firmly draw the line against acquiring anything as invasive, prurient and morbid as the pair of breast enhancers that were retrieved from the trash at the mortuary where Monroe’s funeral was organized. They are said to have been destined for use on her embalmed corpse.
Fortner points out that there is plenty of other illuminating and emotionally powerful material to collect instead, which she would have wanted her fans to know about. Throughout her tumultuous career, while shedding husbands and movie personas again and again, she somehow remembered to preserve her own memorabilia down to the drugstore receipts and eyedroppers.
“Some of my best friends are homosexual,” Broadway musical star Ethel Merman has famously said. “Everybody knew about J. Edgar Hoover, but he was the best chief the FBI ever had.”
Merman and Hoover had a friendship spanning from 1938 until Hoover death in 1972, and Merman’s off-the-cuff allegations regarding the Director’s sexuality have spurred many of the Director’s detractors to hang involved psychological analyses on. But personal insights aside, was there any investigatory benefit to being among the Bureau’s BFFs? According to the singer’s personal FBI file, released via FOIA by Stephen Johnson, to be rich in friends isn’t always enough to keep you in riches.
The only incident in the file took place during Hoover’s twilight period. It involved a theft from Ms. Merman’s residence at the Berkshire Hotel. At the time, the actress was appearing in the Broadway production of “Hello Dolly.”
The primary suspects became a pair of Canadians that walked out on their hotel bill the next day.
But even though the visitors from above the border admitted that they did indeed skip out on their hotel obligations …
and others attested to their lavishly-lived, less-than-honest existences …
there was no evidence that they were the ones to lift Ms. Merman’s personal effects.
With no other leads and no other evidence, the case was closed, the jewels lost, and Hoover’s opportunity to put his investigatory enthusiasm to the test squandered.
In most ways, Roanoke Park, in Kansas City, Missouri, is like other urban parks. Early plans describe it as "a bit of wilderness" in the middle of a bustling neighborhood. On a given day, kids scramble over its playground, neighbors walk their dogs through its green acres, and teens meet for pick-up games on its soccer fields and volleyball courts.
But Roanoke Park has a secret. On its south side, just across from the tennis courts, stands a stone and concrete wall about six feet high, built into a limestone bluff. This was once the entrance to Roanoke Park Cave. At one point open to the world, the cave was blocked off sometime in the mid-20th century, and is now completely inaccessible. Interested parties, from cavers to archivists to a local homeowner's association, are still trying to figure out what—if anything—happened there.
"What I really want to do is just bust the damn wall open," says Jaclyn Dalbey, with a grin in her voice. As a member of Kansas City Area Grotto, a local cave exploration and conservation group, Dalbey spends plenty of time underneath her home state, spelunking through karst caverns and exploring the area's many abandoned mines. But Roanoke Park Cave, just a few blocks from her apartment, holds a special fascination. "It's right in the middle of the city, so everyone knows about it," she says. "You get jazzed about it."
Official information on the cave is slim—the State of Missouri's geological records contain only its name and coordinates—and dedicated hobbyists haven't been able to do much better. "The only data we have is that it's in Roanoke Park and it's closed," says Jim Cooley, director of the Missouri Speleological Society, which is working on mapping all the caves in the state. "It was bricked up or blocked up by the city or the park district decades ago."
To fill this vacuum, locals entertain a flurry of stories about the cave. "There's a mythos to it," says Dalbey. One common one holds that Jesse James, the infamous outlaw, once hid there with his horses while on the run. Others feature endangered children—a pair of young girls lost forever, or a boy who got wedged in the entrance and had to be yanked out by the fire department. Other stories—the most enticing to actual cavers—deal with the cave's size, or supposed secret entrances. "The story I like the most is that it connects all the way to Hyde Park," about a mile away, says Dalbey. "Or if there was some type of crawlshaft in the woods, or under a manhole that's been there since the '40s. Those would be really exciting avenues."
Presented with these hypotheses, Cooley debunks them one by one. "Jesse James [supposedly] hid out in every cave in the state of Missouri," he says. "It’s undoubtably true that he would ride into a cave every once in a while in the summer because it’s free air conditioning—who wouldn’t?" But besides Cleveland Cave, in St. Clair County, which features a carving of his name, "I'm not so sure he did a whole lot of hiding out in caves," he says. There are two documented cases of children getting lost in Missouri caves, he adds, but no such records exist for Roanoke Park.
Although Cooley wishes people would focus on the many caves in his state that, in his mind, have more to offer, he's not surprised by the gossip: "Caves are a very fecund source of imaginative embellishment," he says. He likens cave rumors to a particularly drafty game of telephone: "What you will find is someone will whisper to their neighbor, 'They blocked up Roanoke Park Cave to keep people safe,' and they'll say to their neighbor, 'They blocked up Roanoke Park Cave because someone got lost in there.'"
"By the time it comes around the circle, the Fourth Cavalry disappeared in there during the Civil War and they're still looking for the horses."
Over the years, this particular drip of rumor has formed a stalactite of certainty: something happened here. The Roanoke Protective Homes Association, otherwise dedicated to raising awareness of local zoning laws, hosts a webpage focused on getting to the bottom of the cave mystery. It features the only known historical newspaper articles about the cave: two from the Kansas City Star (which call it "Jesse James Cave," proving that rumors die hard), and one from the March 1946 Westport High School Crier. "Venturesome boys sometimes crawled clear through but the passage was closed years ago by cave-ins," that article says.
The group is dedicated—they have several archivists on tap to search microfiche records, if the date range for relevant events can ever be narrowed. ("I think they love the mystique of it," says Dalbey.) They've also posted a written history by a long-time resident, identified as "John B.," who got to go inside once, in 1946 or '47, after "vandals tore down the entrance barrier."
"As I recall, it was a large bowl-like cavern with a small opening at the rear that I assumed continued under the street above," writes John B. He offers one convincing on-site detail: "There was considerable dampness in the cave."
Dampness or no, Dalbey wants in. "A lot of people would love to have it open," she says. "We could open it, and gate it, and it'd be a bat sanctuary right in the city, and an attraction for people to go and see." (And, of course, she could finally figure out how far it goes.) She's dedicated a considerable amount of time to convincing Cooley to ask the city to open it up, but he won't budge. "Roanoke Park Cave is not awesome, nor massive, nor cool," he says. "It’s an ex-cave, blocked up."
Faced with both literal and human brick walls, invested parties have had to resort to more shadowy methods. "I know a guy who was going there for a couple weeks to work on it with a pickaxe at night," says Dalbey. "But it's just so laborious."
Her pet idea involves drilling a hole and filling it with a special kind of expanding foam, used by firefighters during rescues, that can crack concrete. "You break it looser with that," she says. "Then you pack in a bunch of explosives, and then you run like hell." That, at least, would make a great—and true—story for the future.
In addition to developing the weapon that changed ... well ... everything, the Manhattan Project is the source of countless fascinating stories of innovation and intrigue. But not all of them can be considered successes, in retrospect. Sometimes they are tales of blind alleys, lost causes, and honest failures. There is, among these stories, the case of the secret team that was tracking Nazi attempts to develop nuclear technology during World War II—and instead found a nuclear-tinged marketing scheme. It came to be known as "Operation Toothpaste."
While scientists in the United States were working to build the first atomic bomb, there was also a covert off-shoot mission to determine whether the Nazis were doing the same thing. The Alsos Mission, punnily named for the Greek word for “grove”—as in General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project—was an international operation of scientific, intelligence, and military officials tasked with understanding Germany's technological capabilities. Established in 1943, the Alsos team performed operations throughout Europe during the later stages of World War II.
“Like many things in the Manhattan Project, there was a scientific leader, who was Samuel Goudsmit, he was a Dutch physicist. There was also an intelligence, rough-and-tumble guy named Pash. Colonel Boris Pash,” says Alex Wellerstein, science historian and author of the nuclear history blog, Restricted Data. Pash and his men followed on the heels of Allied forces as they advanced in the European theater. They seized scientists, sensitive scientific data, and atomic materials, which Goudsmit’s team then analyzed and interpreted. “It’s sort of an intelligence mission, it’s sort of a science mission,” says Wellerstein.
According to Goudsmit’s book, titled Alsos, French intelligence gave Alsos a tip about a “German chemical concern,” called Auer-Gessellschaft, that had shown a keen interest in collecting uranium. Auer was primarily in the business of making gas masks, carbon filaments, and other chemical-based war materials. Goudsmit and his team also discovered that, during the occupation of Paris, Auer controlled a smaller French firm that held a monopoly on the rare radioactive material thorium. Alarmingly, the firm’s entire supply of the substance had been moved out of Paris just before its liberation in August 1944. It was no great stretch for Alsos to theorize that Auer could be connected to a German atomic program, and that the smuggled thorium could be critical to it.
“The thorium mystery became an obsession,” Goudsmit writes. Alsos discovered that the Paris firm had been run by a “stooge” named Petersen, with the help of his secretary, Fraülein Wessel. In his book, Goudsmit describes Petersen as “not too bright,” and suggests his secretary was the real brains of the operation.
Petersen and Wessel had cleared their offices of evidence before fleeing Paris, and it appeared that Petersen had returned to Germany. Wessel, however, was tracked to the Belgian border city of Eupen, which had just been retaken by the Allies. According to Goudsmit’s account, Pash, unwilling to wait for authorization from counterintelligence officials, immediately got in his jeep with some men and went off to get her. Alsos's legal authority to arrest these foreign nationals was somewhat suspect, but that didn’t stop Pash. “The Manhattan Project had way more autonomy than people realize,” says Wellerstein. “Alsos itself was its own sort of foreign intelligence agency.”
Wellerstein says that Pash was a rough and overzealous military man, and he often came into conflict with scientific personnel. But in this case, his bravado paid dividends. A few days later, Pash called Goudsmit to report that he had captured not just Wessel, but also the hapless Petersen, who was just visiting but was trapped in Eupen when the Allies took it. “Here was our first real Alsos Mission prisoner,” writes Goudsmit.
Petersen was in possession of detailed documents and records, which told Alsos exactly where the secreted thorium ended up. This appeared to be a huge coup for the Alsos Mission—but any excitement was short-lived. The Auer company, it turns out, was already thinking about the future, about getting out of the war business. They had decided to go all-in on one of their consumer products: thorium toothpaste.
According to Goudsmit, Auer had been “impressed by American methods of advertising,” including Bob Hope’s endorsement of Pepsodent toothpaste, which was advertised as including something called “irium.” There is, it was later revealed, no such thing as irium. Auer-Gessellschaft, like many companies at the time, was trying to get in on the craze for all things radioactive—including cosmetics. “In Germany, it would be thorium, the scientific toothpaste!” writes Goudsmit.
By early 1945, Alsos determined that the Nazis had no nuclear technology program worth crowing about, and by the end of spring, the war in Europe was over. “As it became clear from what they were finding, that Germany had not made very much progress, the goal of the mission shifted a bit and became about denying nuclear materials and expertise to the Soviet Union,” says Wellerstein.
While the thorium toothpaste caper didn’t exactly change the course of history, Alsos went on to a number of substantial achievements. The mission eventually seized a large amount of Germany’s uranium stockpile, which kept it out of the hands of Soviets and others. But first they had to cut their teeth on the case of the mysterious thorium toothpaste.
In the west Antarctica, in a place where there’s a patch of open water ringed by sea ice, scientists on a U.S. icebreaker observed, for the first time in a decade, a “very rare, bizarre” formation known as “dragon-skin ice.”
The wind in this place is strong—hurricane-strength, even—and can lift up ice that’s formed on the surface, exposing the water beneath, as Science Alert reports. That exposed water freezes into ice, too, create a scaly ice surface that looks a little bit like butter smeared in flour, a pie-crust in the making.
This phenomenon, though, is “evidence of a darker chaos in the cyrospheric realm,” says Guy Williams, a polar oceanographer at the University of Tasmania. The cryosphere is the Earth’s frozen reaches—the spot where Willaims and other researchers encountered the ice is the rare place where frozen water and incredibly strong winds meet, “an epic demonstration of polar ocean-atmospheric interaction,” Williams says.
Saturday, May 6, was Obscura Day, our annual celebration of wonder and discovery. At over 175 events in 36 states and 25 countries around the world, thousands of Atlas Obscura readers set out to explore awe-inspiring places in their own communities, while countless more created unique Obscura Day experiences by choosing their own destinations from the Atlas. To everyone who participated—thank you! We had a blast, and we hope you did too.
We've pulled together some of our favorite #ObscuraDay moments below—and these are just small portion of the adventures that took place across the globe.
Tokyo
Reviewing my notes & enjoying a beer at Yanaka Beer Hall while I wait for the sun to go down for my nighttime Yanaka tour! #ObscuraDaypic.twitter.com/4uXUVHAL1m
Forgot to post this yesterday. "Possibly the oldest of America's big, civic peanuts." And that's how we celebrated #ObscuraDaypic.twitter.com/E6sG3HyGF3
Why go to the beach when you can wait for the beach to come to you? For the people of Dooagh, Ireland—an island village off the country's western coast—this patience has finally paid off. After 33 years, a beach stolen from them by a freak storm has returned, transforming a rough, rocky coastline back into a summer destination.
As the Irish Times reports, in the summer of 1984, a storm swept over Dooagh, stayed put for a few days, and then retreated. Before it left, it exacted a heavy payment—about 900 feet of pristine beach. Practically overnight, a shoreline that had been covered in soft, golden sand was instead just bare rock. Hotels and guest houses closed down. Signs that read "to the beach!" were suddenly irrelevant.
— Irish Times Video (@irishtimesvideo) May 1, 2017
And then, late last month, heavy winds kicked up again—and over the course of a few days, the beach returned. "Hundreds of tonnes of sand were deposited around the area where [it] once stood," the Guardian reports. Photos show waves breaking gently on the newly smooth surface, and humans and dogs happily frolicking.
Tourists are already returning, the Irish Times reports. But there are intangible benefits too: "It is great to look out and see the beautiful beach instead of just rocks," local restauranteur Alan Gielty told the Guardian. It's almost like time travel.
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.
A hungry visitor strolling through the narrow streets of 19th-century Naples would have encountered a wealth of food options—some more tempting than others. Vendors hawked meats and cakes, women cooked up soups and omelets, and goats patiently awaited milking. Among those vying for attention would have been the pasta-sellers tending to cauldrons brimming with long strands of spaghetti writhing in boiling water. The spaghetti would have been fished out of its scalding bath and handed over to hungry men and women who then would have deftly lowered fistful of the noodles into their mouths in one gulp. These were the macaroni-eaters of Naples.
From the 17th to 19th centuries, macaroni, which was the term used for all forms of pasta, was a street food. And, like any proper street food, macaroni was eaten not with a fork, but with one’s bare hands.
Watching this custom in action was one of Naples’ major tourist attractions. The macaroni-eaters were written up in guidebooks, illustrated in paintings, and later captured in prints and on film for postcards. Some macaroni-sellers would even provide demonstrations to tourists willing to pay for a plate. Eating a handful of macaroni in a single bite was something of a sport, or at least a gastronomical challenge. In a book published in 1832, Andrea de Jorio, the Neapolitan clergyman and ethnographer, explained that to eat macaroni “the Neapolitan way” requires that the pasta be “swallowed down in a single, uninterrupted mouthful.” De Jorio further explains that the macaroni must be poured into one’s mouth “with both hands in such a way that there is no interval between successive mouthfuls, except what is necessary to allow the macaroni to reach the oesophagus.” Naturally, visitors found this endlessly entertaining.
Many tourists took it upon themselves to organize such spectacles. Simply tossing a coin or two to the lazzaroni, the street beggars, would elicit a mad dash to consume the macaroni in their characteristic way, much to the amusement of their onlooking benefactors. John Lawson Stoddard, an American visitor to Naples, wrote about one night when, while driving through a market, he stopped to buy 20 platefuls of macaroni just to watch people eat them. “The instant that one wretched man received a plate a dozen others jumped for it; [they] grabbed handfuls of the steaming mass, and thrust the almost scalding mixture down their throats,” he wrote. “I had expected to be amused, but this mad eagerness for common food denoted actual hunger.” Macaroni, as Stoddard discovered, was not just a Neapolitan idiosyncrasy, but an important form of sustenance for the poor. But it was not always so.
Pasta was first brought to Sicily by Arab merchants around the 12th century. It eventually made its way to Naples about 300 years later. The curious rope-like dough must have presented a challenge to early adopters. But by the mid-14th century, Italians had taken to eating macaroni with a fork. For centuries, pasta was only eaten by the wealthy on special occasions and by the peasantry as a rare indulgence. All that changed in the 17th century when macaroni-eating took to the streets.
During the 17th century, the price of meat and vegetables rose and the price of bread and pasta dropped. At the same time, greater accessibility to kneading troughs and new mechanical presses enabled pasta to be produced at a lower cost than ever before. Naples, with its quality ingredients and sea air perfect for drying, became a center of pasta-making and pasta-eating. The Neapolitan working poor, who had long subsisted on a diet of mostly cabbage and meat, now relied heavily on pasta, which filled up hungry bellies and provided a wealth of calories. Neapolitans became known as “macaroni-eaters," an epithet that had been reserved for Sicilians up until that time.
When Goethe visited Naples in 1787, he noted that ready-to-eat macaroni “can be bought everywhere and in all the shops for very little money.” These shops, which had more than quadrupled over the course of the 18th century, were mostly stalls on the streets and in the markets. The fresh pasta, made of durum wheat, was laid out near the stalls on cane racks or large cloths to dry in the bright southern sun and fresh coastal air. Macaroni-cooking was a simple affair: The pasta was boiled over a charcoal fire in a large pot of water. Occasionally the water was flavored with pork grease and a bit of salt. Other than that, grated hard cheese was the sole seasoning until tomato sauce was added in the 19th century.
While most Neapolitan pasta had a reputation for being some of the best in Italy, the stuff sold to the poor on the streets did not. A large part of the macaroni-eating population could only afford lower-quality macaroni which contained dirt and, unsurprisingly, had an acidic tang. The conditions in the macaroni shops were less than sanitary. Stoddard described “filthy men” making great sheets of dough which they then hung out to dry “amidst the dust, rags, and wretchedness of Neapolitan streets.” Stoddard did not divulge whether or not he tried the macaroni himself, but he did mention that a friend of his “was almost ill from merely recollecting that he had eaten macaroni here the night before, and nothing would induce him after that to touch the dish.”
In the 20th century, Naples’ dominance in pasta production steadily waned. In an effort to make Italy more self-sufficient, Mussolini moved the growing of durum from the south to the center and north of the country. Soon, northern factories were making pasta and using electric drying tunnels instead of the once coveted Neapolitan sun and breeze. Pasta-eating eventually moved off the streets and back indoors, where hands that had once scooped up fistfuls of macaroni now held forkfuls instead.
Archives and libraries are often tasked with digitizing old books in their collections to preserve them and make them more accessible to the public. Most, even very large volumes, fit in scanners created just for books, but what happens when you need to scan one that's nearly six feet tall? If you're the British Library, you get creative and set up a special studio to photograph the titanic Klencke Atlas. Two inclined platforms support the sides of the tome, while two people hold up reflectors to evenly illuminate the pages for a camera mounted above. The resulting photographs reveal incredible detail—and some incredible gaps in geographic knowledge in the 17th century, considering much of North America, Australia, and Antartica had yet to be charted when the atlas was completed in 1660.
The massive collection of 41 maps was made as a gift to King Charles II by Johannes Klencke, a Dutch sugar merchant who hoped to land favorable trading deals with the British Empire. Charles II was a map lover and kept the atlas in his cabinet of curiosities. And Klencke was knighted. The book stayed in the royal collections until 1828, when King George IV gifted it to the British Library with other maps and atlases.
While the maps were intended to be hung on the wall, they were left bound. This was a boon to their preservation, as they are now in better condition than those that were subjected to years of sunlight, heat, and dirt. There have been several attempts to restore the aging paper and binding over the years. The maps were trimmed and mounted on new paper sometime in the 1800s, and the volume was rebound in the early 1960s. Today the atlas is usually displayed closed, so the new photographs will allow enthusiasts and scholars to study the maps and illustrations without the trouble of cracking it open. At five feet, ten inches tall, and seven feet, seven inches wide when open, the atlas was world's largest for 352 years, until a English publisher made one, Earth Platinum, that's just a bit larger.
After two years in flight, a secret government drone plane has finally landed, and nothing is sinister about it at all.
According to Reuters, the X-37B, otherwise known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), touched down at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center after spending the past two years orbiting the planet for undisclosed reasons. The OTV originally launched in May 2015, and according to a press release from the Air Force, it conducted “on-orbit experiments for 718 days during its mission.”
While the details of the OTV’s latest mission weren't disclosed, the craft has previously been tasked with doing experiments for NASA, including testing out an ionizing thruster.
The windshield-free shuttle is planned to be placed back in orbit later in the year, ensuring that there will always be a secret government plane silently passing overhead, well into the future.
Thomas Pynchon was born 80 years ago today, on May 8, 1937. The famous author hasn’t made an official public appearance in years and guards his privacy by keeping clear of cameras—there are only a few publicly available pictures of him in the world. But on this day fans of the author of Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 celebrate by bringing their own Pynchon out in public.
Pynchon in Public Day was started in 2011 by a group of fans connected with a podcast that discusses Pynchon’s work. According to the website, the celebration began with “Martin and Bill,” two early podcast contributors, “meeting up in a pub in England.”
Since then, Pynchon in Public Day has spread around the world. The simplest way to celebrate is to bring a copy of a Pynchon book out in public and read it. The theory goes something like: If the author doesn’t want publicity for himself, his fans can bring attention to his work. Some also pass out “a Pynchonian card, stick a Pynchon sticker or two,” the Los Angeles Times reported on a previous Pynchon in Public Day. According to the organizers, “Other activities include hunting for muted posthorn symbols, launching model V2 rockets and joining a grassroots alternate reality game based upon underground postal networks." If you're a fan, that all makes perfect sense.
Pynchon in Public Day is now more popular than ever, though, in honor of the writer, many participants choose to keep their faces shielded from view. It all seems a fitting way to honor both the man and his work: dense, unruly, frustrating, rewarding, and weird.
Ancient Egyptians who could afford a lavishly decorated tomb probably had some strong ideas about what they wanted their funerals to be like. Among depictions of gods and scenes honoring the life of the deceased are often depictions of their desired burial rituals, an important resource for archaeologists about religious beliefs and practices. One thing that shows up in these scenes are funeral gardens—tidy planting beds just outside a tomb entrance—but until now there was no hard evidence that they actually existed.
Scientists from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) recently found the first known funeral garden, just outside a rock-cut tomb on Dra Abu el-Naga hill in Luxor, Egypt. It’s about six feet by nine feet, divided into orderly, square plots, a couple of which are raised above the level of the rest. Jose Manuel Galán, director of the project for CSIC, theorizes that each small plot would have hosted a different plant species associated with the afterlife: palm, sycamore, Persea trees (the group that include avocados), even lettuce. In one corner of the garden, the excavators found the remains of a salt cedar shrub and a bowl containing dates and other pieces of fruit, preserved for 4,000 years by the dry climate.
“Now we must wait to see what plants we can identify by analyzing the seeds we have collected,” Galán said in a release. “It is a spectacular and quite unique find which opens up multiple avenues of research."
The site comes from a critical time in Egyptian history, 500 years or so after the pyramids were built, when Upper and Lower Egypt were reunited and the prosperity of the Middle Kingdom began.
Pages from one of the first books ever printed in England have been discovered after being hidden away for decades in the pages of a different text.
According to The Independent, librarians at the University of Reading recently found two pages from a priest’s handbook called Sarum Ordinal or Sarum Pye, which had been pasted inside of another book to reinforce its spine. A librarian working to restore that book noticed and pulled out the pages from the priest's handbook; they date to between 1476 and 1477.
The book was originally obtained by the university in 1997 as part of a larger lot they purchased for £70,000. The two pages alone are now valued at around £100,000.
If you're in town, you can see them for yourself: they are currently on public display at the library's special collections department.
"Well she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now," the Beach Boys sing in their 1964 hit "Fun Fun Fun." "Seems like she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now."
If you love this song, but do not relate to it in the slightest, we might have the job for you: the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is currently looking for a librarian.
According to the online job description, whatever lucky headbanger is chosen for this position will be tasked with cataloguing library resources (including books, scores, and sound and video recordings), creating research guides, giving tours, and "represent[ing] the Rock Hall to the academic and library communities."
On March 27, 1981, a Saturday, Paul Levallois, age 13 and 1/4, buried a treasure in his backyard. He included stamps, an empty lemonade bottles, coins dated from 1969 to 1981, a chip, transistor, a light bulb, other “typical 1981 electronic components,” and a tape recording of himself. Inside, he placed note:
“I hope wherever you are you find this treasure (when you dig it up!) valuable.”
Thirty-six years later, a woman living in the same place, a village in Hertfordshire, England, was out digging in her garden, and she found Paul’s treasure. The electronic components looked a little worse for wear, but as Paul promised in his note, there was still a tape recording of himself in the treasure. He even included a map of the context in which he had buried it, with local features such as the big shed, chickens, and the abandoned house next door noted on the map.
The family who discovered the treasure is looking for Paul now, to try to return it. He would be about 49 but so far they don’t see to know what happened to the enthusiastic boy who buried a treasure in the yard.
