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A Stash of 30 Hidden Bayonets Was Discovered in Valley Forge

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On the last day of an archaeological project near Valley Forge National Park in southeastern Pennsylvania, Dan Sivilich told his team not to expect to find a whole lot. Silivich’s group, the Battlefield Restoration & Archaeological Volunteer Organization (BRAVO), had spent years helping archaeologists scour the site for artifacts. He figured there would be little left to find.

Quickly, one of the volunteers, who use metal detectors to locate artifacts and guide excavations, located a nine-pound cannonball hidden underneath a walking path. “He was so excited,” says Sivilich. “But he was the man of the day for about five minutes.” Bill Hermstedt, a long-time volunteer and charter member of BRAVO, also found something new—a bayonet. And then another. The signal from the detector told him that there was a lot more metal down there.

When archaeologists methodically opened the ground, they found a cache of 30 bayonets, stacked together—a remarkable find for a Revolutionary War encampment.

“I haven’t seen anything else like it in a single excavation. It looked like someone had dug a hole in the ground and threw them in there,” says Jesse West-Rosenthal, a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology at Temple University, who worked on the site and is writing his dissertation on the discoveries there. “It’s rare that you find large collections of intact material, especially something like weaponry. ... To find this grouping of artifacts in one feature—someone putting a hole in the ground and putting the bayonets in the hole—it seems to be pretty unique.”

As Sivilich puts it, “No one has ever found this many together.”

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The site where the bayonets were found is on private property outside the park, but it was once part of the encampment where the Continental Army famously spent a hard winter from December 1777 to June 1778. In such camps, no valuable material could be wasted, so archaeologists usually find just bits and pieces of objects or evidence of materials being reused. Viable weapons didn’t just get buried and left behind.

The bayonets were of various makes and manufactures, reflecting the army’s hodgepodge state. More than two years into the war, George Washington’s army was still cobbled together, a mishmash of militias who supplied their own materials and weapons. The bayonets also show evidence of modification—someone had tried to fit them to muskets they weren’t intended for. (At the time, bayonets and muskets were designed to go together, so a British bayonet would not fit a French musket.)

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But the winter that the Continental Army spent in Valley Forge marked a turning point in its organization. The American states signed a treaty with France, who started to supply the revolutionaries with weapons, and the Prussian drillmaster Baron von Steuben began training the soldiers in a more uniform way. “It’s very possible that this was a discarded collection of materials that may have been replaced by new, more formalized weaponry coming, especially as France starts to supply the army,” says West-Rosenthal.

Though the bayonets stand out among the artifacts discovered at this site, the archaeologists and BRAVO volunteers made other intriguing finds there as well. There was a musket ball that had been turned into a die with Roman numerals on its faces, and a particularly rare U.S.A. uniform button featuring stylized lettering and the year 1777. Only a handful of other such buttons have been found in the archaeological record.

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“There was something going on at this point in the time, this formation of the army, that they felt the need to memorialize it in the visual representation of their uniform,” says West-Rosenthal. “It speaks volumes to this turning point in the war that was Valley Forge.” As an archaeologist, he’s particularly interested in the experience of soldiers—a “bottom-up” view, rather than the “top-down” approach focusing on Washington and other leaders. And while battlefields only represent a few (very intense) hours, encampment sites from the Revolutionary War represent months of difficult army life. Valley Forge, West-Rosenthal says, “is a very tightly dated snapshot in time of six months in American history.”

How the bayonets change the understanding of that six months isn't fully clear. It seems that someone hid them in the ground or disposed of them deliberately. When the army moved on, the men had little time to pack up, so perhaps the man who left the bayonets behind intended to come back for them. For some reason, he never did.


Scientists Can Wiggle a Mouse's Whiskers With Electrical Fields

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The language of the brain is electricity. Electrical signals are critical for cell-to-cell communication, but neurons in the brain don't respond to every signal they feel—they prefer lower frequencies. Stimulating neurons deep in the brain with these signals has been shown to improve symptoms of conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dystonia, but the only way to get them there (without zapping the entire brain) involves brain surgery: the implantation of electrodes. Now, a team led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has forced a mouse's whiskers to wiggle by stimulating deep regions of the brain—from outside the skull.

Unexpectedly, the researchers started with high-frequency electrical fields. Rather than just one, they used two—2,000 Hz and 2,010 Hz. The fields interfered with one another to produce a low 10 Hz signal deep in the brain that was able to excite neurons in a targeted area. In the lab, the researchers were able to move a mouse's whiskers, paw, and ears—proof that they were stimulating their targets.

This technique, known as temporal interference, won't replace invasive deep brain stimulation completely. Some conditions will still require sustained treatment that can only come from implanted electrodes. But for other conditions, such as depression and epilepsy, short sessions of stimulation can provide lasting benefits. Scientists still have to translate the technique to the thicker skulls of humans, and test for safety and precision, but early results are promising.

A Mission to Mow Lawns in All 50 States

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Rodney Smith, Jr. firmly believes he can change the United States with nothing more than yard work and generosity.

Smith, an Alabama A&M social work student, has made it his mission to organize young people to donate lawn care service to needy people in their communities. “In 2015, I saw an elderly man outside cutting his grass, and it looked like he was struggling,” says Smith, who's originally from Bermuda. The culture in which he grew up, Smith says, was all about neighbors helping neighbors whenever they needed it. “From that day on, I decided to cut grass free for the elderly, disabled, single-parent mothers, and veterans.”

In 2016, he started the Raising Men Lawn Care Service, which sends young people aged 7 to 17 out to mow lawns for those might not have the time or ability to do it themselves. Smith champions an old-school work ethic focused on getting kids out of the house and into their local communities. Many of the young people Smith works with come from troubled backgrounds, or are considered at-risk, and his philosophy is that a little hard work can do them a lot of good.

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Modeled after the color-coded rankings of karate belts, kids who participate in the Raising Men program receive a different colored shirt for every ten lawns they mow (despite the name, girls are encouraged to take part in the program as well). The white shirts are for new recruits, and over time the kids work their way up to a black shirt, which is earned for mowing 50 lawns. In addition to the black shirt, anyone who reaches 50 lawns also gets a new lawnmower, so that they can continue helping out in their community.

The Huntsville, Alabama-based program has been such a success that Smith started thinking about ways to spread the concept to more and more communities. That was when he landed on the notion of mowing a lawn in all 50 states. “I was in my internship one day, and I was on my lunch break, and I came across a video on Netflix of this guy traveling the world, performing acts of kindness. That sparked the idea for '50 States, 50 Lawns,'" says Smith. Using Facebook, he was quickly able to locate people in need of such services all over the country. And just like that, he set out in his car to make their yards look better.

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Today, he's about halfway through his goal of trimming at least one lawn in all 50 states. He expects to hit all of the lower 48 states by the end of this year, before heading to Alaska and Hawaii. Smith says that covering the states in the West took some time, but the East Coast should be much quicker, if only because the states are smaller.

Once he has cut someone's grass in all 50 states, Smith says he hopes to continue spreading the Raising Men program throughout the country, with a goal of establishing a chapter of the charity organization in, you guessed it, each of the 50 states. Currently there are chapters in seven different locations, including the original in Huntsville. It's a good start, but there's still work to do.

The Modern Movement to Exonerate a Notorious Medieval Serial Killer

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If the name Gilles de Rais rings a bell, you probably know him as the man responsible for the deaths of 150 boys in 15th-century France, degenerate deeds that led to his apotheosis as an early serial killer and the inspiration for the legend of Bluebeard.

Those with an interest in true crime might be aware of another detail: Rais was a war hero, appointed Marshal of France at age 25, who served alongside Joan of Arc—it’s because of her death, the story goes, that he went mad and turned to heresy, alchemy, and murder.

Brought to trial after dozens of children went missing in the Nantes countryside, Gilles de Rais was accused of, in the words of biographer Georges Bataille, “the abominable and execrable sin of sodomy, in various fashions and with unheard-of perversions that cannot presently be expounded upon by reason of their horror, but that will be disclosed in Latin at the appropriate time and place.” Rais confessed and was summarily executed on the October 16, 1440.

It’s a captivating tale, informing a wealth of books and websites dedicated to a “throat-slitter of women and children, judged for his crimes and burned in Nantes.” (This from Eugène Bossard, another biographer.)

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In 1992, the Breton tourist board commissioned a Gilles de Rais biography from French author Gilbert Proteau. The area around Rais’ castles was a travel destination for those wishing to see the crime scenes of a confessed serial murderer, and the board thought a book would bring in more tourists. Instead, Gilles de Rais ou la Gueule de Loup made the case that Rais was innocent—Prouteau also called for a retrial. A Court of Cassation, the highest court of appeals in France, was conducted and Rais was fully exonerated later that year.

This exoneration isn’t a secret: many of Rais’ countrymen know him as the victim of Church conspiracy, falsely accused on account of his great wealth and political connections to Joan of Arc, who herself was tried for heresy and executed 10 years prior. Yet while attempts to clear Rais’ name go back to 1443, the majority of his biographers make little mention of this or of the suspicious circumstances around his trial. Those who have considered the possibility of Rais’ innocence are few and far between—and almost all of them wrote only in French. Add in the pre-Internet Court of Cassation and you’ve got a wealth of information that has remained inaccessible to an English audience. Like a 15th-century Steven Avery, Rais has been waiting for his very own season of Making a Murderer. Now, 600 years after his execution, he may finally be getting it.

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Margot K. Juby, a writer living in Cottingham, England, calls herself “Gilles de Rais’ representative on Earth” and is determined to clear his name worldwide. Since 2010, Juby has maintained the website Gilles de Rais Was Innocent, posting links to original documents in English and French and explaining how each myth, from the 150 dead boys to the associations with Bluebeard, began to pass for fact. This year, on the 25th anniversary of the 1992 retrial and Gilles de Rais’ acquittal, she will self-publish what she calls the first accurate biography of Rais in existence—and the only English-language biography to discuss the possibility of his innocence. It’s the product of a lifelong obsession and years of research that started, like many things do, with a book.

As a teenager, Juby discovered Gilles de Rais while reading The Devil And All His Works by Dennis Wheatley. One of the pages depicted a man leaning on a battle-axe; the caption read “Gilles de Rais, one of the blackest sorcerers in history.” Juby was intrigued, and over the next few years began hunting down rare and out-of-print books about Rais, many of which were in French. The more she read, the more convinced she became that he had been framed. In 1992, when the retrial made the front page in Kingston-upon-Hull, where Juby lived at the time, she experienced “the greatest adrenaline jolt of [her] life.”

In England, however, Gilles de Rais’ innocence was short-lived. Prouteau’s biography was never translated, and newspaper headlines were slowly forgotten amid the continued publication of salacious books professing his guilt. Twenty-five years later, Juby’s biography offers another explanation for what really happened in the years leading up to 1440 and which, she hopes, will be one link in the chain that finally restores Gilles de Rais to his proper place in history. Clocking in at over 230 pages, it also attempts to catalog the persistent myths that follow Rais even in death.

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“I'm still finding things that are cited as fact in all the biographies that turn out to be based on dust and moonlight,” Juby says. An example is the murder of three children by Rais’ valet Henriet, which appears in the biographies of Bossard and Bataille. Juby looked through the trial records and even checked the Latin transcript—nothing. “Bossard seems to have made that bit up,” she says; Bataille, writing later, swallowed Bossard’s story whole. Indeed, most of Rais’ biographers never even read the original trial records, relying instead on a “more detailed” record written by Paul Lacroix, The Bibliophile Jacob, in the mid-19th century. This version was then absorbed into J-K Huysmans’ novel Là-bas—keyword here being “novel”—and Là-bas, in turn, was reinterpreted as nonfiction by the biographers that followed, resulting in what Juby calls a “posthumous public-relations disaster.”

Even the books that professed Rais’ guilt offered unconvincing reasons. “It seems impossibly quaint in the 21st-century to read a text that fully accepts the validity of an Inquisition trial with the use of torture,” Juby says. Rais’ two judges, Jean de Malestroit and Jean V, Duke of Brittany, were both engaged in business deals with him and would inherit his property in the event of a conviction. Moreover, the physical evidence against him was nonexistent. "What did they find, unearth, discover during their exploration?” Prouteau wrote in Gueule de Loup. “Nothing, not a clue. Not a tooth. Not a trace, not a hair. Not one witness who can say: ‘I have seen.’ Not a weeping mother who claims: ‘There is the dress stained with the blood of my dead daughter.’ Not a father who brings a child's heart ripped from its chest and wrapped in a spotted cloth."

For a proposed murderer of 150 children who supposedly killed these children in his own home, this seems incredibly unlikely.

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None of this is new information. “I’m not the first or the last to question Gilles’ guilt,” Juby says, naming attempts by King Charles VII in 1443, a pamphleteer during the French Revolution, essayist Salomon Reinach in the 1920s, and biographers Fernand Fleuret and Jean-Pierre Bayard. The trial records alone show identical testimonies, witness accounts that were said to exist but weren’t included, and passages amended after the trial’s end.“It’s my impression that Gilles’ actual guilt is much held in doubt by historians today,” says John D. Hosler, an Associate Professor of History at Morgan State University who specializes in the European Middle Ages and the history of warfare.

“All in all, the affair contains a number of pretty standard medieval tropes and accusations,” from the kidnapping and torture of children to the heresy accusations. “Personally, it all looks highly suspicious to me.” Shocking things like Rais’ alleged crimes do happen, Hosler clarifies; nobody can prove his innocence centuries later, not even Juby. But a critical look at all existing information makes a pretty good case for it.

“We no longer believe the evidence in any of the witch trials,” Juby says. “We no longer believe the Knights Templar were some kind of Satanic cult.” While her initial interest in Rais’ trial may have been borne of an adolescent sense of injustice, it has been sustained by an interest in understanding people’s biases, fact-checking across languages and centuries, and wanting to share her discoveries with the world. “I always had a feeling I was supposed to do something, but I didn't know what,” she tells me. She still needs to complete an index, and plans to release her book later this year. “I am proud to be Gilles de Rais' representative on earth.”

Inside the Magic Library at the Conjuring Arts Research Center

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There is an anonymous-looking office building located in midtown Manhattan that hides a secret library for magicians.

It sounds fantastical enough to have been created by Terry Pratchett or J.K. Rowling, but the Conjuring Arts Research Center is very much real, and one of the world’s greatest collections of books dedicated to the deceptive arts.

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Conjuring Arts may be hard to find, but it is located in the heart of New York’s magic community. A few blocks northeast is Tannen’s, the oldest operating magic shop in the city, and a few blocks to the west is Fantasma, a magic store home to the largest Houdini museum in the world. One of the people on the Center’s Board of Directors is Brooklyn-born magician David Blaine.

The not-for-profit organization was established in 2003, “dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts.” It was started by William Kalush, who developed a love of magic from the card tricks shown to him by his father, a Marine wounded in World War II. This love of card magic turned to a love of collecting magic books, which now form a wondrous collection of over 15,000 books—some dating to over 600 years old—housed in this hidden location.

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"I like early books that no one else has ever seen", Kalush says, sitting in a high-backed, ornately carved wooden chair that wouldn't look out of place with a wizard sitting on it. "Books of performances pieces, card secrets, many that are unique.”

Browsing through the shelves stacked with all things conjuring, you will find obscure books on sleight-of-hand techniques, mentalism, deceptive gambling, the history of magic, and the mysterious secrets of card tricks. One book is the seminal The Expert At the Card Table, which appeared in 1902, written by an S. W. Erdnase. It’s one of the most detailed collections of sleight-of-hand techniques and card sharping, a book so iconic and well-studied within magic circles it is known as “the Bible.” Appropriately enough, S. W. Erdnase was a pseudonym. The real identity of the writer has remained a century-old mystery.

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It is in the center of the library, in a windowless room under lock and key, that lies the true treasure of this remarkable place; the rare-book room. Within are shelves full of ancient European texts bound in vellum, with mysterious-sounding names such as Onomatalog Cvriosa et Magica. These incredibly rare books contain the early written history of magic. “Many are unique and can’t be found anywhere else in the world,” says Kalush, holding a book written in Florence in 1491 that promised to show how to read people’s minds.

Interest in playing cards flourished during the Renaissance, and led to books such as one written by Gaspar Cardao in Portugal in 1612. Alongside wisdom on arithmetic and astronomy, the book contained chapters on card tricks. Kalush picks up a delicate pamphlet, printed in Italian, from the 17th century. "They were designed to be sold on the street. Made up of one sheet of paper folded twice over, pamphlets such as these were sold door-to-door at low costs, and would be about cookery, or religious prayers, or folk tales. It just so happens that this slender artifact is a very rare little book of magic secrets.” Another from the 1540s explained the secret of how to tear a piece of string into a hundred pieces, then restore it.

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But these magic books aren’t just secreted away. Above all, the Conjuring Arts Research Center was set up to be a practical resource. “I wanted a place that was available for anyone with an appointment, to be able to come in and find some of the rarest material,” says Kalush. A large part of the organization’s work is sourcing these forgotten treasures, preserving them, and making them available to magicians and scholars.

Much of the Center resembles a regular, compact library, where the day-to-day work of archiving, preserving, and digitizing the vast collection takes place. Conjuring Arts also maintains a vast online resource called “Ask Alexander,” named for the popular early 20th-century mentalist, Claude Alexander Conlin. This search engine dedicated to magic currently stands at 2,500,000 pages of material. Alexander’s act was billed as “The Man Who Knows,” and it’s probable that the search engine will likewise answer any magic questions you may have. It contains such artifacts as back copies of Conjuror’s Monthly magazine, started by Harry Houdini in September 1906. You’ll also find obscure magic journals that explain old card tricks, “Illusions and Mechanical Effects for Theatres,” and intriguing advertisements for long-forgotten detective agencies.

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One of the guiding principles of being a magician is as true today as it was centuries ago: that you can't divulge your secrets. For budding magicians, tricks were learned either by being passed down by word of mouth, or secreted away in these very books. "Conjuring Arts is an incredible resource for professional magicians," says Noah Levine, a professional magician who hosts a weekly after-hours private show at Tannen's Magic Shop. "Digging through old books, magazines, and letters always leads to unlikely inspiration. It's amazing how easily the contents of a 16th-century pamphlet on card magic can be applied to the task of entertaining and engaging an audience in 2017.”

An Entire Small Town in Wyoming Is Up for Auction

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Aladdin is for sale, and Disney has nothing to do with it. The tiny, unincorporated hamlet of Aladdin, Wyoming, is going on the auction block, looking for the highest bidder to purchase the 15-person village.

At just 30 acres, Aladdin isn’t very big, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. According to the Casper Star Tribune, the current owners, Rick and Judy Brengle, are looking to sell off the small town (technically, what's for sale is deeded property), which they have run 24/7 for the past 31 years. As owners of Aladdin, they've also operated its economic heart, a general store and mobile home park. But now that they are in their 70s, they're looking to retire.

Whoever purchases Aladdin will become mayor and general manager of the town, which also contains a bar and a cafe/motel. The Brengles have been trying to sell the area for around a decade at the asking price of $1.5 million, but nobody has bitten, so now they are holding an auction on June 2. Pie will be served.

It’s not clear whether there are any seriously interested parties, but Aladdin is not the first entire town to go up for sale. In March, the town of Reduction, Pennsylvania, went on sale, in November 2016, Sugar Grove Station, West Virginia, hit the market. The list goes on. The Brengles aren’t sure what they’ll do if the town doesn’t sell, so hopefully a new steward will step up. If you’re interested, check out our handy guide to buying a town!

Paging Through the World's Handy, Adorable Orca Catalogs

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In the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of the small Icelandic village of Grundarfjördur, among a pod of about 360 orcas, lives a whale family caught in an accidental double life. The mother orca, a young adult female, has a very distinctive dorsal fin, with a graceful taper and a deep notch that brings to mind a missing tooth. Her two calves—a four-year-old and a six-month-old—follow her around, playing and learning how to hunt. They tend to show up in Iceland around November, and leave again in April, to summer in the seal-rich waters off the Northern Isles of Scotland.

To the orca, this probably all seems entirely normal. But to the humans who study her, these summer vacations have spurred a small identity crisis. While experts in Iceland know the whale as Vendetta, aka #SN069, those in Scotland call her Mousa, aka #019. Her eldest calf is caught up in it, too—in Iceland, he's called Attack. In Scotland, he has a much more peaceful name: Summer. The youngest calf skirted this problem—after the overlap was determined, he was named Tide in both countries, via an international contest.

Such are the small dramas of orca catalogs: exhaustive databases of local orca populations, carefully compiled by researchers and conservationists, and shared with everyone who might be interested, from aspiring citizen scientists to whale watchers. A kind of Facebook for whales, these catalogs allow for quick identification, support long-term research, and encourage the coining of cute nicknames. "You need to know the individuals," says Marie Mrusczo, founder of Orca Guardians Iceland, and the compiler of the catalog "Killer Whales of West Iceland," released this past April after three years of work. "A catalog does that perfectly."

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Biologists interested in keeping track of populations of any animal are often first tasked with identifying particular individuals. To our human-biased eyes, animals can be difficult to tell apart. To make things easier, observers can focus on visible body parts that differ between individuals—and persist throughout the animal's lifetime. Lions and sea lions alike are recognizable by the arrangement of their whisker spots. A Grevy's zebra truly can't change its stripes, and thus can be identified by them. Even weedy seadragons sport unique flank splotches, which scientists can pinpoint with the help of special software.

An orca's calling card rides on its back—specifically, on its dorsal fin. Each starts out with a distinctive shape, and over the course of a whale's life, it usually picks up scratches, nicks, or scars that differentiate it further. And just behind the fin is the saddle patch, a swath of lighter skin that also has a unique shape and shade.

"The fin is like a fingerprint, or like looking a human in the face," says Mrusczo. "They're so different from each other." Take, for example, the dorsal fins of Aurora and Snowflake, two other females who live around Grundarfjördur. Aurora's fin has a knobby top, and is slashed with three heavy scars. Snowflake's is more gently sloped, and has a small, evenly-spaced notches.

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Orca researchers have paid special attention to the whales' markings since at least 1945, when a naturalist named G. Clifford Carl drew the eyepatches of thirteen whales stranded at Estevan Point in British Columbia. But it wasn't until the 1970s, when marine biologist Michael Bigg was put in charge of censusing whales for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, that anyone thought to do this systematically, and at a larger scale. Bigg and his team determined that all orcas have a unique enough fins and saddle patches that they be reliably distinguished by those traits. They set the standard for identification photographs—framing only the fin and patch, and taken in silhouette from the left side.

Today, orca research groups across the world keep catalogs, and update them consistently. Compiling one is an early priority: "Photo identification is the foundation of modern cetacean research," says Eve Jourdain of the Norweigian Orca Survey. Once a robust catalog has been put together, experts can use it to study everything from social structures and behavior patterns to population trends over time. Jourdain's group is working on comparing Norway's current catalog, which dates back to 2007, with data from the late 1980s, "to identify whales still swimming in Norwegian waters over 25 years later," she says.

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"The ID catalog helps us get the basics. How many do we have here? What are the group structures?" says Mrusczo. "It can help me find out migration patterns, and what they feed on." Comparing catalogs with Scotland led Mrusczo to discover that Vendetta and her calves, along with a few other whales, traveled there every summer. This led to another interesting finding regarding how orcas hunt and eat.

Most orca groups are thought to stick with a particular prey, which they hunt using strategies that have been passed down through generations. The orcas in Iceland are known for "carousel feeding," in which they herd schools of herring into balls and stun the fish with their tails, while Argentinian orcas prefer to beach themselves and drag seals into the water. But Vendetta and her traveling companions eat herring in Iceland and seals in Scotland—a surprising lack of pickiness. Since then, more unusual feeding behaviors have emerged in Iceland. "We call them generalists, because they can feed on many things," says Mrusczo. "They're sneaking up on the eider ducks as well. We saw one group killing a harbor porpoise."

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Having a catalog is also great for public outreach. "We want to make people aware of how unique they are," says Mrusczo. During whale watches, she points out particular orcas by name; if the people onboard are so inclined, they can later "adopt" one of those individuals, with the money going to conservation and outreach. When a local resident approached Mrusczo last year and offered to make a sculpture of an orca for the village center, he modeled it after a big local male named Thunderstorm. Mrusczo scratched and nicked the statue's fin herself, to make sure it was just right.

Different catalogs brim over with local flavor, adding to this sense that orcas are members of the community. The United Kingdom gives their whales names such as Floppy Fin and Moneypenny. Iceland, which is full of filming locations for The Lord of the Rings and "Game of Thrones," has male orcas dubbed Boromir, Faramir, and Jon Snow. One entrant in Western Australia's Project ORCA database earned the name Miro—or "spear-thrower" in Noongar, the region's aboriginal dialect—after she was seen attacking a beaked whale in 2016.

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Although Mrusczo takes most of the Orca Guardian catalog's photos herself, she is always soliciting submissions from the public, both to gain more data points for her own research and to encourage a sense of community responsibility. "People send photos to us and say, 'Can you tell us who that is?'" she says. "If they're good enough pictures, we can tell them. That's quite fun."

With a bit of practice, laypeople can also look up whales themselves—a process Jourdain's group has tried to make easier by structuring the online version of their catalog as an interactive flowchart. (Very occasionally, the resulting enthusiasm backfires. After a fan asked "Is that Ruffles?" on a picture of a wavy-finned Icelandic orca, the Orca Guardians had to respond truthfully: "No, Ruffles is dead.")

Keeping track of individual orcas gives the researchers a sense of connection, too. Although it takes a minute to get her to admit it—"You should love all your kids equally," she says—Mrusczo has a favorite orca: Snowflake, the female with three nicks in her fin. Back in 2014, when Mrusczo had just moved to Grundarfjördur to work with the orcas, they used to swim into the fjords by passing underneath a bridge. "Every time Snowflake would go under the bridge and I was standing on it, she would turn her head around," Mrusczo says. "I don't know if she did it with everyone, or if she knew it was me." Maybe, deep down in the ocean, the orcas have a catalog for us.

An Egyptian Slab Lost in Berlin During World War II Has Been Found—in Michigan

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When Berlin's Neues Museum closed in 1939, at the start of World War II, the staff rushed to protect precious items in the collection. As they put important artifacts into storage, someone stashed a 3,200-year-old stone slab from ancient Egypt inside a sarcophagus. After the war, the slab—carved limestone with a turquoise ceramic glaze—was nowhere to be found. Curators wrote it off as one of the many artifacts lost in the chaos. But now, 70 years later, the slab has turned up on another continent.

Nico Staring, a Dutch Egyptologist, noticed the slab in a recent photo from the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and matched it to a historical photo from the Neues Museum. When he informed curators at both museums, the Kelsey Museum offered to return the slab to Berlin. The slab is a portion of a commemorative pillar, or stele, and includes a carving of Ptahmose, a mayor of Memphis. It will be put on permanent display at the Neues Museum this summer.

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When the slab was extracted from the sarcophagus is unknown, but according to Live Science, a German art collector eventually sold it to Samuel Abraham Goudsmit in 1945. Goudsmit was a Dutch-American physicist and chief of intelligence for the U.S. Department of Defense for two years. He gifted the slab to the Kelsey Museum, where it sat until Staring spied it. It's a happy ending for an artifact that escaped the fate—destruction or theft—that befell many priceless works during World War II.


Found: A Lost Dictionary of Slang Written by 'Clockwork Orange' Author Anthony Burgess

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The English author Anthony Burgess, best known for his creepily brilliant book A Clockwork Orange, was fascinated by language; he invented an original form of English, studded with Russian words, for his Clockwork Orange characters to speak. In the 1960s, Burgess was working on a dictionary of slang—he mentions it briefly in his biography—but all traces of his work were thought to be lost.

Now, though, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation has discovered Burgess’ notes for the dictionary, The Guardian reports. They were hiding under old bedsheets, in “a large cardboard box” held by the foundation.

The discovery includes note cards listing entries for the A, B, and Z sections of the unfinished dictionary; there are 153 A words, 700 B words, and 33 Z words, The Guardian says. These include entries such as:

Abfab – Obsolescent abbreviation of absolutely fabulous, used by Australian teenagers or ‘bodgies’.

Abyssinia – I’ll be seeing you. A valediction that started during the Italo-Abyssinian war. Obsolete, but so Joyceanly satisfying that it is sometimes hard to resist.

Arse – I need not define.

Burgess never finished the dictionary, which Penguin Books commissioned in 1965. “I’ve done A and B and find that a good deal of A and B is out of date…I could envisage the future as being totally tied up with such a dictionary," he said.

Despite Tornado, Dad Mows Lawn

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Theunis Wessels of Three Hills, Alberta, decided to mow the lawn this past Friday, so his wife, Cecelia, turned in for an afternoon nap.

A little while later, their nine-year-old daughter woke her up, saying she was worried about Dad. When Cecily headed outside to check on her husband, this is what she saw:

"It seems that most people here mow before the rain comes, so he thought he would do that," Cecilia told Buzzfeed. "It was just a great day to mow the lawn."

That is, until it wasn't. The tornado arose from a thunderstorm on Friday evening, and attracted a lot of attention from Three Hills residents. "Everyone was on their back patios taking pictures," Cecilia told the CBC. No injuries have been reported, and the twister dissipated less than an hour after it started.

Melding as it does the classic themes of "deadly storm" and "unruffled dad," this particular photo kicked up a second storm on the internet, garnering coverage all over the place. Esquire called it "a real life 'This is fine' meme," suggesting that its subject was in some kind of danger.

To Thenius, though, everything really was fine. "It looks much closer... in the photo," he told the CBC. "I was keeping an eye on it."

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

This Bizarre '50s 'Rhino' Vehicle Was Designed to Replace the Tank

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In 1940, as he watched a bulldozer trudge through Central Park, Elie Aghnides, the wealthy inventor of the faucet water aerator, had an idea: he would combine the stability of a bulldozer with the speed of a car, and create an efficient, all-terrain vehicle.

Fourteen years later, he tested out a prototype of the Rhino, so named "for its massive bulk and its penchant for mud." The odd-looking vehicle weighed five tons and could travel with ease through deep sand, mud, and water. On the road, it reached up to 45 miles per hour, but in water, it couldn’t surpass speeds of 5 miles per hour.

The Rhino’s enormous front wheels were made of aluminum and weighed one-and-a-half tons each. Their hemispherical design kept the vehicle extremely stable—apparently, it could tip to 75 degrees without toppling over. The wheels were also hollow, which allowed the Rhino to float; meanwhile, a hydrojet propelled it forward along the river.

Aghnides built and tested his prototype in Indianapolis in 1954. He hoped to sell it to the U.S. military as a replacement for the tank. But they never built it—likely, according to Mashable, “out of concern that the wheels could be punctured by gunfire, sinking the vehicle.”

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Quit Worrying, Fidget Toys Have Been Around Forever

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The first time you saw the strange metallic three-pronged gadget, it was likely spinning nonchalantly between the fingers of a coworker or a random guy on the subway or your 10-year-old niece. The early adopter may have informed you that fidget spinners, in addition to their shiny and spinny appeal, reduce stress and help you focus. That reputation has caused spinners to sell out at drugstores, toy stores, and 7-Elevens across the country and top Amazon’s toy bestsellers list for weeks.

It’s no surprise that fidget spinners have captured widespread attention. People have long been attracted to toys that claim to take your worries away or increase concentration. Fidget spinners are only the latest in a long tradition of toys that gamify worry.

Stress has existed as long as we have been a thinking people. Anxiety about keeping up with emails and the social ramifications of posting on Facebook may be modern but the feeling itself is a tale as old as time. And cultures around the world have come up with toys as a way to cope with worry.

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“Designers are currently excited about creating novel fidget objects, but they've been around through the ages in one form or another,” says Dr. Katherine Isbister, a professor of computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She worked with Dr. Michael Karlesky on research about how and why we fidget, including findings in 2016 titled “Understanding Fidget Widgets: Exploring the Design Space of Embodied Self-Regulation.”

Fidget spinners, to Dr. Karlesky, are reflective of a human need to self-soothe. “We are hard-wired for self-regulation enacted through tangible, tactile sensory experiences,” he says. “These mind-body mechanisms are initiated with specific objects with at least two key qualities: a distinct tactile experience and an ease in repeating that stimulation.”

Centuries before fidgets spinners came on the market, Baoding balls were created in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) to perform a similar function. The two metal balls, small enough to fit in one hand, could be rotated repeatedly to reduce stress. The constant motion of the smooth balls was thought to be soothing and put the user in a more meditative mindset.

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Baoding balls were the inspiration for contemporary ubiquitous stress balls. The squeezable palm-sized ball, designed to relieve tension and stress without leaving your desk, is now best known as a cheap corporate giveaway. The reason this toy persists as an office mainstay is the belief that our stress can be contained and then released if we squeeze that ball hard enough.

More similar to fidget spinners are Greek kompoloi (worry beads), a string of smooth beads that can be rolled and moved along the length of the cord. Worry beads have been historically associated with the monks of Mount Athos, who used them to count their prayers around 800 years ago.

As with the fidget spinner, there is a certain level of skill that can be applied to manipulating the beads. A more practiced user could handle the beads quicker and with more finesse. Unlike look-alike Catholic Rosary beads, misbahas used by Muslims, or Hindu prayer beads, contemporary kompoloi serve no greater function than to be used as a fidget object.

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There have not been controlled studies to conclusively link fidgeting with less anxiety and increased concentration. “Everyday people reporting on their own that a fidget helps them to focus is different than using one to help someone with managing anxiety or ADHD,” says Dr. Isbister.

Until more research is done on the controlled effects of fidgeting, the enticing “anti-anxiety” marketing slogan for fidget spinners should not be believed. However self-soothing with tactile objects is a practice that goes back long before experts were debating the veracity of fidget spinner claims on CNN.

We may need fidget widgets now more than ever. “As we have moved more towards keyboards and touch screens as our dominant experience of our tools, this has caused us to literally reach out for more and varied tactile experiences including objects like fidget spinners,” says Dr. Karlesky.

It’s no wonder then that fidget spinners have exploded into the toy market this spring. Eventually people will tire of this fad. But then someone will reinvent the worry toy again—history has shown us that much.

The Mysteries of a Rare, 18th-Century Native American Map

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Sometime in the early 1720s, a Native American man went to Charleston and gave Francis Nicholson, then colonial governor of South Carolina, a map inked on deerskin. It depicted geographic and social relationships among the Native American nations in the surrounding area. Squares represent European settlements, with Charleston at one end and Virginia at the other, and circles in between represent Native American communities, connected by double lines that resemble paths.

This map, now known as the "Catawba Deerskin Map," is one of the only examples of a map created by a Native American and given to Europeans. Colonial settlers reported that native tribes regularly made maps—etched in ash or on tree bark—and that this local cartographic knowledge helped the settlers develop their own maps of areas they wanted to occupy. There are fewer European reports, though, of native people making maps on animal skin or other long-lasting materials. Few maps made by Native Americans survive at all.

This particular example combined geography with information about the relations between people living in the area, and some scholars argue that the paths drawn between the communities represent social and political distance, rather than geography. “This was a map that was meant to illustrate a trade relationship,” Max Edelson, a historian at University of Virginia, told BackStory radio. Edelson’s new book, A New Map of Empire, explains that the center of the map is the Catawba community of Nasaw, and Edelson compares it to the famous “View of the World From 9th Avenue” map, in which New York City takes on a disproportionate amount of space to represent its inhabitants' view of the world.

There is some question, though, about who actually made the deerskin map. It’s also sometimes described, without attributing it to any single group of people, as “a map describing the situation of the several Nations of Indians between South Carolina and the Mississippi.” The tribe of the person who presented it to the governor is unknown. Nicholson had invited a headman from each town of each nearby nation to visit him, including Catawba and Cherokee representatives.

Historian Ian Chambers, for instance, has argued that the map is of Cherokee origin. One of the keys to his assertion is the path that runs across the top of the map, which connects the Cherokee directly to Charleston. Trade along this connection, Chambers writes, had been logistically challenging, and a Cherokee leader had once promised a trader that “they would make a new path” to ease the way. The central position of the Catawba communities, in this theory, highlights their position as an obstacle to direct trade between the Cherokee and the British, much like a British map might put the Atlantic Ocean at the center of a map of the North American colonies and the British Isles, the center of power, in one corner.

The authorship of the map, though, will probably always be a mystery. The image above is of a copy on paper, not the original deerskin, which was lost. The map only exists today because Nicholson had two copies made and sent back to London, where they now reside in the British Library and the National Archives.

Low Gravity Can Create Mutant Bacterial Slime

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Picture this science fiction premise: In the zero-G of space, a lowly bacteria mutates and forms a dangerous blob that can kill astronauts exploring the solar system. Turns out it's not so far-fetched. Bacteria growing in low gravity, scientists have found, can develop permanent genetic mutations, and form biofilms that can cripple life-support systems in a spacecraft.

Whether it's a recreational orbit of the Earth or a permanent move to Mars, there are likely to be a lot more people in space in the future. But we don't know enough about how microbial hitchhikers will behave, so researchers at NASA and the University of Houston decided to let E. coli grow in simulated microgravity for 1,000 generations. The simulated space ecosystem changed the bacteria, and even after another 30 further generations in regular gravity, the mutations the bacteria experienced remained.

"We are, in fact, seeing true genomic changes—permanent changes," George Fox, a biologist at the University of Houston, told New Scientist. Genetic sequencing can identify which genes changed, "but we don’t know what they’re doing exactly." The researchers do know some of the mutations are advantageous—the mutant strains formed three times as many colonies as a control strain. And some of the mutations are on genes that affect the bacteria's ability to produce biofilms, or colonies that adhere to a surface. Biofilms aren't inherently dangerous—dental plaque is probably the one most are familiar with—but there are places, such as sensitive life-support systems, where they'd be unwelcome.

It's some comfort that the bacteria didn't spontaneously develop resistance to antibiotics in microgravity. That's not to say it's impossible, and we should still take care to use antibiotics judiciously as we take the next steps into space.

This Teen's Prom Send-Off Included a Camel and Three Tons of Sand

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Johnny Eden Jr., who goes by JJ, recently had a camel at an elaborate send-off before his high school prom in the Swampoodle area of North Philadelphia. The camel, brought in from Ohio, was there with three tons of sand and a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce, and a Range Rover, among other things. It's probably safe to say that, this year, JJ's Friday night prom send-off was the biggest in Philly, if not the world.

The idea, Eden's mother, Saudia Shuler, told Billy Penn, was all about bringing Dubai to Philadelphia. Why Dubai? Because Shuler had planned to send Eden there as a graduation gift. Instead, she spent months—and $25,000, she said—planning the send-off party, which was a hit on their block and, later, on the internet, perhaps in part because Shuler carefully documented the proceedings on Instagram.

The real deal for my son @jjedenjr . All the fake ones that tried to stop my show👀 it shines brighter . 😜😜😜😜😜😜😜

A post shared by Saudia Shuler🍴🍗🍤🍰 (@countrycookin1) on

In addition to the camel, Eden had a stylist and three different outfits for the night. He also had three dates, among them his actual girlfriend—"the main event," Eden told Billy Penn.

Hundreds showed up to help Shuler send her son off to the dance, and this all might just be a prelude to something even bigger: graduation. Shuler, who runs a soul food restaurant, said that she's been working on it for a long time: "I’ll show you receipts all the way from two years ago.”


Happy Dead Duck Day

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On June 5th, 1995, at around 5:55 PM, Kees Moeliker, the director of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, was finishing up his workday when he heard a loud, reverberative thud. He went and looked out the window. Below, on the grass, was a dead male duck, recently felled by the the museum's brand new, glassed-in wing.

Nearby was a live duck, also a male. As Moeliker watched, the live duck mounted the dead one and started copulating with it.

Male ducks are known for their aggressive sexual behavior—they've got long, spiky penises, and often force themselves on unwilling females. But before Moeliker, no one had ever observed this particular act. And so every June 5th since then, for 22 straight years, Moeliker has held a small ceremony at the scene of this unique crime. He calls it "Dead Duck Day."

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The Dead Duck Day gathering happens right outside the museum. It generally lasts for 15 or so minutes, from 5:55 PM to about 6:10. Moeliker opens by showing everyone the dead duck in question—now stuffed, and part of the museum's collection—and saying a few words about its fate.

He then talks about other, more recent examples of unusual animal behavior. There are guest speakers and moments of silence, and some years, bonus events: last year, there was a fashion show. In 2013, Moeliker unveiled a new addition to the museum itself—a splatter-shaped memorial on the outside wall where the duck hit, along with an explanatory plaque below.

How about this year? "It was a success," Moeliker says over the phone, as he walks with fellow attendees to a local restaurant for the traditional six-course, post-ceremony "duck dinner." "We had about 85 spectators—it was a record. And the weather, as usual, was beautiful."

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Why would one duck treat another this way? We do not, and cannot, know. Why would a growing group of humans commemorate it? That one is easier, though only slightly. In Moeliker's own words, the experience has changed his life. In 2001, he published a paper, "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos," in the museum's journal, Deinsea. Two years later, that paper won an Ig Nobel Prize, the annual award for offbeat-yet-consequential scientific research.

People started flooding him with other surprising animal behavior tales, bringing him community and a certain measure of fame. "If there's an animal misbehaving on this planet,I know about it," he said in 2013, while giving a TEDTalk about his experiences.

Moeliker is doing his best to pay it forward, using Dead Duck Day and other appearances to raise awareness about how dangerous glass windows are to birds. "We decided to commemorate the tragic fate of this particular duck," he says. "But in fact, we commemorate all those billions of birds that died in a similar way."

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As of this year, that includes one bird that also had a similar post-death. During today's ceremony, Moeliker showed the crowd a brand new museum acquisition, which a fellow naturalist sent him this past spring. "It's the second documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard," he says. "Some people have been waiting for this for 22 years." At least one person, anyway.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A Mainer Shut Down a City Building With Bedbugs

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An irate man shut down the Augusta, Maine city hall recently, after he released around 100 bedbugs as an act of petty revenge.

According to CentralMaine.com, the (for now) unidentified man entered Augusta City Center on Friday looking to apply for state assistance benefits, and when he was told that he did not qualify, he took out a cup full of live bedbugs, and slammed it on the counter. Around a hundred bugs swarmed out of the cup and began to spread, some of them even landing on a nearby city employee. Meanwhile, another employee grabbed some windex and began dousing the pile of bugs to limit their movement, and, maybe, kill them.

After the angry bedbug assailant left the scene, he was quickly picked up by police, though it's unclear what charges he might ultimately face, according to CentralMaine.com.

Just to be safe, the building was closed for the day, and an exterminator was called in to take care of any of the pests that might have gotten away, along with a bedbug-sniffing dog.

Please do not use bedbugs as weapons.

Found: The Oldest Human-Made Metal Object Ever Discovered in South America

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About 3,000 years ago, a group of people in the Andes, in what’s now northwestern Argentina, created an object unlike any other archaeologists have found in South America, LiveScience reports. This sheet of metal, 7 inches long by 6 inches wide, was given the features of a person—eyes, nose, and mouth holes. Along the edges, the people who made this object made small, circular holes—at the corners of the sheet and its middle, bottom, and top. As far as anyone in our own time can tell, it was meant to be a mask.

This discovery, reported in a new paper in the journal Antiquity, is one of the oldest examples of metalwork in South America and the oldest manmade metal object on the continent. There are older examples of metalwork, but “none of the artifacts had been intentionally shaped into a recognizable form, nor were any perforated or shaped into three-dimensional objects,” the paper’s authors report. This mask is unique.

It was first discovered by locals back in 2005, when a rainstorm washed it from the ground. In the place where the mask was found, archaeologists uncovered the remains of 14 individuals. One of the skeletons showed green stains, which indicated that the mask had been buried there, too.

At the time the mask was created, about 3,000 years ago, people in this part of the world were trading hunting and gathering for a more sedentary, agricultural existence. It was previously thought that the practice of metalworking in this part of the world originated in what’s now Peru, but as the authors write, this new discovery indicates that there may be more than one origin point for this craft in South America.

Here's Your Chance to Ride Chicago's Historic Trains

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On June 6th, 1892, the first L train rumbled over the streets of Chicago, carting passengers from 39th Street to Congress Street and inaugurating a new, lasting era of public transit in the city.

You wouldn't have known it from watching, though: while "the opening was a decided success," the Chicago Tribune wrote at the time, there was "no brass band, no oratory, [and] no enthusiasm."

A rough birthday for a helpful bunch of train cars. Today—exactly 125 years later—the Chicago Transit Authority wants to make up for it. This afternoon only, they've pressed a couple of historic trains back into service.

Interested Chicagoans can ride in a 4000-series car, from 1923—each of which boasts an electric motor, a mechanical braking system, and wooden floors—or a 2400-series car, from 1976—built for America's bicentennial, and outfitted in festive red, white and blue.

According to the CTA, both train types will be running continuously around the Inner Loop. Employees will also be handing out free posters on several platforms. 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.

The Delightful English Tradition of Beating Parish Boundaries With Sticks

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At the back of the women’s shoe section of the Marks and Spencer department store in Oxford, England, behind a rack of summer sandals, next to the elevator, you’ll find an odd thing. It’s out of place, doesn’t belong among this season’s pumps and slingbacks. Shoppers pass by oblivious, not noticing there’s a relic of ancient Oxford right under their noses.

The mysterious object is a carved stone, protected by a glass panel set into the wall. It reads; St Peter le Baily, St Martin, All Saints and St Aldate.

The stone used to stand in an alleyway that was later engulfed by the store. It marked the boundary between three ancient church parishes, its original position shown by a metal plaque in the floor nearby.

May 25 is Ascension Day in the Christian calendar. On this day a priest with a white beard, robes flowing behind him, strides past a display of sunglasses followed by 40 people all carrying long willow wands, taller than themselves. Store staff stand aside, shoppers pause to stare. The group gathers around the metal plaque. The priest kneels and writes on it with chalk, steps back and the crowd shout “Mark! Mark! Mark!”, beating the plaque with their willow wands.

“We’ve got to pick up the pace!” shouts the priest, dashing out of the doors and crossing the street into a shopping mall, followed closely by his motley congregation.

This is one of the last remaining observances in the UK of “beating the bounds,” a tradition with a 600-year history. A procession of church dignitaries and parishioners mark the borders of their parish by walking them and hitting marker stones with willow wands.

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Today it’s the congregation of St Michael at the Northgate, the city church of Oxford, beating its bounds. St Michael’s is the oldest building in the city. Its boxy tower, now lost in a jumble of modern store frontages, once looked down on the muddy street grid of the Anglo-Saxon town, nearly a thousand years ago. Its parish lies roughly over the area enclosed by the medieval city wall.

“It was important to know which parish you were in,” says Reverend Bob Wilkes, vicar of St Michael’s. “The parish was the unit of local taxation, and rates could vary. If you were in a parish with a good rate you didn’t want that lot next door sneaking over and trying to get in on your plot. There was a defensive element; this is our boundary, you stay out!”

Beating the bounds was a kind of medieval data backup, a way to pass the knowledge of the parish boundary to the next generation.

The story goes that the clergy used to beat the choirboys with the wands at each stop, to impress upon them where their parish boundary was. That, unsurprisingly, is an element that’s been phased out. Today the beaters are mostly middle-aged parishioners, tourists and students.

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Next stop is a boundary stone set on a wall above some garbage dumpsters in an alleyway behind a Japanese restaurant. The congregation crowds in, reaching high to beat the marker.

“We go through here,” shouts Reverend Wilkes, pointing at a grimy door in the wall. “It’s a restaurant kitchen. Don’t all come in at once.” The procession files through the kitchen, pausing to beat the stone in its back wall then out past the smiling chefs and confused diners.

So why, in an age of satellite mapping, when parishes are pretty much obsolete as a marker for anything much, is the route still walked?

“Oxford is a place where tradition is kept,” says Reverend Wilkes with a shrug.

But there’s something more. The beaters are clearly enjoying this strange peregrination behind the facades of the city, ploughing over flowerbeds, crossing quads, blocking roads, jostling through the goods entrance of the town hall while tourists gape and take photographs.

There’s something alluring about following a path that sticks a finger up at modern planning, ignoring social and commercial boundaries.

The oldest marker stone is in the back wall of the staff bike lock-up of the clothing store Zara. When the procession reaches it, a store manager is waiting to unlock it.

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When he came to the church Reverend Wilkes inherited a map of the boundary stones and a spreadsheet of contact numbers for the people with keys to doors behind which hidden markers lurk.

“One year a young woman had just taken over as manager when I called,” says Reverend Wilkes. “She said her regional manager had told her there was something in the bike store. She wanted to know if it was spooky.”

The procession halts in the middle of Broad Street, one of Oxford’s main thoroughfares. Bikes swerve around them and trucks slow to a crawl. At their feet a patch of old cobbles has been left uncovered by generations of asphalt-laying road-crews. The cobbles are set in a cross as the marker here.

In a built environment that is increasingly off-bounds, owned, restricted, charged for, and in a technological age that increasingly divorces us from the physical, this is a kind of alternative cartography. It’s a mapping with the feet that charts the city of the past and pays little attention to the modern landscape of retail and business; a neural pathway in a community’s memory.

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“Pilgrimage is a very ancient Christian tradition, and this is a brief pilgrimage,” says Reverend Wilkes. “When we mark our parish we mark that bit of Earth’s territory that is ours. In the Anglican tradition a congregation is given a part of the earth to pray and think about. Ours happens to be a chunk of the city center of Oxford.”

The beaters follow a different path than the workers on their way to offices, the morning shoppers, the students strolling to tutorials. They are pacing out a shape that becomes more difficult to trace each year. Today one marker is inaccessible behind a parked truck. Another has been permanently obliterated by an O’Neill’s Irish themed pub.

Reverend Wilkes pauses by a barred gate. “This is locked. It shouldn’t be.” The beaters stop, wands bristling. “The marker is through there,” he says, pointing. As if on cue, the gate silently swings open on hidden bearings, and the procession surges on.

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