It's bald eagle fledging season! Birdwatchers everywhere are glued to their binoculars and webcams, watching as what started as insular family dramas turn into coming-of-age sagas.
But this season's most dramatic plotline belongs to a seaside nest in Sidney, British Columbia. A pair of bald eagles there are raising up a red-tailed hawk—normally a rival species—alongside their own three chicks, the Vancouver Sun reports.
A heartfelt attempt to help out some neighbors? Probably not. The eagles likely kidnapped the baby hawk, intending to feed it to their own children, raptor specialist David Bird told the Sun. When it survived the trip and started peeping, they just started feeding it instead. (This theory is supported by retroactive photo evidence, which indicates that there were once at least two hawk chicks in the nest.)
A video by Christian Sasse shows the brave youngster, which is smaller and scruffier than its adoptive siblings, gleefully taking food from the bloody beak of one of its parents. Observers say the hawk is more than able to fend for itself—and that at times, the eagle chicks even seem to defer to it, the Sun reports. (Sadly, there is no online stream available for this particular nest.)
But the young interloper isn't safe just yet. Sometime in the next few days, all the chicks will begin learning to fly and hunt on their own, says Bird. They'll return to the nest at nighttime, and their size differences may grow even more noticeable.
At that point, all bets are off for the hawk, says Bird: "[The eaglets] may change their minds and decide to eat this little guy." No one ever said adolescence was easy.
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.
If you want to create a bestselling children's book that will routinely receive five-star reviews on Goodreads 40 years after its first publication, the key is to draw it in the style of Hieronymus Bosch.
It may seem counter-intuitive to mimic the hellscapes and grotesqueries of such paintings as The Garden of Earthly Delights or The Last Judgment for a children's book, but the plan sure worked for John O'Brien. He’s the illustrator behind Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls, a 32-page picture book first published in 1977 by Random House. To this day, nostalgic readers still go online to enthuse about it.
Monsters and Trolls recounts three popular Scandinavian folk stories featuring trolls. Undoubtedly the most well-known is the opener, "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," but what sets this telling apart are O'Brien's fantastic illustrations: here the troll is an anthropomorphic toad who keeps prisoners in his stovepipe hat and keeps an odd bird-of-paradise for a pet. Both goats and troll must step carefully to avoid treading on gnomes, kiwi birds, and even stranger dwellers of the baroque Wonderland they inhabit.
"You just have all of these little creatures and peoples, communities of fairy folk occupying every corner of the pages," says the writer Robert Lamb, who grew up with the book and today reads it to his son. "As an adult, I dig the Bosch and Breughel elements in the illustrations, but at the time it was just the richness of the visual world."
"Oh yeah, for sure," says O'Brien when asked if the busy and bizarre scenes of Monsters and Trolls were explicitly drawn in the styles of Bosch and Breughel the Elder. "I was really into those Dutch painters at the time."
Monsters and Trolls was O'Brien's first book out of art school. After graduating from the Philadelphia College of Art, O'Brien began shopping his portfolio to New York publishers. He eventually wound up meeting with the famed children's book publisher Ole Risom. Risom was from Denmark and had worked in publishing in Sweden before immigrating to the U.S. As a vice president in Random House's children's division, he mentioned to O'Brien that he'd always wanted to publish a collection of troll stories he remembered from childhood. Risom thought O'Brien would be perfect for it.
But when O'Brien showed Risom the initial round of sketches for the project, Risom rejected them. O'Brien, worried about jeopardizing his first professional gig, had held himself back from going full Bosch. Risom told him "to go to town" with the weirdness. So O'Brien did.
The book became a collaboration between the two men. Though the text is credited to George Jonsen, no such author ever existed — O'Brien is certain Risom himself wrote it. It's not an uncommon practice in children's publishing for editors and publishers to write the text for picture books under pseudonyms.
"It received a lot of attention at the time," says O'Brien, adding that Monsters and Trolls landed on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books and went through several reprints. "I got work right away. Once you have a book it's easier."
Yet that still doesn't explain why Monsters and Trolls, out of print for decades, continues to attract glowingreviews today. After all, there have been lots of New York Times bestsellers over the years.
The answer may lie in the fact that O'Brien's drawings, whether intentionally or not, provoke readers to linger over the pages.
"When something grabs your attention, you look at it," says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist and co-author of Champions of Illusion. This is called an orienting reflex, Martinez-Conde says, and is related to the connection between our eye movements and our attention spans. Crowded images such as O'Brien's have to be parsed apart — the viewer's eyes must roam around the page to distinguish between the relevant details and the background, thereby focusing his or her attention.
Books such as Where's Waldo? or Monsters and Trolls are "very attractive to children, especially to early readers because the writing may not be that sophisticated but they have sophisticated visual parsing," she says.
And just as attention and eye movement go together, so does attention and memory formation. "It's very hard to remember something you didn't pay attention to," says Martinez-Conde. "If you have a page that is consistently engaging eye movement for long periods of time on multiple occasions, you create an intellectual and emotional experience," which tend to be remembered later, she says.
As any parent can tell you, children like to read or have the same story read to them over and over. When it comes to battling for a young reader’s time—and attention—Martinez-Conde believes Monsters and Trolls has a leg up on the competition. "Most of the books for children don't have this level of complex illustration. It's both a story and a visual puzzle. There's not much of a narrative in the Waldo or I Spy books."
O'Brien is hardly a one-hit wonder. Though his style has since moved away from the Early Netherlandish painters and more toward pointillism, he went on to become a regular contributor to TheNew Yorker, and has illustrated many more children's books. His latest is Revolutionary Rogues, a history of John André and Benedict Arnold.
Still, O'Brien says that in the past three or four years he’s received many e-mails from fans of Monsters and Trolls.
"One e-mailer said, 'I always felt bad for the guy in the hat,'" says O'Brien, referring to the final confrontation between billy goat and troll which ends (spoilers) with the troll and his hoosegow headwear plummeting from the bridge. "He also said he was sure the bird was in cahoots with the troll."
There's something about the books we read as kids that stick with us, regardless of whether they were particularly good. These days, I couldn't tell you what was important about most of the canonical texts I read freshman year of college, let alone the plot of the light-read detective novel I picked up last summer at the beach. But somehow I can recall, with vivid detail, scenes from nearly every trashy preteen book series I devoured in the late 1980s and early '90s.
Yes, that includes The Nancy Drew Files and Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club, all of which no doubt many women my age remember with a fierce fondness. But it also includes Sharon Dennis Wyeth's short-lived Pen Pals series, about a quartet of roommates at an all-girls boarding school who strike up a correspondence with a group of boys, and Eve Becker's fantasy-driven Abracadabra books, which chronicle the adventures of Dawn, a 13-year-old who suddenly gains magical powers. In particular, my drug of choice one long, hot summer were the Dark Forces books, a packaged series of occult-based young-adult horror that made me feel—crucially, at the age of 11—like I was getting away with something naughty.
I'm certain I don't remember these long out-of-print series so well because they were works of genius. To the contrary, the storylines and writing were of relatively low nutritional value, as these things go.
"I started thinking of horrible things I could do to teenagers," says the author Bruce Coville of the pitching process behind his contributions to Dark Forces, which include "Eyes of the Tarot," about a girl named Bonnie who discovers a powerful deck of cards in her grandmother's attic, and "Waiting Spirits," which follows a pair of sisters who unwittingly make contact with a troubled ghost at their family's summer house. Coville has since gone on to an impressively long career in children's publishing, most notably with his My Teacher Is an Alien franchise. But in those earlier days, spinning sinister yarns for paperback originals aimed at young readers didn't exactly boost his profile as an emerging author. Writing these types of books, as opposed to hardcover fare, "really consigned me to being below the salt for a while," he says.
And yet, these are the books from my adolescence that I just can't forget and, at least in part, I think it's because they've been forgotten by most everyone else. I have wonderful memories of reading classic, famous works of children's literature, too, of course: The Secret Garden, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Charlotte's Web. But as an adult, the very fact that I remember Dark Forces—and that image of young Cassie Craig clutching her remarkably creepy toy on the cover of "The Doll"—feels like a special secret that I get to share with myself and few others, for as long as I live. It's like a key, if an odd-fitting one, to unlocking my own personal story, my memories of childhood, my continued love of fantasy and horror novels. I adore these books because I grew up at a certain time, and was a certain kind of girl.
We're kicking off Children's Literature Week today at Atlas Obscura, and we want to hear from you: What are the books you remember reading as a kid that have stuck with you, but that hardly anyone else seems to remember? Send in your appreciations, remembrances, and love letters—a paragraph or two is plenty, though feel free to go longer if you've got a lot to say—to editors@atlasobscura.com by 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, June 15, with the subject line "Kid Lit." Be sure to include your name, age, and where you're from, and give us details about why you think the book (or series) deserves to be remembered. Examples can include everything from picture books to middle-grade readers to YA. We'll round up the best responses and share them in a follow-up post on Friday.
Not far from Bursa, Turkey’s fourth largest city, there’s an archaeological site called the Aktopraklık Settlement Mound, where people had built wooden huts back in the 7th century B.C.
But recently, the Daily Sabah reports, excavations at the site turned up an artifact a much older artifact—a 7,500-year-old flint stone that looked a lot like a modern day drill bit.
A 7,500-year-old pointed flint stone resembling modern-day drill bits has been discovered at a prehistoric... https://t.co/FHFBCHAcbQ
— TurkishArchaeoNews (@turarchaeonews) June 12, 2017
Archaeologists working at the site believe that the drill bit high have been used to create “bead-like pieces” found at the same site. Simple drills like this one have been found going far back into history: some of the oldest, simplest drills date back tens of thousands of years.
Turkish Delight, or lokum, is a popular dessert sweet throughout Europe, especially in Greece, the Balkans, and, of course, Turkey. But most Americans, if they have any association with the treat at all, know it only as the food for which Edmund Pevensie sells out his family in the classic children's fantasy novel The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Until I first tried real Turkish Delight in my 20s, I had always imagined it as a cross between crisp toffee and halvah—flaky and melting in the mouth. Here's what it really is: a starch and sugar gel often containing fruit or nuts and flavored with rosewater, citrus, resin, or mint. The texture is gummy and sticky, some of the flavors are unfamiliar to American palates, and the whole thing is very, very sweet. (In addition to the sugar in the mixture, it's often dusted with icing sugar to keep the pieces from sticking together.) While some Turkish Delight newbies may find they enjoy it, it's not likely to be the first thing we imagine when we picture an irresistible candy treat.
I figured other people who had encountered Narnia before they encountered lokum probably had misconceptions just like mine, so I set out to discover what Americans imagined when they read about Turkish Delight. What kind of candy did we think would inspire a boy to betray his brothers and sisters?
The English name, Turkish Delight, is no misnomer. Turks make and consume lots of lokum, and it's a popular gift, a sign of hospitality. The candy was invented in the early 19th century, reportedly by confectioner Bekir Effendi—though this claim comes from the company Hacı Bekir, still a premiere manufacturer of lokum, which was founded by Bekir and named after him. (He changed his name to Hacı Bekir after completing the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.) According to the Hacı Bekir website, Sultan Mahmud II was so pleased by the new sweet that he named Bekir chief confectioner.
But outside of countries where Turkish Delight is a ubiquitous treat, many people first encounter it via The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first installment of C.S. Lewis's beloved Narnia books (or via the 1988 TV miniseries, or the 2005 movie). In the book, Edmund is tempted by Turkish Delight into an alliance with the White Witch, who has brought eternal winter to Narnia. When Edmund first meets the witch, she asks him, "What would you like best to eat?" He doesn't even hesitate.
England's wartime sugar rationing probably figured into that choice. The reason the Pevensie children were staying in an old house with a portal to Narnia in its wardrobe is that it was World War II, and kids were being relocated due to bombing risks. Candy, too, was a casualty of the war. During the war, and well into the postwar period, sugar was strictly rationed in England; in 1950, when Lewis published the first Narnia book, the allowance was half a pound of candy and chocolate per person per month. It's no wonder that, when the White Queen asked him what he liked best, Edmund's answer was a confection that is almost entirely sugar.
Most Americans, though, didn’t know about that when we first read the book. All we knew was that Turkish Delight was an exotic-sounding treat that would be your first request if a mysterious and elegant woman asked you, "What would you like best to eat?" And we knew that Edmund loved that Turkish Delight so much that he put his siblings and the entire land of Narnia in harm's way in exchange for more. (To be fair, it was enchanted. But still, Edmund. Still.) So we wound up imagining whatever we would have liked best. It was like looking into Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised, but for desserts: When you think of a treat worth betraying your family for, what do you see? Turkish Delight is our collective candy id.
I asked my friends and acquaintances what they imagined when they first read about Turkish Delight. Their answers spanned a whole range of sweet treats—and some surprises.
My friends who grew up in England empathized with Edmund. Adrian Bott was born long after sugar rationing, but still got positively poetic in recalling the treat: "Rose-hued irregular cubes dusted silvery with icing sugar, arrayed on a doily in gentle disarray like a toppled Stonehenge. Edmund's temptation was entirely understandable and one rather felt that in his place, one could hardly have done other than he did." (Bott is a children's author, if you couldn't tell.)
For kids who weren't already familiar with it, though, "Turkish Delight" was likely to be meaningless—which meant we could project onto it whatever confection seemed most delicious. "I imagined it was better and more sophisticated than anything I had ever tasted, considering that Edmund was willing to sacrifice his entire family for just one more piece," said Coco Langford, who described her childhood vision of Turkish Delight as "rich, but still delicate, chewy and soft, probably like some kind of vanilla or caramel fudge, with just enough nuts to add the perfect crunch."
I feel like to me it was a thing made from marshmallows, just layers and layers of marshmallows kind of smushed together, like a marshmallow cake, with maybe the ones on top roasted like on a campfire (brûléed, I guess, although I would not have known that concept). I guess my kid brain just disregarded the whole "Turkish" element, and went with: What would a dessert literally called "delight" be like? It would be layers of marshmallows. —Evan Ratliff
Kelly Taylor assumed that Turkish Delight was similar to her favorite sweet: "I remember at age 8 thinking that it would be like something nutty and chocolatey—my favorite candy bar at that age was a ‘Watchamacallit,' sort of a crunchy peanut-buttery chocolate bar thing." Having found the actual Turkish Delight "boring, bordering on gross," Taylor says she still imagines the Narnia version as "fluffy crunchy nutty chocolatey goodness." Clarice Meadows thought it was chocolate, too: "Not just any old chocolates but serious dark chocolate truffle chocolates that give you an extreme rush of endorphins."
Not everyone thought the Ultimate Candy would be chocolate, though. Stefanie Gray pictured "a way fancier and differently textured old-school version of the pink Starburst" (the best Starburst, as everyone knows). Jaya Saxena also thought it was pink, "maybe some sort of frothy pink beverage that tasted just crazy." And Claire McGuire only cared that it was very, very sweet: "I was so sugar-deprived as a kid that my idea of the ideal sweet, one you'd betray your family for, was basically pure sugar with some pleasing texture. Maybe like nougat, only softer."
I definitely had no idea what Turkish Delight was. I gathered that it was a candy, so what I pictured was basically a lollipop like thing that was really tall and spindly. I had this vague sense that Turkish architecture involved buildings with big spindly towers. So I imagined these were like the long rainbow lollipops but not rainbow colored? —Rose Eveleth
Some bright youngsters knew enough about Turkey to incorporate elements of its architecture or food into their vision of Turkish Delight. "I first thought it was baklava, because I had the vague idea that baklava was both Turkish and delightful," said Michelle Rothrock. "I was correct about baklava, but not about Turkish Delight." Dara Lind also thought it was baklava, "and then, upon being told it was not, assumed it was just the nougat part of a Snickers bar." She found out the truth after visiting Turkey, or rather, after a layover in the Istanbul airport during which she gorged on Turkish Delight ("a TERRIBLE IDEA.")
Jennifer Peepas's version was influenced by baklava-type pastries too: "I thought it would be something crispy and fluffy, like those things my Yia-Yia made out of fried dough coated in honey. Like flaky baklava/crisp dough, but maybe with ice cream between the layers? When I finally tried it, the one I tried was flavored with anise/licorice, and I darn near puked."
Barb Benesch-Granberg also took inspiration from Middle Eastern food, specifically its profusion of spices: "My mental picture involved something white and very fluffy and sort of ephemeral. And also involving exotic spices somehow. Like really dense cotton candy flavored with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and honey." Colleen Robinson-Sentance, too, pictured something easily dissolved: "They were a rosy golden color in my mind, and almost instantly evaporated in one's mouth, hence the obsessive desire they provoked."
I expected it to be like Divinity, this white candy that all Southern grandmothers make at Christmas which is basically pecans suspended in clouds of sugar. It looks gorgeous, but it kind of tastes like nonsense. The first time I had it was when I was 18, and there was this MASSIVE Cadbury vending machine in either Gatwick or Stanstead. And one of the selections was a Cadbury Bar with Turkish Delight filling in it, and I was so excited to try it because it seemed so English and so Magical. —Emily Dagger
A few subtler readers, though, imagined confections they didn't actually like all that much. After all, the Turkish Delight in the book is enchanted to make Edmund crave it obsessively; yes, it's the first thing he asks for, but when he subsequently gorges himself it's partly the magic to blame. Besides, it's Edmund. What does he know?
Kevin Doherty assumed Turkish Delight was like marzipan, even though he hated marzipan. "I guess Narnia seemed foreign and remote and the sort of place that would have that kind of sweet?" he said. "I also may have been subconsciously judging Edmund, like ‘What a tool, I bet he likes marzipan too.'" (This is a good guess. Given the sugar rationing, Edmund probably would have punched a faun for marzipan.)
So I was trying to remember my first impression of it, closed my eyes, and pulled up a mental picture of Edmund in the sled, stuffing himself full of ... roast turkey. Apparently the first time I read it, I went by the words so fast that I didn't even internalize the fact that "Turkish" does not equal "turkey." And so this must have been really exceptional turkey. What the hell. And then in future rereads, my mental picture was already set, so it didn't change for a long time. Of course, eventually I did realize that it was some sort of sweet, but I honestly am not sure what I pictured. I think that somehow it still looked like turkey. —Joanna Kellogg
Here's the thing about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardobe, though: The book doesn't actually say that Turkish Delight is a candy. It would have been well-known enough in 1950s England to render such an explanation unnecessary and a little silly, like describing a lion as "a type of big cat." It's described as light and sweet, and it makes Edmund's hands sticky, but for a few people I talked to, that wasn't enough to keep them from imagining it as some kind of savory snack.
Ann Tabor thought Turkish Delight was "meat … with gravy." Sara Williamson agreed: "I think I also might have had some kind of Turkish/turkey confusion, because I thought it was like Thanksgiving stuffing that always stayed warm, and had the perfect ratio of soft and crispy parts." Her conception was based partly on Narnia's eternal winter—who would want jellied sweets on a cold day? Stuffing sounds way more comforting.
I honestly can't even remember it anymore, I was so angry and upset when I found out what Turkish Delight actually was that whenever I try to visualize it all I can see is disappointment. —Mallory Ortberg
There's one thing almost everyone agreed on: Edmund's willingness to put himself in the thrall of an evil witch in exchange for Turkish Delight makes him not only morally but gastronomically suspect. Though some Americans said Turkish Delight was okay, and a few had discovered they really liked it, the majority found that the aromatic sweet was definitely not their preferred dessert. The classic flavors, like rosewater and pistachio, aren't familiar to American palates, and the texture—chewy, sticky gelatin—is polarizing.
The friends I talked to variously described Turkish Delight as "almost-solid perfume," "like a blobby pink jelly baby," "tastes like how cheap floral-scented cleaning products smell," "gummy soap," "flower-flavored atrociousness," and "sticky gunky horror." As for Edmund himself, responses included: "How sad was that kid's life that the best treat he could think of was THAT?" "The boy had very poor taste." "No child is that rapturous about something that is gelatin with nuts in it." "It made me amazed they ever took him back."
Maybe it's the surfeit of sugar surrounding Americans that makes us unimpressed by Turkish Delight. There's nothing exciting about a super-sweet gel, since we pretty much live on super-sweet gel from birth. Or maybe, for the millions of us who read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (the Narnia series has sold over 100 million copies worldwide), it's the way we build it up inside our brains, imagining it as the ultimate candy or maybe even the most delicious turkey.
One thing is clear: If any of the various Narnia portals make their way across the pond, the White Witch will have to diversify. Over here, we can maintain our integrity in the face of sugar and rosewater gelatin. We'll only consider selling out our families for marshmallows. Or baklava. Or stuffing, chocolate truffles, pink Starburst, nougat, Watchamacallit bars, or cotton candy. Narnia is doomed.
Update, 12/3/15: We originally referred to Bekir Effendi as "Effendi," but that's an honorific, not a last name. We've changed it to "Bekir" throughout.
In 1964, in the English city of Coventry, the evil Daleks of Doctor Who took a momentary break from their mission of conquering the universe in order to sell rag magazines to passers-by.
Designed by the Lanchester College of Technology (now Coventry University) student John Aubrey, the traveling magazine stands strolled through the streets via remote control, stopping for anyone intrigued enough to make a purchase.
Footage from British Pathé captures residents bending over and grabbing a magazine from the Dalek, then dropping coins into a can labelled "Rag" attached to its manipulator arm. Set to eerie music, the video describes the Dalek as a “robot newspaperman that sells rag magazines” and claims its creation was “all in the interest of charity."
A few months prior, Doctor Who's second serial, The Daleks, introduced the iconic villains to the world during its December 1963 to February 1964 run. The Daleks became an immediate sensation: not only could they be found selling newspapers in the streets, but they also quickly began popping up outside of the London Planetarium or along bus stops. Stores sold Dalek-themed toys. And in December 1964, only a year after their introduction, the Daleks had already become so well known that they appeared in a Daily Mail cartoon depicting the French president Charles de Gaulle as a Dalek named "THE DEGAULLEK."
But this 1964 robot newspaperman isn't the world's only Doctor Who-themed bookseller: this year, Detroit installed a TARDIS bookstore.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Getting to Romania's Poenari Castle isn't easy. First there is the drive, to a rural part of the country around 100 miles northwest of Bucharest. Then there are the steps—1,480 of them to be exact—to the top of a steep hill near the Făgăraş Mountains. And now, authorities say, there are also bears to contend with.
The castle was built in the 13th century but made famous a couple hundred years later by its most notorious occupant, Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, thought to be an inspiration for Bram Stoker's famed vampire novel from 1897. (Stoker had little or no knowledge about the castle itself.) The possible connection—actually still disputed—between the historical and fictional characters wasn't widely known until the 1970s, when a Romanian scholar Radu Florescu published a series of books linking the two.
The castle has since become a popular tourist destination, and that popularity brings food and garbage, which Romanian police blame for attracting bears. One in particular—likely a mother protecting her cubs—has recently forced the closing of the site, according to the BBC, following tense encounters with visitors. Authorities are now trying to find a way to relocate the animal family somewhere without such a popular legend attached to it.
Farmers in Japan's Kagoshima Prefecture have been a bit too enthusiastic about killing badgers to protect their fields. Thanks to a government-sponsored cull, the Japanese badger's population has been reduced by 70 percent—and ecologists now warn the species is headed toward extinction.
The government offers about $25 for each tail or photograph of a carcass a hunter turns in. Over the course of a normal year, about 200 badgers—which are considered pests and can damage crops—are legally culled. But between March 2015 and March 2016, more than 4,300 badger bounties were claimed. According to Ecologists from the University of Oxford and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, badger meat has become a trendy menu item in Tokyo, which could be either a cause or result of the surge in culling. The researchers argue in the journal Nature that the cull isn't based on science or strategy and is, in fact, illegal. "An ecological crisis is unfolding," they write.
Other species have been affected by the cull as well. The Japanese word for badgers, anaguma, also refers to raccoon dogs (related to dogs, not raccoons) and raccoons (which are invasive in Japan, the result of a pet craze in the 1970s). All these masked mammals are being targeted.
The Japanese badger is not currently listed as threatened or endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, but the sudden drop in the population may change that. Scientists are hoping stricter regulations can help the Japanese badger can avoid the fate of the Hokkaido wolf, a subspecies of gray wolf that was eradicated in the 19th century by Japanese farmers who poisoned them with strychnine. The Japanese badgers' British cousins are also the target of a massive, controversial cull, in a bid to protect livestock from bovine tuberculosis.
A hedgehog—apparently lost, severely bloated, possibly close to death—was observed last week wandering the streets of Toll Bar, in northern England. Before we go further, we should note, in case anyone is worried, that this story has a happy ending.
The hedgehog was initially thought to be pregnant, but was walking with some distress and also, for some reason, had blood on its nose. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) then intervened, and found that the poor animal had a rare disease known as balloon syndrome, a condition that only affects hedgehogs, in which gas beneath the skin gathers and expands. It can be caused by a number of things, such as an underlying infection or a "traumatic event," according to the Press Association.
"It's the worst case of balloon syndrome I've seen," an RSCPA said. "This poor chap was almost twice its natural size, literally blown up like a beach ball with incredibly taut skin."
Since being found June 5, the hedgehog has had the gas released and is now looking considerably smaller—and healthier. Here's a video in which the two-pound mammal, despite his travails, appears curious about the world around him:
Characters and plot are crucial to any story, but key to the appeal of most fairy tales and fantasy books is the setting: the fictional world that the author builds. These imagined lands can offer an irresistible escape from the hum drum of daily life, so vivid they stay with you well beyond childhood.
And yet, as enchanting as these fantasy worlds are, the Narnias and Neverlands have some stiff competition from—and are often inspired by—the real world. Here are 18 dream-like places you can actually visit. They may look like they were ripped straight from the pages of a fairy story, but in many cases, it was more like the other way around.
This dramatic landscape hidden on the Isle of Skye looks as though you've stepped into a magical realm. The unique rock formations, cone-shaped hills dotted with ponds, and scattered waterfalls are dotted with mysterious spirals. While there’s no definitive folklore linking the land to magic, some say faeries created the landscape and still dwell within its many crevices. It’s no wonder: the whimsical isle looks just like the kind of place you’d expect to find faeries.
Chiseled out of the cliffside in Cataluña, this gorgeous monastery overlooks a plunging vista complete with a waterfall that runs straight through the architecture. Ancient monasteries are often beautiful, whether still working or lying in ruin. But the enchanting church at San Miguel del Fai is especially otherworldly in its setting, as if lifted from a fantasy tale.
The moss-covered boulders and twisted, ancient brambles of this English wood are associated with tales of druids, ghosts, and supernatural spooks. While that is all myth, it’s not hard to see why Wistman's is a magnet for such fables. The ancient forest has largely been left to grow wild, free of destruction or shaping by humans or large animals. With unfettered growth, the trees have grown old and gnarled, yet the rocks have stunted their height so the crooked branches hang down in an oppressive canopy. Mystical beasts and wizards only exist in stories, yet Wistman’s Wood makes it seem so very possible that they could be real.
Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland, Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom, and numerous other magical castles were all inspired by a real place: Neuschwanstein Castle, the awe-inspiring retreat of the “fairy-tale king,” King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The fantastical castle was commissioned in the mid-1800s by the king in homage to the composer Richard Wagner. Ludwig was never able to see the finalized castle, but his taste for elegant and extravagant design decorates the landscape to this day.
Look closely when walking through the mossy trees of Shiratani Unsuikyo forest—there might be kodama, or tree spirits, nearby. The landscape is dense with greenery and very quiet, as sound is absorbed by the thick moss. Gentle creeks trickle over ancient rocks, through the fine selection of Japanese cedars that the island is named for (“yakushima” means cedar). This magical, mossy forest served as an inspiration for Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke, a story that addresses the tension between humans and nature.
In the middle of Lake Vuoksa, about two hours north of St. Petersburg, sits a small stone island that just barely rises above the waters. The island is so small that it is almost entirely taken up by a miniature wooden church perched charmingly atop it. While that church might seem like the stuff of Baba Yaga and Father Frost, it is actually a modern bit of whimsy built in 2000.
Looming tall over a small town of the same name, these castle ruins still manage to give the area a feeling of true magic despite having been abandoned for more than a hundred years. The castle was first built around 920, and the surrounding village grew steadily alongside its proud central tower. With advances in warfare, the town eventually built a wall around the entirety of Esch-sur-Sûre. The ancient castle continues to stand proudly above the town, even though it is in ruins.
Dwarf beech trees top out at roughly 15 feet and are notable for the wide spread of their boughs and the dramatic forms they assume. The Faux de Verzy national forest is the largest concentration in the world, containing nearly 1,000 of the hauntingly beautiful trees. Some of the more spectacular specimens have been given nicknames, such as the Umbrella Fau, the Ox-Head Fau, and the Fau of the Bride. The Maiden’s Fau is so-named because legend has it that Joan of Arc once napped at the foot of the tree.
Tucked near the bottom of the Areuse Gorge is a little bridge that looks straight out of a storybook. Of course the Saut de Brot, as it is known, is very real, and absolutely gorgeous. The lush gorge is a beautiful natural fissure, but maybe the most stunning feature is the small bridge that was built to span the Areuse between the canyon walls. The simple stone arch is not overly dramatic in its construction, but is nonetheless singular enough to create an almost fantastical scene. It was obviously not built by elves, but it almost seems like it could have been.
Perched high on a rocky promontory on the breathtaking coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea—also known as the “Coast of the Gods”—is Santa Maria dell’Isola, a 4th century medieval church that’s accessible only by climbing up a winding flight of steps carved directly into the cliffside. People have lived in Tropea for at least 2,000 years, since Sextus Pompey defeated the emperor Octavius. According to legend, the storied seaside town was founded by Hercules himself.
The Hall of Mosses is the name of a distinct hiking trail in Olympic National Park, located in the Hoh Rainforest. Plucked straight from a storybook, the trail is a wonderland of stupendous old moss-covered trees draped in green and brown. Along the main trail there is a particularly otherworldly 200-foot side path that leads to an enchanting grove of giant maple trees, cloaked in hanging moss. One visitor to the trail wrote that “the trees stand like green-robed figures of eld."
As lighthouses go, you can’t get much more evocative than the Tourlitis off the coast of the Greek port city of Andros. Rising up out of a spindly weather-worn stone spire, this beacon would make a perfect wizard's tower. Renovated in the 1990s, the lighthouse still looks like something out of Dungeon and Dragons, with the winding staircase hewn from the rock itself, leading up to the door of the tower.
This roaring, awe-inspiring double cascade of icy water flows through woodland Oregon like something out of a Tolkien novel. Unlike a lot of the other famous waterfalls in the western United States, Multnomah—the fourth tallest waterfall in the country—is fed by an underground spring, snow melt, and rainwater, allowing it to flow year-round. According to Native American legend, the falls were created to win the heart and hand of a young princess who needed a secret place to bathe.
Of the three palaces “Mad” King Ludwig II had built, the Linderhof Palace was the only one he saw completed. Though much smaller than the others, the architecture of the magnificent palace is extravagant, with ivory candelabras and a carpet made of ostrich down. Inspired by Versailles, Ludwig created a mirror image of “Sun King” Louis XIV’s bedchamber, and styled himself the “Night King.”
Perched high atop a lush hill in São Pedro de Penaferrim is a palace that looks as though it was created by mashing up towers, facades, and architectural flourishes from a bunch of different castles. Built by King Ferdinand II, opulent tastes were imposed on the designers, creating a schizophrenic manse that, at least from the outside, seemed to indulge any and all of the king’s passing tastes. One portion would resemble a medieval European castle complete with ornate parapets, then the portion directly next to it would be modeled after an Islamic tower dome. Each section of the facade was also presented in a different color; a long purple wing is flanked by a red clock tower, and a yellow minaret, and so on. It is said that Ferdinand wanted the palace to look like an opera.
There is another, less known kremlin in the northeast part of Moscow. In the city’s Izmailovo District is an unexpected, fantastical-looking cultural wonderland. It was established as a cultural center and marketplace, loosely modeled after traditional Russian architecture and fairytale depictions of Old Russia.
Blending science fiction and ecological abnormality, a group of 400 trees in Poland’s Krzywy Las, or “Crooked Forest,” are mysteriously bent. Hovering just inches above the ground, the trees amazingly, and dramatically, take a sharp turn toward the sky, rounding into little J shapes as they make their ascent. There is no definitive answer for these pines’ shape, and the stories about them run the gamut from the practical to the bizarre. Every tree in the Crooked Forest has the same haunting bend, but they have all grown to be tall and seemingly unhampered by their curves.
This enigmatic seaside tower looks like something out of a children's tale, and given that it is lovingly known as the “Pirate Tower,” it would seem to live up to the mystique. In reality the lonely spire built into the rocky beach cliff face belongs to the wealthy estate that sits at the top of the ledge. Built in 1926, the 60-foot tower reaches from the edge of the water up to the top of the cliff where the house sits, holding a private staircase inside for the owners to use to access the beach. Unfortunately there seems to have a been a bit of a design flaw as the exit door and some of the tower becomes submerged and inaccessible during high tide, rendering the stairs unusable, while the tower remains as lovely as ever.
For the most recent generation of children, there is also Daisy (and even more recently, Daisy II): potbellied pigs who, like characters loosed from the page, spend much of their lives traveling from library to library, helping to teach children that reading is fun.
It all started, like most fairytales, long ago and far away—in this case, around 1995, in Bristol, Connecticut. Paul and Victoria Minor had just watched their youngest child, Jessica, leave home, and they were starting to feel a bit lonely. One day, Victoria, who'd always wanted a potbellied pig, drove by a sign that advertised piglets for sale. She picked out the runt of the litter, named her Daisy, and brought her home to Paul.
The pig took to her new family immediately, clambering into bed with the Minors on her very first evening home. "We had to get a king-sized bed," says Paul Minor. Her love of humans made her a natural fit for the Boys & Girls Club's annual Kiss-A-Pig fundraiser—in which people pay money in order to get community notables to kiss a pig—and from there, her star kept rising. The Hartford Library children's librarian asked Minor if he'd consider bringing his famous pig in for a story hour, so he did.
She was a hit. Within a couple of years, Daisy had so many gig offers that Minor gave up his day job and hit the road. After she died of old age, in 2009, Daisy II—another natural—took over, and the band played on.
"I've been doing this for sixteen and a half years, but who's counting?" says Minor over the phone from his Baton Rouge motel room. He and Daisy II are currently miles away from home, but they've made themselves comfortable—Daisy is flopped down on the bed snoozing, says Minor. The two are now on the road about nine months out of the year, occasionally accompanied by members of their entourage: Victoria, or their two pugs, Lily Pug and Dixie Cup.
"My mission is to encourage children to develop a love of reading," says Minor. For kids, a library is a bit of a sacred space—full of knowledge and wonder, sure, but also quiet, organized, and staffed by adults. Bring a pig into a place like that, and suddenly anything seems possible. Minor generally wheels Daisy II in a baby stroller, and loosens everyone up with stories about her life and routines.
Depending on the age of his audience, he might show newspaper clippings about Daisy's exploits, or play audio recordings of her eating her food. ("The little kids get a kick out of that," he says). He ends by reading a pig-themed classic. Everyone gets to pet Daisy, and then they roll on to the next town.
Minor may be the brains of this operation, but he knows who the real draw is. As such, he acts more like a celebrity manager—a combination escort and hype man. He now goes by Paul "Farmer" Minor, and he signs his emails "Hogs & Kisses." He brings his star around in style, in a van emblazoned with the slogan "Pig Out on Reading," and refers to her tirelessly as "the most famous pig in the world." She still sleeps in bed with him every night. "These aren't pets in the traditional sense," he says. "These are third children."
Some of this attachment comes from the fact that, more than any of the kids they've met, Minor's own life was transformed by Daisy. "I was in the corporate world for almost 30 years, and wore a suit and tie," he says. "And now, for the past 16 and half years, I've been wearing my bib overalls and traveling with a world-famous pig."
Over the past decade and a half, the act has changed somewhat. The dogs, Lily Pug and Dixie Cup, are now a big part of the show. (They joined up after a USDA field inspector informed the Minors that they could have up to four animals on their license.) Minor has also diversified the programs he offers, and now brings his stars to assisted living facilities, convalescent homes, and juvenile detention centers. "I've found animals can create magic with people of all ages, from 2 to 102," he says. It helps that Lily Pug, who is smaller than the others, fits comfortably on the lap of a wheelchair user.
When we spoke, man, pig, and pugs were halfway through a rigorous schedule of library programs; by the time this article goes to press, they'll have moved on to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the next set. "I did over 300 shows last year, and I'm going to be doing more this year," he says. "I'm going to be 69 in September, but I have no desire to slow down."
Over the years, the Daisies have gained a devoted following. "People have sent her pig books from all over the world," Minor says. (The most popular is Charlotte's Web, although books about Peppa Pig, the cartoon star of a Nick Jr. television series, are going strong right now.) Daisy also has a growing collection of library cards—she's has about 1,300—as well as keys to five different cities. The pig fields a constant stream of letters from fans of all ages. Last fall, Minor says, he met a college student who recognized him from a program the student had attended in the third grade.
What about kids these days, though, with their video games and television and cell phones? "The texting stuff drives me crazy," Minor admits. But, he says, the lesson he has honed over 16-odd years still holds true: "It's all about getting them to read something that's interesting to them." When a giant pig is sitting in front of them in a baby stroller, they want to crack open a book about pigs. Afterward, they'll seek out something else that piques their curiosity.
Of course, it helps that Minor travels with a big, lovable literacy ambassador, ready to deliver a unique reward. "A lot of times, we're tied to a reading incentive program where the principal promises to kiss the pig if they read a certain amount of books," says Minor. "The kids say, 'We gotta read a lot of books so our principal will have to kiss the pig.'" Some things never change.
Sinkholes open up all over the world, swallowing everything in their path, including, it turns out, beloved pizzerias. Which was bad news, recently, for a small, family pizza place in Crooksville, Ohio, that was torn down Friday after a 20-foot deep sinkhole opened up beneath it.
Sprankle’s Village Pizza, the first pizza joint in the village of Crooksville, has stood on its spot on Main Street for almost 50 years, but couldn't survive a hole that swallowed a portion of the porch and interior of the building, condemning the building, according to 10TV.
The Sprankle family believes the sinkhole was a result of erosion from a nearby creek, in addition to constant shaking from rail tracks. Demolition may cost up to $20,000 in village funds, though residents told 10TV they're just sad Sprankle's will be gone.
"It makes my stomach hurt," one neighbor told the station.
Canada turns 150 years old this year, and while some residents are celebrating by planting (and eating) tulip gardens, the country's mint has settled on something different: they've released the world's first glow-in-the-dark circulating coin.
Canada releasing all new Glow in the Dark "Toonie" to celebrate Canada 150: https://t.co/V9o9LSWJpk ^NS
The two-dollar coin, or "toonie," depicts two people paddling a canoe, surrounded by tall pines with the northern lights above. As the Daily Hive reports, it was designed by Timothy Hsia of Richmond, British Columbia, as part of a national contest.
While most of the coin sports your average currency colors, on one side, the northern lights appear in blue and green. When the coin is in a dark environment—say, a bar or a pocket—the green parts emit a soft glow.
A post shared by Royal Canadian Mint (@canadianmint) on
There are plenty of novelty coins out there—and Canada has tried this particular trick before—but most never enter circulation, and have to be purchased purposefully as keepsakes. Although you can buy the glowing toonie as part of the "2017 Canada 150 5-coin collection," you can also just wait around for one to turn up in your palm, or your tip jar.
Just don't leave it out on your nightstand! It might keep you awake.
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 season for getting anything done in Antarctica is short, and when the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust was gathering artifacts for conservation at explorers’ huts in Cape Adare, they had to work quickly. They gathered up 1,500 artifacts to bring north and conserve, including a portfolio of papers that had been hiding under a bunk inside the hut, among dust, mold, and penguin feathers and poo.
Later, in the lab, conservator Josefin Bergmark-Jimenez opened the portfolio and immediately shut it again, shocked by what she saw inside—a beautifully preserved watercolor of a small bird, lying on its back. It was labeled Tree Creeper, March 1899.
Left on the southern continent for more than a century, the delicate painting was preserved in the cold and dark of the huts on Cape Adare, a camp used by two Antarctic expeditions, a Norwegian-led group in 1899, which built the huts, and Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition. The painting was a bit of a mystery, though. Tree creepers are not Antarctic birds, and it seemed likely that someone had brought the painting with them on the expedition. There was another clue, too: the portfolio of papers had a 1911 newspaper article in it that described the Scott expedition. Who could the painter have been?
After she found the painting, Bergmark-Jimenez was at a lecture about Edward Wilson, the chief scientist on Scott’s expedition. He was a multi-talented man—an artist, biologist, and doctor. The lecture included slides of Wilson’s art, and the conservator immediately recognized the handwriting. It was the same lettering she had seen on the painting of the tree creeper.
The trust now believes that Wilson created the painting and brought it to Antarctica, where, along with Scott and three other men, he died after reaching the South Pole and finding Roald Amundsen had reached the goal first.
The huts and tents of polar explorers are recognized as historic sites and are Antarctic Specially Protected Areas. The natural conditions of the Antarctic environment have preserved these sites to some extent, but they’re threatened by the changing climate and need care to survive over the long term. Wilson’s painting, along with the other artifacts collected at Cape Adare, will be returned to the place where they were found after the huts built there are restored, as a monument to the explorers who risked their lives to see what was at the ends of the Earth.
Reading a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward. The early books in the series, which began in 1979, have dozens of endings, reached through branching storylines so complex that that trying to keep track of your path can seem hopeless—no matter how many fingers you stick into the book in order to find your way back to the key, fateful choice. You might end up back at an early fork again, surprised at how far you traveled only to reemerge at a simple decision, weighted with consequences that you couldn't have imagined at the beginning.
The last installment of the original "Choose Your Own Adventure" series came out in 1998, but since 2004, Chooseco, founded by one of the series’ original authors, R.A. Montgomery, has been republishing classic volumes, as well as new riffs on the form of interactive fiction that seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and '90s. The new editions also carry an additional feature—maps of the hidden structure of each book.
On the official maps, however, the endings aren’t coded in any way that reveals their nature. Instead, they operate according to a simple key: each arrow represents a page, each circle a choice, and each square an ending. Dotted lines show where branches link to one another.
Mapping the bones of the books can have other purposes, too. Nick Montfort, a poet and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies interactive fiction, has a habit of asking people what they know about "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. “They often say, 'You have two choices after every page,'” he says. “That’s not true. Sometimes you have one choice. Sometimes you have more than two. When you show the maps, you can see that these books don’t look exactly the same.”
The older volumes, for instance, tend to have more endings than the later ones, and three of the oldest—Journey Under the Sea, Space and Beyond, and By Balloon to the Sahara—have 42 endings each, more than any other books in the series.
Here’s what Space and Beyond looks like mapped:
And here’s Journey Under the Sea:
In this book, you’re trying to locate Atlantis, and while each of the 42 endings is distinct, they can be grouped into categories.
There’s disappointment: You give up the search and someone else finds Atlantis, you don’t quite get there, your ship is destroyed, your eyesight is damaged. There’s hope: A mysterious submarine saves you, you give up the search but get a second chance, you glimpse Atlantis in the sky. There are sea dangers: You might ride a whale, get eaten by a fish, escape a shark, get eaten by shark, die by poisonous snake bite, escape a whirlpool and find your ship, escape a whirlpool but die in the ocean, get spit out of a whirlpool and find your ship, or explore a deep hole that you can’t escape from. There’s Atlantis itself, but you might destroy it before you get in. You might meet Atlanteans and, in a rare case, end up back on the surface. More often, you stay with Atlanteans, who appear in different guises in different endings. You might travel through space-time with them, be an advisor to their king, lead a revolution, end up in a dungeon, get gills implanted, live out your life in a Atlantean zoo, or become a blob of light, an Atlantean farmer, Atlantean musician, or Atlantean historian. Oh, and there’s also a secret deepwater laboratory.
This book is particularly tough on readers. One analysis found that more than 75 percent of the endings are unfavorable or deadly. One of the most poignant endings is the one where you choose to pull back from your search and someone else finds Atlantis. You regret giving up your search, but, the book says, “You didn’t really have a choice. Did you?” (Of course you did.)
By contrast, Surf Monkeys has the fewest endings of any book in the original series, with long stretches without decision-making. You’ve been spending the summer learning to surf, but now your friend Jorge is missing. Before you even have a choice to make (see that long string of arrows on the left), you’ve started your investigation, met a gang of surfers, and encountered a shark.
This book also has the longest path to an ending of any of the classics. By the end of a 61-page storyline, you've finally found Jorge, and though it’s not the only ending where you rescue your friend, it’s the only one where you also get to surf a killer wave.
Sometimes, your journey ends quickly, though. Island of Time has the shortest path from beginning to an end, at just six pages. Your parents leave you home alone for the first time with instructions to answer the phone if it rings and take a message. When the phone does ring, you’re presented with your first choice—be obedient and answer it, or rebel and ignore it. If you pick up, you have a quiet weekend at home. If you ignore it, you might travel back in time, meet a lake monster, get recruited to work on a ship, or end up trussed on a dock.
In just about every case, it can be surprising how a simple choice leads you down a complex path. In By Balloon to the Sahara, you’re in a balloon and are presented with a choice on the very first page. Storm clouds are on the horizon. Choice 1: “If you act now, you can release gas from the balloon and land before the storm overtakes you.” Choice 2: “Perhaps the storm will pass quickly. Maybe you can ride it out.” That's just the beginning, since this book has the most decision points—48—of the series.
Other installments, including Eighth Grade Witch, The Case of the Silk King, Zombie Penpal, Search for the Mountain Gorillas, and Tattoo of Death have decision points that are not simply binary. One page in Mountain Gorillas, for instance, has three different choices, each leading to a different ending:
Cup of Death goes one step further. You are an amateur detective and are offered a four-pronged choice early in the investigation. As the map shows, though, one of those is a false lead, which takes you to a three-pronged fork. There, each of three options loops directly back to one of the paths you avoided at the previous decision point.
There is yet another possibility in these nonlinear books: hidden endings. Inside UFO 54-40 has a hidden ending that’s only available to a reader who ignores the decisions and flips to it without prompting. But it’s there. “It’s a two-page, big illustration of this city,” says Montfort, the MIT professor. “The land of Ultima. As you flip through the book, even if you’re being very obedient, you can’t help but wonder what this text is.”
In Escape from the Haunted Warehouse, there’s a clearer path to the hidden ending—a page that hints "The End ... or is it?" Solving a simple puzzle in the text prompts the reader to turn to one more page—to a much happier outcome.
There are also structures that loop readers through the story in unique ways. Mystery of the Maya, for example, has time travel, and keeps sending the reader back to the same page and place in time. ("Almost as if it were the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum," as Doc Brown would say. If you think that's what it is, click here. If you decide it's just an "amazing coincidence," click here.)
These are just some of the possibilities for what is today the wide-open field of interactive fiction. When Montfort teaches “multisequential stories” he includes David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, because, with all its long footnotes, it asks the reader to make choices about how it’s read. The simplest form of a story that asks a reader to make choices might be a book such as Composition Number 1 by Marc Saporta, which has the reader shuffle all the pages before reading. (The book has many possible configurations, but only one action required of the reader.)
In the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series, Montfort points out, “The choices are normally about the action of a character. What action transpires at the story level?” By contrast, in Raymond Queneau’s Yours for the Telling, the choices presented to the reader are about how the story is told. The reader might choose to hear more about a particular details, or decide what color a character’s mittens are. “It’s like the story is being told to a child,” says Montfort. “Do you want to want to hear more or less?”
Maps like the ones Chooseco created can reveal the structure of a book that gives readers choices, but though the multiple story lines are part of what makes the series so fun, they're not the only thing that defines it. The meat of "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories are gender-neutral romps in worlds where there are no obviously right or wrong moral choices. There's danger around bend, usually in the form of something like space monkeys, malicious ghosts, or conniving grown-ups. Even with a map, there's no way to find out what really comes next without making a choice and flipping to another page.
The Great Historical Clock of America, the Smithsonian’s most ambitious timepiece, measures 13 feet tall and comes alive every few minutes.
In the 1890s, a team of now obscure Boston artisans covered its wooden case with scrolling scenery and rotating figures. When it was shipped off for display as far away as Australia and New Zealand, newspapers called it “without doubt, the greatest scientific, mechanical and artistic achievement of the nineteenth century.”
When its mechanism is properly wound, folk tunes tinkle as George Washington pops out of a domed tower and admires a procession of American presidents and Revolutionary War minutemen. A painted fabric view of Niagara Falls cascades behind a seesawing boat. Tableaus show Native Americans encountering the first white settlers. In between models of the Statue of Liberty and a Gettysburg memorial column, galloping horses carry Paul Revere through the Boston suburbs and the Civil War hero Philip Sheridan across Virginia battlefields. The machinery celebrates the passage of seasons and time, too, with zodiac signs and planets and figures representing the stages of life from infancy through marriage and decrepitude.
The video below shows the clock in action.
During its 1890s showings, minstrel singers, sword swallowers and trained gorillas performed alongside the clockworks. It was marketed as an educational survey of “stirring incidents in the early history of our country.”
The clock, after spending decades dismantled and crated in storage, goes on view June 28 in an exhibition at the National Museum of American History, “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith.” Videos will show its newly repaired components in action, but it will not be allowed to perform for the public. Beth Richwine, the clock project’s lead conservator, said that given the fragility of much of its components, “It would be a maintenance nightmare to even try to run it.”
When the clock was first exhibited, newspapers attributed its construction to a Bostonian craftsman named C. S. Chase and his son Albert. The makers sewed tiny realistic clothes for its wood and papier maché figures, and in the clockworks, they combined mass-produced gears with bits of recycled hand drills. An impresario named R. G. Bachelder took it on its first worldwide tours. Little else about its manufacturers and travels is known.
By the 1950s it belonged to a New Hampshire clock collector, a retired lingerie salesman, who cut away part of his barn loft to make room for its dome. When the Smithsonian acquired it in 1979, the mechanisms were only partly functional. To activate its dioramas and folk tunes, Ms. Richwine said, “You could reach in and crank a set of gears."
For the June display, conservators replaced chains between shafts and cleaned away dirt, corrosion and mold. “The clothing was all very carefully vacuumed,” Ms. Richwine says. A few flaws remain, however. The presidents are not in chronological order, and a handful are missing—were the figures broken or lost on the road, or did the Chases dislike those particular politicians?
The Statue of Liberty also no longer carries a lightbulb in her torch. “We’re afraid to put anything electrical in the middle of all that paper and fabric,” Carlene Stephens, the museum’s curator of clocks, explains.
She has tracked down a few similarly grandiose contemporaries of the Smithsonian’s Great Historical Clock. A turreted timepiece is covered in figures of apostles at the Hershey Story museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” at the National Watch & Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania, plays hymns and patriotic songs to accompany the motions of figures from the Bible and the American Revolution. On the carved mahogany “Wonderful Clock” at the Detroit Historical Society, “Miniature figures in the base represent different nations which march to music around the globe every five minutes.”
Only the most prestigious pupils could enroll in The Philadelphia Phonograph School of Languages for Parrots, which in 1903 was said to be “the only institution of its kind in the world.” It boasted over 100 feathered graduates that “could pronounce all kinds of sentences and phrases” and speak three different languages (English, French, and German).
One of the school’s most distinguished alums was a parrot that, in the morning, could tell the children in its house it was time for school and, at night, could “ask them, with a knowing look, if they have mastered their lessons and express the hope that they have been good scholars." This bird belonged to an unnamed famous actress.
A woman named Mrs. Hope—the school’s founder and only teacher—started the academy because her husband, a bird seller, found that he could make 10 times the profit on a single parrot if it could talk. She wanted in.
“It was because the demand for good talkers was one which Mr. Hope could not always supply that Mrs. Hope, who is his wife, established her school,” The Strand Magazine wrote, identifying only the male Hope by first name.
Mrs. Hope's Philadelphia school soon sparked a revolution in parrot pedagogy. Previously, the norm was for a professor to hide behind a curtain—seeing a person proved too much of a distraction for the birds—and repeat the same phrase hundreds or thousands of times, a process that Hope called “monotonous and tiring.” But Hope had an epiphany: rather than endlessly repeat “Pretty Polly," she could instead make phonograph records and play those on loop.
“I tried this upon eight parrots and the success was beyond my expectations,” she said. TheStrand Magazine article noted that those parrots “were declared to be the finest talkers in Philadelphia” and each sold for approximately £20 (roughly £2,000, or $2,500, today).
The birds were such a hit that Hope’s husband began boasting of them in the press. To one publication, he described how the school had trained a parrot for a soap company, Apple Soap, to squeal at customers, "Buy Apple Soap," and "Apple Soap Forever." The goal was for customers to heed the advice of the feathered employees and purchase the product. This was, he proudly declared, the future of advertising.
As news of Hope’s successes with phonographs spread, other parrot owners began requesting that Hope give speech lessons to their birds. She agreed; for a full school term, she would teach any bird to talk for the price of £8, though most customers opted for the shorter, 10-shillings-per-week option. Luckily, tuition covered room and board for the birds.
Arthur Conan Doyle himself may have memorialized the prestigious school in The Adventure of Black Peter, also published in The Strand Magazine in 1904, a year after the Philadelphia Phonograph School of Languages for Parrots feature was published. A throwaway line at the beginning of the book mentions the arrest of a "notorious canary-trainer."
"In this memorable year ’95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged [Holmes’] attention,” he wrote, including “his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East-end of London.”
The meaning of "the notorious canary-trainer" has been the subject of much debate, with many fans wondering whether "canary" might be a euphemism of some kind, but one theory suggests that Holmes was in fact inspired by the Philadelphia parrot academy.
When the Strand Magazine journalist visited the Philadelphia school, he described eight parrots sitting in a room, staring intently at a phonograph that repeated, “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly.” He wrote: “The birds were listening attentively, and now and then one of them would stammer, ‘Pree-pah,’ ‘Pree-pah.’” They kept on repeating the words until they got them right.
"Those parrots will hear that phrase for a week," Hope remarked. "It takes the average bird a week to learn one sentence. Only one lesson is given a day, and it lasts half an hour."
Then the pair visited The Philadelphia Phonograph School of Languages for Parrots' "star pupil," whose valedictorian status had earned him a room all to himself. There, he was practicing “what is believed to be the longest speech ever mastered by a parrot”:
On this map, you will find the real world locations where the heroes of books you might have read early in life lived out their adventures. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, just a few blocks from Gracie Mansion, Harriet the Spy is forever taking notes about her neighbors and eating tomato sandwiches. In Portland, Oregon, Ramona Quimby is tormenting her older sister. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ponyboy Curtis is coming out of the theater, about to be attacked by a rival gang.
For a kid, made-up worlds can seem as real as actual places, and real-life cities can seem as fantastical as any fictional town. For Betsy and Tacy, in Maud Hart Lovelace's classic Betsy-Tacy series, Milwaukee is "no ordinary city. Milwaukee was their secret." One day, in Betsy's dark buggy shed, the two tiny heroines pretend to ride out of town until they see Milwaukee's towers in the distance, as exotic as can be:
"That's right," said Tacy. "I see palm trees." "The people will wear red and blue night gowns, like they do on the Sunday School cards, most likely," Betsy said. "Maybe there will be camels," said Tacy.
But just like there is a real version of Milwaukee, there is a real version of that shed, Betsy's "small yellow cottage," and Tacy's "rambling white house," down the street—they are in Lovelace's hometown of Mankato, Minnesota. You can go there and see for yourself.
So many of the worlds that seem adventurous and magical when you read about them as a kid are based on real-world and very specific places. Even when the author is clear about where the story is set, many young readers don't have anything to hang that knowledge on—your sense of how to reach Narnia (through the closet, clearly) might be more obvious than how to reach Boston.
So perhaps it comes as a surprise that the Nolan family, in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn lived on Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. That the Island of the Blue Dolphins, from the eponymous 1960 novel, is actually one of the Channel Islands off the California coast. That Caddie Woodlawn, in her "big house on the prairie" and Laura, in her "Little House in the Big Woods," were practically neighbors in Wisconsin.
For this map, we have restricted ourselves to literary heroes who happened to live in North America—Maniac Magee, Anne of Green Gables, Holden Caulfield—and even though the original idea was to feature children's books, we included some more likely to be filed under "young adult." How could we resist revealing the location of V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic or Bella Swan's hometown of Forks, Washington? We also focused on books that could be linked to a specific town, street, or even house.
But there are so many more stories that are set in specific but more loosely defined locations, or beyond the necessary boundaries of this project. The Yearling is in central Florida; the Murry family farmhouse in A Wrinkle in Time is somewhere in Connecticut. There could be a rich and thickly dotted map representing the British Isles: The Dark Is Rising; The Golden Compass; Winnie the Pooh; Ballet Shoes; Paddington Bear; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Harry Potter—all have settings inspired by real-world locations. A world map would show Heidi in the Alps, Pippi Longstocking in Sweden, the Swiss Family Robinson in the East Indies.
Finding these connections, between the spaces of childhood fantasy and the cities and streets of adulthood, can make otherwise ordinary places seem special again. In one of the books that follows Betsy-Tacy, Betsy eventually makes it to Milwaukee, and though there are no palm trees or biblically dressed people, it still has a hold on her—it's never an ordinary city. The places on this map might have once seemed mythical. One of the great pleasures of growing up is being able to explore in real-life the world that you could only imagine as a kid.
Thanks to Lauren Young and Jack Goodman for the data mapping.
The European eel makes two major Atlantic journeys in its life, once as a larva to European waterways, and back again as an adult to spawn in the Sargasso Sea (a region of the North Atlantic). The trip from the breeding ground to Europe can take anywhere from 17 to 28 months as the small larvae drift along in the Gulf Stream. Somewhere between the Canary Islands and Norway, they jump off, grow into small, clear eels called glass eels, and then make their way to streams and lakes for the next stage in their life cycle. But exactly how the eels know when and where to get out of the Gulf Stream has been a bit of a mystery—until now.
To figure out how the eel larvae know when to change course and head for the continent, researchers from the University of Miami and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research used two devices to study how eels behave in their normal environment, and under artificial conditions. Using a special, partially enclosed aquarium off the coast of Norway, they observed how the eels swam in a simulation of the the drifting they experience in the Gulf Stream. They observed eels in a magnetoreception testing lab, where the scientists were able to manipulate magnetic fields.
Off the coast, almost all of the eels showed a preference for a particular compass direction, and most oriented themselves south during ebb tides. In the lab, where the eels had only the generated magnetic field to go by, most also oriented themselves to the (artificial magnetic) south during ebb tides. “It is incredible that these small transparent glass eels can detect the Earth's magnetic field," said Alessandro Cresci, a coauthor of the report, in a press release. "The use of a magnetic compass could be a key component underlying the amazing migration of these animals.”
At least four times since mid-May, police outside Toronto have responded to calls about people, many of them teens, climbing construction cranes. The police are calling it a "trend" now, and it's not a particularly welcome one.
"There are obvious dangers associated with climbing cranes that are 10, 12, 13 stories tall," police constable Andy Pattenden told the CBC. "Gravity is not going to be your friend if you slip and fall."
What's behind greater Toronto's hottest new death-defying behavior? Police aren't sure exactly, but they don't think it has to do with an April incident, caught on video, in which a woman was dramatically rescued from a crane:
Instead, Pattenden blames "selfie culture" and "social media" and "YouTube"—particularly an incredibly popular genre of online videos featuring people, mostly young, climbing various buildings and structures and putting themselves in bafflingly dangerous situations all for the sake of the stunt and the online notoriety it can generate.
Teens of Canada (and everywhere else): You must know that there are safer ways to get the clicks.
