On Tuesday morning, a team of chefs in Shediac, New Brunswick, rose early and headed to a secret-ish location. If all goes well, over the next couple of days, they'll shape and bake a fluffy bread roll longer than a basketball court. They'll mix scores of pounds of lobster meat with a few gallons of mayonnaise and a dozen heads of shredded lettuce. And they'll put it all together to form a delicious-yet-intimidating summer treat—the longest lobster roll yet known to man.

These chefs are attempting to break a very specific world record. But they're also firing the latest salvo in what has become an international lobster roll war: a multi-year claws race that has been mired by botched record-keeping, rocked by bread-related controversies, and escalated such that the sandwich-making prowess of one small town has come to stand in for the honor of an entire nation.

It all started back in 2014 in Shediac, a town of about 6,600 people tucked into an inlet on the New Brunswick coast. The town—one of several East Coast spots that calls itself the Lobster Capital of the World—holds an annual festival celebrating its ties to all things crustacean. "That year was the 65th anniversary of the Lobster Festival," explains Pierre Cormier of the Shediac Chamber of Commerce. "So we were looking to make a 65-foot lobster roll."

At first, they didn't realize the audacity of this plan, but as they began researching tips and techniques, they realized that no one had yet accomplished a lobster roll of this length. The closest they could find was 61 feet, a feat accomplished in 2009 in Portland, Maine. "We came across that it would be a world record," says Cormier. "So that's how it all started." (After a later discovery that chefs in New York state actually held the record, with a 66-foot lobster roll constructed in 2010, organizers upped their goal to 68 feet.)

When it comes to lobster roll length, the hard part isn't the meat or the mayo—it's the bread. In order to be deemed legitimate by the World Record Academy—a competitor of Guinness that offers "unlimited categories"— a record-breaking roll "has to be one unified bread from one end to the other," says Cormier.

Shediac Lobster Festival organizers say this is the world's longest lobster roll. CTV News at 5 tonight. https://t.co/gCeQb7ryt7

— David Bell CBC (@DavidBellCBC) July 9, 2014

After much trial and error, Shediac chefs came up with a strategy: running a massive snake of risen dough through a conveyer belt oven, over and over, until it was unbroken and golden brown. The process "takes between 12 and 14 hours," says Cormier.

The 68-foot roll was a success, unveiled as part of the 2014 festival's opening ceremonies and gobbled up by attendees. (Proceeds went toward scholarships for local students.) Meanwhile, across the Northumberland Strait, the people of Prince Edward Island were watching. PEI is also known for its lobster, and the organizers of the island's annual International Shellfish Festival were sure they could do better.

So in September of 2015, chefs there spent ten hours constructing and baking a 72-foot sandwich roll—four feet better than Shediac's. (They had been aiming for longer, but "ran out of bread," the CBC reported.) The roll was paraded from the kitchen by 32 fishers, dressed in black t-shirts like a team of casual pallbearers. A police escort stood watch. It was then placed in a special festival tent, where it was stuffed, and then consumed, by enthusiastic volunteers.

And the bun is on the move. Organizers estimate this match will take 25 minutes #PEIhttps://t.co/yTHzF0xsKn

— Jessica Doria-Brown (@JDoriaBrownCBC) September 20, 2015

Prince Edward Island crowed over the victory, but New Brunswick pushed back. The PEI chefs had been chasing an outdated number, they said: New Brunswick's most recent roll, from July of 2015, had been 85 feet long, not 72. ("We were foolish enough to do it again," says Cormier.) As they were already so far ahead of the pack, they hadn't bothered to update their website.

PEI asked to go to the tape. By next season, though, the point was made moot. At the 67th annual Shediac Lobster Festival, in July of 2016, New Brunswick outdid themselves, PEI, and everyone else by constructing a 106.2-foot roll, as long as a ten-story building is tall. "We've been on treadmills the last six months training for this," Cormier told the CBC. "This year they'll have to top [106.2 feet] if they want to beat us."

They did. After their own two-month training session—which involved finding a venue that could house a long enough table, and soliciting lobster donations from the entire island—PEI rolled out a 120-foot sandwich in September of 2016. This time it took 60 fishers to carry the thing, and 400 people to eat it. They even lobbied Guinness, asking them to consider adding a brand new category for their accomplishment.

Just set the record for the Worlds Longest Lobster Roll here at @PEI_Shellfish! Fantastic work!! (Now let's eat) pic.twitter.com/QKhqByNmNQ

— 95.1 FM CFCY (@cfcy) September 18, 2016

As PEI celebrated, New Brunswick was briefly disheartened. The timing of the respective festivals, combined with the dedication of their opponents, meant their future records would last for a few months at most. "To be honest, we thought we were all done," says Cormier. "We thought, 'They're always going to beat us.'"

But the race wasn't done with them. "I said, 'If there's a good reason, we'll make another one,'" says Cormier. And there was: Canada's 150th birthday celebration, which inspired the Shediac lobster roll team to yet new lengths. "I decided we would make one 150 feet long, and then we would stop," he says.

Thus was set to end some good, clean Canadian fun. Since the first back-and-forth, representatives from each festival have attended the other to officially measure the roll, and to pose for goofy photos. The CBC has covered the feud religiously, and supporters of both players war good-naturedly in article comments, exchanging sunny insults and arguing over whether a proper lobster roll should include lettuce at all. "It's a great camaraderie between the two cities," says Cormier.

Witnessed the making of the World's Longest Lobster Roll last weekend! 😋 @EaterBoston@BritishBeerCopic.twitter.com/8PMew5e4S4

— Jake (@jcryan503) June 22, 2017

But two weeks ago, a wildcard player emerged from the shadows: Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Having read about the rivalry—and looking to "bring bragging rights to the States"—chef James Gibney of the British Beer Company entered the fray with a 159.5-foot roll, which he and other workers constructed outdoors under a massive awning. They threw a lobster-chowing party, sold tickets, and donated the proceeds to Hero Pups, a local charity that places therapy dogs with military veterans.

Afterward, they sent paperwork into the World Record Academy to be certified. But when the Canadian teams got wind of this newcomer, they found themselves suddenly united. They quickly contested the accomplishment, saying that Portsmouth's sandwich roll was not continuous.

Gibney—who has since withdrawn his certification paperwork, citing both this wrinkle and the WRA's $8,000 record registration fee—says he wasn't aware of this requirement. "We did use 5-foot sections pieced together to make the roll," he writes in an email, "which is how we thought the others did it from the pictures we saw."

But he also says he's figured out the roll-making trick, and that Canada should watch their backs. "Will we try this again? You bet," he writes. "Will I have the biggest ever on [public] record? You bet... Good luck to PEI, I hope they smash it!"

As the controversy swirls, Shediac is forging ahead: "We're still going to do ours," says Cormier. By now, they have begun mixing, kneading, and shaping the dough; on Wednesday, they'll lay out the big festival table with however many yards of delicious 'wich they've managed to create. "What we're trying to do tomorrow is exceed 150 feet," says Cormier. "But as always, we'll start by doing the first foot. Where it stops, that's where it's going to be."

In eastern China, 5,000 years ago, some of the people who lived there were unusually tall—giant, even, compared to most people living at that time.

Archaeologists excavating a settlement in what’s now Shandong province have found 205 graves, and many of the men buried there would have been around 5’10” in height. One skeleton belonged to a man who would have been close to 6’3", according to Xinhua News.

These heights aren’t as unusual today, but in 3,000 B.C., these men would have towered over everyone else. The people living in this area had a rich diet of millet and pigs, which could have helped them grow tall.

Even today, though, people from this area of the country pride themselves on their height: on average, people here about an inch taller than people in the rest of China, The Independent notes. Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher, came from this area of the country and was said to be 6'3".

When Jay Leibold started writing Choose Your Own Adventure books in the 1980s, no one told him exactly how to create a branching story with a passel of different endings. “It was a seat-of-the-pants, use-your-intuition kind of thing,” he says.

As the story developed, dividing along different branches, Leibold would map its shape on 8 1/2-by-11-inch pages. One page, two pages, then a branching choice. “There was lots of erasing, crossing out, trying again,” he says. As the story grew and the first half became more settled, though, a standard, letter-sized piece of paper wasn’t large enough to hold the whole map of the story. Eventually, he had to tape two large pieces of paper board together in order to hold it.

After reading Atlas Obscura’s story about maps that reveal the hidden structure of Choose Your Own Adventure stories created by the publisher ChooseCo, Leibold sent us images of the original, hand-drawn maps he used to create some of his CYOA books. Here’s the final map of Sabotage, the first book Leibold contributed to the series:

Sabotage had 30 possible endings. “It was so challenging, and it really did feel pretty great to have it finished and take it in all at once, on one chart,” he says.

Leibold would eventually write 15 Choose Your Own Adventure books, and each time he developed a better feel for how to shape the story, he says. Each branch, for instance, could not divide into many choices. Some had to come to an end relatively quickly. “We had the idea that there should be a choice on nearly every page,” says Leibold. “It was never dictated but I think that’s the feeling we all had.”

Building in so many choices to the story meant enough action had to be condensed in between each branching point. One challenge was telling enough story in between each branching point that the next choice still felt meaningful; another was building enough material into each storyline so that each different ending felt satisfying. “Part of the game for me was for the reader to find the story lines that went on the longest,” he says.

One way to make story lines last longer was to allow some of them to loop back to an earlier moment in the book. The challenge, though, was making what came next consistent with both paths that led there. Leibold also experimented with stories with fewer choices. One of his books, Surf Monkeys, has the fewest endings of any book in the series. Even when a story had a certain linear progression built into it, though, say when a plot revolved around a journey, it was possible to branch off in many directions. For the book Grand Canyon Odyssey, Leibold created stories that brought in geology, dinosaurs, and Native America tribes, and he found it helpful to map both the geography of the trip through the canyon (top image) and the structure of the story (below).

Having fewer choices, he says, “put pressure on the choices to feel really meaningful. When you’re doing a choice every page or two, sometimes you just scramble—you have to come up with some kind of choice. Not that much has happened. Sometimes the choices were more mundane or seemingly trivial, even though they might lead to very different consequences.” With fewer choices, each one could be a bigger, more weighty decision.

“Maybe the best way to describe writing these books is that it’s a real juggling act,” says Leibold. “You’re juggling storylines and possibilities. The number of pages and space. The choices and branches and how do they balance out. It’s like three different dimensions of things that you’re juggling. It requires a certain flexibility of mind.” Having a map to keep the whole picture in one place helps all those pieces stay in the air, tumbling and flying into graceful, shifting stories.

Every Goodwill in the country is full of stuff you never knew you needed. As KSBY reports, though, visitors to San Luis Obispo's outpost now have the ability to consider a truly life-changing purchase: a 40-year-old, 4-ton sperm whale with a crab pot embedded in its head, made out of steel pipes and concrete.

Homeless Whale statue still looking for home. @angelm_russell reports:https://t.co/MtTmHvm3pe#SLO#SanLuisObispo#MorroBay#HomelessWhalepic.twitter.com/CN5iZoDfT9

— KSBY (@KSBY) July 4, 2017

If concrete sperm whales could talk, this one would certainly have a story to tell. Since it can't, its creator, Donald E. Hedrick, has picked up the slack, writing out the whale's detailed history on www.homelesswhale.org.

Hedrick built the whale over the course of 5 months in 1975 and '76. Its original home was a seafood restaurant called The Whale's Tail, where the many kids who liked to climb on its head made the charming cetacean "the most photographed thing in Morro Bay," Hedrick writes. "It has been guessed that a million people have had their picture taken in front of that whale."

In 2011, the Whale's Tail lost its lease, and the business that replaced it was required to expand the sidewalk out front. "The whale could not suck in its gut to pull in the one foot it would have intruded into the planned new sidewalk," writes Hedrick, "so it had to go."

#homelesswhale visit homelesswhale.org I didn't know the story until I visited the site...a true artist's struggle to please a client and find a home for his work. Handmade and custom quality work is something people are taking for granted..it makes me sad to see other artists and creators fighting "the man" because other people are fucking sheep. Creators,Do not sell yourselves short, do not be intimidated by hagglers and know your worth. If I had a home to accommodate this whale I'd do it in a heartbeat...I'd want it finished by the artist and I'd cook meals out of his head as intended. #saveallwhales #pismobeach

A post shared by Laura May (@sheisthebee) on Sep 28, 2015 at 10:58pm PDT

The city told Hedrick that he could have it back, as long as he did the work of removing and transporting it. He did: "it impressed him that an old man would work so hard with a jackhammer," he told KSBY. And he has: he's been touring the whale around ever since, bringing it to "personal appearances" at community and ocean-related events in an attempt to drum up a buyer.

Thus far, there have been no takers, though—thus this most recent personal appearance, outside of Goodwill.

If you'd like to save this particular whale, you can write to Hedrick at the email address listed at the bottom of his website. But be warned: after all the whale has been through, he's considering serious offers only. "It must be the right thing to do," he writes.

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 world’s first spiral escalator could easily have been lost forever.

That is, if it weren’t for a routine inspection of the Holloway Road station of the London underground. One day in early 1993, an engineer was climbing through a ventilation shaft when he stumbled upon a contraption, covered in rubble and spiraling up into the duct. Forgotten about for over 80 years, the spiral escalator was built in 1906 but quickly deemed to be unsafe, boarded up, and forgotten. By the time it was found, all that was left was a dusty heap of snaking drive chains and hulking slabs of rust.

It’s not surprising that this early spiral escalator never lived to escalate. It had no stairs and was simply a sloping travelator, with guide rails along the sides. (Riders would have had to grip onto them for dear life, probably white-knuckled in terror, as they made their way up to the surface.) The escalator would have been dark, dangerous and extremely noisy—more like a test of endurance than a space-efficient way of getting from platform to pavement.

Jesse W. Reno, a Kansas-born engineer, was behind the machine. Fifteen years earlier, he’d introduced the world to the regular escalator (nicknamed “the inclined elevator”) as a ride at Coney Island, New York. It was a simple slope and just a few feet high, but revelers queued up in their droves to ride it, sitting sideways on a bench that ran along the middle. On other early examples without seats, passengers would lean forward on the slope to maintain their balance, like ski jumpers about to launch themselves into the air.

Even after they featured stairs rather than cleats, early escalators made many pedestrians very nervous. One of Britain’s first escalators, some 40 feet high, was installed in high-end department store Harrods: its then-manager, Richard Burbidge, noted in his diary that nervy shoppers had sometimes had to be revived with brandy by an attendant at the top.

But once pedestrians learned to take escalators into their stride, some began to yearn for a spiralling alternative. In his 1925 drawings of “The City of 1950”, published in Popular Science Monthly, Harvey W. Corbett, president of the Architectural League of New York, imagined spiral escalators six or seven stories high connecting underground trains through three levels of road (for fast motor traffic, slow motor traffic, and pedestrians).

Mitsubishi has been making spiral escalators since 1985, still using virtually the same technology today. They’ve installed just over 100 in the past 22 years, with around 40 in Japan. You can ride them at the Westfield shopping mall in San Francisco and Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. But given how amazing spiral escalators look, why aren’t there more of them?

In truth, say Yuri Kudo and Tetsuyuki Yanase, both from the company’s Buildings Systems Group, most of the spiral escalator’s advantages are aesthetic. They use as much energy as a standard escalator would and take up slightly more floor space. But, Yanase says, speaking through a translator, it’s about all about the journey.

“Imagine the people in the building using this escalator, riding it from the bottom to the top … it’s a very fun experience. You have a very panoramic view, which changes as you turn, as you slowly make your way around the arc upwards.” Like Reno’s first fairground escalator, they’re at least as much of a joyride as they are a way to get from A to B. “You have to think of escalators in a new way, as an amenity to the building,” Yasane says.

Designers and architects choose them for the wow-factor, rather than for any inherent advantage. A single one costs around $900,000 to install—at least four times the cost of an ordinary escalator.

Technically, the spiral escalator is stupidly twiddly. They require considerable, highly skilled manual labor that can’t be replicated in a factory: artisanal escalation. And there are plenty of things that can go wrong. “If there is even a slight discrepancy, they just won’t move,” Kudo says.

Imagine two people running around a curved track—the person on the outside has to travel further than the person on the inside. Spiral escalators have the same problem: somehow, the inside of the step has to move slower, and a shorter distance, than the outside, while remaining in sync.

Mitsubishi solves this problem, Yasane says, with differently sized gears for the inside and out, controlled by a motor at the top axle of the escalator. The inside one is comparably smaller and slower; the outside bigger and faster. The motor is responsible for maintaining a delicate balance between the two and making it move smoothly.

There are other trade mysteries involved, of course. Kudo laughs and laughs when asked how the handrail succeeds in turning at an angle, but divulging the escalator’s secrets proves a step too far. “It is pretty awesome,” Yasane ventures.

While Mitsubishi’s escalators certainly curve, they aren’t true spirals—at each story, pedestrians have to walk back around to the start again. For reasons of structural integrity, spiral escalators can be no more than six meters high, making a complete spiral an impossibility. Reno’s spiral escalator did manage to make a single unbroken loop, but might have been a good way to break one’s neck. Its links were “joined together with universal joints,” New Scientist reported in 1993, into a sort of chain probably driven from beneath. Now exhumed, it’s on exhibition at the London Transport museum depot in Acton, London.

But there is one more spiral escalator upstart that does purport to go all the way round. Enter the Levytator, a 2010 invention named for its designer, City University emeritus professor Jack Levy. Each individual step is curved like a sickle moon, allowing them to slot together in one continuous loop. Like Reno before him, Levy took inspiration from the London Underground. “I wondered why all the escalators had to be straight,” he told The Independent in 2011. “Sometimes it’s really convenient to go round a corner.”

In theory, the Levytator can go around any freeform curve, twisting and bending as required. It even loops back on itself, minimising both apparatus and fuel costs. But despite early excitement in the plans, this true spiral escalator seems to have struggled to make it off the ground, with no further development beyond an initial flurry of excitement six years ago.

While it might look beautiful, the spiral escalator most likely won’t ever be commonplace outside of megawatt shopping malls and high-kitsch Vegas hotels. It's probably best thought of as destination transportation, rather than transportation to your destination.

It may seem like there's a lot of potato diversity when you walk through the produce section. But those purple, yellow, red, and brown spuds are all varieties of one species — Solanum tuberosum— that was domesticated in South America over 7,000 years ago. There are about 20 potato species in North and Central America, and one species in particular has been part of the human diet for over 10,000 years, according to a study published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The potato, Solanum jamesii, is native to the American Southwest, and especially thrives in sagebrush and piñon pine ecosystems in New Mexico. There are just five small populations of the potato in Utah. It was near one of those, in an area once known as Potato Valley, that researchers were excavating an archaeological site and found grinding stones, known as manos, and slabs known as metates. "Grinding plant tissues with manos and metates releases granules that get lodged in the tiny cracks of stone, preserving them for thousands of years," said Lisbeth Louderback, an archaeologist at the University of Utah and coauthor of the study, in a press release. In the cracks in the manos and metates found at the site, Louderback and her colleagues found starch grains from Solanum jamesii. The oldest grains are around 10,900 years old, while other grains are around 6,900 years old. These potatoes weren't a passing fad.

The big and colorful potatoes we find in the grocery store are the product of domestication, but Solanum jamesii is still very much a wild potato. Its tubers are small and you won't find them at the farmer's market anytime soon. But its limited range in Utah suggests it may have been brought to the region by people, and there may even have been attempts to domesticate it. The researchers are now looking to the potato's genes for clues about its history, and maybe even something about human history, too.

In Ontario, Canada, between Parry Sound and Sudbury, crews are hard at work expanding Highway 69 from two lanes to four, work which has been planned for years.

But as they make their way south, the CBC reports, they're increasingly running into a noisy threat: rattlesnakes. Specifically, they're running into Massassauga rattlesnakes, which are found across North America but especially in this pocket of southern Ontario, which is particularly hospitable for the pit vipers.

So far, no one has been bit, but crews have been warned to keep an eye out, along with instructions on what to do if one encounters a snake (mainly: freeze, before slowly retreating).

Workers are also building accommodations for the snakes themselves, lest the construction disrupt their habitat. These include passages beneath the road, so snakes won't have to slither over.

But even if you are bit, you're probably going to survive. The last deaths from Massassauga bites in Ontario occurred decades ago, information which doesn't really help people who are unnerved by the mere sight of snakes to begin with.

In the late 1950s, in response to a growing spate of thefts, a new, cure-all invention made the rounds in the British media: the anti-bandit bag.

In 1959, British Pathé reported that banks and financial firms regularly transporting large quantities of cash were considering adopting one such example—one that promised to smoke out thieves.

The design was simple. When bank couriers needed to transport cash, they placed a container of chemical vapor into their bags. Before walking into public, the couriers attached a thick cord connected to the container to their wrists. The cord automatically responded to strain; if someone grabbed the bag from the courier, an electric current was switched on, unleashing the chemical vapor.

Not only did the bag promise to make a scene that would frighten away thieves, but because the vapor was dyed red, it could also stain their clothes as well as any money they managed to run away with—making the thieves' capture all the more likely. In the demonstration video, as soon as the vapor was released, the bandits immediately dropped the bag and sprinted away.

Subtlety, however, was not the aim of the 1959 anti-bandit bag: the cord that the couriers wore was comically obvious. Perhaps for this reason, the invention was never purchased.

Yet this was not the only anti-bandit bag to receive media hype, then disappear. In 1963, The Manager and other publications described a spinoff—the Pug anti-bandit bag—that, rather than smoke, ejected the contents of a bag once a thief grabbed it.

Invented by John H. T. Rinfret, who was purportedly a frequent target of robberies, the Pug anti-bandit bag featured a spring attached to the handle. If a thief tried to steal the bag, the courier needed only to crook their thumb, and the bag flew open, its contents spewing everywhere. Presumably, this would frighten away the robber, and the day would be saved.

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

Shaming very good animals is one of the internet’s favorite pastimes, and now the National Aquarium of New Zealand is doing it IRL, with a public notice board that praises and shames their penguins.

As shared on their Facebook page, and all aroundthe internet afterwards, the National Aquarium of New Zealand posts the name and actions of both a naughty and a good penguin each month. On Saturday, for example, the sign congratulated a penguin named Betty for being a good swimmer and for waiting patiently for her fish, though just above that was Timmy, who was guilty of pushing another penguin and stealing fish.

The aquarium houses a collection of little blue penguins, also known as “fairy penguins,” which are native to New Zealand and Australia. It's not clear whether they are markedly more naughty than their Antarctic cousins, but if you want to decide for yourself, the aquarium allows small groups to view the daily feedings. The humans at least, are expected to be on their best behavior.

An estimated 200 rhesus macaques live in and around Silver Springs State Park in Ocala, Florida, the remnants of an entrepreneur's failed 1930s plan to make the monkeys part of a riverboat attraction. The monkeys' population has been growing for years, and they have recently been spotted outside the park in nearby places like The Villages, where over 150,000 people—most of them retired—live.

But the monkeys, who are largely a peaceful bunch, are also wild animals, meaning that a wrong move during an encounter can lead to some aggression, and, for you, possibly, some fear. Take the Ramsey family, who was spending time in the park on June 29, when they ran into a pack of monkeys who weren't terribly excited to see them.

No one was hurt, but Susie Ramsey told WFTS that weren't any signs indicating that monkeys might be around, and she was a little irritated about it "because they're obviously very aggressive."

Ramsey also said that her family didn't do anything to provoke the attack.

Experts say the best way to avoid a monkey attack is to stand your ground, open your palms—indicating that you aren't carrying food—and to not look the monkey in the eye or bare your teeth, both of which can be signs of aggression.

Also, don't run and scream, which will make them even more aggressive. Stay calm. You'll get through this.

The last time a tsunami hit Puerto Rico, it was 1918 and an earthquake had just shaken the northwest coast of the island, initiating a disaster that killed 116 and caused $4 million (about $70 million today) in damages. Afterward, residents in small towns like Aguadilla and Mayagüez had to ask the government for money to help rebuild homes and businesses, filing forms that later ended up in boxes, forgotten in the General Archives in San Juan. Now, nearly 100 years later, the forms are being used by seismologists to get a clearer picture of the natural disaster that can help plan for the next one.

"The layout of [Aguadilla] is pretty much the same as it was in 1918," said seismologist Roland LaForge, a coauthor of the report, in a statement. The forms include street addresses or neighborhoods, so LaForge and his collaborator were able to match them with modern locations and map just how the quake and tsunami affected the town.

Information about the damage caused by the tsunami is especially important. Aguadilla is a coastal town, so officials need to know how a future tsunami would behave. The 1918 data confirms the tsunami inundation spared buildings that were built four or more meters (13 feet) about sea level, which are also likely to be safe in another disaster. Descriptions of the damage caused, coupled with knowledge of the architecture of the time, could also help scientists get a sense of exactly how the ground moved. There's plenty, in other words, seismologists hope to learn.

"The dataset in general is a real gold mine," LaForge said.

Construction workers in New York City were working on digging a foundation for a new building when they unearthed the most cartoonish-looking torpedo imaginable, reports NBC News. It looked as much like a bomb as anything could—long, finned, and probably dangerous.

@NYPDnews literally found a bomb on 21st street in NYC. pic.twitter.com/nsUpoE74RS

— Pierce Streiff (@heypiercey) July 5, 2017

But when the New York Police Department came to investigate, they determined that the torpedo was harmless: it was a time capsule filled with notes and photos from 1985.

John Argento, the co-owner of the 1980s club Danceteria, famous for its celebrity regulars and late-night parties, bought the missile shell from an Army Supply store on Canal Street for $200. It hung from the club’s ceiling and inspired two great parties, Argento says—one to fill the capsule with Polaroid photos and notes to people 10,000 years in the future, the other to bury the shell, in a gravel lot where Argento parked his car, New York reports.

The Danceteria crew never meant to dig the capsule back up, although about 10 years ago, Argento checked on it, only to find the place had been capped with concrete.

According to New York, the contents of the missile may have met the fate of so many well-intentioned time capsules—water may have seeped in and ruined the lot.

Quick: try to define a tree. How big is it? What's it made of? How is it different than a bush?

Tricky, isn't it? Several Australian councils found this out the hard way recently while trying to work together on a large road-building project, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The WestConnex motorway project aims to build about 10 miles of new tunnels connecting different roads in Sydney, as well as to widen and extend some of those roads. As per the project agreement, trees chopped down to make way for the new construction are supposed to be replaced as often as possible.

Five different councils were working together to move one part of the project forward—but when they had to write down exactly what a tree is, they got snagged.

City of Canada Bay's council thought it was "a perennial plant with at least one self-supporting woody or fibrous stem." Strathfield's took that definition and tacked on "a height equal to or exceeding 4m."

Burwood's went number-heavy: "A woody perennial plant equal to or exceeding 4m in height with a trunk diameter equal to or exceeding 150mm measured at a distance of 1.4m above ground." And Inner West requires their trees to have "a more or less distinctly elevated crown, the main criterion being 'form' rather than 'size.'"

Eventually, the Telegraph writes, "the state government was forced to intervene," proposing their own tree definition: "a long lived woody perennial plant greater than, or usually greater than, three meters in height with only one or relatively few main stems or trunks."

Everyone was cool with that—although it seems no one asked the trees.

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.

Here’s a very fun game to play: Take a list of cities with unusual demonyms—that’s the category of words describing either a person from a certain place, or a property of that place, like New Yorker or Italian—and ask people to guess what the demonym is. Here are some favorites I came up with, with the help of historical linguist Lauren Fonteyn, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. It’s tilted a bit in favor of the U.K. for two reasons. First is that Fonteyn lives and works there, and second is that the U.K. has some excellently weird ones. The answer key is at the bottom.

1. Glasgow, Scotland
2. Newcastle, England
3. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
4. Liverpool, England
5. Leeds, England
6. Wolverhampton, England
7. Madagascar
8. Halifax, Canada
9. Barbados

Demonyms are personal and vital to our conceptions of ourselves. Few things are more important to our identities than where we’re from. This explains why people invariably feel the need to correct anyone who gets their demonym wrong. “It's understudied but it's kind of important,” says Fonteyn, who is originally from Belgium. “I moved to Manchester and had no idea what the demonym was. And if you do it wrong, people will get very, very mad at you.”

The demonym for people from or properties of Manchester is “Mancunian,” which dates back to the Latin word for the area, “Mancunium.” It is, like the other fun demonyms we’re about to get into, irregular, which means it does not follow the accepted norms of how we modify place names to come up with demonyms. In other words, someone has to tell you that the correct word is “Mancunian” and not “Manchesterian.”

A major problem with the entire system of demonyms is that it’s almost entirely ad-hoc, a mess of words cobbled from mostly archaic languages. Typically, though not in every case, the way we turn a place name into a demonym, at least in English, is with a suffix. The suffix -an or -ian, as in “Canadian,” “Mexican,” and “German,” comes from Latin. The suffix -er comes from, linguists think, Proto-Germanic, the Northern European precursor to Germanic languages like English, German, and Dutch. Originally it was something like -ware or -waras, but eventually was turned into the -er suffix we see in “New Yorker,” Londoner,” and “Berliner.”

Other less common ones came from other sources. From Old French we get -ois, as in “Québécois” and “Seychellois.” Also from Old French is -ese, as in “Chinese” and “Portuguese.” Proto-Germanic also gave us -ish, as in “Scottish” and “Swedish.” From Ancient Greek we get -ite, which is found in “Brooklynite” and the somewhat irregular “Muscovite” (that’s someone from Moscow, Russia).

Demonyms usually end in a suffix like that, but there are hardly any rules as to which place names get which suffixes. Sometimes there’s some historical connection with the base language of one of the suffixes—“Venetian,” say, because Venice has Roman and Latin roots—but sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes we pick a certain suffix to make a demonym easier to say, as in “Peruvian,” because nobody wants to struggle to say “Peruer.” Sometimes we don’t! The demonym for Dubai is “Dubaiite.”

And things get way worse than that, because not only does the suffix not necessarily follow any rules, but the actual place name itself often changes, as in Manchester’s switch to Mancunian.

From our list, let’s take Glasgow, which boasts the irregular demonym “Glaswegian.” “That one is formed through something we call analogy,” says Fonteyn. Analogy in the linguistic sense is sort of like your classic SAT question analogy: as A is to B, Y is to Z. Let’s take the words “drive” and “dive” for example. The past tense of “drive” has always been slightly unusual in that it’s “drove.” But the past tense of “dive” is not supposed to be unusual—it’s supposed to be “dived.” But because “drive” and “dive” sound so similar, Americans saw an analogy between those two words, and invented the word “dove.”

Glasgow is similar. The demonym “Glaswegian” comes, linguists think, as an analogy of the Irish city of Galway. “Glasgow” and “Galway” are two fairly similar looking words. And Galway has long had its own analogy with another similar-looking word: Norway. Galway’s demonym is “Galwegian,” as an analogy of “Norwegian.” So “Glaswegian” is a sort of a photocopy-of-a-photocopy of Norwegian. Not something anyone could ever guess!

Other irregular U.K. demonyms come from ancient names of those places. “Mancunian” is a well-known one, but Fonteyn actually played the “guess the demonym” game with me about a weirder one: Leeds. I thought about it, realized I had never heard it, so took a guess. Leedsian?

Nope. It’s “Leodensian,” which comes from an old Celtic language.

Another good one is the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, usually just referred to as Newcastle. Newcastle is an extremely interesting demonym place because it actually has two demonyms. A more formal one in the same general spirit as “Leodensian” is the demonym “Novocastrian,” basically a direct Latin translation of “Newcastle.”

But the much more common demonym for people from Newcastle is so wildly irregular that it fits into a totally new section of demonyms. These I have decided to call the reappropriated demonyms. And Newcastle’s is “Geordie.”

Reappropriated demonym is not an official linguistic term, because demonyms, being understudied, are lacking some terminology. But it’s a useful categorization for some of the most fun demonyms out there. “The ones with the really weird demonyms for some reasons tend to originate in places that are talked about with a certain scorn,” says Fonteyn. These are poorer places, or places with large immigrant populations, or places with lower levels of education, or even just places with specific, unique dialects. They are, basically, the places that New Yorkers and Londoners—you’ll note that those are not irregular demonyms—mock.

Once these places are established as somewhere that is mocked, and mocked in a specific way, those terms might get reappropriated. If those jerk elitists in the big city think we’re all dirtbags, by god, we’re going to call ourselves the Dirtbaggers! Dirtbaggians!

The precise history of “Geordie” isn’t exactly clear, but most sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, pin it to the fact that in 19th-century Newcastle, as the city grew during the Industrial Revolution, there were, um, many people named George. So people outside the city, in stereotyping and generally being rude to the Novocastrians, referred to them as “George.” As the British love to do, eventually it got a diminutive—that “-ie”—added onto the end and the second “g” was inexplicably replaced with a “d.”

Eventually the Novocastrians reclaimed the demonym and took pride in being called a bunch of Georges. Fonteyn ran a couple of collated searches for me in which she looked at the type of adjective most associated with different demonyms in news stories and on Twitter. What she found was that Geordie, today, is informal, but can be used for both positive and negative things. You can be a “proud” Geordie, or a “true” Geordie, or an “adopted” Geordie. Or you can be “shirtless,” “partying,” or “naughty.” (The word “Geordie” became known worldwide thanks to the U.K.’s Jersey Shore knockoff, Geordie Shore. So it’s not always positive.) But on the whole, says Fonteyn, “tentatively I would say that it’s been properly reappropriated.”

There are examples of reappropriated demonyms all over the world, and usually these are the ones with the best backstories. There’s “Yinzer,” in Pittsburgh: Pittsburghers are one of the many groups to have come up with a solution to English’s lack of a second-person plural. But instead of going with “y’all,” as did the American South, Pittsburghers created their very own: “yinz,” a corruption of “you ones.” The word is so associated with the city of Pittsburgh and nowhere else that Pittsburghers have taken pride in it and become known as Yinzers.

In Barbados, the particular dialect of English spoken in the country also changed the demonym. The regular demonym of Barbados is “Barbadian,” but that’s hardly used at all; instead, they go with “Bajan.” This is not pronounced “bah-han,” as it would be in the Mexican state of Baja California; instead, it rhymes with “Cajun,” and is a corruption of the last three syllables of “Barbadian.” See it? Badian becomes Bajan.

Another example: the people of Liverpool. Most people are probably aware of the formal demonym for people from Liverpool, if only because of the Beatles: “Liverpudlian.” (This seems to have no more complicated root than being sort of a pun. Pool, puddle. It’s not that funny but it stuck around.) But Liverpudlians have their own version of “Yinzer” and “Geordie.” Theirs is “Scouse.”

Scouse comes from a cheap fisherman’s stew of the same name. (The word “scouse” seems to come from a word of unknown origin, “lobscouse.” Scouse does not include lobster.) Liverpool is a working-class fishing town, and scouse is the iconic dish of the dockworkers. In scorn, other people would refer to people from Liverpool as “Scousers.” Eventually it was reappropriated, though not entirely; it is still sometimes used in kind of punny British way. For example, "scouse brows" is a way Liverpudlian women do their eyebrows, plucking out all the hairs and drawing the eyebrows back in with a marker. Scouse, according to Fonteyn’s indexing on Twitter, it is not nearly as reclaimed as “Geordie,” in that it is still often used in a scornful way.

Even currently non-marginalized cities sometimes have demonyms that come from reappropriation. Ever wonder where the word “Yankee” for a New Yorker comes from? The most likely history comes from New York’s days as New Amsterdam, full of recent Dutch immigrants. At the time, two of the most popular names for Dutch folks in the New World were Jan and Kees. If you wanted to mock those Dutch jerks out in New Amsterdam, you might refer to them—regardless of their actual name—as a bunch of Jan Kees. Jan, of course, is pronounced “yahn,” and was eventually Anglicized into “Yankee.”

One of the most interesting demonym quirks is associated with the Ancient Greek suffix, -ite. Unlike the reappropriated demonyms, the regular ones, like Italian or Welsh, are typically neutral. The word “Italian” carries no positive or negative connotation in itself—it is simply a factual way of describing the people or a property of a place. But -ite is not neutral; it is, weirdly, negative.

“This is extremely puzzling,” says Fonteyn. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the -ite ending as “slightly contemptuous,” and Wiktionary declares it “sometimes pejorative.” I took a look through Twitter myself to see about that.

Tweets using the demonym “New Yorker” are not notably positive or negative. But “Manhattanite” and “Brooklynite,” both of which have no particular reason to mean anything besides “person or property of this place,” are both strikingly negative. Words associated with “Manhattanite” include “wealthy,” “pampered,” “gilded,” “lily white,” and “entitled.” The same feeling of rich snobbery happens with “Londonite.” The more historically working-class -ite places, like Brooklynite and New Jerseyite, take the same forms as the reappropriated demonyms: a lot of words such as “proud,” “true,” and “native.” This does not happen with other regular suffixes such as, say, “Bostonian” or “Parisian,” big cities whose demonyms are primarily neutral.

I have no idea why -ite is weird. But not understanding something about demonyms seems, even after studying them, to be pretty par for the course.

ANSWER KEY

1. Glaswegian
2. Novocastrian or Geordie
3. Pittsburgher or Yinzer
4. Liverpudlian or Scouser
5. Leodensian
6. Wulfrunian
7. Malagasy
8. Haligonian
9. Bajan

Mike Ziegler is a collector and (apparently) a Nirvana superfan. One website once called him "probably the internet's most prestigious Nirvana trader of all time." Ziegler deals in videotapes, pictures, set lists, and other artifacts and ephemera from the time when grunge music was just beginning to form. Just check out his impressive collection of Nirvaniana.

His latest find is a videotape made on January 24, 1988, which shows the now-legendary band performing in an empty RadioShack in Aberdeen, Washington, a day after they recorded their first demo. But the video isn't a live show, it's what might happen in any teen's bedroom at any given moment—a pantomime of rocking out.

As you'll notice, Kurt Cobain jumps a bunch, and bassist Krist Novoselic also seems to be playing along—but their instruments aren't plugged in. It's only the drummer, Dale Crover, best known for playing with the band Melvins, who's actually making any noise. (Dave Grohl didn't join them on drums until the next year.) Recorded just a day after a show at the Community World Theater in Tacoma, which Ziegler also uploaded footage of here, this was intended to be a music video "of sorts," according to Ziegler.

Ziegler doesn't name the person who shot the film, but says he's always on the hunt for other recordings.

"If you happen have a Nirvana tape that you recorded that has been sitting in a closet/attic/basement for 25+ years, let me know," he wrote yesterday. "Happy to help get it properly archived and shared with the world."

Four years after the video was shot, Nirvana's Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous at the top of the charts, paving the way for the band to become, arguably, the biggest rock band in the world. RadioShack didn't know what they had.

Zooxanthellae have a pretty sweet deal. The photosynthetic algae live within corals, and supply their hosts with food in exchange for shelter and nutrients. In shallow waters, the corals even produce glowing fluorescent proteins that act as sunscreen for their microscopic tenants. Corals found as deep as 165 meters (541 feet) also glow, but their algae don't really need sun protection because it's so dark at that depth. Until now, these deep glowing corals were a bit of a mystery, but new research shows that, like their shallower cousins, these corals are also trying to help their algae out.

"Corals need special features to adjust to life in these low-light depths for the benefit of their vital photosynthetic partners," said Jörg Wiedenmann, a researcher at University of Southampton and coauthor of the report, in a press release. In the dark depths, most of the light that penetrates from the surface is in the blue part of the spectrum. There, the corals' proteins absorb this blue light and emit orange-red light instead. The organge-red light provides more fuel for photosynthesis for the resident algae. In a lab, these orange-red fluorescing corals were more likely to survive than neighbors that don't glow.

And now researchers are exploring other uses for these fluorescent proteins. They can also be used to help cancer and HIV researchers, who use such glowing proteins to help identify living cells under a microscope. It may not be as great a deal as the one zooxanthellae get, but it's not bad.

Charles I, the 17th-century monarch most famous for dismissing the English Parliament and ushering in the reign of Oliver Cromwell, was a fashionable man. He sported elaborate, French-style clothing: breeches, slashed doublets, lace collars, long boots. He could often be found with a “sky-blue ribbon” around his waist and a gold-enameled pendant bearing 42 diamonds. But Charles’ most enduring fashion legacy is the giant pearl earring he donned from early life until death.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, earrings were somewhat in vogue among select wealthy English men, a trend borrowed from France. Goldsmith Louis Roupert wore an earring in one ear—as did Earl of Somerset Robert Carr and Duke of Buckingham George Villiers, who was also a friend of Charles I. Sir Walter Raleigh, meanwhile, had pearl earrings in both ears. In 1577, the British history compendium Holinshed’s Chronicles described “some lusty courtiers also and gentlemen of courage… [who] wear either rings of gold, stones, or pearls, in their ears, whereby they imagine the workmanship of God to be no little amended.”

But those few men who wore earrings certainly did not represent the majority. The prominence of earrings in England—a style that was revived in the 16th century after a nearly 600-year hiatus—was predominantly driven by women. In fact, some report that King James I, the predecessor of Charles I, abhorred the sight of men in earrings.

Still, Charles’ earring was nothing to sneeze at: in an era during which pearls were extremely valuable, his was an astonishing five-eights of an inch long and a rare pear shape. On it rested a gold crown, plus an orb and a cross.

Charles, debuted his earring at the age of 15. In the decades following, it appeared in nearly every portrait of him—always just the one earring, and always worn in his left ear.

The showy and sizable jewel contrasted with his shy personality, but Charles refused to part with it. The earring became such a staple of his fashion that he wore it to his execution in 1649, after Oliver Cromwell put him on trial for treason. Though some claim that the jewel inspired a mob—“as soon as his head had fallen, the witnesses of the dreadful scene rushed forward, ready to imbue their hands in his blood in order to secure the royal jewel”—this was almost certainly not the case. The earring remained intact until his body was prepared for burial, when it was removed and sent to his daughter Mary.

From there, the earring reached Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne William Cavendish. It remains in his collection today, now under the ownership of the Dukes of Portland.

Not long after Charles' death, male earrings seem to have fallen out of fashion. By the 1660s, they had disappeared. But they had somewhat of an afterlife: for a short period after that disappearance, “the exquisites of the Court wore two or three strings of black silk in the left ear, hanging down to the shoulder.”

Angelina Jones filled up her jug with water from the pump and walked with Rocky, her dog, over to her graves.

Her family, the Keens, have massive, stone “cradle graves”—a fad back when they were buried, in the mid-19th century. Towering, stately headstones are attached to bathtub-like extensions. The Keens’ graves are full of soil and all manner of flowers and greenery, which Jones sprinkled with water. She comes to the Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia regularly to tend to the Keens’ graves, despite having no connection to them, familial or otherwise. She and her husband were randomly assigned the Keens family when they became grave gardeners.

Originally a botanist’s estate in the 18th century, the Woodlands was converted into a rural cemetery in the 1840s. People still get buried at the cemetery today, but less frequently than in its heyday 150 years ago. The grave gardener program here is only in its second year. Accepted gardeners—150 out of 250 applicants this year—are assigned a cradle grave or two to tend as if it were a dear relative’s final resting place. It’s a creative outlet for city dwellers who may not have space for a garden at home, and it brightens up the cemetery.

“There’s two groups of people,” says Jessica Baumert, the executive director of the cemetery. “There are the ones that think this is the coolest thing ever, like when you tell them you do this, and there’s the ones that think it’s the weirdest thing ever.” Everyone who signs up automatically falls in the former camp, she says, so naturally they all become friends.

Accepted gardeners must attend workshops on novice gardening, the history of rural landscape cemeteries like the Woodlands, and 19th-century plants. This year they also had a workshop at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania so gardeners could find information about the people buried in the graves they are assigned.

“It really helps it fit into our interpretation, but it also makes gardeners feel more connected to the site and they end up being really good liaisons for us to the community,” Baumert says.

Maya Arthur, a rising senior at the nearby University of Pennsylvania, said she’s found a community among the other gardeners through the planting advice they give one another in-person and on their Facebook group. Gardening her graves has allowed her to escape the stressful atmosphere at Penn.

A common refrain from people who frequent the Woodlands is that if you walk far enough in among the trees and the tombs, you can’t even hear the city.

Arthur described gardening her graves as “really f**king weird and really nice,” and hopes she’s respecting her residents, Harry and Elizabeth Straw, who are buried beside their five-year-old son, also named Harry. Back in April, before school was over and she left for an internship in California (a friend who is also a grave gardener waters and maintains her graves while she’s away), Maya had poppies and Johnny jump-ups sprouting in the cradle graves, and she had just planted some bee balm, snapdragons and creeping phlox.

Many of the other graves have similar plants, and they aren’t arbitrary choices. All of the plants in the graves are historically accurate, and come from a list that Baumert created.

For Elizabeth Womack, being limited to popular 19th-century flowers and plants was the most exciting part of becoming a grave gardener. She is a scholar of the Victorian era, and teaches at Penn State Brandywine.

Right now, Womack is working on an article about the types of plants people grew in 19th-century London, in parks and window boxes.

“When I saw the kind of plants that they were ordering for this project, there’s a lot of overlap, the same plants that people were growing in 19th century London—lady slippers, geraniums … It was kind of fun to do that work and then see what it was like to plant them in a Victorian context.”

Gardening her grave—of a 20-year-old bride who died from consumption—is like watching her research come to life. Cemeteries also don’t creep her out. She calls them “parks with reading material.” But she hasn’t been able to approach every aspect of grave gardening with scholarly distance. Womack says she saw it “almost impossible to look at” the graves of children when she first started.

“It made those deaths feel so real and so immediate and I found that very painful when I was thinking about my own son,” she says. But soon it became impossible for her to avoid looking at them, because two children’s cradle graves are near her own grave garden.

“I finally had to start planting something there because the neglect felt painful,” she says. “What I found is gardening those spaces was kind of healing. Ever since my son was born I felt this really acute pain when I contemplate the deaths of children. There was something about tending to those graves that helped me acknowledge that possibility in a compassionate way.”

Scuba divers from across the globe flock to Angelita Cenote, an underwater cave along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, to witness an unusual mirage: a river in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Located about 30 meters below the water's surface at Angelita Cenote, the "river" is actually the result of a hydrogen sulphide cloud at the halocline, the point where the saltwater and freshwater in the cave meet. Both the freshwater and saltwater came to be trapped in the cave because of a sinkhole, which was caused by a limestone collapse. Organic chemicals—which are suspended at the halocline because of the salinity change—create the foggy layer that has the appearance of a river, concealing clear saltwater beneath.

The photographer Anatoly Beloshchin took these haunting shots of the quote-unquote river.

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

Like something out of a fable, one little fox seems to have been trying to pay his respects to the dead in the English town of Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, when it recently got its head wedged between a pair of headstones.

Inspector McCormick rescued this fox from the grave mistake it made by gently sliding it up the gap. Released to the wild uninjured. 42 pic.twitter.com/Jn9AJ3pl7D

— RSPCA Frontline (@RSPCA_Frontline) June 29, 2017

The crafty canid was discovered last week by someone at St. Mary Magdalene Church graveyard, who quickly contacted Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, according to the BBC,

The RSPCA said that it was unclear how the fox got stuck there, but that it probably had been like that since at least the night before, since foxes tend to be nocturnal animals. Luckily, while its head was wedged firmly between two stone slabs, it was seemingly uninjured.

Once an inspector freed the animal, it bounded back off into the woods. The moral of this tale: don’t go looking for food in a graveyard.