Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11437 articles
Browse latest View live

Arizona's (No Longer) Mysterious Monkey Farm

0
0

On Saturday, July 1, a YouTube user named Jesse posted some mysterious footage of a monkey farm in Mesa, Arizona.

"It has been reported this facility is closed and has been abandoned but as you can clearly see it's still open and housing monkeys as of July 1, 2017," the user wrote. Armed with that video and a few others, local media jumped on the story, because who doesn't like an abandoned monkey farm mystery.

"Primates found living in Mesa facility - but who is caring for them?" ABC15wondered on July 3, and went on quote one of the drone pilots, in an utterance that can only be described as very reflective of 2017. "Everything I read on the internet, that it was abandoned, and monkeys left there eating each other, that's what intrigued me to go look and see," the anonymous drone user said.

Another said, "It just makes you wonder, why they're out there. Why so many? Why has nobody heard of it? Why are they hidden and tucked away?"

ABC15 aspired to due diligence. The station's reporters reached out to local officials and quoted an anonymous contractor who said that the University of Washington owns the site, and that the monkeys are, in fact, being cared for. But no official comment on the matter came, perhaps because of the long holiday weekend. The mystery, such as it was, lingered.

Finally, on July 6, the Arizona Republicwent deeper and confirmed that the site—formerly a chimpanzee sanctuary—is indeed operated by the University of Washington, as a breeding facility for pigtail macaques. There are 368 macaques there, cared for by a staff of around 20 vets and other personnel. They are being bred for research conducted in Seattle by the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A university spokeswoman also told the Republic that the facility is regularly inspected by the USDA, and is air-conditioned and provides the monkeys free rein. All of this suggests it's not the dystopian monkey death camp one might imagine after doing some freelance internet research—not that the facility's real purpose was much of a secret online either.

The mystery was fun while it lasted.


The Rat-Related Internet Outage in Ontario

0
0
article-image

When students at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario found themselves unable to get online this past weekend, some of them may have shouted "Rats!"

They were right. According to the CBC, rats chewed through the school's fiber optic cables and brought down the network.

Luc Roy, Laurentian's chief information officer, figured out the problem. After addressing it, he had some advice for the perps: "If there's a rat listening, I would caution it [not] to eat fibre because it's glass at the end of the day," he told the CBC.

article-image

Roy also suggested that this type of outage be named a "rat," just as a software glitch is called a "bug."

It's not a bad idea—rodents are constantly interrupting human festivities by chewing wires, whether it's mice decommissioning air conditioners, rats eating Volvos, or squirrels gnawing through Christmas lights. Wildlife control expert Bill Dowd told the CBC it's because they're attracted to new, eco-friendly wire coatings, which are commonly made of soy.

But it could also, of course, be part of a larger plan.

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.

At Tom Thumb Weddings, Children Get Faux-Married to Each Other

0
0

Featuring fancy dress, generous parties and disturbingly age-appropriate vows, “Tom Thumb weddings” are oddly anachronistic plays in which young children pretend to marry each other. These plays (not unlike the fake wedding George-Michael and Maeby put on to entertain Alzheimer’s patients in Arrested Development) have been put on for community crowds in America for more than a hundred years, and are still performed today in a manner largely unchanged from their 19th-century origins.

The ritual takes its name and inspiration from Charles Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb, a Connecticut-born man with dwarfism who made his considerable fame in P.T. Barnum's employ and who in February 1863 married Lavinia Warren, a fellow little person, in a posh New York ceremony nicknamed the "Fairy Wedding.”

article-image

Stratton was a gifted performer who could sing, dance, perform a riotous pantsless routine in which he impersonated Grecian statues, and command the fancy of women the world over, to whom he swore he was a general in “Cupid’s artillery.” His biographer estimates that over four decades of fame, Stratton performed for more than 50 million people in two dozen countries. Even Queen Victoria adored him.

Enthusiasm and curiosity swamped criticism of the wedding as a commercialized sideshow, and the Fairy Wedding was a sensation, knocking Civil War news off the New York Times’ front page for three days straight.

There was a miniature silver horse and chariot from Tiffany & Co. as a wedding gift; President Lincoln received the couple afterwards; and the New York Times remarked:

"Those who did and those who did not attend the wedding of Gen. Thomas Thumb and Queen LAVINIA WARREN composed the population of this great Metropolis yesterday, and thenceforth religious and civil parties sink into comparative insignificance before this one arbitrating query of fate—Did you or did you not see Tom Thumb married?”

And indeed, Tom Thumb’s extraordinary wedding would be his lasting legacy, though certainly not in the way he or anyone else would have expected. Stratton died in 1883, and the idea of a theatrical child-wedding as his oddball memorial appeared not long after, taking root particularly in churches and community organizations during the 1890s.

In 1898, the tradition had enough purchase that the Walter H. Baker Company printed a small pamphlet as a do-it-yourself guide to the definitive Tom Thumb Wedding. (Claiming 1898 copyright, the publishers scoff at such rank imitations as “The Marriage of the Tots,” “The Jennie June Wedding,” and “The Marriage of the Midgets.”)

article-image

The play envisions a full retinue of wedding participants, with as many as 40 or 50 children recommended for a successful performance: a minister, bride and groom, maid of honor, groomsman, wedding party, ushers, flower-girls, and guests, all well-rehearsed and dressed in their best evening wear.

In Baker’s script the young bride and groom are referred to as “Tom Thumb” and “Jennie June”–an allusion to Stratton’s character and an uncomfortable erasure of Warren’s, which does not bode well for the feminist character of the overall ceremony. And indeed, the vows are as wearisome as you might think: bad marriage jokes for the benefit of the grown-ups, punctuated with tired stereotypes about progressive womanhood and the old ball-and-chain.

Tom takes Jennie, harridan princess: “for better, but not worse, for richer, but not poorer, so long as your cooking does not give me the dyspepsia, and my mother-in-law does not visit oftener than once in a quarter.” (Millinery budget is to be covered by the bride’s father, “out of gratitude for not having you left upon his hands in the deplorable station of a helpless spinster.”)

Jennie takes Tom, eye-rolling Honeymooner, “provided that you do not smoke or drink; provided that you will never mention how your mother used to cook, or sew on buttons, or make your shirt-bosoms shine; provided that you carry up coal three times a day, put out the ashes once a week, bring up the tub, and put up and take down the clothes-line on wash-day, and perform faithfully all other duties demanded by a ‘new woman’ of the nineteenth century.”

At this the pair is pronounced married, and everyone bows and recesses.

article-image

Baker & Co.’s copyright warnings aside, the pageants were wildly popular. In smaller communities, a Tom Thumb wedding was often the only show in town; at events like the annual “baby parade” at Asbury Park, New Jersey, they could draw crowds in the thousands.

Commentary and history suggest that the dramatic practice of Tom Thumb weddings began, and grew, in order to teach children about religious or moral values; to model adult conduct and institutions; to offer entertainment and community fundraising potential; and because there was no Netflix to binge. Over time, the event decorated itself with different bells and whistles: sometimes fairytale or cartoon characters attended, sometimes there was singing; and very often there was an ice cream feast to entice the kids to cooperate.

The Hope Pioneer of North Dakota described a 1914 Tom Thumb wedding to benefit the Hope lodge of Rebekahs (a women’s service organization affiliated with the Odd Fellows). Despite the fact that the bride “got a little drowsy and fell off her lilliputian chair,” and never mind that the participants were very quickly distracted from the script by licking their dessert bowls and hiking their fancy skirts over their shoulders, the adults were surprised and delighted by the whole affair. When all was said and done, the lodge took in $75 (about $1,800 today).

article-image

The tradition appears to have quieted down in the wake of World War I; and only popped up in any appreciable media sense again in the 1980s, at which point the jokes modernized even if the concept hadn’t: one Philadelphia “wedding” in 1982 purported to marry three child couples: the Flintstones, the Smurfs and the Jeffersons.

Even today, Tom Thumb’s bizarre, infantilizing legacy continues; though as the practice has continued into the current era, the scripts have revealed what really matters to keep the tradition going: today, vows have been known to negotiate terms not around chores or gender roles so much as snacks, Nintendo, and parental rewards for playing along with the whole notion.

Norway's Destroyed Penis Rock Rises Again

0
0

A couple of weeks ago one or more vandals destroyed Trollpikken, a rock formation that resembles a phallus and is beloved by locals in Eigersund, Norway, around 200 miles southwest of Oslo.

Undeterred, residents started a crowdfunding campaign to rebuild the rock, and eventually raised 226,000 kroner (around $27,000). On Friday, the broken chunk of rock was raised and reattached to its former anatomical glory.

The work was important enough to be livestreamed for the world to see:

According to the Associated Press, it will take around a week for the iron wedges and concrete to set, but that once they do, the rock will once again be safe to climb onto. Long live Trollpikken.

Found: A Purse Hidden in the Library Walls Since 1966

0
0

A librarian on Chicago’s North Shore was presented with a mystery, found in the building’s walls. When a crew was renovated the HVAC system, they found a black purse, the Daily North Shore reports.

Inside, there were a few objects—a lipstick, an earring, a pencil, two photos, and a reservation ticket for the dentist’s office, on a Tuesday, October 11.

The photos showed a younger girl and an older woman, but most helpful clue so far was the ticket for the dentist’s. It turns out that there was only one Tuesday, October 11 in history when dentist Arthur S. Dunn was at the number listed on the card. That was in 1966.

The card also had a name—Ellen Pritikin. Between the photos and that last clue, the library is hoping to find the original owner.

How the purse ended up in the wall, though, will stay a mystery. The library has been renovated enough that it’s just not clear how the purse ended up in the wall and stayed there for more than 50 years.

Hunting for Treasure in Brooklyn's Coolest Prop House

0
0
article-image

Walking into Brooklyn’s ACME Studio you have to pass a TV—displaying static and embellished with disco balls—that is half-hidden under faux-jungle underbrush that also drapes over a giant wooden skull, next to a pristine vintage motorcycle. And that’s all before you’re greeted by the bright green plastic horse.

ACME Studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn calls itself a prop house or a photo studio, but its space is more like a modern cabinet of curiosities, the walls filled with oddities and artifacts accumulated from years of careful (and not so careful) collecting.


article-image

"This horse of a different color was gifted to us, oddly enough, and has been a staple of our studio ever since! Even when wrapped up in bubble wrap and packing blankets, this unmissable shape always stops traffic when being loaded out of the back of a truck." -Brian Colgan, ACME


ACME started with a compulsive collector. Its founder, Shawn Patrick Anderson, is an accomplished set designer. “He’s always had tons of cool stuff," says Brian Colgan, ACME partner and studio director. After Anderson accumulated a wild collection of props and leftovers from sets he worked, as well as knick-knacks he picked up out in the world, he eventually had to have a warehouse to store it in. Eventually he began being approached by photographers and friends who wanted to use his space for shoots, and not long after, the idea for ACME was born.

“In the beginning we had a lot of taxidermy, just because Shawn likes taxidermy,” says Colgan. “Taxidermy is pretty fragile. A lot of the prop houses don’t have it or what they do have is pretty beat-up. I think it put us on the map somewhat.” And while their space still houses an impressive amount of intriguing taxidermy including lion, elk, and boar heads, alongside a small menagerie of other mounted critters, the space is also jam-packed with an ever-morphing assemblage of… stuff.


article-image

"The Hairy Chair, the brainchild of our founder Shawn Patrick Anderson, has become an icon of sorts for ACME. [It] never fails to delight those who encounter it—including many celebrities."


As Colgan says, in the early days of the company, they really tried to keep everything they would find or collect from older sets, but this soon proved unsustainable. “In the beginning, we were just [taking cool things]. Then we realized, no one really wants an 800-pound barber chair from the 1920s,” he says. Now they tend to pick the items they buy for the warehouse with a more directed eye towards what their clients, who range from fashion photographers to television shows, might want.

While the company is branching out into supplying props for more television and film, ACME has built its portfolio mainly in the world of print, magazines, fashion, and increasingly events. Colgan says that they pride themselves on being able to find anything for anyone’s needs, and sometimes that means renting out something from their collection, sourcing items from other houses, or creating it themselves. However, sometimes people want things that they just have no answer for. There is a running list of the strangest requests in their office, which includes things like “11 gold bong trophies,” “fake money and Space Jam characters,” and “interactive coffee tables.” They have a lot of items, but even ACME is hard pressed to provide a “front of Batmobile.”


article-image

"A lot of our vintage luggage has names written inside or other little identification markers of those who once owned them. It's fun to think of who may have owned a lot of the items we have, but there's something especially romantic luggage with history."


Rather than relying solely on thrift-store finds and photoshoot cast-offs, Colgan, Anderson, and their staff now source new items for their collection from places like eBay, Craigslist, Etsy, and estate sales. With such diverse customer needs, and constantly growing collection, it’s hard to decide what to keep around, and what to get rid of. Colgan tells the story of a dozen or so human-height pencils that they acquired for an Oprah Magazine shoot. “We held on to them for about six months, and then finally we were going to get rid of them, and the next day, someone was like, ‘Do you have 10 or 12 huge pencils?’”


article-image

"Although it doesn't go out all that much, I love this stool. It has a dozen or so metal bars that connect to the top, and go into a hole in the bottom. If you flip the stool over, all the metal bars slide out. I've never for the life of me figured out why it is designed this way, although I assume it has an industrial reason rather than just amusing me."


Today, some seven years after becoming a prop business, ACME has a reputation not just for taxidermy, but for unique items, whether that’s a handcrafted macrame wall-hanging (a personal favorite of Colgan’s), or a pair of retro-futuristic binoculars. And the collection continues to grow and morph. “We have a lot of funky stuff, that’s sort of what we’re known for, but we’re starting to get a little more clean, more modern. Mid-century stuff is really popular [right now],” says Colgan.

Prior to working at ACME, Colgan prided himself on his lack of belongings, but now he says his apartment looks more like the artfully cluttered prop studio. “I’m a collector of stuff now,” he says. And as for Anderson, Colgan says that even if the prop business was no longer around, the collection of curiosities itself would likely still thrive. “He has a limitless appetite for acquiring cool things and finding cool things. He’s always on the hunt.”

This Russian Castle Is Actually a Kindergarten

0
0

Since 2013, 150 Russian kindergarteners have been attending a school that resembles a castle. Found in a rural farming settlement in Russia's Leninsky district, the school was designed to imitate the Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, except with more colors.

Among its features are multiple playgrounds, playhouses, a soccer field, and a garden. The school stretches over 6,000 square meters and has a monthly tuition of 21,800 rubles (which, to drive costs down, the Russian government subsidizes).

The school is intended to promote social optimism among its students. According to its website, each month is themed—for instance, September revolves around orienting students to the worlds of education and professional careers.

The Russian Minister of Education named the school the best of its kind.

You can also take a virtual tour of on the official website.

article-image
article-image
article-image

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

Meet California's Three Newest Wolf Pups

0
0
article-image

One of northern California's wolf packs has grown this year. The three fuzzy gray wolf pups are the newest additions to the Lassen Pack and were captured playing and following after their mother by a U.S. Forest Service trail camera last week.

Their mother was captured by California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists right before the photos were taken so she could be collared for tracking. The collar allows biologists to follow her movements and learn more about her food preferences, and they noted that she had recently given birth. After she was released, biologists went back out into the field to check up her. They saw that her prints were accompanied by pup paw prints too. The nearby trail camera provided the first glimpse of the young wolves.

article-image

The Lassen Pack is one of two in California, and the first wolves to live in the region since 1924. These three pups likely also have a famous grandfather, a wolf known as OR-7. OR-7 was born in northeastern Oregon sometime in 2009, and he's since traveled hundreds of miles, and was the first wolf to reenter California. He made his way to southeastern Oregon in 2011. He eventually settled in Oregon's Rogue Valley, where he's part of a breeding pair. His son's DNA was found in scat in Lassen County.

Wolves are listed as endangered at the federal level and in California, but have been delisted in Oregon. About 110 wolves live in the state, while California's population remains small—but growing.


A Brief History of the Modern-Day Straw, the World’s Most Wasteful Commodity

0
0
article-image

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

The plastic straw is a simple invention with relatively modest value: For a few moments, the device helps make beverages easier to drink. And then, due to reasons of sanitation and ease of use, the straws are thrown away, never to be seen again.

Except, of course, the straw you use in your iced coffee doesn’t biodegrade, and stays around basically forever, often as ocean junk. That, understandably, is leading to chatter around banning plastic straws—notably in Berkeley, California, often the first place to ban anything potentially damaging to the environment.

And while the rest of the world won't be banning straws anytime soon, maybe they should start thinking about it, because the problem with straws is one of scale. According to National Geographic, Americans use 500 million straws every single day—more than one per person daily.

The resulting waste is difficult to recycle and often shows up in landfills, at sea, and on the beach.; the plastic is particularly dangerous for marine wildlife.

But it wasn’t always this way. The modern day-straw was an attempt to solve the failings of a device that was very much biodegradable. And that replacement was itself biodegradable. The problem, really, is what came after.

article-image

Marvin Stone, perhaps more than any other person, deserves credit for making artificial straws useful and popular. But he doesn’t deserve the blame for what straws have become.

Stone, a serial inventor who was known for manufacturing a variety of products with a cylinder shape, such as cigarette holders. Born in Ohio in 1842, but based in Washington, D.C., for much of his life, he launched his career as a journalist, but eventually followed his father’s inventive spirit into the realm of manufacturing. Being a D.C. resident, he was a big fan of mint juleps, a drink popularized in the city during the 19th century by famed Kentucky Senator Henry Clay. Stone would order the drinks at Aman’s, a well-known restaurant in D.C. during the era—though he was disappointed by the rye straws, which had a negative effect on his drink.

Yes, that’s right, before plastic straws, we used straws made of rye grass—produced naturally, from the ground. The manufacturing process, according to a The Small Grains, a book by Mark Alfred Carleton, was closer to wheat than plastic.

“After bleaching, the straws are assorted by hand, each individual stalk being examined, and the imperfect ones removed,“ Carleton explained. "They are then cut, the five lower joints only being utilized for drinking purposes. The sheaths are then removed, and the straw washed and bound into bundles ready for the market.”

The rye straw, while the first widely used variety of drinking straw, had some significant problems—including that the straws affected the taste of the drink and that they had a tendency to disintegrate into the beverage, leaving sediment at the bottom of the drink.

Stone was just the guy to fix the problem. He was already making cigarette holders at his nearby factory, and had recently patented a fountain pen holder, so he knew a thing or two about building cylinder-shaped objects. So he wrapped a sheet of paper around a pencil, added some glue, and suddenly he had invented the paper straw. He gave his initial supply to Aman’s for his own personal use, but found that people he ran into at the bar were impressed enough with his invention that they wanted their own. That led Stone to patent the device, and within a few years, he had cornered the market on paper straws, which became popular with the rise of soda fountains at pharmacies.

article-image

According to a 1889 article from The Lafayette Advertiser, Stone’s factory was producing 2 million straws per day not long after he filed for that patent. And when he died in 1899, Stone was well-regarded in obituaries.

“Although few pharmacists have had the pleasure of personally meeting Mr. Stone, his name is, nevertheless, known wherever there is a soda fountain,” the pharmacy trade publication The Spatula wrote at the time.

But the straws had a problem—simply, they weren’t as durable as plastic, and while they didn’t negatively affect the taste of the soda like rye straws did, they did eventually disintegrate in the beverages. By the 1960s, plastic straws, which initially carried a sense of novelty for the public because they could be made clear, had usurped the paper version entirely.

Good for plastic. Bad for the environment.


In 2017, we’re perhaps more aware than ever of the weaknesses of the plastic straw, bendable or not. And more than one entrepreneur has tried to create new alternatives that solve the problems of both paper and plastic.

Heck, one guy is even trying to bring back the rye straw!

Many of these straw varieties rely on permanence over disposability and biodegradability, which means you’ll be carrying a straw around with you—no matter how weird that seems.

Perhaps the most intriguing natural option for straw drinking is the bamboo straw. The company Brush With Bamboo, which makes a bamboo-based toothbrush (and sports support from Ed Begley Jr. on its website), also sells a set of bamboo drinking straws, which are handmade in India and designed to be reused for many years. As a result, the company sells a 12-pack of bamboo straws for $20—or more than a dollar a straw.

Other materials, like metal, have also become common straw vectors. And more than one small-scale manufacturer, like the Michigan company Strawesome, has tried selling straws made from glass. (That said, neither of these straws sound good for your teeth.)

On the disposable front, the primary alternative that’s revealed itself is corn, which has perhaps gotten the closest in terms of disposability and flexibility. Eco-Products, a Certified B Corporation, sells plastic materials to stores and other retailers made from Ingeo, a biopolymer often produced from corn that’s compostable and renewable.

article-image

While not horribly cheap compared to standard plastic straws—they sell for about a quarter a pop in small quantities—Eco-Products’ compostable straws are a lot better for the environment.

And hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, eat 'em—the straws that is. Starbucks earned a whole lot of buzz a couple years ago after it started selling cookie straws to go with its Frappuccinos, and it’s not a phenomenon that’s completely unheard of—candy straws and beef straws are things that exist. But perhaps the most natural approach to edible straw-making might be ice straws. Just make sure you don’t want a refill.

All these alternative materials are great—but the concerns about plastic have brought long-dormant paper straws back from the brink.

And you can thank an eccentric billionaire for that.


A couple years ago, I called Ted Turner“the Steve Jobs of television,” as well as a “genius,” and emphasized I was not being hyperbolic by making this claim—because what he did for television in the ‘70s was genuinely groundbreaking.

Now, while Turner no longer has the level of influence and power he once did—he no longer owns Turner Broadcasting (which he regrets), and he literally gave a billion dollars to the United Nations in 1997, which probably did a number on his checkbook—he does own a lot of land, and that land contains a lot of bison. And that means that he’s well suited for being a restaurant entrepreneur.

article-image

Ted’s Montana Grill, a chain he started in 2002, is quietly an environmental maverick—the entire chain was built around the idea of ensuring the bison would stick around for generations to come by building business value around the animal. Despite the fact you’re eating bison, it’s actually hugely beneficial for the species’ long-term survival because there’s a business case for investing in ranching bison. But beyond that, Turner and his business partner George McKerrow Jr. saw an opportunity to build an eco-friendly legacy even greater than that of Captain Planet.

And the straw is kind of the key element of the whole thing. In a 2011 interview with the podcast and news site Southeast Green, McKerrow (who is also known for starting the LongHorn Steakhouse and Capital Grille chains) explained how he helped bring the paper straw back to life as a tool of environmentalism—and how it was one of the biggest challenges he faced in his efforts to minimize the amount of plastic used by the chain.

“I remember growing up with a paper straw,” McKerrow explained in an interview with the podcast’s Beth Bond. “It collapsed a lot, but heck, it was better for the environment than a plastic straw, which might be in a landfill for a hundred-plus years, or for eternity.”

McKerrow looked online for info and soon found himself on the phone with the owner of Precision Products Group—the parent company of Paramount Tube, the direct descendant of Stone’s manufacturing company. McKerrow noted that paper straws hadn’t been manufactured anywhere since 1970, but that the firm was willing to pay top-dollar to get those straws. Precision had the equipment around, but it had fallen into disuse. But inspired by the phone call, the company pledged to check to see what was possible.

“About two weeks later, he got back to me, and he said, ‘We found that machine,’ and I could hear it in his voice that he was really excited,” McKerrow continued. “He said, ‘The engineers think that they can make it work.’”

And they did. Ted’s Montana Grill became the first company to use paper straws in more than 30 years, but the quality issues with the straws—made from paper and coated in beeswax—were still apparent, leading to customer complaints. Initially, McKerrow relented for a time, letting plastic into the cups at the restaurant, but eventually, he got a hold of Precision again, only to find that the phone call a couple years prior had led the firm to shift its entire corporate direction.

article-image

Precision, seeing a market need for eco-friendly straws, launched a brand-new subsidiary, Aardvark, to bring their paper straws back to the market.

“The story goes, we recreated a whole industry, something that was old became new again, something that was better for the environment by at least 50 percent,” McKerrow added.

They aren’t cheap—at 1.5 cents each, the cost is far above the commodity price of standard plastic straws. But in some ways, the extra cost on the front end means it’s a whole lot cheaper for the environment.


Like most people, I drink a lot of beverages on an average day, often out of cups, sometimes with straws. There’s something strangely appealing about the basic disposability of cups that you don’t have to carry around everywhere. We live in a disposable culture and we probably throw away more disposable cups than anything else.

But there are consequences to that disposability. In 2015, a sea turtle became the face of a budding anti-straw movement after a gruesome video of that turtle getting a straw removed from its nose drew millions of views online. It’s here, but a word of warning that it’s disturbing. (Aardvark launched a new bendy straw, with sea turtle art, directly inspired by the story.)

That video is one of a few reasons why we’re starting to see campaigns to cut back on straw usage pick up in a big way. It’s easy fodder for corporate responsibility campaigns—Bacardi, a company that has probably benefited more than most from the existence of straws, started one last year—and multiple nonprofit campaigns have coalesced around the issue, including The Last Plastic Straw and One Less Straw.

Which doesn't mean we have to ban straws to stop them from polluting the environment, but there is a reason to discuss changing habits. How much harder is it to drink your coffee out of a cup that you bring with you? If you end up using a straw, is there a way to get just a little bit more mileage out of that piece of plastic? And if the issue matters to you, does that affect the places you go to buy things? (And no, this isn’t a commercial for Ted Turner’s restaurant chain.)

The problem with straws are that they’re so insignificant that we take them for granted. Perhaps we shouldn’t.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

article-image

China Is Building a Solar Farm Shaped Like a Cartoon Panda

0
0
article-image

For many Americans, it’s a common worry that China will surpass us in the field of renewable energy. But maybe we should be more worried about their advancements in cuteness now that a Chinese energy company is building a solar farm shaped like a giant cartoon panda.

As Business Insider is reporting, Chinese clean energy giant China Merchants New Energy Group, along with the United Nations Development Program, recently finished the first portion of a 248-acre solar farm that will look like big panda when seen from the air. Once it is finished, the panda-plant is expected to produce 3.2 billion kilowatt-hours over 25 years, eliminating the need for around a million tons of coal.

The project is meant to help raise awareness of sustainable energy solutions among young people, especially ones who love pandas. It is hoped that this is only the first in a series of panda-shaped power farms that will continue to provide energy and hold young people's attention for years to come.

Bringing Aerial Photography to the Masses—One Squid Kite at a Time

0
0
article-image

It's a perfect July evening in Somerville, Massachusetts, a small crowd has gathered, and Jeffrey Warren's squid just won't get airborne. He tosses it into the air over and over again, waiting for a gust of wind. He tries launching it off the ramparts of the stone tower that sits at the crown of Prospect Hill. He runs it across the grass of the park that stretches out beneath. But each time the wind puffs half-heartedly and dies, and the squid—bright pink, with eight fluttering tentacles and two cartoony eyes—crumples to the ground.

You never need a reason to fly a kite. Nevertheless, Warren and his companions have one: They're testing an improved version of an old invention, an aerial rig that will let them fly a camera up with the kite and take pictures from the sky (with a method cheaper, more widely available, and less intrusive than drones).

The squid kite is part of a new kit made by Public Lab, a nonprofit that helps individuals and communities use low-cost technology to learn about their local environments. (Warren is Public Lab's cofounder and research coordinator.) What the Prospect Hill group learns tonight will help them make aerial photography easier for others—provided they can get anything in the air at all.

article-image

Public Lab is designed a bit like that squid kite—one big head, many arms. Originally started by a group of New Orleans–area DIY enthusiasts in the wake of 2010's BP oil spill, the community has grown to include people all over the world. Members in many cities hold meetups, and also experiment on their own. They tweak and build off of each other's work, and share results and new discoveries on a huge, shifting wiki. When there's enough consensus about a particular tool, Public Lab puts together a kit—bundled materials and instructions that enable ordinary people to build and use the idea themselves.

The Lab has launched a lot of projects—there are kits for 360-degree camera rigging, water-quality monitoring, and desktop spectrometry, not to mention the many experiments that can be acomplished with ordinary household materials (such as this rig for a balloon camera, which uses a coat hanger and an iced tea bottle) or that require slightly more obscure tools (such as this dust mapper, which requires an optical particle counter).

But flying things have always hovered over the proceedings. "Kite mapping and balloon mapping have been a cornerstone of the work that Public Lab does," says Bronwen Densmore, the Lab's community manager. "They are two of the things that get the most use."

article-image

Balloon and kite mapping existed before Public Lab, but over the seven years since the group's founding, its many contributors have honed a methodology, complete with personalization and contingency plans. "All of these ideas and modifications get workshopped collaboratively online and in person, and we end up with a great set of resources," says Densmore. The group on Prospect Hill has taken the advice of one online contributor—to balance the kite with a carabiner when it starts to list to one side. After the tenth or so attempt, it's finally up, candy pink against the blue sky.

As another volunteer handles the reins, Warren unpacks the rest of his gear: a tiny camera and a small plastic case. He fits the camera snugly into the case, turns on the automatic photo setting, and attaches it to the string of the kite. As the squid rises, its string unspooling like its real-life counterpart might tug a fishing line, the camera comes along, higher and higher.

Provided it descends safely, the camera will bring a lot of pictures back down, some of which are bound to be useful—or, at the very least, interesting. Since the advent of hot air balloons in the 18th century, aeronauts have known that views from above can change the way people think about the landscape and encourage a broad perspective that allows us to see how different aspects of a space fit together.

article-image

Add an environmental perspective, and the possibilities snap into focus. Public Labbers have used kites and balloons to track invading water chestnuts, coastal restoration efforts, and the progress of an oil pipeline in Western Canada. They use the insights they've gained to advocate for change, whether by tracking and reporting water pollution or documenting the sizes of protests. In the best cases, real changes occur. In southern Lebanon, a whole team has mobilized flying cameras to map the refugee camp where they live, to track overcrowding and find good locations for green space.

Often, the resulting photos inspire as many questions as they answer. When Edmund Diegel's work mapping plant cover around the Gowanus Canal revealed unexpected ice-melt patterns, he began seeking out Brooklyn's many "ghost streams," or brooks covered up during the city's construction. And as those 18th-century hot air balloon mappers knew, just viewing the place you live from a different angle can spark insights. When the camera came down and picked up a series of views of Somerville—with houses and businesses packed to the horizon—the city's status as the most densely populated space in New England was suddenly made real and visceral.

Over the years, technological progress and teamwork have combined to make perspectives like these even more accessible. "People have worked out a lot of great solutions for rigging and stabilizing [the kites and balloons], and getting different kinds of things up in the air," says Densmore. The proliferation of inexpensive, lightweight cameras has been a huge boon. "People can get started without having to look for helium tanks," says Densmore.

article-image

Still, the new mini-balloons and kites are "prototyping kits"—Public Lab–speak for "not quite there yet." Prospect Hill is acting as a proving ground, where wrinkles can be found and ironed out. And mistakes are made. On its first flight up the squid kite string, the tiny camera is upside down. On its second, it slips free and bounces off a few tree branches before it lands hard on the pavement. (And is out of commission for the evening.) "Ok, so when the line goes slack, the rigging falls out," Jeff says, clearly stowing that tidbit in his head for later. "We just did some science!" He then jogs over to a passerby: "Hey, did you see that camera fall out of the sky?"

Throughout the exercise, neighbors stop to ask questions, take a turn on the strings, or just gawk skyward for a moment. In a moment when aerial photography is often associated with furtiveness—silent drones, hidden cameras, surveillance towers—Public Lab has cultivated an contrasting ethos, from their open-source hardware to their bright pink designs.

"One thing about the kites and balloons that's really nice is that they force you to be in the space that you're mapping," says Densmore. "And they tend to spark a lot of comunity engagement, whether that's your intention or not." After all, if you see a squid in the sky, you're probably going to stop and say hello—and maybe, eventually, join the shoal.

A Professional Runner Outran Two Amateur (?) Bears

0
0

Moninda Marube, a professional runner from Kenya who is also a student at the University of Maine at Farmington, awoke before 5 a.m. on Wednesday to go for an 18-mile run.

Things were fine for about six miles—until Marube ran into two black bears on a trail near Auburn Lake. After a five-second staredown, Marube did precisely what experts say you shouldn't: He turned around and ran, according to the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal. The bears immediately gave chase, and got as close as 10 yards from Marube before he managed to lock himself in a screened porch.

Then a waiting game began.

"They could see me. I could see them," Marube told the Sun Journal. Ten minutes went by like this, as the bears sniffed around, before they suddenly peeled off into the woods. (The bears apparently didn't realize that they could easily have broken through the screens.)

Marube's close encounter with two of Maine's estimated 36,000 black bears was over, and left him with a moment of contemplation. "Just make peace with people," he told the Sun Journal. "You never know when your day comes."

Good advice.

So what should you do if you see a black bear? According to the National Park Service, stand your ground and start shouting, while beginning a slow retreat. You should also throw rocks. If the bear attacks anyway, fight with any available weapon, including your bare fists.

"Do not," they advise, "play dead."

The Hidden Rules of the Puritan Fashion Police

0
0
article-image

In 1676, Hannah Lyman was in trouble. She was among three dozen or so young women who had been summoned to court: They had flouted the laws of Connecticut colony by wearing silken hoods. Among these “overdressed” women, Lyman was, apparently, the most rebellious and strong-willed. She appeared in court wearing the very silk hood that she had been indicted for donning.

The judge was, predictably, not very happy. He accused her of “wearing silk in a flaunting manner, in an offensive way, not only before but she stood presented” at court. She and the other young women were fined for their offensive sartorial choices.

New England’s Puritan colonies had many laws restricting how citizens—particularly women—could dress. “Sumptuary laws” like these weren’t unique to that time or place; they had governed personal behavior as far back as ancient Rome. Usually sumptuary laws were enacted to control behavior in order to distinguish the high classes from the lower ones, though sometimes they were intended to keep wealthy-enough people from squandering all these resources on fashionable indulgences. Pirates’ dramatic and colorful style of dressing was, for instance, a deliberate and brazen violation of these laws.

But Puritans, being Puritan, gave sumptuary laws a particularly moral cast. Dressing in a simple manner meant avoiding the sins of pride, greed, and envy, especially for women. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne make this point explicitly when he described the scarlet “A” that Hester Prynne wore on the breast of her gown, made “in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread.” This letter, Hawthorne writes, “was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.”

article-image

The Massachusetts Bay Colony passed its first law limiting the excesses of dress in 1634, when it prohibited citizens from wearing “new fashions, or long hair, or anything of the like nature.” That meant no silver or gold hatbands, girdles, or belts, and no cloth woven with gold thread or lace. It was also forbidden to create clothes with more than two slashes in the sleeves (a style meant to reveal one’s rich and fancy undergarments). Anyone who wore such items would have to forfeit them if caught.

For decades the colony continued to refine these laws. In 1639, the colony instituted a stricter law against lace and forbade clothes with short sleeves. In the 1650s, the law became more class-conscious. Only those who had more than 200 pounds to their estates were allowed to wear gold and silver buttons and knee points, or great boots, silk hoods, or silk scarves. Exempt from the rule were magistrates and public officers, their wives and children, as well as militia officers or soldiers, and anyone else whose with advanced education or employment, or “whose estate have been considerable, though now decayed.” In 1679, the colony also started worrying about hair, since “there is manifest pride openly appearing among us by some women wearing borders of hair, and their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair.”

article-image

Massachusetts and Connecticut were not the only colonies to pass such laws. In New Jersey, by 1670, it was illegal for a woman to “betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's male subjects, by scents, paints, cosmetics, washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, or bolstered hips.” And if they did? The marriage would be “null and void.” Oh, and they would be punished exactly as if they had been convicted of witchcraft or sorcery.

Eventually, even Puritan New England relaxed, kind of, about the way its people were allowed to dress. Although the laws remained on the books, they weren't always enforced with vigor. This is in part because the punishments didn't provide much deterrent. Six years after Hannah Lyman flouted the court with her silk hood, another magistrate went after a different group of women for the same offense. But that second time, no one else in the community was interested in indicting them. Law or no law, Puritan women were going to indulge in sinful extravagance, at least every once in awhile.

A New Map Tracks the Life of San Francisco's Emperor Norton

0
0
article-image

In 1859, Joshua Abraham Norton declared himself Emperor of the United States. From his seat in San Francisco, the country’s new emperor released proclamations, pushed for political reform, issued currency, and acquired a lasting reputation as one of the city’s premier eccentrics. Most famously, he proposed the construction of a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland—a vision that came to pass, many years later, in the form of the Bay Bridge. When Norton died in 1880, his obituary was front-page news in the San Francisco Chronicle, and a crowd of mourners followed his coffin to burial at the city’s Masonic Cemetery.

Today, the San Francisco of Emperor Norton is hidden beneath decades of urban growth and reinvention, and the geography of his life was mysterious enough that even his most devoted fans only knew of a couple of the key places in his history. Now, though, The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign, a small nonprofit dedicated to celebrating the emperor’s legacy, has created a comprehensive map of his San Francisco, which includes not just the places where he lived and worked, but also 44 delightfully detailed entries on everything from the Mechanics’ Institute, where the Emperor played chess, to the amusement park where he was denied access to the roller skating rink.

Norton was born in England and lived with his family for many years in South Africa before moving to San Francisco in 1849, when he was in his early 30s. The new map includes these far-flung destinations as well, though the details of those parts of the Emperor’s life are sketchier than those from his time in America. It also includes spots, marked by stars, that feature Emperor Norton–inspired art. The research for this map, which involved digging into “ship's passenger lists, city directories, newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts,” and more, according to the campaign, did turn up new details about a key period in Norton’s life—the years between his financial ruin and his self-appointment as emperor.

After Norton came to San Francisco, he built wealth through an inheritance, real estate, and importing, but in the early 1850s, he made a bad deal on a large shipment of rice, and eventually had to file for insolvency. Usually when his story is told, he left San Francisco at that point and returned only to crown himself emperor. But, says John Lumea, the president of the Emperor’s Bridge Campaign, “a close reading of the city directories from this period suggests that Norton was in San Francisco the whole time—and that he was living in a boarding house on Kearny Street between Broadway and Vallejo when he issued his original Proclamation.”

The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign originally launched in 2013 as part of an effort to rename the Bay Bridge for Norton. It now has around 100 members, as well as a group of 25 or historians, researchers, and artists who supply the campaign with new information about Norton’s life and legacy.

“There is a 'received' version of Emperor Norton as a lovable kook in a funny suit—a harrumphing mascot of San Francisco who reimagined himself and marched to his own drummer, never mind what anyone else thought or said about him,” says Lumea. “What has received far less attention—and what emerges through a careful reading of the full body of Emperor Norton's newspaper Proclamations—is that the Emperor also was an early champion and popularizer of the values of tolerance and fairness,” including women’s suffrage, better labor standards, and legal protections for African-American, Native American, and Chinese people. “To be espousing such farsighted ideas in the 1860s and '70s—this, too, was ‘eccentric.’” By revealing more of the emperor’s history, the group hopes to show a more complete pictures of this unique man.

Manhattan Residents Had a Wake for This Doomed Tree

0
0

Cher, a 25-foot weeping willow tree, has lived in Manhattan since the 1970s. She makes her home in the La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez community garden, in the East Village.

Earlier this year, she started showing signs of advanced old age—crumbling wood; fungus under her bark. She was even dropping the occasional branch. So the Parks Department made a decision: Cher would have to come down.

When a beloved community member gets that kind of diagnosis, it's best to pay your respects. And so this past Sunday, July 9th, Cher's friends and neighbors gathered beneath her gracefully arcing branches for a tree wake.

Cher—which stands in the southwest corner of the park, by Avenue C and 9th street— has watched over the neighborhood for 41 years. According to a press release from La Plaza, she was installed "thanks to a grant from Plant-a-Lot," along with two companion willows, named Krusty and Wally.

Wally was toppled by Hurricane Irene, and Krusty is also expected to be slotted for removal by the Parks Department, although the hammer has not come down on him just yet.

#reverendbilly #churchofstopshopping #laplaza #nyc #garden #park #weepingwillow #memorial

A post shared by Eden Bee (@edenbrower) on

Sunday's wake was led by local activist and performer Reverend Billy, who led the group in free-form prayer and song. Photos posted on local blog EV Grieve show scores of people sitting on the grass or standing in the shade, many wearing leaf garlands. (One held a sign that said "Plant New Willows.") In one video clip, Reverend Billy thanks the tree, just as a small bird flies and perches on one of its highest branches.

Cher—and Krusty, when he goes—will clearly be missed. "They're kind of like the icons of the space," the garden's executive director, Ross Martin, told DNAinfo. "They dominate everyone's view of the place."

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.


Found: Three Cases of Madeira Bought for John Adams’ Presidency

0
0
article-image

In 1796, a family in New Jersey stocked up on wine, in anticipation of celebrating America’s second president, John Adams, who would take office in March 1796. More than 220 years later, three cases were still in the wine cellar of what had become the Liberty Hall Museum—those bottles of wine now make up the largest known collections of 18th century Madeira wine, NJ.com reports.

In the colonial era and the early history of the U.S., Madeira wine, made on the Portuguese island, was a popular drink for settlers in America: The wine shipped well and rarely spoiled. According to NJ.com, at one point, British colonies in America were buying 95 percent of the wine that Madeira produced.

The Liberty Hall Museum, built in the 18th century, was originally the country house of a prominent New Jersey lawyer; now it’s part of a state college. The museum’s leadership and staff knew about the bottle collection in the cellar but had no idea exactly how old the wine was. At one point, the wine racks had been walled off, probably during Prohibition, but they had since been revealed and were part of the museum tour.

Only when the museum started to re-inventory the collection, though, did anyone discover just how old the wine was. One bottle was opened for a tasting; the wine, according to Liberty Hall’s president, would appeal to fans of sweet sherry.

A Violent 15th-Century Freshman Hazing Ritual Involving Boar Tusks and Razors

0
0
article-image

Fifteenth-century European universities had a problem. Their incoming students were young and unruly, so confident in their own abilities that they did not apply the requisite level of effort in class. So universities instituted hazing requirements; before their education could begin, new students needed to complete humiliating tasks in order to be purged of their pride, gluttony, and other sins.

According to The Medieval Magazine, some of these hazing rituals included becoming a de facto servant to an upperclassman—as at the University of Avignon in France—or paying for other students to go to the baths (which was deemed immoral only when the university faculty weren’t also invited).

But perhaps the strangest and most elaborate of the hazing rituals was Deposition, a practice that predominated with slight variations in both Germany and Sweden beginning in the late 1400s In order to enroll in their chosen universities, students in these countries endured a bizarre series of tests that makes the modern college application process look simple.

The best recorded accounts take place at Uppsala University in Sweden in the 15th and 16th centuries, but the practice existed in most of Germany at the time as well. Details vary slightly, but Deposition seems to have worked like this:

When new students—all of whom were male—arrived at a university, they announced their presence to the dean. Then they waited. Once enough people requested to study at the school, the dean scheduled a Deposition, so that the new students could formally enroll.

article-image

On the chosen day, students arrived at the dean’s office, where a Depositor—a faculty member appointed to conduct the ceremony—greeted them.

Once everyone was ready, the Depositor passed around odd items with which the students needed to adorn themselves: hats, looking-glasses, saws, razors, combs, shears, and clothes “of various patterns and colors.” Fake horns and fake donkey ears were attached to their heads.

The Depositor also asked students to open wide—and he inserted a boar tusk on each side of their mouths. They were expected to hold the tusks in place for the duration of the ceremony. The Depositor then marched them down the hall into a cavernous lecture room—though calling it “marching” is generous. The Depositor, in reality, spurned them forward with a stick as if they were “a herd of oxen or asses.”

Inside the lecture room, the students formed a circle around the Depositor, who proceeded to first insult them for looking like animals (they still had all varieties of horns attached to their bodies), then lecture them on “the vices and follies of youth” and the necessity “for them to be improved, disciplined, and polished by study.”

article-image

Then the Depositor began hitting them again. He whipped out a large sand-bag and started swinging wildly, sending the students “scamper[ing] about with all manner of laughable gestures and duckings.” A series of complex questions followed, sometimes in the form of riddles; if a student answered wrong or too slowly, the Depositor hit him some more. Often the students “received so many strokes with the sand-bag, that tears… started from their eyes.”

Yet because the students had—you know—boar tusks jammed into their mouths, even those who answered the questions correctly could barely speak. Their replies resembled a string of gargling sounds rather than actual words. The Depositor insulted them for this, too. He called them swine, and said that their tusks represented the sin of gluttony, “for young people’s understandings are obscured by excess in eating and drinking.”

Then he asked all of the students to renounce their sinful ways. If they did, the Depositor pried the boar tusks out of their mouths with a pair of tongs, symbolizing an end to their gluttony. He also removed their horns—which represented rudeness—and their fake donkey ears, which presumably represented their inner, donkey nature.

To follow the metaphor: the Depositor was stripping away the animalistic tendencies within the students.

article-image

But this was not the end of the Deposition—not even close.

Next, the Depositor instructed students to lie down flat on the ground. He went around to each student and filed their nails, “cleaned their eyes,” planed them, and “pretended to… saw off their feet.” In fact, at some point during this, “a beard [was] painted on” each student.

The Depositor also cleaned their ears “with an enormous ear-pick,” all the while saying:

"Let your ears be closed to protect you against fools;
I cleanse you for learning, not for vile buffoonery."

According to some accounts, he then told prospective students to sit on stools, where he combed their hair and “shaved them so sharply with a wooden razor, that the tears"—once again—"started from their eyes.”

Once he was done, the Depositor chanted, “Literature and liberal arts will in like manner polish your mind,” and poured water over their heads—a symbol of their newfound purity.

According to one source:

"The buffoonery being ended by this washing, [the Depositor] admonishes the plane, scrubbed, and washed assemblage that they must commence a new life, strive against wicked impulses, and lay aside evil habits, which will envelope their minds just as their different garments envelope their bodies."

Finally, the Depositor led the prospective students out of the lecture room and back to the dean, who gave a short speech, put salt in their mouths, said, “Let your conversation always be salted with salt,” and dumped wine onto their heads. Once was done, he “admonishe[d] the student thenceforward to lay aside all uncleanliness, and to live a pure life.”

After the ceremony was complete, the students received a Certificate of Deposition and, now sin-free, were accepted into the university.

article-image

In most German schools, the Deposition was not optional—a Certificate of Deposition was required for matriculation into the university. According to The American Journal of Education, the Deposition was “not merely a piece of buffoonery invented by the students, but was reckoned an officially authorized ceremony.” Statutes at the universities in Erfurt, Greifswald, and many more specifically praised the effectiveness of the Deposition ceremony.

In 1545, the University of Greifswald said:

"The Deposition is to be kept up. Such Beani [incoming students] as feel themselves free from school discipline, are inclined to idleness, and think themselves exceedingly learned, are to be somewhat sharply admonished during the Deposition how trifling their learning is, and how much they have yet to learn."

By the early 1600s, Deposition had spread to the majority of German universities. Both Catholic and Protestant schools practiced it. Universities often justified the elaborate ceremony by referencing its supposed precursors: they pointed to other trials that students at the Academy of Plato or that Spartan warriors needed to endure in order to become mature.

Interestingly, as The Medieval Magazine notes, Deposition may have actually begun as a joke—its first textual appearances appear to be satirical—and then morphed into a legitimate phenomenon.

But not everyone appreciated Deposition. Critics likened it to “stupid buffoonery” and called the practice “barbarous.” Eventually, these complaints resonated with the majority of aristocratic Germans and Swedes—by accident.

In Germany, the 1600s saw the birth of Pennalism, a hazing ritual that borrowed many of the themes of Deposition. But instead of lasting only one day, Pennalism continued for an entire year. New students who endured Pennalism soon suffered such great abuse that the public outcry forced universities to crack down on the practice. Though the backlash primarily targeted Pennalism, the two rituals had so much in common that universities decided to ban Deposition as well.

article-image

In 1717, Deposition was out at German universities in Tubingen, then at Wittenberg (1733) and Altorf (1753).

But without Deposition, the need to purify sinful students remained. German universities instituted alternate measures. The University of Halle, for instance, discontinued Deposition in 1694 but retained the requirement that new students “be examined by the dean of the philosophical faculty” and “be admonished of the piety, modesty, and manners which befit an ingenuous youth.”

Sins: cleansed.

These Endangered Pygmy Rabbits Survived a Wildfire by Heading Underground

0
0
article-image

In 2001, there were just 16 pygmy rabbits living in the wild in Washington state. Thanks to breeding programs at zoos and universities, and protection under the Endangered Species Act, North America's smallest rabbit species started to make a comeback. So when the Sutherland Canyon wildfire swept through the sagebrush of eastern Washington at the end of June, biologists were worried that the it claimed the rabbits living at a special breeding site. They decided to stage a rescue as soon as the area was safe.

A team of biologists and firefighters found 32 rabbits—out of about 100—who survived the fire by retreating into their burrows. Rescuers found some still underground, while others had made their way to a tiny patch of surviving sagebrush. Sagebrush makes up nearly all of the rabbits' diet, and provides them cover from predators. The destruction wrought by the fire means that the breeding site is now uninhabitable for rabbits—at least until the sagebrush grows back.

article-image

"The fire was a setback for our restoration program, but we can start making up for those losses next year," said Matt Monda, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife regional wildlife manager, in a statement. "Wildfires are a fact of life here in sagebrush country, which is a major reason why we don't keep all of the rabbits in one place." The survivors were taken to two nearby breeding sites, where they join about 70 others.

The Best Demon Illustrations of All Time

0
0
article-image

The demons of the underworld that tempt us into sin are (theoretically, anyway) endless in number. Yet this didn’t stop the early 19th century occultist writer Jacques Collin de Plancy from trying to catalog them anyway.

Like many demonologists before him, de Plancy set out to create an accounting of demonic events and forces in his book, Dictionnaire Infernal. What sets de Plancy's work apart is his frighteningly surreal illustrations—the devils that make up his occult bestiary are some of the most evocative in the history of demonic literature.

article-image

De Plancy published dozens of titles in his lifetime, but he never surpassed the success (or infamy) of the Dictionnaire Infernal, which first appeared in 1818 and was followed by several updated editions. The full subhead for the 1926 edition describes the book as a “universal library on the beings, characters, books, deeds, and causes which pertain to the manifestations and magic of trafficking with Hell; divinations, occult sciences, grimoires, marvels, errors, prejudices, traditions, folktales, the various superstitions, and generally all manner of marvelous, surprising, mysterious, and supernatural beliefs.”

Many of the demonic descriptions in the Dictionnaire Infernal have their roots in earlier demonological texts, such as the 16th century Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or the 17th century Lesser Key of Solomon. Both of those titles contained hierarchical descriptions of Hell’s many denizens, versions of which de Plancy included in his text. Among the spirits presented in de Plancy’s book are well-known evils such as Lucifer and greedy Mammon, but also more obscure devils such as the lower demon Ukobach, who tends to fireworks and oils, and the bellows-bearing fallen angel Xaphan.

article-image

When de Plancy first published his guide to the world of demons in 1818, he had a reputation as an opponent of superstition and religion. However, in 1841, de Plancy had a change of heart, and converted into a devout Catholic. By the sixth edition of the Dictionnaire Infernal, published in 1863, whether influenced by his conversion or simply thanks to extra resources, de Plancy included illustrations. And it’s a good thing he did, as the bizarre images that accompanied the text are some of the most indelible depictions of demons ever created.

The 1863 edition of the book featured hundreds of spot illustrations, over 60 of which were of specific demons. They were designed by the French painter Louis Le Breton, and then engraved as woodcuts by M. Jarrault, both of whom signed many of the illustrations. Their odd depictions of stilt-legged owl men, insect-legged frog-cat kings, and spiral-horned jesters transformed the Dictionnaire Infernal from an occult oddity that could easily have been forgotten to a frightening bestiary that is still referenced and shared today.

article-image

Since 1863, the illustrations from de Plancy’s book have also been used to accompany esoteric titles such as new printings of the Lesser Key of Solomon, plus any number of books on magic and demonology (thanks, Public Domain!). In the internet age, they also pop up regularly just for their general weirdness, including over at Boing Boing and Dangerous Minds.

Over 150 years later, Le Breton’s illustrations still come across as devilishly inventive. Check out more of these horrid creatures of sin below.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

When the U.S. Postal Service Used Gyrocopters to Deliver the Mail

0
0

Today, gyrocopters are mostly found in the homes of hobbyist collectors and in James Bond films. Because of the effectiveness of helicopters, these odd, single-person aircrafts with blades reminiscent of windmills have limited practical use. But this was not always so: soon after the invention of a gyrocopter prototype—the autogyro—in the early 1920s by Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva, the machines showed the potential to revolutionize transportation.

One place where they tried to leave their mark? Mail delivery.

article-image

Though autogyros could neither fly long distances nor at high speeds, they avoided car traffic and required small runways (between 15 and 50 feet), making them ideal for efficient, small-scale transportation. Unlike planes, which struggled to fly at low speeds except at sharp angles, autogyros also did not stall.

Sensing opportunity, the United States Postal Service—then the U.S. Post Office Department—decided to invest in the new technology. In 1937, Congress appropriated money to fund a series of experiments on autogyro mail delivery, and within a year the first flight—from Bethesda, Maryland to Washington, D.C.—was made.

Apparently, the test was effective: in January 1939, the U.S. Post Office Department began considering offers from commercial airline companies for a Philadelphia-based autogyro postal service. The video above shows an early autogyro flight from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Camden, New Jersey—a six-minute trip.

article-image

To deliver the mail, autogyros could simply land on the roof of a post office, drop off the mail to a waiting employee, and then fly to the next location. During the 10 years in which autogyros were delivering U.S. mail, hundreds of flights hopped from roof to roof in cities like Camden, Philadelphia, and Washington—as well as Chicago, Illinois and New Orleans, Louisiana. In all, they delivered thousands of pieces of mail.

But by the late 1940s, as helicopter technology improved, the autogyro mail service fell out of favor. Unlike helicopters, autogyros could not hover—a significant technical problem.

Today, the memory of the autogyro delivery service lives on through the special stamps that christened the letters they delivered.

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

Viewing all 11437 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images