Fire ants may not be cute or cuddly, but they have some pretty cool tricks. They can form rafts to survive floods, and researchers have now figured out how they form towers to escape danger or surmount obstacles.
The ants don't consciously decide to throw themselves on top one another to build towers. Rather, it takes a lot of trial and error, with the ants following certain basic rules. First, they wander around without direction until they come to an empty space in a group. Then they position and brace themselves to support other ants clambering over them. They do this horizontally to form rafts, and vertically to form towers. The towers can be more than 30 ants high, and end up looking a bit like the Eiffel Tower—with a wide base that evenly distributes weight.
Supporting other ants is no problem for these insects. "We found that ants can withstand 750 times their body weight without injury, but they seem to be most comfortable supporting three ants on their backs," said report coauthor Craig Tovey, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in a release. "Any more than three and they’ll simply give up, break their holds and walk away."
Time lapse footage of the towers show they're not static formations. After feeding ants radioactive food, the researchers watched them build a tower in an X-ray machine to better understand the inner workings of the living structures. They found the tower is actually perpetually sinking, and when ants slide to the bottom, they make their way out from under the pile through tunnels among the ants in the base. Then they head back up the tower again build some more. "The ants are circulating like a water fountain, in reverse," Tovey told Nature.
They may be tiny, but fire ant engineering may offer humans some insights, such as for using swarms of tiny robots to build things.
Long before Las Vegas wore the crown of America’s “Sin City,” there was Newport, Kentucky.
Today Newport is a small, upstanding U.S. city near Cincinnati, yet during Prohibition, and for decades after, Newport was a hotbed of gambling, prostitution, organized crime, and widespread corruption.
If you had no idea that Newport once had this reputation, don't feel too bad. In large part, that's likely because its age of corruption just didn't last. By the 1960s, the city was ready for a change. And the unlikely event that kicked off the city's transition? A pulpy scandal involving, of all things, the frame-up of a former football star. So buckle-up, dear readers, for the story of Newport, George Ratterman, and the Night That Never Was.
First established in 1795, the city of Newport grew steadily on its waterfront spot at a convergence of the Ohio and Licking Rivers. The first signs of trouble began during the Civil War, when a prostitution industry sprung up to serve Union soldiers stationed on the Ohio side of the river. By the 1920s, Prohibition brought a widespread criminal element to the city, as speakeasies (or “tiger blinds” as they were known in local slang) began appearing. Just across the Ohio River, Cincinnati would come to be known as one of the hearts of bootlegging in the day, but much of what was sold and moved through that city came from Newport.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, the entrenched criminal underworld in Newport had to find other sources of revenue, and a number of casinos and brothels moved in to fill the void, bringing with them widespread institutional corruption among the police and local government. During this time, the city was under the constant sway of gangland mob bosses, and violence wasn’t uncommon as various factions competed with one another.
Over the next couple of decades, the city of Newport enjoyed a solid reputation as a sin city, but by the late 1950s, things began to change. The growing desert city of Las Vegas had begun to lure the attention of serious criminal enterprises, and Newport’s star as a mecca of gambling and prostitution had begun to fade. By the early 1960s, locals were ready for a change as well.
A civic organization known as the Committee of 500 rose to prominence around this time, made up of Newport residents who wanted to take the city back after decades of corruption. The group was growing quickly, but they needed a face to put to the cause, and they found the perfect mug in the All-American square jaw of a former football star, George Ratterman.
Ratterman, a native of Cincinnati, had made a name for himself in the mid-1940s playing college sports at Notre Dame, including tennis, baseball, basketball, and most notably, football. He went on to a career in the fledgling NFL, playing for teams including the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yanks, and finally the Cleveland Browns. Ratterman gained a headstrong reputation that led The New York Times to refer to him as a “cocky little blond.” Two weeks after appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, he blew out his knee, and officially ended his professional sports career in 1957.
As a footballer, Ratterman cut an almost cartoonish figure of the handsome, corn-fed American hero, so he made a perfect law-and-order candidate for Newport sheriff. According to a 1999 article in the now defunct Cincinnati Post, by 1961, Ratterman was the married father of eight children, working both as a part-time sports commentator and in financial planning. He announced his campaign for sheriff of Newport in April of 1961, saying, “I am told that if I run for sheriff, I will be the victim of all sorts of personal slanderous attacks. But I say to our opponents, let the attacks start now, if they must. Let the battle be joined now.”
Just over a month later, he woke up in bed next to a stripper.
Shortly before 3 a.m. on May 9, 1961, Ratterman was arrested at the Glenn Hotel in Newport on charges related to prostitution, based on an anonymous tip. When detectives burst into the room they found Ratterman half-naked and in bed with a 26-year-old exotic dancer called April Flowers (real name, Juanita Hodges). Ratterman had no idea where he was and said he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. Nonetheless, the police brought him in, and he was promptly bailed out by his lawyer.
The night before, Ratterman had met with a former football associate, Tito Carinci, who just so happened to be president of the Glenn Hotel and its nightclub, the Tropicana. Not wanting to be seen in Carinci’s joint, they met for a drink in Cincinnati. But after just one drink, Ratterman claimed he'd lost track of the night, remembering only being in a strange apartment and at one point having people pull at his clothes. With no memory of his previous night to use as a defense, it would prove hard for him to shake the story of his arrest. Or it would have, if his obvious frame-up hadn’t been such a botch job.
His sensational arrest quickly hit the national papers, but the whole affair fell apart nearly instantly during Ratterman’s trial, a week later.
Still foggy, Ratterman had been taken to his physician just hours after his arrest. At the hospital, doctors took blood and urine samples which, after testing, showed large amounts of chloral hydrate, an early date-rape drug sometimes called “knockout drops.” Clearly he had been set up. One doctor estimated that Ratterman had been given a triple dose.
Ratterman and his lawyer had one other ace up their sleeve in the form of a freelance photographer named Thomas Withrow. According to The New York Times, the photographer testified that he'd been approached by Carcini three weeks prior to Ratterman’s arrest and told to be ready to snap pictures of a man and a woman in a hotel. Carcini told him that someone would open the door and Withrow would have to run in, quickly take photos, and run out. Withrow never went through with the deal, but with his testimony, the blackmailers’ plot was sunk.
The plan to discredit and intimidate Ratterman backfired in just about every possible way. All charges against Ratterman were dropped, and he easily won the sheriff’s seat later that year on a wave of sympathy. Carcini, Hodges, the arresting officers, and others eventually became the target of investigations and prosecution.
Maybe the most influential fallout from Ratterman’s arrest came straight from the top. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, already on a crusade against organized crime, took a special interest in Newport after hearing about the case, sending dozens of FBI agents to the town to help with the investigation. Once the Feds, angry locals, and righteous heroes such as Ratterman combined forces in Newport, the days of Sin City were over.
Ratterman served as sheriff for just four years, but by the end of his tenure it seems the criminals that had held sway in the city for so long were pretty much leaving on their own. In his New York Times obituary, Ratterman, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 80, is quoted as saying that while his officers had to kick in a few doors, “the other side knew what was coming, and they left quietly, on their own. We knew who was in charge of the corruption, and they knew we knew.”
Whether it was Ratterman’s direct influence, or simply the changing habits of the underworld, Newport shook its criminal image by the end of the 1980s. Today, the title of Sin City is so firmly associated with Las Vegas that it’s hard to remember that there was once another city that more than earned the name.
By the end of World War I, nearly one million French soldiers had been admitted to the hospital, and more than 10,000 American soldiers had been discharged after hospital stays, not for battlefield injuries, but because they had contracted sexually transmitted infections. The average stay in a hospital for venereal disease (the more commonly used term at the time) lasted 50 to 60 days, valuable time that could be better spent on the war effort. Allied military leaders were in a bit of a pickle. They needed to address a public health crisis, but without appearing to condone what would be considered immoral behavior back home.
The French government's approach was to open maisons de tolérance, brothels where women were screened (though not always thoroughly) for disease. The British Army Council worried that banning their soldiers from these establishments would offend the French, while the United States had no such qualms and declared them off-limits to troops. British and American military leaders chose a less tolérant approach, and handed out harsh punishments for sexual rule-breaking. By the end of the war, they also produced posters reminding soldiers of the dangers of venereal disease.
Early posters appealed to soldiers’ patriotism, and compared venereal diseases to yellow fever and the plague. In the years that followed World War I, syphilis and gonorrhea remained persistent public health challenges in the United States. (Penicillin wasn't widely available to troops until 1943, and the general public got access in 1945.) The Works Progress Administration (WPA), as part of its Federal Art Project, produced posters for local and state health departments, many of which urged men and women to get tested, and portrayed venereal disease as a threat to families and worker productivity.
With the start of World War II, military leaders once again had to worry about venereal disease keeping their men from the front lines. American posters were produced by both the Army and Navy, as well as the Public Health Service. Some popular examples were also translated into French, Italian, and Spanish. Much like during World War I, some of the posters of the 1940s equated contracting a venereal disease with helping the enemy. But others that evolved from the WPA posters depicted women as deceitful, pestilential temptresses. Shame was another strategy—soldiers were reminded that wives, parents, and children were waiting for them back home. Other posters were more pragmatic, urging soldiers to "take a pro," short for prophylaxis, which referred to prophylaxis centers where men were disinfected, as well as kits containing everything from ointment and cleansing cloths to condoms or urethral syringes.
Most of the artists behind the bold, arresting graphics of these posters are lost to history, or known only by one-name signatures (if a poster was signed at all). Some can be attributed to known artists, including Kansas artist Dorothy Darling Fellnagel and Polish caricaturist Arthur Szyk. Stan Lee, of Marvel Comics fame, claims he helped design posters during the war, and told Playboy in 2014, "My mission was to tell the troops to go to the pro station after they'd had sex. So I drew a little cartoon of a soldier. […] Over his head there's a dialogue balloon that says, 'VD? Not me!' They printed a couple million of them. I figure we probably won the war based on that." It's hard to say what impact these graphic warnings against disease—and, in many cases, seemingly against women in general—had on the war and soldiers’ behavior, but they likely helped make a taboo topic slightly more acceptable for discussion.
Atlas Obscura has compiled a selection of American VD-related posters from the mid-20th century.
At a wedding in an apple orchard in New Brunswick, Canada, just over the border from Maine, J.P. Nadeau, the father of the bride, was giving the customary toast while some storm clouds gathered behind him. He didn't notice the storm brewing until ...
Lightning struck, first hitting the sound system and then traveling into the microphone in Nadeau's hand. "And I'm looking at my hand and it's all flared up," Nadeau told the CBC. "It was like I was holding a lightning bolt in my hand, it was amazing."
The father was shocked, but quickly realized he was not seriously injured—just a small "scorch mark" on his thumb, and a bum knee that "actually feels a bit better."
What did everyone do next? What else? They continued with the celebration. "It was a beautiful wedding," Nadeau's wife told the CBC. "But that was pretty terrifying for a second."
Nadeau says he's had other close calls in the past—he was once rescued from a fiery cruise ship off the Falkland Islands by the British Royal Air Force—but has always emerged a survivor. "I've had lots of brushes with death," Nadeau said. "But death keeps ignoring me."
It's a cartoon cliché: a character fishes for actual fish, only to turn up an old boot or some other piece of comic detritus. But, recently, an 11-year-old South Carolina boy did something similar in real life, snagging an old purse with his fishing rod, before, with the help of a relative, tracking down its owner.
According to ABC News, Brodie Brooks was fishing on July 3 in Lake Hartwell, near the Georgia border, when he dredged up the rotting purse. Inside, Brooks and a relative found credit cards, lipstick, pictures and other items that identified the owner as one April Bolt, who told ABC News it was stolen during a family cookout in 1992.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was lost for words,” Bolt, 49, told the network. “You never think you’d see it again. I knew somebody must’ve just gotten the cash out and threw it in the lake.”
The purse had seemingly spent the intervening years zipped up, meaning that the baby pictures, lipstick, and other items from Bolt’s past were reasonably well-preserved, for having been in a lake.
“It meant the world to me,” Bolt told ABC News. “My son is 26 now, but he was 15 months then and I had all his photos that were professionally taken in my wallet. Back then you didn’t have your cellphone with the pictures. They have water damage but you can make him out.”
I found myself, in truth, on the brink of the valley of the sad abyss that gathers the thunder of an infinite howling. It was so dark, and deep, and clouded, that I could see nothing by staring into its depths.”
This is the vision that greets the author and narrator upon entry the first circle of Hell—Limbo, home to honorable pagans—in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of his 14th-century epic poem, Divine Comedy. Before Dante and his guide, the classical poet Virgil, encounter Purgatorio and Paradiso, they must first journey through a multilayered hellscape of sinners—from the lustful and gluttonous of the early circles to the heretics and traitors that dwell below. This first leg of their journey culminates, at Earth’s very core, with Satan, encased in ice up to his waist, eternally gnawing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius (traitors to God) in his three mouths. In addition to being among the greatest Italian literary works, Divine Comedy also heralded a craze for "infernal cartography," or mapping the Hell that Dante had created.
This desire to chart the landscape of Hell began with Antonio Manetti, a 15th-century Florentine (like Dante himself) architect and mathematician. He diligently worked on the “site, form and measurements” of Hell, assessing, for example, the width of Limbo—87.5 miles across, he calculated. There are several theories for why it was so important then to delineate Dante's Hell, including the general popularity of cartography at the time and the Renaissance obsession with proportions and measurements.
However, given the inherent limitations of mapping a fictional world, there was some debate between scholars over the specifics. What was Hell’s circumference? How deep did it go? Where was its entrance? Even Galileo Galilei weighed in. In 1588, he gave two lectures in which he investigated the dimensions of Hell and ultimately affirmed the calculations in Manetti’s map.
Galileo wasn't the only Renaissance heavyweight to attempt infernal cartography. Late in the 15th century, Sandro Botticelli—perhaps best known for The Birth of Venus and La Primavera—was commissioned to create a series of illustrations of Dante's masterwork. His Map of Hell is a lavishly detailed hellscape that depicts the circles as a stepped funnel filled with specific scenes from the poem.
After the Renaissance, the desire to deduce the dimensions of Hell waned, before a brief resurgence in the 19th century. Here, Atlas Obscura offers a closer look at the labors of Hell's cartographers.
About 80 miles east of Amman, Jordan, lies the basalt desert of Jebel Qurma. It doesn’t seem like there’s much to be found here—it’s a dry place, once described as a land of “dead fire,” and there’s little human presence here today.
But a long-term archaeology project has been investigating this area’s rich history, and as the project’s leaders write in Near Eastern Archaeology, they’ve found evidence of people living here millennia ago, including gravesites marked by mounds of stone, some with impressive constructions.
The archaeological evidence found so far indicates that people lived in this area during the first millennium B.C. and a thousand years before that, late in the third millennium B.C. with a gap in between, as LiveScience reports. Even 4,000 years ago, though, these communities buried their people on high plateaus and basalt hills, under cairns made of mounded stone. The archaeological team, which is based at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, has found hundreds of these cairns, including more complex tower tombs that date to the more recent period.
The tower tombs are made of flat rocks and show impressive constructions: they can be as large as 16 feet in diameter and 5 feet high. There’s little known about the culture surrounding these tombs, but they’re common enough that they likely weren’t just for elites. The team plans on coming back for many years and hopes to uncover more clues to the life people led in this beautiful, difficult place.
Apple pie is not an American invention. In the 14th century, farmers in England began wrapping apples into inedible containers known as “coffins," a pie prototype. Only in 1697 did the concept reach the United States—through European immigrants.
But the USA has laid claim to the iconic dessert, a process that was crystalized when a 1902 New York Times article lambasted an English writer for complaining that eating apple pie more than two times per week was excessive:
[Twice a week] is utterly insufficient, as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.
But even in the United States, apple pie has its regional variants—and, inevitably, detractors of those variants.
Perhaps the biggest controversy? Cheese.
This is going to completely shock a number of apple pie fans and elicit an “of course” from a whole slew of others, but: a lot of people put cheese, specifically a sharp cheddar, on their apple pies.
The tradition has silently polarized the nation, with some, like author John T. Edge, confessing, “at lunch or dinner I thought a wedge of pie was naked if it wasn’t crowned with a preternaturally orange slice of cheddar.” The poet Eugene Field (1850-1895) once wrote, “But I, when I undress me / Each night, upon my knees / Will ask the Lord to bless me / With apple pie and cheese.” There is even a saying, popular in many circles: “An apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze.”
Meanwhile, another faction has lamented, “Why would anyone choose to crown their apple pie with stinky old cheese when they could have a scoop of ice cream melting on top?” In 1998, a reader of the Los Angeles Timescomplained that “[a column] about cheese and apple pie left me feeling like I live in the twilight zone… I have so far never encountered American friends or acquaintances who even want to try this.” When asked whether he ate pie with cheese in his home state of Mississippi, one chef said: “Oh, God no! They’d put you away in a home."
Proponents of apple pies with cheese defend their choice by pointing to the contrast between “the sweetness of the pie” and “the sharpness and saltiness” of the cheeses, saying it works the same way as chocolate-covered pretzels.
There are many ways to prepare it: some people bake cheese into the pie crust, some slip it into the apple filling, some melt it on top of the pie, and others leave it on the side of the plate. Though in the United States, cheddar is the favorite, many types of cheese can be used. Recipes may call for Wensleydale, Roquefort, gouda, parmesan, or Gruyère. The ABC show Pushing Daisies featured an iconic scene in which Ned, owner of a restaurant called The Pie Hole, prepares an apple pie—with Gruyère in its crust—for his girlfriend’s aunts.
Though fans of apple pie with cheese exist everywhere, they seem to be concentrated in the American Midwest, New England, and parts of Canada and Britain. Vermont even has a 1999 law on the books requiring that proprietors of apple pie make a “good faith effort” to serve it with ice cream, cold milk, or “a slice of cheddar cheese weighing a minimum of 1/2 ounce.” In some circles, apple pie with cheese is tradition.
So where does this come from? And why, especially in the United States, do some people expect apple pie with cheese, while others have never even heard of the concept?
The idea appears to have originated in England, where all sorts of fillings were added to pies. At some point, the 17th-century trend of adding dairy-based sauces to pies morphed into a tradition of topping them with cheese. For instance, in Yorkshire, apple pie was served with Wensleydale, which is likely how the phrase “an apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze” began. (Though it is in dispute whether the phrase originated in the United States or England, it caught on in both places in the 19th century, suggesting a kind of cultural collaboration between the two.)
According to The Mystic Seaport Cookbook: 350 Years of New England Cooking, New England settlers brought the idea behind these Yorkshire pies with them, but instead of Wensleydale, they began using cheddar.
Why cheese? At the time, apple pies were quite bland: prior to the creation of the Red Delicious apple in the late 19th century, few apples tasted sweet. Cheese offered a readily available supplement. After all, in an era before the ubiquity of freezers, the most popular pie topping today—ice cream—was out of the question.
Places in the United States with heavy concentrations of dairy farms therefore became centers of the cheese-on-apple-pie craze. These included New England, Pennsylvania, and especially the Midwest—largely the regions where cheddar cheese apple pie is popular today.
Regions that pioneered pie a la mode, meanwhile, largely lost the trend: New York City, for instance, has served the dish since the 1890s, and today generally falls into the “pie with ice cream” camp.
During the 20th century, ice cream gradually usurped cheese as the most popular pie topping in the United States at large. But the cheese-on-pie love has endured. So this Thanksgiving, beware: whether you serve your apple pie with cheese or without it, you might get some funny looks.
And now, over to you:
Do you have a stand-out memory—or strong opinions—involving cheese and apple pie? Write to michael.waters@atlasobscura.com
In 19th-century America, from the 1830s through the Civil War, one of the most scandalous settings an author could choose for a story was a Catholic convent.
It was the heyday of the “convent exposé,” a book, fictional or not, that purported to reveal the sin and salaciousness hidden behind the walls of religious institutions. In these books, sisters are kept captive, denied medical care, and sometimes raped or otherwise subject to sexual depravities. In the most disturbing of the stories, nuns dispose of unwanted babies by killing them shortly after they're born.
These books, mostly forgotten today, were some of the most popular publications of their time. As Nancy F. Sweet, a literature professor at Sacramento State, writes, there were “dozens of other convent exposés, narratives, treatises, and romances published between 1829 and the outbreak of the Civil War.” After the most famous of these books, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, was published in 1836, it became the best-selling book in America besides the Bible. It was outsold only when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in 1852.
These stories generally follow the same structure. A young woman enters a convent, moved by circumstance or the spirit to explore a religious life. She soon realizes that she’s made a terrible mistake. At best, she finds that the life of a nun isn’t the reflective, spiritual experience she imagined; at worst, nuns are subject to regular abuse. She’s usually kept from leaving but manages to escape to tell her story. Sometimes, though, there is no escape and she dies—trapped in the evil convent.
Many of these books were sold as fiction, but some of the best known, including Maria Monk, were supposed to be true—even though that best seller contained some of the most lurid details of all of them. Maria is dissatisfied at home, so she joins a convent, only to find she’s expected to have sex with the priests next door, who enter the convent through secret tunnels. When nuns inevitably become pregnant, their condition is hidden and their babies murdered and buried in the basement. After the book was released, though, journalists tracked down the titular author and found that her book had been ghostwritten by a group of anti-Catholic men, who made up most of the story. (Monk was a real person, who had contact with Catholic institutions but never lived in the convent featured in the book. The most lurid revelations were entirely fictional.)
But some of the books had elements of truth to them. Another famous example, Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent, was based on the author's experience as a novice at the Ursuline convent of Charlestown, just outside of Boston, in the 1830s. Reed's tale was less salacious than Monk's, but she wrote that she had been forced to submit to penance and other cruel punishments far beyond what was considered reasonable. Her book was published with the help and oversight of a Protestant pastor, and her claims were never debunked, as Monk's were.
Though less dramatic than many other exposés, Reed's story was enough to rile up Americans worried about Catholic incursions into their Protestant strongholds. After the details began to circulate through Boston, a mob attacked the convent, destroyed its gardens, and burned part of it down.
Why were these books so popular? In addition to the tempting, salacious content, at the time they were published, Protestant America was being transformed by Catholic immigrants, and the Catholic Church was becoming the largest single religious institution in the country. But though anti-Catholic prejudice and fears contributed to the popularity of these books, some scholars see another explanation for their popularity.
Although the women in convent narratives were often in danger, they were pushing the boundaries of what was expected of women at their time. As Sweet writes, the appeal of the books included the “pleasure antebellum readers attained through exposure to the subversive potential of symbolical border-crossing”—and sometimes literal border-crossing. In some of these stories, the hero travels across Europe or into the North American wilderness as part of her escape from convent life. If these books were warnings about the dangers of Catholicism, they were also invitations to imagine how an encounter with sin might also be the start of an adventure.
If you were alive in 1982, you might remember a very special episode of Phil Donahue’s talk show. On that day, the President of Procter & Gamble went on the program and admitted that the company supported the Church of Satan and that its logo contained Satanic symbols. Oh, it happened in 1985? Actually, others remember the episode airing in 1989.
The truth is, this never occurred. P&G has never had any connection to the Church of Satan. The Church itself describes the claim as "completely false." But the truth has never stopped a good rumor from catching on.
To better understand the P&G rumor, it’s important to grasp its broader context. During the late 1970s through the late 1990s, a potent fear of Satanic cults, known as Satanic Panic, gripped the United States. Years of news and cultural touchstones like the Manson Family trial and The Exorcist had primed the country for this paranoia. In his seminal 1972 study, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, British sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the phrase “moral panic” in reference to events like this, which appear suddenly to threaten societal norms. These events are misrepresented in sensationalistic fashion in the media and eventually reporting on the subject comes to define it for the public.
When the first article on the P&G rumor, “Rumor Giving Company a Devil of a Time,” appeared in The Minneapolis Tribune in March 1980, Satanic panic was hitting its peak. The story detailed an accusation of Satanic imagery hidden in the company’s logo—a man in the moon looking out on 13 stars. But as a spokesperson from P&G, Tressie Rose, explains, this claim was without merit. “[It was] first developed by wharf hands to mark STAR candle crate boxes,” Rose writes in an email. “We then decided to formalize it, created the graphic, 13 stars for the 13 original American colonies. It was officially trademarked in 1882 but the incorporation of a face in the moon happened before that. It was the logo created in 1930 that created the rumor but not until the 1980s, 50 years after its creation.”
To most people, that design would appear insignificant, but most people aren’t Jim Peters. In the 1980s, Peters was the music director at the Zion Christian Life Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a member of a family of anti-rock crusaders who instigated a record-burning campaign in 1978. His brothers, Dan and Steve, initially gained notoriety for a series of seminars and a pseudo-documentary in the vein of Rock, It’s Your Decision called Truth About Rock.
Jim, who could not be located in research for this article, was just as ambitious and had been delivering seminars of his own. When interviewed by The Tribune for the article, Peters claimed to have found a copy of the P&G logo in a book by British occultist E.A. Wallis Budge called Amulets and Superstitions. A member of P&G’s public relations team responded at the time by stating, “This is the kind of rumor we can’t do anything about … People will believe what they want to.
To its credit, P&G was right and the story disappeared for almost two years until January 1982 when papers in the Midwest began running variations on a wire story from United Press International. The articles had titles like “Soap Baron Battles Devilish Rumors” and again made references to P&G’s logo, but this time without any connection to Jim Peters.
Oddly, this version of the rumor was more specific and drew direct connections. First, the curls in the beard and hair of the moon man resembled the number six, and each pattern of curls happened in a series of three. Additionally, when connected, there were three distinct patterns in the 13 stars that created another series of three sixes. In the minds of many, the recurring instances of the number 666 in the design of the logo were references to the mark of the beast in Christian theology.
In an attempt to get out ahead of the story, P&G filed lawsuits against a number of people caught spreading the rumor, including an Atlanta weatherman. The Phil Donahue anecdote seems to have come out of this era, appearing on leaflets alerting people to the supposed Satanic connection. After fielding 15,000 related calls and letters in June and July 1982, the company also employed an aggressive media relations strategy on the West Coast where it was believed the new version of the rumor originated.
Again, P&G seemed to have some success and the story quietly disappeared by the end of 1982. Unfortunately, it again found life in 1985 when The New York Timesreported on leaflets being circulated around New York City claiming P&G was in league with the devil.
It seemed no matter what P&G did, the rumor would not die. Then again, it’s hard to kill a rumor when you have opponents actively working to promote it. In a 1991 retrospective by The Washington Post, Paul Martin, a former Minnesotan, recounted a meeting with the Peters family in 1985: "These three brothers from the Zion Christian Life Center—Dan, Steve and Jim Peters—came to speak to my boys to tell them to burn their rock music albums … They showed a slide of the Procter & Gamble symbol and said it was the same as the Church of Satan in Minnesota."
In a last-ditch effort to exorcise the company of its demons, P&G announced in April 1985 it would be dropping the logo indefinitely. But the gamble blew up in the company’s face in spectacular fashion. Concerns became so widespread that public officials were even drawn into the firestorm. In April 1986, an exasperated Attorney General from South Dakota issued a press release to state media reminding them that no executives at P&G had sold their souls to the devil.
However ridiculous this may seem, moral panics like the Satanic panic are sustained on strange conspiracies like the P&G rumor because these kinds of stories are almost impossible to debunk. In his 2003 book A Culture of Conspiracy, political scientist Michael Barkun observed that these kinds of ideas survive because they “...[promise] a world that is meaningful rather than arbitrary. Not only are events nonrandom, but the clear identification of evil gives the conspiracist a definable enemy against which to struggle, endowing life with purpose.”
In the case of Jim Peters, that enemy was clear. In P&G, he saw Satan. But as the 1980s faded into the 1990s the specter of religious paranoia slowly gave way to material concerns. In 1990, P&G announced the first of a number of lawsuits against Amway distributors. A pioneer in the field of multi-level marketing, Amway farmed out sales of its products to third-party distributors who would occasionally engage in aggressive sales tactics to boost sales.
In 1990 and then again in 1995, Amway distributors were caught using Amway’s voice mail system to send messages to consumers stating that P&G profits supported the Church of Satan. P&G sued in both cases, but a series of twists in the 1995 lawsuit would cause the case to take over a decade to finish. In 2007, however, P&G won its civil suit against the Amway distributors and seemingly put an end to the rumor for good.
In 2013, P&G announced the return of a moon-like design to its corporate logo. Whether this inspires a new wave of Satanic rumors, only time will tell, especially in an environment in which a pizza shop can be accused of being a front for Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Jim Peters lives on in the spirit of “Pizzagate.”
Psychologist Rob Brotherton, author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, suggests that such salacious rumors are likely to continue finding receptive ears. “A lot of our beliefs, conspiracy theories included, are based on how well they fit with our intuition,” Brotherton writes in an email, noting that research into this subject is in its nascent stages. “So one strategy for making people a little more resistant to conspiracy theories would be to get them to slow down and process the claims more analytically, and to realize that their brain might be being biased."
"Of course," Brother adds, "that's easier said than done."
NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016, orbiting the massive planet five times so far, and collecting a lot of valuable data in the process.
What Juno did Tuesday was for the data, but also for the spectacle, as it passed directly over Jupiter's most famous feature—the Great Red Spot—and took a ton of amazing pictures along the way.
The pictures were made publicly available on Wednesday, and while the raw images (like the one above) aren't so vibrant, several citizen scientists have enhanced their color and contrast to show off all the detail they contain from the Earth-sized, centuries-old storm.
Juno flew as close as 2,100 miles from Jupiter's surface, and about 5,600 miles from the Great Red Spot, which is also sometimes called the Eye of Jupiter. It is completing its sixth orbit of the planet, the solar-powered craft will fly around six more times before steering itself to certain, planned death.
Below is another enhanced photo of the storm. Its creator, Jason Major, a graphic designer from Warwick, Rhode Island, told NASA about his inspiration. “I have been following the Juno mission since it launched,” Major said. “It is always exciting to see these new raw images of Jupiter as they arrive. But it is even more thrilling to take the raw images and turn them into something that people can appreciate. That is what I live for.”
The sun's 11-year magnetic cycle is winding down, so there shouldn't be many sunspots on the star's surface. Scientists were therefore surprised to see a new sunspot pop up, and even more surprised at its size. The dark blemish may seem tiny on the massive sun, but its core is larger than Earth.
Sunspots are areas of the solar surface with intense magnetic fields, and they're dark because they are relatively cooler than their surroundings (by about 2,000 Kelvin). They are a common phenomenon, and through scientists aren't entirely sure what causes them, they know that they're more frequent when the sun produces its most magnetic activity, known as the solar maximum. At that time, which occurs on that 11-year cycle, the sun's magnetic field flips, resulting in increased sunspots and solar flares. Here on Earth it makes for more intense auroras.
The sun is currently heading into a solar minimum, and its surface had been spot-free for two days before this new sunspot came into view. NASA's Sun Dynamics Observatory satellite caught the first glimpse on July 5 and watched it grow until July 11. It's by no means among the largest sunspots ever observed (those happen during maxima), but it's certainly impressive for what should be a quiet time on the sun.
Since ancient times, across cultures and continents, the concept of dragons—powerful creatures to be both feared and respected—has been a source of utter fascination. This lasting and nearly universal enthrallment with the scaly beasts is a remarkable cultural phenomenon, especially considering dragons are completely made up.
That said, it’s very likely that ancient and medieval people believed dragons were real. Early naturalists and scholars from Europe to China documented the behavior and habitats of dragons, and even classified the creature as one of the scaled animal species. Early paleontologists, too, believed they were digging up old dragon bones.
No one knows for sure precisely where the dragon myth originated. The earliest tales of giant winged serpents may have grown out of exaggerated descriptions of very real beasts such as crocodiles and snakes. They were surely further inspired by (or at least perpetuated by) discoveries of dinosaur fossils and whale bones. In any case, the myth persisted, embellished by retellings and morphed over time by cultural mixing. Dragons eventually became such a powerful and vivid part of civilization as to blur history and mythology.
The “dragon” took on very different shapes, sizes, characteristics, and meaning across time and cultures. In Chinese folklore the snake-like dragons were a symbol of power and luck; in Hindu and Buddhist India they took the form of serpentine deities, sometimes with several heads. In Christian Europe, dragons represented sin and Satan (hence the fire breathing) and were something to be feared. Before a scientific understanding of the world, scaly winged monsters often represented the dangers of the unknown. Old maps never actually warned "Here Be Dragons"—ironically, that itself is a myth repeated often enough to be taken for truth—but medieval cartographers did decorate maps with images of sea monsters and dangerous beasts representing what might be lurking in uncharted territory.
Tales of heroic dragon slayers became the stuff of folklore passed down for generations. In medieval Europe, depictions of dragons showed up on flags, coats of arms, and across the pages of history books. In some cases, the remains of a “real” dragon was preserved and put on display, or otherwise immortalized by statues and sculptures. Some of these you can still visit today. Here are five places to get about as close to a dragon as you're ever going to be.
Hanging in the Old Town Hall of the largest Moravian city is the carcass of an actual dragon, or so the originators of the Brno Dragon legend would have you believe.
One of the most famous legends in the city of Brno is that of the dragon that once threatened the local people. But unlike similar myths across Europe, the people of Brno actually have a body to back up their tale. Supposedly the preserved reptile hanging in the town hall is the actual beast that inspired the legend. However, it is the body of a crocodile.
Poland’s Wawel Cathedral holds the remains of a number of Polish royals as well as some of the country’s most famous religious art, but the real attraction is the hanging bundle of bones which are rumored to have belonged to a local dragon.
Hanging next to the cathedral’s entrance are the “real” bones of Smok Waweleski, the local dragon, who before the city was founded was said to live in a cave under one of Wawel’s rolling hills. The bones are chained together in a random jumble, hanging high above the main doors.
A preserved “dragon” rib memorializes the legend of the founding of the city of Atessa. The local legend of the village dragon is well known to the people of Atessa, where they preserve a large bone that is said to be a rib from one of the mythical creatures. The large bone is held behind glass in a viewing case that is itself behind iron bars. The long, curved bone is believed by skeptics to be a part of a mammoth skeleton, but this has no more been verified than its belonging to a dragon.
According to the legend, in the 13th century a dragon was wreaking havoc in Klagenfurt until a brave man caught it like a fish. In 1335, the dragon’s skull (unfortunately in the 1800s zoologists realized it belonged to an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros) was found in a nearby quarry aptly known as Dragon’s Grave.
For decades the skull was proudly displayed in the capital city of Carinthia’s town hall. Later, it was brought to life in a medieval sculpture and fountain still seen today. The woolly rhino’s jawless skull is still on display at the State Museum of Carinthia.
Nibelungenhalle, a stone temple decorated with scenes from Richard Wagner’s fantastic opera by the same name, even has its own collection of “dragons.” Both living and sculpted, they recall the famous giant-turned-dragon, Fafnir. The “Dragon’s Den” contains a huge stone dragon protecting its cave, echoing the beast that was killed by the mythic Siegfried. A small reptile zoo was added in 1958, containing 40 terrariums of the exotic lizards that may have inspired the local dragon legend.
Conducting research and science in the Arctic presents a number of problems, not the least of which is how to build a base of operations in a wilderness that doesn’t offer any readily available materials, amid unrelenting elements. Historically, the solution has been tunnels, built beneath the surface ice using imported struts and shoring materials. This solution, though, is not only expensive, but also remarkably inefficient. More recently, according to Science, scientists have started turning to a more whimsical (and cheaper) solution: giant balloons.
The construction process begins much like many previous base-building operations, as industrial-sized snow-blowers cut deep trenches into the ice and snow. But instead of building those into mine-like shafts, giant balloons (up to 40 meters in length) are inflated in the space. Then the balloons are recovered with snow, which is given time to harden.
Once the top layer of snow is hard enough, the balloons are deflated, leaving perfectly arched tunnels behind. The arched shape is not only less difficult to make, it is also more sturdy and easier to maintain than traditional, squared-off corridors.
The balloon method has been in use since 2012 when it was spearheaded by Jørgen Peder Steffensen, a physicist at the University of Copenhagen. They have more recently been used by the East Greenland Ice-core Project (EastGRIP) to create their own tunnel base. Arctic research has rarely looked like so much fun.
The stamps issued in the tropical archipelago of Amis and Amants show a series of arcane islands in miniature watercolors. The sea sweeps the empty beaches of Outburst of Tenderness. Palm trees wave beneath stormy skies on the isle of First Love. From the shores of Fair Weather Friend a distant volcanic peak is visible on the horizon. On the island of Hand-in-Hand, mountains slope down to neatly ploughed fields.
These are Cinderella stamps; artifacts that look like stamps but aren’t. These islands of love and friendship don’t exist. They were painted by the American artist Donald Evans, who made thousands of stamps for 42 imaginary countries over a short, bright career, before his death in a house fire in 1977 at the age of 33.
Cinderella stamps can be anything from propaganda messages or charity labels to local stamps for obscure islands and tiny towns. You can’t send a letter through the official post with a Cinderella because they have no legal value, but that’s the attraction. It means anyone can make them, and the only restriction on what you can put on them is the stamp-maker’s imagination. Donald Evans was the king of the artistamp, a form of Cinderella made as an artistic work.
Artist Ginny Lloyd has been making artistamps under the pseudonym Gina Lotta since 1975. “An artistamp is a little museum,” she says. “You create an exhibit within a sheet of stamps. There’s complete freedom in what you want the content to be. They can have a political message, commemorate events from your life, whatever you want. I make sheets of stamps for people I know who’ve died. Some artists make them to distribute their work outside of the gallery system. Others mimic real stamps as a political commentary; some have had the Secret Service visit them for counterfeiting. Artistamps subvert in a quiet way. You have to look closely to see if they’re real or not.”
As a kid Donald Evans built cities from cardboard, complete with houses and highways, churches and traffic. To make his imaginary worlds more real he wrote letters from them and made stamps to put on the envelopes. In the 1950s, between the ages of 10 and 15, he made hundreds of stamps, recording them in detail in his Catalogue of the World. He abandoned his hobby as a teenager, returning to it as an artist only once the cultural landscape had been transformed by Pop Art. (If it was okay to paint soup cans and comic strips, maybe it was okay to paint fake stamps.) Donald Evans dug out his childhood catalogues and began making stamps again.
He created countries to mark elements of his own life. Anything could be transformed into geography: a meal; a game of dominoes; a dance; a dinner party; a surname; a pair of shoes, a friendship, a love affair. His stamp issues minutely explored bird’s eggs, Chinese plates, Indonesian vegetables, alphabets, penguins, pasta, mushrooms, windmills, quilts, chairs and shells. To make his stamps look real he carved erasers to make postmarks and mounted his work on envelopes he distressed and addressed.
He kept the details of the lands he thought up deliberately and tantalizingly vague. He wanted viewers to step through these tiny doorways into worlds of their own imagination. These were vast territories, large enough to encompass all interpretations.
For other artistamp makers the form has been a way of making more political points. Unlike mass-produced official stamps, Cinderellas are hyper-local, often reflecting the personal preoccupations of the artist. Stamps traditionally commemorate the proud moments of a country, but Cinderellas can subvert that, marking the shameful or the perverse.
Artist Karl Schwesig drew faux stamps while imprisoned in 1940 at the Gurs concentration camp in southern France. He drew what he saw around him; the barbed wire, the guards; the bodies, the coffins heading for the burial ground. In the 1960s the Fluxus experimental art movement started using used stamps and mail art as a form of ‘living art’, a collaborative, anti-commercial medium that they sent out into the world instead of displaying in a gallery. Canadian conceptual artist Anna Banana, whose work satirises authority by parodying its symbols and concepts using the humble, humorous and nonsensical banana, produced a series of banana-themed stamps. Russian artist Natalie Lamanova has used stamps to explore issues of identity, ownership and control in 1990s post-Soviet Russia. American mail artist Otto David Sherman has been making stamps since the 1970s that highlight the disparity between the way nations represent themselves in official imagery and the actual actions of their rulers, depicting corrupt politicians and despots and showing first-world leaders in farcical poses; Vladimir Putin in a top hat, Donald Trump juxtaposed with a chimpanzee.
The artistamp community today is a DIY culture of makers swapping stamps through the post, mixing up drawing with image-editing software, color printing with pinking shears, internet forums with the traditional mail network. For a new generation it’s retaliation against the global with the super-local, against the mass-produced with the slow-made.
Mail art creator Vittore Baroni has said that “Artistamps rebel against the monopoly of governmental emissions, claiming the right for everyone to self-produce and issue virtual values in any possible shape, number and subject.”
The countries Donald Evans created were peaceful, their politics idealized. The Island of the Deaf is a silent paradise with a capital called Hand-Talk. The country of Stein with its capital Gertrude is a literary dictatorship with 100 percent literacy. The imperial kingdom of Caluda emerges from a native takeover as the new independent state of Katibo, the Sudanese dialect word for a black man who sets himself free. He told the Paris Review in 1975 that his stamps were a “vicarious traveling for me to a made-up world that I like better than the one I’m in. No catastrophes occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps. The countries are innocent, peaceful, composed.”
Ginny Lloyd sees in the artistamp an echo of a childhood fascination with unknown worlds. “The excitement I feel when I receive artistamps in the post is the same excitement I used to feel as a child when I would get packages of loose stamps for my collection. I would spend hours looking at all of these beautiful places outside of my very small town, dreaming about travel. I wanted to know more about other worlds and this was one of the ways I learned.”
The art of Donald Evans was subject to a raft of self-imposed restrictions. He only painted stamps, always in the same sizes with frequently recurring themes, in washed out colors painted with the same brush. He used this sameness, this deliberate smallness, to explore the infinite. His stamps are pieces of physical evidence sent directly from the limitless landscape of the imagination.
The Isle of Man sits in the Irish Sea, nestled between Ireland and Britain, and has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. About 220 square miles, or the size of Chicago, it is home today to around 85,000 people, including, maybe, one who was recently marooned.
According to local authorities, a makeshift "HELP" sign was found Monday night on a beach that's only accessible by boat, not far from Douglas, the isle's capital. The sign was made out of old tires and other trash assembled into six-foot letters.
But after a search deep into the night involving a "cliff technician," authorities couldn't find anyone, so they posted about it on Facebook.
Was it possible for someone to be marooned on such a well-populated island, or was it all just an ill-advised joke? We might never know, though some members of the public weighed in online.
"I'm glad no one needed help, but I hope they are feeling ashamed of themselves," one user commented. "If they had to be 'clever', they could have spelled 'rubbish' but perhaps that took to [sic] many brains."
On June 17, 2017, Huocheng County in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region held its seventh annual lavender tourism festival. Complete with acrobats and dancers, the festival celebrates the start of the lavender bloom. From June to August, over five square miles of lavender are harvested, totaling over 100 tons per year.
Once an important stop along the Silk Road, Huocheng County transplanted lavender from Beijing in the 1960s. Its plantations have grown exponentially since: Huocheng County now accounts for 95 percent of China’s lavender production.
Along with plantations in Provence, France and Hokkaido, Japan, the Huocheng County Lavender Planting Base is one of the largest in the world.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
When a loved one died in parts of England, Scotland, or Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, the family grieved, placed bread on the chest of the deceased, and called for a man to sit in front of the body. The family of the deceased watched as this man, the local professional sin eater, absorbed the sins of the departed’s soul.
The family who hired the sin eater believed that the bread literally soaked up their loved one’s sins; once it had been eaten, all the misdeeds were passed on to the hired hand. The sin eater’s own soul was heavy with the ill deeds of countless men and women from his village or town—he paid a high spiritual price for little worldly return. The coin he was given was worth a mere four English pence, the equivalent of a few U.S. dollars today. Usually, the only people who would dare risk their immortal souls during such a religious era were the very poor, whose desire for a little bread and drink outweighed such concerns.
As early as the 1680s these morbid local feasts were written of as an “old Custom at funerals,” and the practice survived into the early 20th century. According to Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, first published in 1813, the sin eater “sat down facing the door; they then gave him a groat, which he put in his pocket; a crust of bread, which he ate; and a full bowl of ale, which he drank oft' at a draught; after this, getting up from his stool, he pronounced, with a composed gesture, 'the ease and rest of the soul departed,' for which he would pawn his own soul.”
Many funerals in the Welsh county of Monmouthshire included a professional sin eater, author Catherine Sinclair notes her 1838 travelogue, Hill and Valley. Her description of the job gets harsh when she adds that the men “who undertook so daring an imposture must all have been infidels, willing, apparently, like Esau, to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.” To those who believed in the powers of this ritual, sin eaters were doing a necessary but distasteful job, literally becoming a bit more evil as they performed their task.
Sin eating had experienced a decline by the time Sinclair observed the practice in Wales, but the last recorded sin eater, Richard Munslow, briefly brought the custom back in the late 19th century. In the travel guide Slow Travel Shropshire, Marie Kreft explains that Munslow revived the practice not because of desperation, but due to sadness. He was a successful farmer who suffered the loss of four children, including three in a single week. It’s speculated that this tragedy drove him to practice the sin-eating trade, at first as a form of grieving, to help his children on into the afterlife.
The god-fearing villagers who hired sin eaters in the profession’s heyday, however, wanted to skirt the consequences of their sins (and those of their loved ones) by giving them to someone else, and adapted their own morals to accommodate the practice. Because of the religious climate of the time, people took the idea of sin seriously, and were eager to reach heaven free of their misdeeds. They needed a sin eater to come around every once and awhile, but most of the time being a sin eater meant you were homeless and a social pariah. Nevertheless, sin eaters in the United Kingdom were expected to attend funerals and wakes when they were notified of a local death.
The origin of sin eating is elusive, but the custom may have grown from older religious traditions. Historically, scholars believed it came from pagan traditions, but in Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Ruth Richardson writes of a medieval custom that she thinks may have developed into sin eating; before a funeral, nobles once gave food to the poor in exchange for prayers on behalf of the recently deceased.
In the 18th century, rituals involving symbolic breads, which represented the souls of the dead, were fairly common and may connect to sin eating, too. Antiquarian Henry Curzon wrote in 1712 that villagers in the English county of Herefordshire hired “poor people to take on them the Sins of the Deceased,” yet also piled cakes in “high heaps” on tables to honor their dead loved ones for the Catholic holiday All Souls’ Day, on November 2.
In her essay The Gift of Suffering, Ingrid Harris writes that Protestant practice may have used sin eating to regain the lost sacraments from its Catholic roots. In fact, many sin eaters listened to confessions from grieving families. Sin eating was not officially supported or sanctioned, however, and Richardson argues that using a sin eater bestowed human power over spiritual events, which would have been considered heresy.
Calling a sin eater might also have meant that the local priest, who normally would have coaxed the soul to heaven and performed a funeral ceremony alone, was overlooked. Over time, fewer sin eaters took on the mantle, restoring priests to their traditional role. By the early 20th century, sin eating had mostly died out.
Sin eaters may have stopped plying their trade, but according to Jane Aaron’s book Welsh Gothic, they continued to eat sins in literature, and were used to explore various forms of Welsh identity. In these texts the sin eaters were always reviled. A narrative poem from 1920 features a sin eater called Morgan who is described as “gaunt, ghastly, lean and miserably poor,” and was later found dead as if struck from a bolt of lightning. In the United States, the concept of sin eating made its way to communities in Appalachia, where it survived as legends about nomads who roamed the countryside, looking to absorb dark and powerful sins.
The last known sin eater in the United Kingdom, Munslow, died in 1906. Though it took some time, he was likely one of the first of his profession to be commemorated with a ceremony and funeral of his own—in 2010 in Ratlinghope. While it’s unlikely that anyone was able to consume his heavy burden of sins as a bready meal, at least he was finally served something he and many other sin eaters deserved—recognition.
Oregon's Highway 101 is a beautiful drive along the coast, but for some drivers yesterday, it was a little more slimy than scenic. The Oregonian reports that a truck carrying 7,500 pounds of hagfish overturned two miles south of the town of Depoe Bay, causing a five-car crash and covering two sedans and the highway in goo and fish. It required a bulldozer and fire hoses to clean it all up.
Hagfish are about one to two feet long, and while they have a skull, they lack a spinal column. They're sometimes called slime eels because they ooze goo–up to four cups in less than a second–when they're distressed. When combined with water, that goo expands. Slime from just one hagfish can grow to five gallons, which means things got pretty gross when cleanup crews took hoses to the mess.
— Depoe Bay Fire Dist. (@DepoeBayFire) July 13, 2017
Hagfish meat is popular in South Korea, and the country consumes around five million pounds of it each year. The skins are used for leather. That's where these hagfish were headed, before they ended up all over the highway. Needless to say, this catch won't end up on dinner plates.
In 1837, Reverend Sylvester Graham, the man who gave us the graham cracker, published a book titled A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making. It began with the following sentence: “Thousands in civic life will, for years, and perhaps as long as they live, eat the most miserable trash that can be imagined, in the form of bread, and never seem to think they can possibly have anything better, nor even that it is an evil to eat such vile stuff that they do.”
The reverend's sentiments may sound like the ravings of a mentally disturbed baker, but in 1837, A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making was a runaway hit. Graham was a star preacher within the temperance movement, and championed a strict, meat-free diet modeled after the Bible’s original vegetarians: Adam and Eve. Graham’s diet called for consuming only plants, water (no alcohol), and other “pure” items one might find in the Garden of Eden. Chief among Graham’s concerns was whole-grain bread, made from home-ground wheat, which he viewed as the cornerstone of modern, impure lifestyles. A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making inspired the production of so-called graham flour, graham bread and, most famously, graham crackers.
Graham claimed his diet was more than simply a way to stay healthy—he viewed it as imperative to stopping the moral collapse of humanity. He believed that “gross and promiscuous feeding on the dead carcasses of animals” would degrade man down to the “bone and marrow,” rendering society “odious and abominable.”
But Graham’s holistic approach to self-improvement went far beyond food. It included mandates to exercise, bathe regularly (a radical idea at the time), and, most importantly, abstain from sex except in cases of reproduction. To Graham, our thoughts and morals flowed from our primal, bodily functions. Grahamism espoused that chaste sex and food consumed in its purest form were essential to living a healthy and spiritually fulfilling life. There was also, according to the reverend, a link between the two: living by the Graham diet would stop all sinful sexual urges. For the young man whose impure diet led him to commit "the worst of all venereal sins ... self pollution," something as simple as a graham cracker could prevent masturbation.
The reverse was also true: a bad diet would not only deteriorate health but encourage sinful sexual behavior. As he noted in his 1848 text, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, consuming a delicious steak dinner with wine could “increase the concupiscent excitability … of the genital organs” and lead to all sorts of horrific “sexual excesses.” These excesses included lascivious thoughts, wet dreams, sex outside of marriage, sex within marriage but without the intention of procreation, and, most dreaded of all, masturbation. Roughly half of A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity is a grisly, organ-by-organ account of how these food-induced “sexual excesses” destroy each and every part of the body, including the stomach, intestines, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, nervous system, brain and, of course, genital organs.
According to Dr. Graham’s theories, if a 19th-century man woke up in the middle of the night to discover that he’d had a wet dream (which was completely his fault, because he ate processed bread), he might experience a “hemorrhage of the lungs, and gushing of blood from the mouth and nostrils.” But of all the sexual excesses, Graham was most obsessed with masturbation. A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity returns to this topic, at length, a total of 33 times, obsessively detailing all the gruesome consequences of “self-pollution.” Masturbate long enough, and your eyes will “fall back into their sockets, and perhaps become red and inflamed.” You may even go blind. This all could be avoided, of course, if one adopted “a plain, simple, unstimulating, vegetable and water diet.”
Graham’s theories may seem ludicrous—Pornhub has yet to blind anyone—but his adherents had some reason to believe the good doctor. In the 19th century, during the syphilis epidemic, sex quite literally caused disease, insanity, and death. Before germ theory evolved, medicine did not have an explanation for syphilis, and the majority of doctors and scientists embraced the idea that sex acts themselves (as opposed to microorganisms) were responsible for disease. Graham claimed that his diet prevented cholera, and when cholera hit New York, in the summer of 1832, many followers of his strict regimen avoided the disease altogether. Or at least that’s the perception that Graham created. Graham obsessively documented their testimonials in his 1839 text Lectures on Science and Human Life, a 700-page opus devoted to defending his theories. The account of one Evander D. Fisher effectively summarizes the urgent tone and visceral content of these endorsements: “We adopted ... living on simple vegetable food … I was among the dying and the dead, and assisting in laying out and putting into their coffins at least a dozen dead bodies of those who had died of cholera, yet neither myself, wife nor sister, had the least premonitory symptoms of cholera, nor any other illness during the whole season.”
Cholera was the best thing to happen to Sylvester Graham, as a frightened public latched onto his ideas. Grahamites, as his followers came to be known, mobbed his lecture series in New York and New England—often as many as 2,000 people attended. Graham put on quite a show, and he was known to pack as much gore, sin, and sex into his sermons as possible. But though his fire-and-brimstone style excited the Grahamites, it angered his enemies: butchers, who promoted “gross and promiscuous feeding on the dead carcasses of animals,” and bakers, who produced “miserable trash” disguised as bread. When Dr. Graham visited Boston in 1837 to promote A Treatise on Bread and Breadmaking, butchers and bakers nearly rioted outside the packed lecture hall.
Despite his popularity, Graham never grew rich off his ideas. He never branded or sold his particular type of graham flour; he was far more concerned with saving souls than starting a business. (And Graham never would have approved of adding sugar to make graham crackers tasty, as The National Biscuit Company—or Nabisco as it’s known today—did in 1898.) He made his ideas available to everyone, and as a result, the Graham diet lived on well past his death in 1851. Grahamism eventually disappeared toward the end of the 19th century, but Graham’s influence was lasting. As historian Richard H. Shryock noted in his 1930 publication Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, “A century after Graham first made his appeal, his preachments have begun to be practiced and today, at least part of the population, apparently eat less and select their food with greater care than did their fathers. People nowadays are seekers after roughage and the whole grain in cereals. They worship fresh air and sun-tan, and the bath room has become the very symbol of American civilization. Verily, Americans have been ‘physiologically reformed.’”
Shryock’s observations still ring true today; Graham was a leader of the diet reform movement of the early 19th century, and many of our contemporary attitudes toward food and eating can be traced back to his theories. If it were not for Graham (and his health obsessed peers), the concept of the modern diet may not exist. As historian Martha H. Verbrugge notes inHealthy Animals and Civic Life: Sylvester Graham’s Physiology of Subsistence, Graham was at the forefront of “a variety of medical and lay reformers [who] advocated new codes of dietary and sexual behavior, arguing that self-improvement … was the fundamental agent of social betterment.”
Ultimately, Graham’s greatest legacy is not the graham cracker, but the concept of a diet and the link he forged between our spiritual existence and eating. Today, the diet has supplanted religion as a popular method of addressing our deepest existential worry: the problem of death. Through diet and exercise, our mortal bodies can stave off their inevitable fate; salvation is possible when there is a StairMaster. It may be easy to render Sylvester Graham as a comic character—the Jesus-freak vegetarian who invented graham crackers to stop masturbation—but there is a reason his concept of the diet has endured. Graham tapped into our greatest mortal fears and presented a solution. And it makes sense that a preacher would merge our conceptions spirituality and corporeality—making the body a temple. Though many Americans have since abandoned Jesus in their quest for their “best self,” we still seek salvation through our stomachs. You are, after all, what you eat.
