Up in the high passes of the Bernese Alps, a team of researchers found a box. It was about 8 inches in diameter and made of pine, willow, and larch. It was 4,000 years old.
Now, the scientists report in a new paper, published in Scientific Reports, they have discovered traces of what was once held in the box—someone’s lunch (or dinner or breakfast).
The team thought that the box might have held porridge and looked for traces of milk. But they found nothing. Instead, using a newly developed technique, they were able to find traces of spelt, emmer, and barley inside the box.
As The Local reports, there’s no way of knowing exactly why the box was carried up high in the mountains, but it might have belonged to a farmer grazing cattle on a mountain plateau or a traveller crossing the mountains. It’s not a stretch—there’s probably a trail mix on the market right now that features spelt, emmer, and barley. A good lunch is a good lunch, at any time in history.
Rotorua, a town on New Zealand's North Island, is known for its Maori heritage and geothermal activity—including bubbling pools of mud. The sulfurous muck is both a source of local pride and tourism, and the sloppy heart of the annual Mudtopia festival, which is kicking off this December. In addition to homegrown musical acts, the expected 100,000 guests can tough it out in the Mud Arena, Mud Games Zone, and Mud Run, or simply slip into the Mud Day Spa.
But angry New Zealanders have begun slinging mud over the local council's decision to spend some $68,000 on five tons of mud powder (just add water) from distant Boryeong, South Korea. The powder is intended to be used over the next five Mudtopia festivals, the New Zealand Herald reports. The expense, unearthed by the New Zealand Taxpayers' Union, has been called "beyond imagination. It’s like Dubai importing sand for a Desert festival.”
But organizers counter that the five imported tons are little to worry about, and that 85 percent of the festival's muck will come from a quarry in the area. The South Korean mud, they told the Herald, is a premium product, to give "Mudtopia visitors a different type of mud for a hands-on experience."
There are safety concerns, too. "I know there's a perception that Rotorua has enough mud," local councillor Trevor Maxwell said. "But you can't just pull any old mud out of the ground and throw it at people. There could be anything in there that could end up making people sick."
Boryeong, which is known for its mineral-rich beach mud, is at this very moment holding a similar festival of its own. The Boryeong Mud Festival has been taking place each July for nearly 20 years, and has more than two million visitors annually. Rotorua is trying to piggyback off that success, but some think that tracking in mud from its inspiration is just a dirty trick.
Any well-lived life comes with wear and tear. Spend enough time out and about, and you're going to pick up a few scars, and maybe a mole or two you should keep an eye on.
The same is true for Preikestolen, a massive, square-edged cliff that rises 604 meters above Lysefjorden in Norway. After a long existence of hosting tourists, picnickers, BASE jumpers, and (perhaps) ancient preachers performing blood sacrifices, the geologic wonder is suffering a bit—enough that local scientists have decided to keep a closer watch on the foot-and-a-half wide crack that runs along its length.
As The Local reports, geologists have been monitoring the crack since 1930, and at one point screwed bolts into the cliff in order to measure any increase. This year, for the first time in over two decades, the bolts indicated that the gap had widened by between two and three millimeters.
In response, researchers with the Geological Survey of Norway are setting out to study the gap in more depth. They plan to scan the cliff, 3-D model its surface, and bank a series of high-resolution helicopter photos.
Scientists are not panicking, saying that such measurements have proven inaccurate in the past. "We assume that Preikestolen has not moved lately," NGU's Marina Böhme told Stavanger Aftenblad. "Nevertheless... we plan to go up and check the crack from time to time," and if more movement is seen, more precise measuring equipment may be installed.
Sounds like a plan. After all, the cliff has to stick around until at least September, when it will (presumably) check another thing off its bucket list—meeting Tom Cruise.
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.
Western Greenland doesn't experience all that much seismic activity, so scientists were surprised when a 4.0 magnitude earthquake was recorded in the Karrat Fjord area on June 17, followed by one of the largest tsunamis in recorded history, which swept away 11 houses in the small village of Nuugaatsiaq. A closer examination of seismic data and the mountains surrounding the fjord reveals that it wasn't an earthquake that caused the tsunami after all. Instead, it was a massive landslide that tripped seismic sensors and generated the unprecedented wave.
The landslide was a whopping 3,200 feet across and 1,000 feet tall. When it crashed into the fjord below, it displaced 300 feet of water. Across the fjord—nearly four miles away—the water rose by 164 feet. This places it among the tallest tsunamis in history. By comparison, the earthquake-generated tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004 was 50 to 100 feet (though it struck a much larger area).
Local authorities anticipate more landslides, so residents of three villages on the fjord have been evacuated. Tsunamis caused by landslides tend to be relatively localized. Scientists are now trying to learn about what caused the landslide with 3D modeling. As the climate warms, these landslides could become more common, so understanding the forces at work on Karrat Fjord can help save lives down the road.
Don’t worry: if you haven't heard of a rhombicuboctahedron, you're not the only one. When the National Library of Belarus opened its new Minsk location in 2006, the shape—with its eight triangular and 18 square faces—left many scratching their heads.
The architects behind the project, Victor Kramarenko and Michael Vinogradov, chose the rhombicuboctahedron shape so that the library would resemble a diamond—a symbol of the beauty of the knowledge it houses. The glass panelling that covers the building, causing it to glimmer in the sunlight, only cemented their aim.
But Kramarenko and Vinogradov were faced with a problem: they wanted the 22-story National Library to glitter at night, too. So they decide to install a light show in the panelling.
Today, over 4,646 light fixtures cause the faces of the rhombicuboctahedron to change colors at night—a spectacular sight that has attracted many tourists.
On Monday, near the Golden Ears Bridge, about 20 miles east of Vancouver, a grenade launcher, some ammunition, and and some electronic equipment fell out of a moving truck that belongs to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
An unsecured hatch was to blame, and the driver of the truck apparently didn't noticed anything was awry until another driver alerted him. An inventory confirmed the missing items—including a 40-millimeter Abrams Airborne Less Lethal Multi-Launcher. That type of launcher isn't designed to be deadly, and shoots things such as tear gas for crowd control.
The RCMP understandably wanted their launcher back, and eventually swallowed some pride and asked the public for help. It worked. After a few hours, the person in possession of the launcher contacted the police.
The RCMP lost a grenade launcher near the Golden Ears Bridge yesterday and would like it back pic.twitter.com/gmDPuEMydI
While it wasn't quite a Broken Arrow situation, people were still upset. Given a choice between treating it as a learning experience or firing someone over it, 53 percent of the voters in the Vancouver Sun's "Daily Poll" on Tuesday opted for firing.
At one time, the term “milquetoast” was the go-to slam for bullies looking to belittle the meek. And while it sounds like some sort of French bread dish (and that’s no coincidence), the term originated with an early 20th-century comic strip star named Caspar Milquetoast, who through the subtle brutalities of everyday life became a sort of hero for the timid soul.
The original milquetoast was the creation of the illustrator H.T. Webster. Known as “Webby” to his friends, Webster grew up in rural Wisconsin and started his cartooning career in the first decade of the 20th century, with little formal education. He drew sports cartoons for some newspapers out of Denver, Colorado, before moving back to Chicago, Illinois, where he'd briefly attended art school.
During his years in Chicago, Webster produced satirical political cartoons for papers such as the Chicago Inter Ocean, which proved incredibly popular. According to the introduction to 1953’s The Best of H.T. Webster (published a year after his death), Webster's political cartoons were front-page attractions and even inspired an unsuccessful bill brought before the Illinois legislature to outlaw cartoonists’ unflattering portrayals of state senators and representatives.
His star rising, Webster took a job at the Cincinnati Post around 1908, where he continued his mostly single-frame strips for three more years, after which he headed off to travel the world. His travel journal comics didn’t prove popular enough to finance his globe-trotting adventures, so soon enough Webster found himself back in the States. He went to work in New York, where he began creating illustrations for the Associated Newspapers cartoon syndicate, and later the New York World and the New York Tribune. During this period, Webster moved away from political cartooning, focusing instead on the comedic strips for which he'd eventually come to be known. In a 1949 New Yorker profile, Webster said, “I didn’t like being in hot water, so every now and then, I’d do a little human-interest picture. [...] I found that drawing human-interest pictures is what I wanted to do more than anything else.”
Webster’s comics often involved a bucolic, nostalgic moment from childhood or a funny, meaningful, usually banal interaction with the modern world. The term “common foibles” comes to mind. He came to grouping them under titles such as The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime, about life’s little victories; Boyhood Ambitions, which highlighted the lofty dreams of children; and Life's Darkest Moment, which were about the small indignities we all weather. Webster’s life was often front and center in his work, with many of his childhood strips recalling his Wisconsin upbringing. His Poker Portraits series was based on jokes around the card game that he enjoyed so much, and love of dogs came out in his collection of canine-based gag strips.
As popular as these comics were, it wasn’t until the introduction of Caspar Milquetoast that Webster became a legend.
Milquetoast first appeared around 1926, while Webster was working at the World. The character evolved out of an everyman figure that Webster began incorporating into his strips, although he told the New Yorker that even he was a bit unclear about Milquetoast's exact origin. As he solidified, the character of Milquetoast was drawn as a tall, skinny, older man dressed in a scholarly suit and delicate glasses. His most defining features were his bushy white mustache and little derby hat. Milquetoast was literally a caricature of a wimp.
As the character continued to pop up in Webster’s strips, they were eventually grouped together under the title The Timid Soul. Most of the Timid Soul comics involved Milquetoast becoming scared or offended by some seemingly innocuous circumstance, such as finding a blobby piece of art too suggestive, or being too scared to make small talk with a gruff-looking stranger. In a fitting reversal of rough-riding Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, Caspar Milquetoast came to be described as someone who “speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick.” The Timid Soul ran a couple of days a week, mixed in with some of Webster’s other strips, and soon gained a popular following.
Webster often modeled Milquetoast’s experiences on his own. Those who knew Webster described him as having a “hypersensitive consideration” of others' feelings, and an almost pathological respect for authority—so did Milquetoast. When Webster got into golf, or had car troubles, Milquetoast could be expected to go through the same.
In 1931, Webster’s Caspar Milquetoast comics were collected into a book, also titled The Timid Soul. In the New York Times review of the book, the reviewer describes what made the character so popular. “In his black and white delineation of the life and times of Caspar Milquetoast, [Webster] catches virtually all of humanity at one time or another in its most spineless moments.” Caspar Milquetoast, for all of his sniveling wussiness, embraced a sensitivity and universal weakness that was unlike the macho norms of the early 20th century. “The discovery that there are others just as craven is a sure cure for sensations of inferiority.”
Milquetoast went on to inspire a radio show, and even a television show that ran on the doomed DuMont Network. An article in Time from 1945 began, “Millions of Americans know Caspar Milquetoast as well as they know Tom Sawyer and Andrew Jackson.”
But the most telling sign of the character’s popularity was the adoption of his last name as a generic term for “wuss.” By at least the late 1930s (Merriam-Webster’s marks its first recorded usage in 1935), the term “milquetoast” was being widely used as a general term, outside of its comic strip origins. As Webster’s friend later noted, “Webby lived to see the word 'milquetoast' listed and defined in a standard dictionary.” The illustrator continued to produce comics until his death in 1952, but he would never create anything as iconic as Caspar Milquetoast.
The term enjoyed widespread popular usage during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. But judging solely by the number of times it pops up in the New York Times' archives, “milquetoast” experienced a steep decline in the late 20th century. Today, it sounds almost hilariously anachronistic, especially in the face of more abrasive, but similar, put-downs like "cuck" or "snowflake."
Despite his mid-century popularity, the character of Caspar Milquetoast has also largely fallen out of the public consciousness. In an age when the basic concepts of sensitivity and thoughtfulness are under scrutiny or attack from seemingly every side, we could use more characters like Milquetoast (albeit updated with evolved views on gender and diversity), who aren’t afraid to own their weakness. As a friend of Webster’s said in the closing bits of the illustrator’s New Yorker profile, “Take a good look at Mr. Milquetoast and you’ll find that the big reason he has such a hard time in this world is that he’s a gentleman. A gentleman with the accent on ‘gentle.’”
Still, as Oklahoma’s KFOR is reporting, someone apparently managed to pull it off, after a full 2003 Chevy Trailblazer was discovered buried beneath a trail in Pottawatomie County, suspiciously wrapped in plastic. The truck was discovered by 15-year-old Cody Green, who was trying to adjust a bump in the road that his family uses as a jump for ATVs.
"Went down a little deep and the tractor just stopped," Cody told KFOR. "I went, 'man, what is this?' Well I end up digging some more and got to the hood of it, and, 'This is a car!'"
Green’s father told him not to touch the SUV, and called the authorities. After exhuming the rest of the vehicle, the police were able to identify it as one that had been reported stolen by a previous owner of the land back in 2003, when it would have been brand new.
No one has been charged with a crime in the case, though police suspect that the SUV had been buried as part of an insurance scam.
"We jumped off this car for several years with our ATV and motocross bikes, without ever knowing it," Green's father Fredie told the station.
The same applies for beavers’ tails, barnacle geese and tiny baby rabbits. All definitely, definitely fish. That is, if you’re a Medieval chef in Western Europe, and it’s a fast day, and you’re gearing up for yet another meal of almonds and salted cod.
Christians observed at least three fast days a week for much of the Middle Ages, usually on Wednesday, the day Judas betrayed Christ; Friday, in penance for His suffering; and Saturday, to commemorate the Virgin Mary. In addition to that, there were other periods of fasting throughout the year, the longest of which was the 40 days of Lent. Fasting was a form of self-discipline, writes Bridget Ann Henisch in Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society: “a spring-cleaning to freshen the soul and make it ready to receive God’s grace.”
From the outside, the rules seemed clear: On these days, no animal products (eggs, dairy, meat) could be eaten, though anything from the water was another kettle of fish altogether. While pigs, cows, sheep and other land-beasts had had to shelter from the Flood on Noah’s ark, fish were exempt, and therefore permissible.
A fast day didn’t necessarily indicate eating less, or even less expensively: the only real change to the menu was the substitution of fish for meat.
Coastal folk had it relatively easy, guzzling down seafood, but for those living inland, the abstinence was on an entirely different scale—weeks upon weeks of muddy-tasting freshwater fish or salted herring and cod.
For many, this quickly became a struggle. One 15th-century schoolboy noted in his personal book: “Thou will not believe how weary I am of fish, and how much I desire that flesh were come in again. For I have eat none other than salt fish this Lent, and it has engendered so much phlegm within me that it stops my pipes that I can scarcely speak nor breathe.”
Others, driven mad by their enforced pescetarianism, turned to drink. The Benedictine monk Robert Ripon, alive at the turn of the 15th century, was suitably scathing: “In this time of Lent, when by the law and custom of the Church men fast, very few people abstain from excessive drinking: On the contrary, they go to the taverns and some imbibe and get drunk more than they do out of Lent, thinking and saying: ‘Fishes must swim.’”
Robbed of their eggs and dairy, Medieval chefs were forced to get creative on fast days, often plumping for the same substitutes many 21st-century vegans choose. Almonds were a crucial tool in the Lenten chef’s arsenal: Lisanatti, Kite Hill and other almond cheeses have their lactose-free precursors in medieval cookbooks.
In milk form, there seemed to be no limit to what almonds could do: bind pastry; thicken sauces, even, in one staggeringly popular incarnation, pose as a hard-boiled egg.
The most staggering thing about the Mock Egg is that anyone could bear to eat it at all. A 1430 recipe book instructs chefs to fill empty egg shells with a mixture of almond-milk based jelly and a crunchy almond center, dyed yellow with saffron and ginger. It resembles an egg’s zombie counterpart, with its pallid yolk set in a mass of grey jelly. So far as texture or taste goes, the Mock Egg is a lot like baby food, and nothing at all like an egg. It might have been permissible so far as fasting rules go, but manages to be unforgivable as a foodstuff.
Mushy white pike roe was used in similar ways—some chefs would take pink salmon and stripe the two together to make imitation bacon or ham.
All of these restrictions led to some flagrant misinterpretations of what was or was not a fish. The Benedictine abbey of Le Tréport, in northern France, came under fire from the local archbishop, in Rouen, when it was discovered they were regularly noshing on puffins. These, they argued, were mostly found in and around water and must therefore be fish.
Some of these justifications were very dubious. Dolphins, porpoises and other cetaceans were mammals, but acceptable to eat as mammals of the sea (the medieval German word for dolphin is “merswin,” or “pig of the ocean,” while “porpoise” comes from the Latin for pig fish: porcus piscis).
A cookbook from a 15th-century Austrian nunnery, as translated by Melitta Adamson, suggests: “From a dolphin, you can make good dishes. You can make good roasts from it … one also makes sausages and good venison.” (These mammals, known as "royal fish" in the United Kingdom, were forbidden from commoners’ tables from 1324—as they are still, bar some arcane exceptions about whales over a certain weight.)
Other questionable permissions included the tails of beavers, which were scaly and apparently tasted enough like fish to qualify and, more horrible still, the unborn fetuses of rabbits, known as laurices.
Strangest of all was the Barnacle goose, a small black and white species that breeds in the Arctic circle and wings its way across Europe for the winters. Its intercontinental migratory habits led some Medieval birdwatchers to conclude that it hatched not from eggs but from the goose barnacles that clung to driftwood or rocks.
Sir John Mandeville, writing in the 14th century, believed these barnacles to come originally from trees that “bear a fruit that become birds flying, and those that fell in the water live … hereof had they as great marvel, that some of them trowed [found] it were an impossible thing to be.”
Impossible is correct—but the myth was widely accepted as fact. Gerald of Wales believed them to be“born at first like pieces of gum on logs of timber washed by the waves. Then, enclosed in shells of a freeform, they hang by their beaks as if from the moss clinging to the wood and so at length in process of time obtaining a sure covering of feathers, they either dive off into the waters or fly away into the free air.”
While Gerald acknowledged that these were “unnaturally produced,” he had seen so many of these barnacle birds (“more than a thousand”), for it to be in doubt. Barnacle geese, like puffins, were definitely fish.
Not everyone could swallow the story: Emperor Frederick II, the King of Italy, did some personal examination of the barnacles and coolly concluded that they did not resemble birds at all. “We therefore doubt the truth of this legend, in the absence of corroborating evidence.”
As the 16th-century Reformation took hold across Western Europe, many of these stipulations were stripped away, leaving people able to eat any meat they chose on any day of the week. But it took until 1966 for the rules to be relaxed for Catholics: after Vatican II, meat could finally be eaten on Friday—provided, of course, that some other sacrifice or good work had been substituted in its place. The effects of these rules can still be seen in today’s menus: To counteract the Friday droop in hamburger sales, McDonalds introduced Filet-o-Fish, an unexpectedly holy sandwich.
In April 2017 an art gallery opened in an improbable place—on a former palm oil plantation in Lusanga, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Located more than 400 miles southeast of the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, the town is remote and impoverished. Workers on the plantations make just $19 a week, and many have too little to eat. The bright white gallery, a brand new institution whose ambit is yet to be defined, stands out not just against the red earth and lush foliage of its surroundings, but as an incongruous extravagance.
The gallery is the latest development in an ongoing project that’s incited heated debate. Can art be used to address the economic exploitation of the plantation economy that plagued Africa for centuries without, on some level, being a source of exploitation itself?
The plantation workers of Lusanga had never even seen an art gallery before the gallery’s inauguration, a ceremony entitled “The Repatriation of the White Cube,” but more than 2,000 people took part in the festivities. There was music, dancing, and the ceremonial burning of a fishing net draped over the gallery’s exterior.
Both foreign and local artists took part, including the gallery’s resident collective, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantations Congolaise (CATPC), a group of 12 Congo-based artists who see art as a tool for the economic development of the whole Lusanga community.
Artist Mathieu Kasiama quit school aged 10 when his father, a palm nut cutter for Plantations Lever Zaire, died. He worked growing crops, cutting palm nuts, and cutting hair before joining the CATPC as “an opportunity to have a bit of work.” Earlier this year, he traveled to New York to see his work displayed at SculptureCentre in Long Island City—the first time he’s left Lusanga, and the first time he’s been to an art institution.
Since joining the CATPC, Kasiama says, “I’ve spent a lot of time in solitude, with deep thoughts, and art is allowing me to give them form.”
Among the CATPC’s creations are river mud sculptures, digitized using a 3D scanner, sent to Europe, and cast in chocolate using Congolese cacao beans, the product of plantations like theirs.
These chocolate sculptures have been exhibited at museums and galleries in Berlin, Amsterdam, Middlesbrough, and New York. Profits from the art works now total around $100,000—equivalent to 101 years of plantation work—all of which go back to the collective.
The new gallery is part of the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI)—a conference center, library, and art gallery designed by Rem Koolhaas’s Dutch architectural firm OMA. Beyond its function of showing art to the people of Lusanga, the White Cube (actually an irregular hexahedron) is symbolic. Organizers say the gallery walls represent a “white” culture, and are granted new meaning when placed in a part of Africa Joseph Conrad dubbed The Heart of Darkness. There’s a longstanding tradition of art created in Africa—from ancient carvings to contemporary art—being pulled away from the continent to be sold in Western capitals like New York, Amsterdam, and London. The cube, in some ways, reflects the return of that cultural capital to where it was created.
The extraction of cultural capital follows, of course, a long history of the exploitation of natural resources, including Congolese palm oil plantations. Belgian King Leopold II established the Free State of Congo as a personal colony in 1885, and used forced labor to extract ivory and rubber. In 1911, land there was granted to Britain’s Lever brothers, who later partnered with Dutch margarine manufacturers to form consumer goods conglomerate Unilever, to establish palm oil plantations, with which to make consumer items such as Sunlight soap.
Lusanga, once known as Leverville, was home to Unilever plantations until 2009, when they were sold to a company called Feronia, which continues to produce raw materials for Unilever products.
The CATPC initially produced their works on a Feronia plantation, from 2012 to 2014, before the owners changed their minds about the project and kicked the artists out. Now, with funds raised from their art, the CATPC plans to purchase their own land for more diversified, sustainable farms, or “post-plantations,” that would put an end to over a century of low-paid or unpaid labor performed for foreign kings and shareholders.
Now one of the world's largest conglomerates, Unilever has actively sponsored art exhibitions, including a series of installations at London’s Tate Modern gallery. Because these exhibitions have been paid for, in part, with the profits of Congolese labor, the Congolese should have a more prominent place in contemporary art, according to Dutch artist Renzo Martens, director of a research project called the Institute for Human Activities (IHA) and one of the main drivers behind the Lusanga Centre.
Martens sees his work with the people of Lusanga as a mutually beneficial effort, where he brings his experience with using art to comment on the world and they bring, among other things, an understanding of war, famine, and the consequences of colonialism and its hunger for resources, from palm oil to gold to coltan.
“It’s so strange that capitalism, being paid for your capital, would only work for rich people,” he says. People who endured brutal economic, social, and political hardship, he posits, have an understanding of the world that everyone can and should learn from.
“On the one hand there’s people who need to work all day and shut up, and other people elsewhere on the globe are allowed to think that through, to critique and to comment upon it, to generate alternatives,” Martens says. “That is a very strange, in my mind, distinction, a very strange type of apartheid.”
Martens’ dream of helping to “gentrify the jungle,” as he described the project to The Guardian, has come under fire. Ania Szremski, editor of art blog 4columns, has accused Martens of acting as a “parachuting, white, Western do-gooder.” She implies that in order to further his own career as an artist, Martens is exploiting the people of the Congo in ways that echo the actions of Unilever and King Leopold II.
American curator Jarrett Gregory, who visited the CATPC in the Congo, says “one of the reasons I wanted to go was because it’s a very controversial project and I wanted to meet the artists and see what it was like on the ground … it felt really exciting to me what they were doing.”
Despite the controversy, the new art center allows at least a few Congolese plantation workers—previously denied the educational and economic opportunities that are more common in wealthier countries—to contribute more to the global economy while at the same time improving the understanding of its failings.
Art institutions are often accused of alienating their audiences. But of the White Cube, a building that—in Lusanga, at least—looks like it might have come straight from outer space, Mabiala says simply, “it is our house.”
In 1983, Jim Herr, the owner of Herr Food Inc., most famous for its eponymous line of potato chips, had a problem to solve. The state of Pennsylvania was beginning to tighten enforcement of waste-disposal regulations, and Herr found himself with no way to dispose of thousands of pounds of potato chips, pretzels, and cheese curls, among other products that, for whatever reason, weren't good enough to sell.
So Herr bought a farm, and 300 cows, and let them snack away—though he did work with a nutritionist to determine the best mix of chips, grass, and other feed. Thirty-four years later, the meat from the farm's cows is now being sold directly to restaurants and consumers. According to chefs and others who spoke with ThePhiladelphia Inquirer, the chips, pretzels, and cheese-dusted snacks are helping the flavor of the beef.
"The party-mix finishing feed lends the more subtle things," one local chef, Charles Parker, told The Inquirer. "For example, it has an unusual toasted cheddar note, and it’s a little sweet.”
Until last year, the beef was sold lumped together with meat from industrial-scale farms, until a neighboring farmer convinced Herr Food Inc. to sell it on its own merits—riding the wave of the farm-to-table craze.
Now it's served in two Philadelphia restaurants and sold at a farmer's market, with the best cuts fetching up to $30 a pound, and ground beef going for $6 a pound. That means that snack-fed beef can cost more than a lot of grass-fed beef.
There’s a whole world hidden beneath modern London: Churchill’s war bunker, a Victorian street, and the 2,000-year old remains of a Roman amphitheater. There’s also 240 miles of underground track, a tunnel beneath the Thames for pedestrians, and a vast sewage system network that dates from the late 19th century. And then there’s the Mail Rail, 6.5 miles of disused railway that, for more than 75 years, shuttled letters and parcels between sorting stations across the capital—some 70 feet underground.
But before the Mail Rail, there was that popular Victorian device, a pneumatic tube. The London Pneumatic Dispatch Company opened a postal railway under Euston Station in 1863 that could carry 35 bags of mail one-third of a mile in a minute. According to a comparison in the East Kent Times in 1864, the tunnel “represents the pea-shooter, and the train the pea, which is driven along in one direction by a strong blast of air, and drawn back again in the opposite direction by the exhaustion of the air in front of it.” It was deemed to do the job “exceeding well," according to an 1865 edition of the Illustrated Times, but it proved expensive. The line closed in 1874, after a little over ten years of operation.
As the city developed, so too did its traffic problems. The congested roads created significant postal delays, so in 1909 discussions began for an underground railway. Construction started in 1914, but the timing was poor: With the outbreak of World War I, the operating equipment could not be ordered. The tunnels were finished, but with no method of transportation, the project was halted until 1923. The tunnels did serve a secondary use during the war: They stored works of art from the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Museum. The Mail Rail eventually opened on December 5, 1927, just in time for the year's Christmas rush.
The system ran from Paddington in West London to Liverpool Street Station and the Eastern District Office. A diagram from 1926 shows how it worked. Mailbags from trucks were transported down to platforms via chutes and elevators. Once loaded onto the trains, the mailbags went along a single tunnel, nine feet in diameter, which split upon arriving at stations. The trains were electric and driverless, and resembled carnival rides. (Appropriately, staff held Christmas parties in the stations, and Santa arrived by train.) At its peak, the Mail Rail ran for 22 hours and carried four million letters each day.
Over the years, postal use declined and running costs escalated. After over 75 years of use, the Mail Rail closed in May 2003. The abandoned tunnels were rediscovered by urban explorers, but there’s now a legitimate way to view a part of London's hidden underground world: the new Postal Museum. Opening on July 28, 2017, the Museum’s attractions include a ride on one of the mail trains under the Mount Pleasant sorting office. If you can’t get there—or can’t wait until the ride opens on September 4—Atlas Obscura has a selection photographs, of both the abandoned tunnels and the heyday of the Mail Rail.
About 4,000 years ago, the land that we call Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria was known as Canaan. Much of what’s known today about the Canaanites comes from sources like the Bible: as Science reports, these people didn’t leave behind many traces for historians and archaeologists to interpret.
The Bible tells one story about the Canaanites—after the Israelites famously fled Egypt, they conquered these lands and destroyed the people who lived there. But DNA evidence tells a different story.
Geneticists were able to extract DNA from five Canaanite skeletons from 3,700 years ago. These skeletons were discovered as part of an extensive, years long excavation of an ancient Canaanite city, the Los Angeles Times reports. The archaeological team has found 160 burials in all, but it's rare in these conditions for DNA to be preserved. These samples came from particularly resilient pelvis bone DNA.
They found that these people shared about half their DNA with farmers from the Levant, who had been living in the area from thousands of years previous, but half of their DNA with an earlier Iranian population. That stacks up with Greek sources that report the Canaanites came from further east, Science reports.
But the Biblical account of Canaanite destruction doesn’t quite hold up. According to the study, published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, the genes of people living in Lebanon today overlap significantly with these ancient Canaanites—they share about 90 percent of the genes.
That doesn’t eliminate the possibility that the Biblical story is true, though. Canaanites and Israelites may have been indistinguishable genetically—after all, part of the story is that Abraham settled in Canaan and had Canaanite children. As one geneticist told Science, “You can have genetically similar or indistinguishable populations that are culturally very different and don’t get on with one another at all.”
It’s finally summer, when the hours are best spent relaxing, and labor is better left to machines. To give weary fingers a rest, Hendrick’s has concocted the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher, an unusually prodigious machine designed to slice cucumbers and ornament your not-so-ordinary cocktail.
Yet the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher isn’t only a cucumber-dicing delight. It’s also a functioning vehicle, powered by a large diesel motor and a well-dressed gentleman pedaling a penny farthing.
To operate the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher, one must first climb atop the vessel’s crown, where ambassador Mark Stoddard cycles to keep the machine’s gears grinding. Near the gentleman’s hip rests a French Horn…or is it? Sliding a cucumber into this “instrument” activates the device’s culinary engine: an elaborate system of pneumatic tubing, interlocking gears and rotating blades.
Though the 38-foot-long vehicle can lumber through speeds of up to 25 mph, the dissection of a cucumber is a more delicate affair. One should have plenty of time to disembark from the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher’s bonnet to its rear end, where a conveyor belt delivers mouth-watering cucumber slices directly into thirsty patrons’ cups.
Processing 18 cucumbers per hour, the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher’s blades slice with all of the urgency of your auntie on her morning stroll. The “marvelously inefficient” machine may not possess the horsepower of modern machinery, but it possesses an old-world charm irresistible to those who prefer spectacle to speed.
See the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher for yourself this summer as it makes its way across the country. Residents of Seattle, Houston, and Atlanta take special note: Atlas Obscura is hosting garden soirees filled with earthly delights and of course, cucumber-accented libations. Amid verdant surroundings, imbibers will be treated to music, lawn games, and other Atlas Obscura-curated revelries.
Join us this sunny season, wherever you are, in a journey to the unusual, the unexpected, the cool, and the refreshing. Raise a glass to the cucumber, and meet us at the Hendrick's Grand Garnisher, where radiance and refreshments abound.
Since 1937, visitors and locals alike have flocked to a humble food stand, Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, in the center of Reykjavík, for a hot dog rumored to be the world’s greatest. It combines a triumvirate of meats (lamb, pork, and beef), two kinds of onions (crispy fried and raw), and a couple of distinctive condiments. But the rapid development and change that's overtaken Iceland's capital is about to impact this culinary ritual.
Well, sort of. Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur (‘The Best Hot Dogs in Town") is relocating—across the street, and temporarily. The metal stand has stood on the corner of Tryggvagata and Póstshússtræti through eight decades of Icelandic history—through a Cold War, a World War, at least one financial crisis, and even the legalization of beer (1989!). Until now, that is. A flashy new multipurpose retail, hotel, and residential complex is forcing a temporary move. It seems a minor inconvenience, but it is troubling many who are concerned about the pace of development and gentrification in the city.
Why do people feel so strongly about Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur? There's the history, sure, but the secret might also lie in the toppings. Even the ketchup is distinctive: It’s apparently made with apples rather than sugar. And the special sauce, remolaði, is the Icelandic cousin of France’s remoulade, a mayonnaise-based sauce spiked with pickles, vinegar, and onions.
Thankfully, the move won’t be permanent. “We hope to be back at our normal location before Christmas,” Guðrún Kristmundsdóttir, the owner’s daughter, told mbl.is. But the other changes to Reykjavík will be.
Meet Charity, Perpetuation of Perfection. She's a cow made out of solid chrome. She's about twenty feet tall. Her neck is festooned with a sharp-looking garland of metal maple leaves. And she's giving her new neighborhood, the Toronto suburb of Markham, something to chew on.
Markham residents have a beef with tall cow sculpture & would like it moo-ved. Is this udder-ly another case of NIMBYism? pic.twitter.com/uFbamQCf2f
The bovine behemoth, which the CBC describes as "life-sized" and "raised two [stories] high on stilts," is receiving a less-than-warm welcome from her new neighbors. "Many gathered this week to demand that the recently installed artwork be removed immediately," the outlet reports.
Complaints focused on everything from its aesthetic (not "austere" enough) to the potential danger it poses to kids playing nearby. An 11-year-old neighborhood resident, Chloe, expressed a more specific beef: "I think it's strange to see the cow's butt every morning," she told CBC News.
Charity, Perpetuation of Perfection—which is modeled after an award-winning local Holstein named Brookview Tony Charity—almost didn't make it to Markham at all. A donor attempted to give the statue to the neighborhood way back in 2015, but the local public art committee turned it down. After the donor promised to pay for the statue's maintenance and installation, the city council reversed that decision.
The ruminant resistance will have an opportunity to make their feelings known in a more official way at the next city council meeting, in September. In the meantime, they'll have to learn to live with someone who's a little different than they are.
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.
When it comes to classifying species and understanding the complex web of relationships between different organisms, DNA barcoding has changed the game. Now scientists can refer to specific sections of DNA to determine how closely two species are related. An international team of scientists recently used this tool to help classify butterflies found in South America. They were in for a few surprises. They found that two dramatically different-looking butterfly species were, in fact, one and the same, and identified another three new species.
The sunburst cerulean-satyr butterfly, Caeruleuptychia helios, was first described by German entomologist Gustav Weymer back in 1911. And the drab brown Magneuptychia keltoumae was only officially described in 2012. But the DNA barcode results show these two butterflies belong to the same species and are just an extreme example sexual dimorphism—differences between sexes. The result was a complete surprise to scientists because most male and female butterflies of their kind, called euptychiines, look fairly similar to one another.
It turns out the sunburst cerulean-satyr isn't the only euptychiine butterfly species with extreme sexual dimorphism. A new species, Trembath’s cerulean-satyr, discovered thanks to this DNA barcoding project, also has bright blue males and brown females. Now scientists plan to study how these differences evolved and what they mean for reproduction. But, said study author Shinichi Nakahara in a press release, they've clearly perfected using wing colors for signaling between the sexes. “Fortunately," he added, "the butterflies are much better at distinguishing one another among the hundreds of other similar species than butterfly experts are.”
In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—a member of the Italian literati who had studied in Egypt, France, and Italy—published his radical Futurist Manifesto, a document whose exaltations of technological disruption ignited the Italian Futurism movement.
Marinetti called for art that embraced new innovations like automobiles, glorified war, “fought” morality, and did away with libraries and museums, which focused too heavily on the past.
The Italian Futurism he spawned revolted against the old: Futurist poetry, for instance, often discarded grammar rules and appeared in non-linear jumbles, while Futurist paintings experimented with perspective and a collapsing of space.
Fashion was a particular fascination of Futurists. Since 1914, with the publication of Giacomo Balla’s “Futurist Manifesto of Men's Clothing” manuscript, the debate over how Italians should dress raged within Marinetti’s circles. Futurists wanted manufacturers to craft clothing out of “new revolutionary materials,” such as paper, cardboard, glass, tinfoil, aluminum, rubber, fish skin, hemp, and gas.
In 1920, the “Manifesto of Futurist Women's Fashion” added a new material to this list: milk.
The idea was not entirely novel. Between 1904 and 1909, German chemist Frederick Todtenhaupt attempted to turn milk byproducts into a fibrous silk substitute. Though his efforts failed, their underlying premise intrigued Marinetti’s band of Futurists. Many began to speculate that milk was the fabric of the future and would one day comprise all styles of dress.
It wasn’t as crazy as it might sound. Wool is a protein, so on a molecular level, it has a very similar structure to casein, the protein found in milk. Chemists simply needed to figure out how to process casein in a way that emulated the texture of wool.
Thus, for milk-based clothing to happen, Marinetti and the Italian Futurists needed to wait for the technology to catch up.
That moment came during the 1930s, when Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini began his push for the country to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Mussolini had stormed into office in 1922 amid popular resentment for what many saw as British, French, and American stiff-arming in the Treaty of Versailles. Marinetti was one of his early proponents. In 1919, Marinetti’s short-lived Futurist Political Party—an attempt to bring Futurist ideas into government—merged with Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party. The two were associates—Mussolini once called Marinetti a “fervent Fascist”—and they shared the goal of strengthening Italy’s economy in preparation for coming wars.
One way they accomplished that? Milk clothing.
In the early 1930s, Mussolini commanded Italians to create more of their own products and, in doing so, to innovate “an Italian style in furnishing, interior decoration, and clothing [that] does not yet exist.”
Like many in the Fascist government, he pinned his hopes on artificial fabrics, a market in which Italy proved dominant. As the Futurists had earlier proposed, many Italian companies began using organic materials—rather than less-prevalent silks and wools—to develop textiles.
Italy’s first great success came with rayon, an artificial silk made of cellulose. In 1929, the nation became the world’s leading producer of the material, boasting 16 percent of total rayon output.
The party responsible for the lion’s share of that rayon was a textile company known as SNIA Viscosa. By 1925, SNIA accounted for 70 percent of Italy’s artificial fibers, growing so large that it became the nation’s first company to be listed in foreign stock exchanges (in London and New York).
And in 1935, SNIA Viscosa acquired the rights to a new kind of fiber: a milk-based synthetic wool that, building on Todtenhaupt’s earlier work, the Italian engineer Antonio Ferretti had recently perfected. This new milk fiber was dubbed lanital (a compounding of lana, meaning wool, and ital, from Italia).
The lanital production process that Ferretti pioneered went like this: first, scientists added acid to skim milk, which separated out the casein. The casein was then dissolved until it developed a viscous consistency. Next, according to TIME, the casein was “forced through spinnerets like macaroni, passed through a hardening chemical bath, [and] cut into fibres of any desired length.” The result? A substance that mimicked wool.
A 1937 British Pathé video offers a rare glimpse into this process, closing on an incredible prediction: “in the future, you’ll be able to choose between drinking a glass of milk and wearing one.”
To Mussolini, lanital was ingenious. Italy, like most nations, was wasting billions of pounds per year in excess skim milk. Lanital gave them an inexpensive way to repurpose it and, considering it otherwise would have languished, offered a lot of bang for their buck: 100 pounds of milk contained around 3.7 pounds of casein, which translated to 3.7 pounds of lanital.
Though lanital was neither as strong nor as elastic as actual wool, Mussolini remained steadfastly delighted. This was the kind of Italian innovation he wanted more of.
So in 1935, after his invasion of Ethiopia resulted in heavy sanctions from the League of Nations (a post-World War I prototype for the United Nations) that further isolated Italy, Mussolini turned his full attention to lanital.
Then more than ever, Mussolini needed to achieve the economic self-sufficiency he craved. He invested more and more in what Italy did best: artificial textiles. According to Karen Pinkus, artificial fabrics, including lanital, became “a central obsession for the regime.”
SNIA Viscosa received large sums of government aid, and its promising new milk fabric earned strong support: by 1937, an astonishing 10 million pounds of lanital were produced. State-run textile boards began publishing propaganda posters urging citizens to “Dress in an Italian manner.” Futurists, delighted by the newfound prominence of milk fibers, enthusiastically praised the invention and the ingenuity of the Fascist government.
Marinetti himself became somewhat of a poet-in-residence for SNIA. His 1938 poem “The Poem of Torre Viscosa” praised the textile company, while “The Simultaneous Poem of Italian Fashion” thanked the company for its “exemplary Italianness, dynamism, autonomy, [and] creativity.”
But most memorable was his “Poem of the Milk Dress,” which was published in an illustrated propaganda booklet, and which featured some choice writing in praise of lanital:
And let this complicated milk be welcome power power power let’s exalt this
MILK MADE OF REINFORCED STEEL
MILK OF WAR
MILITARIZED MILK.
The propaganda worked. Lanital became ubiquitous throughout Italy, and the Futurist dream of milk clothing seemed to become reality.
In April 1937, British publication The Children’s Newspaperreported that “milk wool” had infiltrated Italian suits, dresses, garments, and even flags: “an order has gone forth that flags and banners be made of this material, of which the Italians are exceedingly proud.”
In fact, by 1938, SNIA Viscosa became intent on spreading milk-based clothing around the world. Two years later, it had sold patents to eight countries (Holland, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Japan, France, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and England).
Yet there was one country in particular that SNIA Viscosa hoped to woo: the United States.
The U.S. was a natural target for SNIA Viscosa's milk fibers. Since the early 1920s, Americans had discussed casein as a potential bridge between the agricultural and manufacturing sectors and as a way to repurpose their 50 billion pounds per year of excess skim milk.
In 1900, Henry E. Alvord, a president of multiple American agricultural colleges, suggested that casein be used in glue, buttons, and combs. During World War I, casein appeared in a paint that coated airplane wings; by 1940, it appeared in piano keys. Casein was also found in certain kinds of American paper, where it attached to minerals to give off a glossy sheen.
So SNIA Viscosa thought—why not also in clothing?
With the help of the Italian government, SNIA dispatched fashion emissaries like American journalist-turned-Italian-princess Marguerite Caetani to promote lanital clothing in New York. A December 1937 TIME article describes how Caetani recruited American socialites like Mona Bismarck—whom Chanel once voted the “Best Dressed Woman in the World”—to model high-end milk-based dresses for American audiences.
Their efforts paid off: in 1941, a team for the Atlantic Research Associates—a division of the National Dairy Corporation—began producing lanital under the name aralac (“ARA” as in American Research Associates + lac, Latin for “milk”).
The new milk fibers were a hit. As SNIA had hoped, the New York fashion scene fixated on aralac-based clothing, and aralac briefly denoted sophistication. But when the U.S. joined World War II, it found a more universal use: military equipment.
Aralac was blended with rayon to produce hats, thus providing modern historians with a trivia fact to trump all trivia facts: during World War II, American soldiers wore milk to battle.
Aralac spread so quickly throughout the United States—it soon appeared in coats, suits, and dresses—that a 1944 LIFE article declared, “A great many U.S. citizens, without knowing it, are wearing clothes made from skimmed milk.”
But despite the initial honeymoon period, milk-based fabrics soon fell out of favor around the world. Despite press hype about its luxury, lanital was much weaker than wool, and it broke easily. Threads often came out when ironed. But most damning was the putrid odor these fabrics sometimes gave off: “when damp, [lanital and aralac] smelled like sour milk, causing many consumer complaints.”
By 1948, production shut down in the United States. Soon after, SNIA Viscosa itself began focusing its energy on other synthetic products. Its reputation had taken a massive hit after World War II, when lanital-infused boots, blankets, and military uniforms—which Mussolini believed would resist poison gas—in fact did little to protect Italian soldiers, and led to 2,000 cases of frostbite during a battle against France. Anyway, cheaper synthetic products were flooding the market, pricing out lanital.
Yet that is not the end of the story.
Over the decades, milk-based clothing has remained popular among futurists, and in recent years, the fibers have made somewhat of a resurgence.
In 2011 there was the debut of German-based clothing company Qmilch, whose fashionable products are manufactured almost entirely with casein. Started by German microbiologist and designer Anka Domaske, Qmilch offers products that require fewer chemicals than the lanital of the 1930s and 1940s. A single dress costs between roughly $200 and $230 and is made from six liters of milk.
According to Reuters, the fashion label Mademoiselle Chi Chi—a high-end clothing producer that is a favorite of American celebrities like Mischa Barton and Ashlee Simpson—has also begun selling milk-based clothing. Uniqlo's popular Heattech apparel line, too, is partially made from milk proteins.
Today, these clothes are especially attractive because they are both biodegradable and sustainable. In fact, as global society continues to emphasize reuse, one cannot help but think that perhaps Marinetti’s Futurists were right all along. Perhaps our future lies with the milk dress.
Ian Beck's illustrations have appeared in popular children's books, magazines like Cosmopolitan, and—perhaps most famously—on the cover of Elton John's wildly successful Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. Now, Beck's work has found a new home: the pages of a $30,000 adult coloring book.
Ten customized illustrations by Beck will appear in the Bespoke Colouring Book, which contains handmade paper and a leather-bound front cover bearing 24-carat gold lettering. It is billed as the first "luxury" coloring book, and presumably aims to cash in on the growing popularity of illustrated books among adult readers.
Beck, who says he is "delighted" to take part in the project, will even meet with the buyer to discuss the style and content of the customized illustrations.
The coloring book is being sold on the website VeryFirstTo, an online store for the mega wealthy.
Residents in Windsor, California, about an hour-and-a-half up 101 from San Francisco, got a unpleasant surprise from the air on Thursday: about 100 gallons of pink fire retardant, accidentally dropped from an air tanker onto their neighborhood.
Cars were covered in the stuff, streets were covered in the stuff, sidewalks were covered in the stuff. It was a pink mess.
Officials said that the fire retardant came from a plane operated by the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It was returning from a blaze in nearby Penngrove when it accidentally unleashed some of its load. "I came outside [and] everything was pink," one resident, Alex Cruz told NBC Bay Area. "I've never seen this before."
Local fire crews soon came to clean up. The pink substance, which is sold under the brand name Phos-Chek, is 85 percent water, but contains a number of substances that can interact badly with car paint if allowed to linger. Officials were also wary of the chemical getting into local water supplies, so fire crews sealed storm drains before pumping what they could into trucks. The substance is not considered toxic to wildlife.
According to NBC Bay Area, the final tally of what was hit includes 12 cars, nine houses, and a camper, though it might've been worse; the plane was carrying around 900 more gallons.
"Looks like they stopped," Cruz told the station, "probably noticed they did something wrong."
