Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

The Women Miners in Pants Who Shocked Victorian Britain

0
0
article-image

As part of an investigation into working conditions in mines, Sub-Commissioner Samuel Scriven went into a Staffordshire, Great Britain shaft in 1841 expecting to find a place of work. Instead, he descended into hell. Following reports of women and children being killed in coal mining accidents at work, commissioners like Scriven headed into mines to see for themselves, and were appalled by what they found.

Quite apart from the children who labored in dangerous conditions, men and women worked side-by-side, stripped to the waist and sweating furiously in the heat. There was “something truly hideous and Satanic about it,” Scriven said—not least because some of the women, if they weren’t completely naked, were wearing trousers.

article-image

This, along with their bare breasts, was an affront to Victorian modesty. These young women would be“unsuitable for marriage and unfit to be mothers.” The Labor Tribune, which called itself the “Organ of the Miners,” went further still: “A woman accustomed to such work cannot be expected to know much of household duties or how to make a man’s home comfortable.”

Trousers were shocking. The Manchester Guardiancalled them“the article of clothing which women ought only to wear in a figure of speech,” the Daily Newsclaimed that the “habitual wearing of the costume tends to destroy all sense of decency,” and even the miners union’ said they were a “most sickening sight.”

article-image

But women miners had few options when it came to clothing: flimsier, cooler clothing, which revealed the contours of their body, were seen as“an invitation to promiscuity.” Trousers, and other practical garments, were “unwomanly”—and often led to wardrobe malfunctions. In his 1842 speech to Parliament, Lord Ashley described how the work sometimes wore holes in the crotch of these women and girls’ trousers: “The chain passing high up between the legs of two girls, had worn large holes in their trousers. Any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work. No brothel can beat it.” (What’s especially striking about these observations is that they seem more concerned about the modesty of the women than that they toiled in life-threatening situations.)

article-image

Having women in the mines was financially advantageous to both their bosses and their families. One “underlooker” told the commission that women were paid roughly half of what men were, allowing their employer, the collier, to spend “one shilling to one shilling sixpence more at the alehouse.” Women had worked in Staffordshire mines for centuries, adding crucial coffers to family kitties.

The outcome of this inquiry was swift—the 1842 Miners and Collieries Act forbade all women and girls, and any boy under the age of 10, from working in the mines. They would be replaced by pit ponies, an expensive alternative. Families felt this sudden loss of income acutely. One female miner said, afterwards, that though working underground was not pleasant, it was certainly better than starving. The penalty for employing women in mines was small enough that some women were still illegally employed below-ground—especially as mine-owners often passed this cost onto the women themselves.

However, by the 1880s, around 11,000 women had found work aboveground at the coalmines, sorting coal. Conditions were cold and dirty, and so they wore a striking ensemble, as described by one onlooker: “She wears a pair of trousers which formerly, were scarcely hidden at all, but are now covered with a skirt reaching just below the knees. Her head is cunningly bandaged with a red handkerchief, which entirely protects the hair from coal dust; across this is a piece of cloth which comes under the chin, with the result that only the face is exposed. A flannel jacket completes the costume.” The women most famous for this outfit were “‘Wigan’s Pit Brow Lasses’.”

article-image

These trousers caused some consternation. Below ground, few, if any, non-miners were exposed to this scandalous sight. Now, people feared that the women “dressed and acted like men,” and visitors were restricted from entering the pit to protect their eyes and their moral sensibilities. But people did go, and were somewhere between being titillated and disturbed by what they saw. Frank Hird, a visitor to the mines, described how, at work, “the pit brow lass tucks the skirt around her waist.” When she was on the way to and from home, however, “it is let down, and there is nothing to distinguish her from any ordinary working woman.” But the implication is clear: these “lasses” were different from ordinary working women. Their bifurcated legwear, even under a skirt, showed a degradation of femininity. Wigan pit brow lasses were often characterized as weak and immoral and likely to be drinkers.

article-image

Despite restrictions on visitors, people came from far and wide to observe these women in their trousers. Photographers in particular were fond of documenting them in their unusual get-up, and sold their photos later as cartes de visites or postcards. There was a roaring trade in these, which were sometimes blown up to life-size and then hand-colored. Angela V. John in By the Sweat of their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines, writes: “Sometimes the pit girl would be shown dressed for work on one side and wearing her Sunday clothes on the reverse. They were chiefly sold to commercial travellers who bought them as curiosities.” Pit girls seem to have enjoyed being photographed, for which they were sometimes paid a shilling.

article-image

Few other mines outside of Wigan had women customarily wearing trousers, and seem proud to have shaken off this moral affront. Scottish women miners were said to“dress like ordinary females, they do not dress like the Wigan ladies,” while the inspector for South Wales described the local women there as “respectably dressed.”

But the pit brow women didn’t seem to be especially unhappy about their costume. (They had other considerations to worry about, like feeding their families on half the wage that the men received.) Many married male miners, and were part of a tightknit local community, sparking the anonymous poem, or perhaps song, “A Pit Brow Wench For Me”:

“I am an Aspull collier, I like a bit of fun
To have a go at football or in the sports to run
So goodbye old companions, adieu to jolity,
For I have found a sweetheart, and she’s all the world to me.

Could you but see my Nancy, among the tubs of coal,
In tucked up skirt and breeches, she looks exceedingly droll,
Her face besmear’d with coal dust, as black as black can be,
She is a pit brow lassie but she’s all the world to me.”

Many pit brow lasses were very much in favor of being allowed to work in and around coal mines—not just for the money, but because they enjoyed the fresh air. The other option, working in a factory, was stuffy and unsanitary, with workplace accidents almost as common. And, even while spectators may have thought of them as unladylike, they did what they could to assert their femininity in the pit among the dirt and the dust. A French visitor described their “taste for feminine things and a love of ribbons. Most of them, in fact, wear around their neck ties, whose folds will soon become nothing more than little nests of coal dust.”


The Hermit Crab With the Cool, Modern, Expandable Home

0
0
article-image

Hermit crabs are so much more than just shells with legs sticking out of them. To begin with, some of them have a lot of personality: 40-year-old Jonathan Livingston Crab, for instance, follows his owner around, hangs out at her feet, and waits for her at the front door. And they bravely face vulnerable moments in the dangerous sea, when they transfer from one shell to another as they grow. A newly described species of hermit crab, found in the shallows of the Amami Islands, north of Okinawa, is done with this process of shifting from one shell to the next. Instead, it resides in living coral, which grows with it. No upsizing required—just pure crustacean real estate bliss.

Diogenes heteropsammicola is not the first known species of hermit crab that uses an expandable home. A South African crab discovered in 2013 lives in a soft mass of gooey sand and extendable organic matter, made up of colonies of sea anemones. But only this tiny, gangly new cousin is known to live within coral this way. The coral homes themselves have a somewhat retro-futuristic aesthetic—great pinkish domes that resemble a designer lamp. The hermit crabs seem to be into their modern architecture. They're house-proud, and meticulously brush stray detritus away.

article-image

But although they may be new to us, these hermit crabs have been living symbiotically with coral for a very long time. The crab's long, thin tail and spindly arms are well suited to fitting into the coral's cavity, which is usually inhabited by a marine worm that also shares a symbiotic relationship with the coral. Hermit crab hind ends usually spiral to fit shells, but these crabs are more symmetrical, to fit well in the coral. There are advantages for the coral, too. In the journal article, published in PLOS ONE, researchers describe how the crab "carries the host coral and prevents the coral from being buried."

See? Not just a shell with legs sticking out of it.

The Split Pants That Are China's Alternative to Diapers

0
0
article-image

In The Travels of Marco Polo, Rustichello da Pisa’s account of the travel tales Marco Polo allegedly recounted during their stint in a Genoan prison together, there are descriptions of “black stones” that could burn like logs to keep homes warm. Coal was used around China in the 13th century, when Travels was written, but largely unknown to Europeans at the time.

There’s a long history of innovations from the Far East that seem unusual to Western eyes but are anything but, and are eventually adopted with verve. Paper, movable type, gunpowder, compasses, porcelain—and split-crotch pants?

Kai dang ku (开裆裤), which translates literally as “split-crotch-pants,” are the traditional Chinese alternative to diapers: coverings that are open through the middle so toddlers can relieve themselves without obstacle whenever they feel the need. Practical, economical, and still common, kai dang ku provoke all kind of reactions in Western travelers, from shock to wonder and admiration for their environmental benefits. After all, American consumers throw away around 20 billion plastic diapers a year, amounting to 3.5 million tons of waste.

article-image

“Chinese babies never wore fabric diapers. Instead they always wore kai dang ku,” wrote Canadian author Jan Wong inRed China Blues, a collection of her cultural awakening when she visited China during the cultural revolution in the 1970s. Split-crotch pants, Wong points out, are way cheaper than diapers, and less water-intensive—especially important in pre-Mao agrarian China, where water was better used to grow crops. “Cotton, water and soap were all scarce items. People weren’t. Someone was always available to ha a Chinese baby,” Wong added. Ha is a short sound for a quite specific act: putting a wobbly toddler in squatting position when nature calls, and cleaning up after them.

Wong’s observation points out a dynamic that long made kai dang ku a welcome option: a communal approach to child-rearing. At least up until a generation ago, most Chinese babies and toddlers were cared for by extended family and the wider community. There was no shortage of people to help, Wong wrote. The use of kai dang ku also presumes that crawling infants, as young as four to six months old, can be active participants in toilet training, much earlier than diaper-wearing Western children, who rarely even attempt it before 18 months of age or later.

article-image

Today this Chinese tradition seems prescient, at least among a certain segment of parents in the United States who have signed on to the idea of what’s called elimination communication. Elimination communication refers to practices such as whistles and hisses that may help parents and very young children communicate about the “need to go potty” long before the children can speak. Supporters of this method argue that it helps babies recognize and learn to control their bodily needs at a young age. “This is due, in my opinion, to a conscious recognition of the act, reinforced by a standard position and procedure, whereas diaper babies are encouraged in a way to just let loose whenever,” according to a post on Chengdu Living, a blog written by Americans living in China.

This long-standing sartorial tradition—there is even a Chinese saying, “we have known each other since wearing split-pants”—is fading. “It’s a very recent change,” says Jason Sun from the Museum of Chinese in America. “Kai dang ku were standard up until a generation ago, but today, people from big cities, which is roughly 50 percent of the country, do not use them.”

Economic liberalization has played a role in this: China's titanic diaper market opened up in 1989, and manufacturers weren’t about to miss out. “Nappies [diapers] were introduced to China by P&G during the 1990s and it has taken a long time for consumers to adopt the products,” market researcher Xu Ruyi recently told the Financial Times. But adopt them they have. The multinational corporations have largely focused on new mothers, not grandmothers, when selling the magical properties of diapers. For example, a 2007 P&G Pampers ad campaign tried to convince mothers that diaper-wearing babies sleep better—and in turn grow stronger and smarter.

article-image

China’s one-child policy has played a part, too. “With the one-child policy people started having fewer children and were more able and willing to spend more on the few they had,” says journalist Mei Fong, author of One Child Policy. “So this is the period where the use of diapers and powdered [formula]—seen as more "scientific" and better for child development—really grew rapidly, fostered by the canny power of advertising.” The market economy also put more children in cities, without extended family nearby, and saw parents working longer hours. Beijing Normal University's Zhao Zhongxin said in a 2004 interview with China Daily that the use of diapers became an indicator of social status.

Among Chinese families who have moved to the United States, few families use kai dang ku, according to Sun. But some American parents are warming to the idea of going diaper-free. Birth Day Presence, a childbirth education studio with locations in tony Park Slope and Soho, New York, started offering elimination communication classes back in 2013. At the beginning most people laughed, founder Jade Shapiro told The New York Times, but one or two couples from every childbirth class signed up. Kai dang ku aren’t exactly coal, paper, or gunpowder just yet, but the final verdict on their diaper-free ethos isn’t in just yet.

One Doctor's Quest to Reveal the Perils of Polyester Pants

0
0
article-image

Static electricity can be a real pain. It can make your hair frizz out, it can zap you when you turn on the lights, and, according to one scientist, it can even affect fertility. But you don't have to worry about the charge created when you shuffle across carpet. A small body of research, all conducted by one doctor in Egypt, says you might want to worry about the polyester pants lurking in the back of your drawers.

The late Ahmed Shafik was an incredibly prolific researcher who published more than 500 scientific papers, primarily on the subjects of urology and reproduction. He innovated bladder transplantation techniques and ideas for urinary diversion. He described the muscle reflexes involved in sex, and spent a year in prison for working on an artificial bladder. And a handful of his papers, most of them published in the early 1990s, suggest Shafik was also deeply suspicious of polyester. One paper describes an experiment on dogs that investigated the effects of polyester on hair growth. Another had study participants put on and take off wool and polyester hats to measure the static electricity generated.

One study's frank title belies the quirkiness of the experiment it describes. "Effect of Different Types of Textiles on Sexual Activity: Experimental Study" doesn't tell you that rats wearing pants were involved.

Rats. In pants.

article-image

Shafik dressed 75 male lab rats in tiny little underpants, some of cotton, some of wool, others of 100 percent polyester, and some of a polyester/cotton blend. The rats wore these pants for six to 12 months, and Shafik tracked their sexual activity. He also measured the electrostatic potential on each rat's penis and scrotum with, it's probably safe to assume, very small electrostatic probes. Shafik found that the pure polyester and polyester blend pants generated a static charge—and he hypothesized that this may help explain why these rats were not as successful when it came to their sexual advances. He published the results in the journal European Urology in 1993.

He performed similar experiments on dogs. One study had female dogs wear the same types of pants as the rats (presumably in a larger size) and tracked whether they conceived. In another, "the effect of different types of textiles on pregnancy was studied in 35 pregnant bitches." In still another, male dogs wore cotton or polyester pants for two years, and Shafik found the dogs in polyester pants had lower sperm counts. "The cause of this effect is unknown,” he wrote in the journal Urology Research, “but it may be assumed that the electrostatic potentials generated by the polyester fabric play a role in it.”

As with many clinical trials, eventually the experiments moved from animals to humans. After tracking the sexual activity of 50 men wearing underwear made of the same four fabrics he had tested on rats and dogs (a control group went commando), Shafik determined the polyester pants had an "injurious effect" on human sexual activity. He also tested a potential male contraceptive on humans—a polyester sling. The men in the study wore the sling for a year, and after an average of about 140 days, they stopped producing viable sperm, he reported. Once they took off the slings, things eventually returned to normal.

article-image

Today's polyester pants tend to be more of the athletic variety, compared with the distinctive suits of the 1960s and '70s. But if you're eyeing your workout clothes with suspicion, you probably don't need to worry. Shafik's human experiments didn't have many participants; 14 subjects are certainly not enough to definitively declare polyester slings effective birth control. Also, Shafik's volunteers all wore their polyester undergarments every single day for at least six months. Chances most wardrobes wouldn't present this problem.

Shafik passed away in 2007, without having left us any idea of what sparked his interest in the safety of polyester underwear. His work on rats and the sling contraceptive earned him a posthumous Ig Nobel Prize in 2016—a tongue-in-cheek award dedicated to the corners of science that sound absurd but still provoke thought. His work, unusual as it seems, certainly has a place in the sexological tradition, from Freud to Gräfenberg to Kinsey.

How the Skort Went From Rebellious Garment to Athleisure Staple

0
0

Today, the skort—a portmanteau of skirt and shorts—is most often associated with female tennis players dodging across a tennis court, Spandex-like bike shorts beneath an A-line mini fluttering in the wind serving two purposes: modesty so a woman can spread her legs without flashing the world while retaining a sense of traditional femininity.

But the history of the skort doesn't begin with tennis. Instead, the skort's real path to mainstream acceptance can be traced to a fad that hit America hard in the late 1890s: bicycling.

article-image

The first skorts were actually referred to as "trouser skirts," a clunky but apt name describing the outfit's dual identity. While non-Western cultures had long experimented with drapey pants for women—the salwar of South Asia, the gathered-at-the-ankle jodhpurish pants of the Amazons—pants were, and in many more conservative cultures continue to be, considered virulently masculine and obscene for women to co-opt.

But in the 1890s, bicycling rose from mere spectacle to sport, and a trendy one at that. The design had immensely improved from its previous "boneshaker" design, allowing the rider to balance more comfortably on two similar-sized, air-filled wheels and a metal chain that kept said wheels moving. On these new and improved bicycles, a woman could independently move about—a fact that both perplexed and horrified males and women alike, who couldn't fathom why early feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were so enamored of speeding around on two wheels.

article-image

And as anyone who's ridden a bike knows, having an article of clothing between your ankle and the metal chain that keeps the wheels whirring is asking for a tumble. That meant the florid fashion of the Victorian age was especially ill-equipped for a ride around town. As a 2014 piece in the Atlantic notes, this introduced the first radicalized statement in women's fashion, with exposed ankles and bloomers making the socially proper gasp in shock at what they viewed as outright impropriety and impunity at social norms.

Today, the act of donning pants beneath a skirt might seem almost conservative, but Keren Ben-Horin, a fashion historian and author of She's Got Legs: A History of Hemlines and Fashion, says that the "trouser-pants" that biking demanded of women made for a stunning statement of independence. "It was very forward," Ben-Horin says. "And it was only worn as athletic attire, not as street clothes."

Indeed, the first skorts doubled as the first athleisure, though it was nothing like the sleek, moisture-wicking, body-defining outfits we associate with Lululemon yoga pants. The first skorts were wide-legged pants beneath a panel that buttoned up double-breast style to hide the fact that there was a pair of pants below the skirt. "They weren't bifurcated garments, and the pants part weren't really shorts," says Deirdre Clemente, a professor of history at the University of Las Vegas specializing in the fashion industry. "They were more like a skirt with a flat front, and they were very baggy."

article-image

But these garments were revolutionary in that fashion at the time emphasized a voluminous behind (usually created with a corset and cage) and a flat front. "Big bosom, big sleeves, big behind," Ben-Horin says. The trouser pants reversed that concept. "It brought up a lot of questions," Ben-Horin points out, "about what it means to be a woman, what it means to behave properly, what it means to be a woman wearing pants. This was infringing on men's power and a man's role in society by wearing something considered masculine; if you are wearing pants, you are infringing on this power men assert."

As with many a fashion trend, the French were the first to make skorts cool. It was World War I and women were redefining fashion and utility, questioning the Victorian era's emphasis on ruffles and impractical layering amid the newfangled idea that clothing should prioritize ease of movement. What's more was the era's fascination with Orientalism: Westerners were fascinated by the spoils of colonialism and what they saw as "exotic"—namely, harem pants, dense and intricate embroidery, and more fluid lines that allowed a woman to walk and not teeter-totter precariously in a literal cage. Parisian couture houses began showcasing heavily embroidered trouser skirts that could be worn at home or as costumes, deemed more as whimsical vestiges of far-off lands than a practical thing to sling on for errand-running.

article-image

In an ironic twist, dancing brought the masculine-straddling skort to the mainstream. Ben-Horin traces the trouser skirt's blowup in popularity to Irene Castle, who—along with her husband Vernon—is credited with making ballroom dancing fashionable in the wake of World War I. The Castles dancing expertise was immensely popular on silent film and involved quick twirls that required complex footwork. Those Victorian era frou-frou gowns were an impediment and basically useless. Castle is credited for not only ushering in the flapper era with her bob and slinky, shin-skimming dresses, but also having a thing for "split skirts," or a skirt that was divided like harem pants, with front-covering pleats that made it look outwardly like any other dress. That freedom of movement combined with flapper-era trendiness was enough to get upper-crust females to don pants under their skirts.

Clemente says the skort's rise also shadowed the rise of synthetic fabrics like rayon, which had just been invented. "It made mass production possible for women," she says. Previously, women's fashion was very much tailor-driven, but the skort was an off-the-rack purchase for going dancing, and could be produced cheaply thanks to manmade fibers. Rayon also took to dyes better, introducing color that took away from the drab, dull, beige-ish hues that dominated the Victorian era and allowed women to express themselves in more vibrant tones.

article-image

That produced a trickle-down effect from women to girls: Clemente says that rayon's unique capability to be used in skorts meant that college-age women began adopting a variation of the skort as uniforms for gym class, which appeased administrators in having the appearance of the skirt while allowing female athletes to run and jump without the restrictions of a skirt. "It was the first time you really saw the spending power of young women," Clemente says. "These women under 30 were navigating social norms and dictating purchases. And with rayon, they were able to buy two of something their mother would only buy one of."

If bicycling made the skort accessible and dancing made it appropriate, then tennis finally made the garment something a woman could wear out in the open, into the streets. Wimbledon 1931 changed the course of women's sports fashion history—and vaulted the skort into superstardom. "Wimbledon has always been fertile ground for issues and conversations around women's dress," Ben-Horin says. Prior to 1931, the big fashion controversy was stockings: Women wanted to give them up, but the hoity-toity Wimbledon people thought the prospect of seeing a woman’s bare legs preposterous.

That Wimbledon, in 1931, Spanish tennis player Lili Alvarez appeared on court without stockings. But no one noticed—because Alvarez was also wearing what amounted to culottes draped with a layer of fabric to create the illusion of a skirt. The outfit, created by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, had previously been worn to the French Open, but its debut at the conservative Wimbledon left several members of the audience gasping. "Some said it was unbecoming, shocking," Ben-Horin says of newspaper reports commenting on Alvarez's take on femininity on court. "But Lili said that it was much more comfortable, allowing her to spread her legs. Even though it looks like a skirt, it still caused an uproar."

article-image

"The skort got sidelined after 1930," says Clemente, mentioning that society had come around to seeing women wearing shortened pants, making the front panel and pretension of a skirt unnecessary. "They were still very popular among tennis players, but they lost their prominence." But Alvarez singlehandedly made it permissible for women to wear pants to work—if a woman could flounce around a court in loose culottes parading as a skirt, then society was fine with a woman wearing pants. And Alvarez’s version of the skort helped democratize the article of clothing—previously, its audience was solely white, well-off, and able to afford the leisure time sports afforded them. Now, the skort was a practical item, something that a woman could wear jogging, or a girl could don for soccer practice.

Yet the skort was relegated to the world of sports and not of popular fashion, and Clemente has a theory why. "Skorts represent the compromise between the offensive—shorts—and the polite, the skirt," she says. "Skorts had an element of formality of the traditional garment, but you were getting these modern elements of movement and freedom, too. Shorts were associated with masculinity, but when they became acceptable, it wasn't necessary for women to wear a skort any more."

It took another world war and a couple more decades of hemline hiking for the skort as we know it—an above-the-knee contraption that's got an A-line cut and bike shorts below it—to really take hold. By the 1960s, thanks to miniskirts and the counterculture revolution, the skort bobbed to the surface. "It was very fashion forward, for free-spirited women," Ben-Horin says. "It never really became a fad so much as a statement for freedom of movement."

article-image

"One thing with the skort was that it pleased both men and women," Clemente says. "Femininity is something that men forced upon us. Men defined what is feminine and what is not feminine. The skort let women retain their femininity but also let women define femininity for themselves."

That's the thing about the skort: Its quiet rebelliousness might have some thinking that it's in disguise as a skirt, offering traditional modesty for its wearer. The skort's ability to rise above the boxes of masculinity and femininity, to be pants and skirt in one, mean it's importantly able to be more than a cute portmanteau. Without the skort, it would have been nearly impossible to kickstart the women's sports revolution in America. Without the skort, gender roles in fashion—a man should wear pants and a woman should wear a skirt—would have been difficult to transcend. Without the skort, some of today's biggest trends for the lower half of the body—swooshy big pants, calf-grazing skirts, religiously observant and modest fashion, and of course, athleisure—would have been nearly impossible to conceive of and even more difficult to sell to a broad audience.

"Skorts are crazily important," Clemente says of the garment's role in feminism. Don't let its indecision about being neither shorts nor a skirt fool you: The skort is revolutionary.

Hubble Spotted a Strange New Object in Our Solar System

0
0
article-image

In the 27 years since the Hubble Space Telescope settled into orbit, it's returned some stunning images and fascinating discoveries. It added another to the list recently, when it trained its lenses on asteroid 288P.

It turns out that 288P isn't your typical hunk of space rock. As the asteroid neared the sun last September, Hubble saw that 288P is not one but two asteroids, roughly the same size, that orbit each other about 62 miles apart. That may seem like a tiny gap, but for a binary asteroid system, it's huge. Based on how the asteroid system moves, a team of astronomers think it's only been a binary system for about 5,000 years. Before that, it was probably one asteroid, which then broke apart because it was rotating too quickly.

As the two asteroids whirl around each other, and orbit the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, they also happen to generate a tail of vapor from water ice—just like the tail of a typical comet. Binary asteroids have been discovered before, but this is the first one that can also be classified as a main-belt comet. Scientists suspect that water first came to early Earth on an icy asteroid not unlike 288P, so the strange object may hold important insights.

Behold Wisconsin's Cabinet of Curiosity Corn Maze

0
0

There are a few things here at Atlas Obscura that are what you might call, “of perennial interest,” and that list includes mazes and cabinets of curiosity. So now that the University of Wisconsin’s Geology Museum has teamed up with a local farm to create a corn maze in the shape of a fossil-filled wunderkammer, you better believe we’re going to share it.

As Science is reporting, geologists from the museum worked with the Treinen Farm, some 20 miles north of Madison, to create a massive, science-themed labyrinth that pays tribute to the state’s official fossil, the trilobite (an early arthropod that crawled sea floors for 270 million years).

From the air, one can see that the maze is split up into sections like the cubbies of a curio cabinet, each containing a different specimen, sketched out of the corn. The center of the maze is taken up by the massive trilobite design, which is said to be almost 500 feet long. On either side, the path of the maze forms the shapes of a bee, a microscope, an arrowhead, and more, each representing some aspect of the state’s scientific heritage. And each area is separated by a twisting filigree for visitors to get lost in.

In addition to the maze itself, which will be open all fall, the Geology Museum will be offering educational fossil courses for the duration.

The Bad Hair, Incorrect Feathering, and Missing Skin Flaps of Dinosaur Art

0
0
article-image

Illustrating long-extinct creatures is difficult, but important work. With no living specimens to observe, it’s up to “paleoartists” who draw, paint, or otherwise illustrate the creatures of prehistory as we think they might’ve been. Their work is the reason that when we talk about velociraptors, stegosaurs, or even wooly mammoths, we have some idea of what they looked like.

But since all we have to go on are fossils, deciding how a dinosaur would have looked is as much art as it is science. And there’s at least one paleoartist who thinks we might be getting things wrong.

C.M. Koseman is an Istanbul-based artist and author (along with John Conway) of the 2012 book, All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. A long-time creature designer, Koseman had always had an interest in dinosaurs, but he embarked on his book with Conway after they began to realize that something was a bit off. “We were both dinosaur geeks, but the more we looked at these skeletons, and the more we looked at the pictures, we noticed that most mainstream dinosaur art didn’t look at dinosaurs as real creatures,” says Koseman.

Most serious paleoart bases itself on the detailed findings of paleontologists, who can work for weeks or even years compiling the most accurate descriptions of ancient life they can, based on fossil remains. But Koseman says that many dinosaur illustrations should take more cues from animals living today. Our world is full of unique animals that have squat fatty bodies, with all kinds of soft tissue features that are unlikely to have survived in fossils, such as pouches, wattles, or skin flaps. “There could even be forms that no one has imagined,” says Koseman. “For example there could plant-eating dinosaurs that had pangolin or armadillo-like armor that wasn’t preserved in the fossil. There could also be dinosaurs with porcupine-type quills.”

article-image

Rarely do we see that type of variation in depictions of dinosaurs. In many ways, there is a certain amount of uniformity in the way we think of dinosaurs, which creates some common tropes in paleoart that Koseman thinks could improve.

One of his main points of contention is the way that we consider dinosaur heads. “The reference has always been crocodiles,” says Koseman. “The biggest thing is teeth and facial fat. Readers have to be aware that all dinosaurs they see in all media, and especially in popular culture, seem to have their heads flensed. They’ve always got these weird grins with only the teeth visible.” As he points out, most animals have lips and gums and lumps of facial fat that change the profile of the head, and cover the teeth. But in many predatory dinosaur illustrations, these are usually missing, making them look fierce, if improbable.

“Another trope is what I like to call the ‘roadkill hair’ trope,” says Koseman. Some fossils show signs of hair, which Koseman says can lead to artists illustrating their creatures with hair only on the parts where it was found on a fossil. However, it’s possible that some dinosaurs had much more hair that they are usually shown to have. “Imagine if you found a raccoon, and only half of the tail was covered in hair, so then you carry that over to a living reconstruction.”

A similar issue occurs with the relatively recent trend of giving dinosaurs feathers. While it is a good way to add some color and flare to an illustration, the placement and length of dinosaur feathers is often based more in fantasy than any past reality. “We have full-on wing feathers erupting from distinct places on the head. Or things like a raptor dinosaur jumping like a ninja and his feathers are coming out of his elbows or knee joint or those weird things,” says Koseman. He thinks that sometimes dinosaurs are over-feathered, with plumage where it doesn’t belong, or under-feathered, being too conservative with the overall coverage.

article-image

There is also the practice of what he calls “feather dressing,” where an artist will transfer the color palette of a living bird’s feathers over to a dinosaur. Given the diversity and unique colorations that belong to single varieties of birds, it’s unlikely that any dinosaur shared the same hues. “The feathers of a green-headed mallard exist only once in nature,” says Koseman. “There’s no way in the world that a specific bird’s clothing would be replicated in a dinosaur in the past.”

Then there is the issue of proportion. Koseman says that there is a tendency to exaggerate the heads and claws of dinosaurs. Certainly many dinosaurs had large claws, and fearsome heads, but in many pictures, they seem to be almost cartoonishly huge. “Artists sometimes do this semi-unconsciously because they want to depict the head and the claws, the business end of the thing,” he says.

None of this is to say that paleoart is failing at its job. Many of the more improbable aspects of current dinosaur illustration make the beasts seem rather more sensational, and in some ways more attractive, helping to keep future generations interested in paleontology. Dinosaurs look cool.

article-image

And the problems with depicting the creatures of the past aren’t going anywhere. It’s likely that far-future paleoartists will have similar problems with creatures we take for granted today. It’s conceivable, for example, that future paleoartists will speculate that turtles once left their shells, or that frogs, with their weird legs, used to run around upright. “There’s going to be all sorts of reconstructions with reindeer antlers having strange membranes or juvenile reindeer jumping from cliffs, using their horns as paragliders,” says Kozeman.

Short of a Jurassic Park-style clone scenario, we might never know exactly what dinosaurs looked like. But until that day, we have artists like Kozeman to continue dreaming up the endless variations of the prehistoric animal world, by taking a cue from the creatures in our own backyards. “Do not imitate them, but see what other shapes they could take.”

For more paleoart goodness, check out our discussion about illustrating ancient sharks with Allen John Gregory.


How Books Designed for Soldiers’ Pockets Changed Publishing Forever

0
0

In early June, 1944, tens of thousands of American troops prepared to storm the beaches of Normandy, France. As they lined up to board the invasion barges, each was issued something less practical than a weapon, but equally precious: a slim, postcard-sized, softcover book.

These were Armed Services Editions, or ASEs—paperbacks specifically designed to fit in a soldier's pockets and travel with them wherever they went. Between 1943 and 1947, the United States military sent 123 million copies of over 1,000 titles to troops serving overseas. These books improved soldiers' lives, offering them entertainment and comfort during long deployments. By the time the war ended, they'd also transformed the publishing industry, turning the cheap, lowly paperback into an all-American symbol of democracy and practicality.

As the bookseller Michael Hackenberg writes in an essay for the Library of Congress, small books and paperbacks have arisen many times over the course of publishing history, usually in response to some particular need. In 1501, Venice's Aldine Press began printing octavo-sized editions of Latin and Greek classics for aspiring scholars on the go. (The books were designed to be "held in the hand and learned by heart… by everyone," their publisher, Aldus Manutius, later wrote.)

article-image

The streets of 16th-century Europe were plastered over with paper tracts and pamphlets. In the 1840s, the German publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz began putting out portable editions of popular books, which travelers snapped up to while away the hours during rail journeys, and by the 1930s, Britain was stacked with softcover Penguin Classics, available at every Woolworth's store.

But in the U.S. in the early 20th century, paperbacks were a bit more of a hard sell. As Hackenberg writes, without a mass-market distribution model in place, it was difficult to make money selling inexpensive books. Although certain brands, including Pocket Books, succeeded by partnering with department stores, individual booksellers preferred to stock their shops with sturdier, better-looking hardbacks, for which they could also charge higher prices.

Even those who were trying to change the public's mind bought into this prejudice: one paperback series, Modern Age Books, disguised its offerings as hardcovers, adding dust jackets and protective cardboard sleeves. They, too, couldn't hack it in the market, and the company folded in the 1940s.

article-image

At exactly that time, though, another demographic arose that had a particular use for low-cost, portable books: American soldiers. In September of 1940, as the U.S.'s entry into World War II began looking more and more likely, President Roosevelt reinstated the draft. Hundreds of thousands of new recruits soon found themselves in basic training, an experience that, due to a lack of available facilities, often included building their own barracks and training grounds.

Within a couple of years, many of them—along with hundreds of thousands of others—had been deployed. As Hackenberg writes, the U.S. military now consisted of "millions of people far from home, who found themselves in a situation where periods of boredom alternated with periods of intense activity." In other words, they were the perfect audience for a good paperback.

It didn't take long for the Army, too, to come to this conclusion. As Molly Guptill Manning writes in When Books Went to War, although books were already considered an important source of troop morale—the Army Library Services had been established during World War I—Nazi Germany's embrace of book-burning, propaganda and censorship imbued them with new wartime significance. In 1940, after word got out that the newly built camps were starved for books, the Army's new Library Section chief, Raymond L. Trautman, set out to change that.

article-image

As Manning writes, Trautman's initial plan, which involved using Army funds to buy one book per soldier, fell far short of its goal. In an attempt to pick up the slack, libraries across the country independently organized book drives. This quickly mushroomed into the nationwide Victory Book Campaign, or VBC, a collaboration between the Army and the American Library Association that aimed to be the biggest book drive in the country's history.

Although the campaign started off strong, collecting one million books in its first month, donations soon slowed—citizens, who were already being asked to sacrifice for the war effort in any number of other ways, couldn't keep up that initial pace. Many of the books donated—like How to Knit and An Undertaker's Review—were rejected, as it was assumed, fairly or unfairly, that they'd hold no interest for soldiers. On top of that, the bulky, boxy hardcovers proved bad battlefield companions. In 1943, the VBC was officially ended.

article-image

Trautman had to try something different. Over the course of the preceding years, he had consulted with publishers, authors, and designers about how to quickly and efficiently increase the number of books that made it to the troops. In 1943, together with the graphic artist H. Stanley Thompson and publisher Malcolm Johnson, he officially proposed his idea: Armed Services Editions, or ASEs.

These would be mass-produced paperbacks, printed in the U.S. and sent overseas on a regular basis. Rather than depending on the taste and largesse of their overextended fellow citizens, soldiers would receive a mix of desirable titles—from classics and bestsellers to westerns, humor books and poetry—each specially selected by a volunteer panel of literary luminaries.

But choosing the books was only half the battle. As had been proven by previous efforts, in order for this project to be a success, the objects themselves had to be somewhat war-ready: "flat, wide, and very pocketable," as John Y. Cole, of the Library of Congress's Center for the Book, put it. Although five different presses quickly volunteered to help make the books, their machines were normally used to print magazines, which, while both flat and wide, were certainly too big for your average soldier's pocket.

article-image

Trautman and Thompson solved this problem by printing two books at a time, laid on top of each other. Workers at the presses printed out the double pages, cut them in half, and sorted them into appropriate piles. The pages were then stapled together—a way of thwarting the world's many glue-eating insects, and of slowing down the mildew invited by thread.

Because of the varying sizes of the printing presses, two types of ASE resulted: a smaller one, about the size and shape of a postcard, which could fit into a breast pocket, and a larger one, 6 ½ by 4 ½ inches, for the pants pocket. Both kinds were horizontally oriented, almost like a flip book. These design choices weren't lost on the soldiers: "Whoever made 'em hip pocket size showed a stroke of genius!" one soldier wrote. "I can't say it's next to my heart, but it is treasured."

The first set of ASEs was released in October of 1943. Each month for the next four years, crate after crate of books made their way to overseas soldiers, pretty much wherever they were. "They have been dropped by parachute to outpost forces on lonely Pacific islands; issued in huge lots to hospitals… and passed out to soldiers as they embarked on transports," reporter Frank S. Adams wrote in 1944.

article-image

They were a huge and immediate hit. "Never had so many books found so many enthusiastic readers," Cole later wrote. As Manning tells it, "servicemen read them while waiting in line for chow or a haircut, when pinned down in a foxhole, and when stuck on a plane for a milk run." Some soldiers reported that ASEs were the first books they had ever read cover to cover. Troops cherished their shipments, passing them around up to and beyond the point of illegibility. "They are as popular as pin-up girls," one soldier wrote. "To heave one in the garbage can is tantamount to striking your grandmother," quipped another.

Sometimes, particular titles had lasting effects. Betty Smith, whose A Tree Grows in Brooklyn went out in Shipment D, received ten times more fan mail from soldiers than she did from ordinary civilians. (One, from a 20-year-old soldier who read the book while recovering from malaria, told her that it caused his "dead heart" to "[turn] over and become alive again.") After Katherine Anne Porter's Selected Short Stories was chosen, she began hearing from aspiring writers who wanted to discuss technique and craft.

During a Library of Congress event in 1983, veteran Arnold Gates remembered tucking Storm Over the Land, Carl Sandburg's history of the Civil War, into his helmet before marching to the front lines. "During the lulls in the battle I would read what he wrote about another war and found a great deal of comfort and reassurance," he said.

article-image

This influence went both ways. The soldiers' enthusiasm brought particular titles—including the Great Gatsby, which wasn't very popular when first released—a new wave of renown. It also changed the American paperback's reputation forever. "The ASE series set the final imprimatur on cheap, mass-market reading material," Hackenberg writes.

From the beginning of the production process, he continues, the publishers involved felt "a sense of pending triumph and of crossing a new threshold." After the project's end, in 1947, this instinct was borne out: by 1949, softcovers were outselling hardback books by 10 percent.

So the next time you dog-ear a page of your pocket paperback and slip it into your jacket to accompany you on your commute, think of a soldier. They're a big part of why it fits.

The Banned 1910s Magazine That Started a Feminist Movement in Japan

0
0

It was close to 10 p.m. on a spring night in Tokyo in 1912, when Kazuko Mozume heard a dog barking behind her father’s house. It would not stop. At the back gate, she found three men waiting for her, a policeman and two others. They didn’t say what they wanted, they only asked her if this was the office of Seitō, the women’s literature magazine she had started with four other young women.

She led the men through the large house and down the long corridor to the rooms that served as the magazine’s headquarters. The men looked around and spotted just a single copy of the magazine’s latest issue. They seized the publication and, as they were leaving, finally told the surprised young woman why they had come. This issue of Seitō had been banned, they told her, on the grounds that it was “disruptive of the public peace and order.”

The young women who had created the magazine less than a year before had known it would be controversial. It was created by women, to feature women’s writing to a female audience. In Japan in 1911, it was daring for a woman to put her name in print on anything besides a very pretty poem. The magazine’s name, Seitō, translated to “Bluestockings,” a nod to an unorthodox group of 18th-century English women who gathered to discuss politics and art, which was an extraordinary activity for their time.

But Seitō was not intended to be a radical or political publication. “We did not launch the journal to awaken the social consciousness of women or to contribute to the feminist movement,” wrote the magazine’s founder, Haruko Hiratsuka, who went by the penname Raichō, or "Thunderbird." “Our only special achievement was creating a literary journal that was solely for women.” Raichō was most interested in self-discovery—“to plumb the depths of my being and realize my true self,” she wrote—and much of the writing in the magazine was confessional and personal, a 1910s version of the essays that might now be found in xoJane or Catapult.

Women's feelings and inner thoughts, however, turned out to be a provocative challenge to the social and legal strictures of this era, when a woman’s role was to be a good wife and mother. The Seitō women imagined much wider and wilder emotional and professional lives for themselves. They fell in love, they indulged in alcohol, they built careers as writers, and they wrote about it all—publicly. The stories were radical enough that the government censored them. The story that prompted policemen to visit the magazine’s office late at night was a piece of fiction about a married women writing to her lover to ask him to meet her while her husband was away.

As they attracted public attention and disapproval, instead of shying away from the controversy they'd created, the editors of Seitō were forced to confront more baldly political questions, and this in turn earned them more banned issues. In the pages of their magazine they came to debate women’s equality, chastity, and abortion. Without originally intending to, they became some of Japan’s pioneering feminists.

article-image

Starting the magazine hadn't been Raichō’s idea. At first she had no interest in being a professional writer or editor. At the time that her mentor, Chōkō Ikuta, suggested it, Raichō had been immersed in practicing zen meditation, learning English, and pursuing a self-directed course of literary study at the library. She was 26 and living at home with her parents, so she wasn’t worried about supporting herself. She may also have been reluctant to reenter Ikuta’s world. Her experience with his last literary society had ended when she ran off with a married man to a mountain retreat, where they spent a night outside in the cold—a romantic, failed attempt at suicide.

This incident had been a scandal for her upper-middle-class family, and though her father and mother had supported her through it, she was still expected to settle down in a respectable marriage. Raichō was part of a generation of Japanese women who had unprecedented access to education, in women’s high schools started in the late 19th century and at Japan Women’s University, which was established in 1901. Women like Raichō studied the literature of naturalism, full of ideas about self-awakening (for men, at least). Even as women’s education improved, they were expected to conform to increasingly constrictive ideas about women’s roles and behaviors. Strict moral codes were creeping up around chastity, and arranged marriages, once a practice reserved for the highest classes of society, were becoming more common among the middle class.

“A lot of these young women had developed intellectual curiosity and ambition and wanted to do something more than be a good wife and mother,” says Jan Bardsley, a professor of Asian Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Bluestockings of Japan.

Living at home, Raichō had a roommate, Yoshiko Yasumochi, a friend of her older sister. When Raichō mentioned the idea of a literary magazine, Yasumochi, who had recently graduated college, jumped on it. “She had no desire to return to her home in Shikoku,” Raichō wrote in her autobiography. “This was just the sort of job she had been looking for.”

The two women started making plans for the magazine and a literary society that would accompany it. They recruited three other founding members, including Mozume, who offered her house as an office. Raichō was too worried about her own father’s continued support to offer hers, but her mother did secretly fund the printing of the inaugural issue. At Ikuta’s urging, the Seitō founders had canvassed for submissions and support among the few female writers of Japan and the wives of literary men. The first issue contained a poem from the famous poet Akiko Yosano, who wrote:

The day has arrived when the mountains are about to become active
People do not believe me when I say this
The mountains have simply been dormant for awhile …
... Believe only this
Now all the women who lay dormant are rousing themselves.

Raichō herself wrote the magazine’s manifesto and call to action, which became known as the first public address on Japanese women’s rights. “In my wildest dreams, I did not imagine how much my opening statement would stir the young women of my generation,” she wrote later. She had sat up through the night, writing “with every fiber of my being,” an expansive, rambling, impassioned piece that opens, “In the beginning, women was the sun ... ” and builds to a call to arms, “Even if I collapse halfway, or even if I sink to the bottom of the ocean, a shipwrecked soldier, I will raise both my paralyzed hands and yell with my last breath, 'Women! Advance! Advance!'”

The Seitō editors put a small ad in the paper to announce the first issue. They priced it at 25 sen, slightly more expensive than other magazines of its kind. None of them expected it to be a publishing success.

The first issue sold out in a month. Seitō was a phenomenon.

article-image

In the first issues, the Seitō editors published essays, poems, and works of fiction that plumbed their inner worlds. “There was a vogue at the time to write in the first person, as if you were sharing your innermost thoughts,” says Bardsley. These weren’t political provocations, but they attracted an impassioned following, mostly young women. Letters from around the country poured in, and the magazine's most ardent fans showed up at the office looking for advice or a glimpse of the writers they admired.

From this outpouring of enthusiasm, the inner circle of Seitō began to grow. Within the first year of publication, the office started receiving frequent letters, which, Raichō wrote, “stood out for their pure idiosyncracy.” They came from Kōchiko Otake, the daughter of a prominent artist. In person, Otake was tall and loud, and dared to wear men’s clothing. But in her writing, she sounds like an eager kid. In her first letter to Seitō, she wrote, “I’ve said so many foolish things, but that’s the kind of person I am—I just can’t be dishonest about myself. So I’ll just go ahead and send this letter .... When I go to Tokyo, I’ll visit your office and apologize in person in my crude, childish way.”

“She was absolutely uninhibited,” Raichō wrote.

This particular quality of Otake's became a problem for Seitō. The popular media had taken an interest in the lives of the unusual women who were producing the magazine. As many feminists have found, their ideas and work mattered less to the press and public than how they conducted their personal lives. After she became a regular presence in the office, Otake's taste for adventure and eagerness to share her experiences fueled the gossip swirling around the editors.

In one incident that made it into newspapers, for instance, Otake visited a café known as a haunt for local artists, where the proprietor taught her to make a trendy cocktail with five brightly colored liquors. Women weren’t supposed to drink, and Otake was less interested in imbibing than in the delight of mixing the concoction. But when she described it in the magazine, it seemed as if everyone involved with Seitō had been getting drunk on fancy cocktails.

article-image

More scandalous was a visit arranged by Otake's uncle to the Yoshiwara quarter of the city, a red-light district that only men were supposed to frequent. A small group of women, including Otake and Raichō, spent the night in a high-end brothel, in the company of a courtesan named Eizan. The Seitō editors had little sense of the lives of women of lower classes, and the visit was meant to open their eyes to the problems faced by women of different circumstances. That is not how it was received when Otake told a reporter about it.

“Some key members of the 'Seitō Society’ have absurdly and outrageously been to the Yoshiwara,” one paper wrote. “They have gone so much on the loose that even men would have been put to shame."

"They also write about iconoclastic and unconventional things," the article noted, almost as an aside.

The newspaper reporters weren’t the only ones who thought Otake and Raichō had gone too far, though. The Yoshiwara trip in particular caused divisions among Seitō's members. The magazine’s subscriber base had been growing, but after this incident, teachers, worried for their jobs, canceled their subscriptions so they couldn’t be associated with this group of wayward women. Mozume’s father forced her to resign (though she kept writing under a pen name). Yasumochi, who had been so important in the founding of the magazine, wrote to Raichō that, “In the earlier stage Seitō was indeed a heartfelt, trustworthy and distinguished magazine, but it has lost these good qualities .... Because of your thoughtless conduct, all these women have gained a bad reputation for doing away with past conventions and attempting things women have never done before.”

article-image

By 1913, Seitō had reached a turning point. The group’s collective journey of self-exploration had led them into trouble, but rather than turning away from the controversy, they leaned into the questions of women’s rights and lives that they’d raised.

In the first year of publication, the editors had discussed women’s issues on occasion, most notably in a special issue on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, itself a controversial work about the place of women in society, which had run in Tokyo. And the 1912 Seitō story, “The Letter,” which provoked the first censure from the government and the seizing of the issue from the office, read: “thinking of the nape of your neck and the delight of the first night your crimson lips met mine …. What I want ... is to feel completely enveloped by an earnest and human love.”

They increasingly began to confront controversial questions about the rights of women and the control they should have over their bodies. In a special 1913 issue on women’s rights, Seitō commissioned an essay from Hideko Fukuda, a feminist known as a radical activist, on “The Solution to the Woman Question,” in which she advocated not just for equal rights between genders, but also for a communal system to create equality among classes as well.

“Only under such circumstances will real women’s liberation come about,” she wrote. “Unless this first step is taken, even if women get voting rights, and even if courts, universities, and government offices in general are opened to women, those who enter these, will, of course, only be women from the influential class; the majority of ordinary women will necessarily be excluded from these circles. Thus, just as class warfare breaks out among men, so class warfare will occur among women.”

article-image

The government banned this entire issue for being “disruptive of public peace and order.” A couple months later, another issue was banned because of an article opposing arranged marriages. The next year, one of the magazine’s writers sparked a debate on chastity when she wrote (in vague terms) about losing her virginity to a boss who threatened to fire her if she wouldn’t have sex with him. Though that question aroused the feelings of the magazine’s contributors, who argued over whether the writer’s decision was analogous to accepting an arranged marriage, the government allowed the discussion to proceed.

Censors returned for a 1914 issue containing a fictional story about a woman leaving her husband, and one in 1915 for a fictional story about a woman who did not regret having an abortion. That story, “To My Lover From a Woman in Prison,” was inspired by real-life events, and the main character offers a pro-choice argument that must have seemed incendiary at the time. “As long as a fetus has not matured, it is still just one part of the mother’s body,” she writes to her lover. “There, I believe it is well within the mother’s rights to decide the future of the fetus, based on her own assessment of its best interests.” The government called the story “injurious to public morals.”

article-image

As they provoked government censors with their writing, the women of Seitō tried to live according to the principles of freedom and exploration that they advocated for. They left husbands and started affairs. They found themselves pregnant and considered abortion. Raichō started a relationship with a younger man, left her parents’ house, and gave up their financial support. Pursuing an unconventional life and publishing a controversial magazine, though, strained her emotional resources. In 1915, she handed over editorial control of the magazine to Itō Noe, who pushed further into contentious territory. But the magazine had been struggling financially and, after Japan entered World War I, attention began to fade. It closed, without warning, in 1916.

For many years after that, Seitō’s creators dropped out of the spotlight. “They were notorious in the 1910s, but then you don’t hear too much from them,” says Bardsley. But after World War II, the occupying Allies pushed for women’s equality, through coeducation and the right to vote. All of sudden, interest in the Bluestockings rose again, and they were seen as a pioneering feminist organization in Japan. Today, anyone who studies the history of women's rights there learns about their work.

“Too often the perception is that women movements come from elsewhere to Japan,” says Bardsley. The story of Seitō, though, shows that Japanese feminism has its own legacy. “It’s mixed in with ideas from abroad, but there are Japanese ways of thinking about these issues,” says Bardsley. “In its own day, what was so bold about Seitō was just that these women stood up and wrote, ‘I think this. I want this.’”

Found: An Incredibly Well-Preserved Medieval Shipwreck, Among Many More

0
0
article-image

For centuries, the Black Sea, the wide basin that connects Eastern Europe to Asia, was traveled by ships laden with goods. Not all of those ships made it to their destinations, and a team of scientists studying the bottom of the sea—the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (MAP)—has discovered a collection of beautifully preserved shipwrecks that date back to the 9th century.

The Black Sea MAP project wasn’t explicitly searching for shipwrecks, but rather scanning the seafloor to understand the region's natural history. But they knew they would find wrecks along the way. The Black Sea’s waters have relatively little salt and low oxygen concentration, which means that the creatures that break down the wood of shipwrecks elsewhere don’t thrive here. When a wooden ship sinks to the bottom of the sea, it can stay in decent condition, even after centuries.

article-image

Of the 43 shipwrecks the team identified, one of the most stunning is a medieval ship dating to the 13th or 14th century. Historians know that ships of this style existed from written sources, including manuscripts from Venice, but no example had ever been found. This one is so well preserved that the masts are still standing.

“This is the type of ship that created the trading empires of Venice and Genoa; the type of ship used by the Crusaders,” the University of Connecticut's Kroum Batchvarov, a codirector of the project, said in a press release.

The project’s primary goal is to study the layers of sand and rock at the bottom of the sea to better understand the region’s history of flooding. At one point in history, the waters of the Black Sea had receded enough for people to settle in what had been marshy land—only to have their homes floods as climate has shifted. How fast did that happen? It would have been a slower-moving disaster than a sinking ship, but still the sort of event that upended lives before people had a chance to adapt.

Great News for Fans of Historic Buses

0
0
article-image

It's a little hard to get excited at the thought of spending your Sunday on a city bus.

A historic city bus, though—that's a different thing altogether. This Sunday, September 24, the New York Transit Museum will throw its 24th Annual Bus Festival, a daylong celebration of the city's surface transportation.

article-image

The museum is pulling out all the stops for the occasion. The planned event advertises "crafts, toys, and transit merchandise," along with "special guests," namely historic buses temporarily brought out of retirement.

article-image

This year, they're teasing appearances from Betsy (a double-decker bus from 1931), Bus 2185 (restored after it was damaged by falling debris from the Twin Towers), and Tunnel Wrecker, aka the "Monster of the Tunnels," which once rescued disabled vehicles from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

article-image

The vehicles will be parked in stately rows along Boerum Place, where fans can step on and off of them, offer seats to each other, and generally pay their respects.

article-image

The party starts at 11 a.m. (More information can be found on the Museum's website.) Admission costs $1, which, shrewdly, is much less than a modern-day bus ride. Not bad for time travel.

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.

Two Silver Fabergé Fish Knives, Lost For a Century, Have Reappeared

0
0

In late 1917, handcrafted gold items and silverware alike were melted down as part of the October Revolution. Newly fledged Bolshevik Russia was short on cash, and the literal liquidation of these glimmering assets was a speedy way to fill communist coffers. The tsars' chattel was quickly "nationalized," and even extraordinary examples of silver and gold plates, goblets, and cutlery were lost in minutes. Among the items was a priceless neo-Gothic silver tableware set by master jeweler Fabergé, thought to be gone for good.

But perhaps not entirely. Two lost silver fish knives from the set have reappeared in Poland, as reported by AFP. They have attracted bids of more than $1.2 million from foreign collectors. The longer of the two, used for serving, is 14 inches long; the smaller individual one just over eight. And there's a story behind them, Adam Szymanski, a Polish art historian and Fabergé expert, told the news service. They were apparently gifted to a Red Army soldier in 1918, as payment for his help in melting down their silver flatmates. Three years later, Szymanski said, the soldier sold them to a Polish doctor, whose family they stayed in, though their precise whereabouts became a little foggy. Last year the knives reappeared, as if from nowhere, to be sold to a new owner.

article-image

Fabergé is known for his enamel-encrusted golden eggs, studded with semiprecious and precious stones. Today, these fetch astronomical prices at auction. But he also made other treasures, including the tableware set. It had been commissioned by the wealthy heiress Barbara Kelch-Bazanova, Szymanski said, who married into nobility. This 32-person set was designed to be impressive and match the decor of the neo-Gothic dining hall of the Kelch Mansion. "There's no doubt the letter 'K' on the knives is exactly the same as the ones we find engraved in the Kelch dining hall," Szymanski told AFP. "The knives have the Fabergé stamp ... the name 'Fabergé' in Cyrillic print is very legible."

They certainly seem legitimate, though the $1.2 million offer put forward by an American collector may not be a good value. AFP spoke to two jewelry experts, who felt that the value of the knives is considerably lower. "If I were the owner, I'd accept a million dollars straight away!" said French jewelry expert Maxime Charron, apparently sputtering. "Despite being quite rare and interesting, it's just simple cutlery."

Oxford Bags, the Ridiculously Wide-Legged Trousers of the 1920s

0
0
article-image

In a 2013 article for the Newsletter of the New Sheridan Club—a club dedicated to extremely British foppishness—writer Sean Longden makes the following claim: “Only jeans can compete with bags in the history of 20th-century menswear.”

Bags.

What he’s talking about is a style of pant called the “Oxford bags,” a mysterious and, yes, influential design that achieved extreme popularity in the 1920s. Of course, in the cyclical world of fashion, the popularity of the Oxford bags didn’t end with a single tenure; they came back in the 1970s, and then, arguably, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They are singularly ridiculous and delightful, at their extreme one of the silliest pant designs ever conceived. And there’s no reason to think they won’t be back again at some point.

article-image

First, let’s do a description. Oxford bags were typically made of flannel or another lightweight material. They are not particularly weird in terms of construction; a typical design sported all the normal pockets, had a crease down the front of each leg, and was cuffed at the ankle. Where things get weird is in their dimensions: these were among the earliest, perhaps the original, pants that were baggy to the point of ridiculousness. The most extreme examples could be 44 inches in circumference at the ankle; this is big enough to completely hide the lower leg and any evidence of a foot. For comparison, the leg opening of a Levi’s 501 jean—a fairly loose cut, by modern standards—is 16 inches. These pants were bonkers.

The story of how Oxford bags became a trend is one mired in controversy; at least, as much controversy as a debate over 100-year-old English pants can create. The most-cited explanation for their size and name comes from 1924, at the University of Oxford, when the school administration supposedly banned the wearing of knickerbockers (or, more specifically, plus-fours). Knickerbockers are those baggy almost-pants that end at just below the knee. Plus-fours extend, as the name suggests, another four inches down. (There are also plus-sixes and plus-eights.) Plus-fours were, the story says, beloved amongst Oxfordians. As a rebellion, the students decided to keep wearing them—but to wear something over them, to hide them. Something fairly lightweight and billowy enough to hide the already loose plus-fours they loved so dearly. And so was born a fashion trend.

article-image

Longden finds this claim ridiculous. You’re banned from wearing your favorite pants so you...wear stupider pants over those pants? So nobody will see them and also you’ll be uncomfortable? Longden also finds it unlikely that the early versions of the Oxford bags would even fit over plus-fours without an unmanageable surplus of fabric bunching up; they were big, but not that big, not yet.

There is a long history of baggy pants before the Oxford bags. Harem pants, similar to knickerbockers, are very baggy pants made of a lightweight material, though harem pants are gathered at the ankle rather than just below the knee. As long as there have been pants, there have been loose pants. But Oxford bags may have been the very first to make over-the-top bagginess a part of their appeal.

Longden thinks Oxford bags started out as a sort of formal, Oxfordian version of warmup pants. Rowing is a popular sport and culture at Oxford; what the rowers did and wore had a pretty good chance of becoming a trend. The rowers, Longden suggests, came up with the wider-leg pants (at this point only about 22 or 24 inches at the ankle) to make it easy and comfortable to slip on over their rowing shorts during cold mornings. The wide ankle and flowing fabric would make it easy to wear as an outer layer, and wouldn’t even require the rower to remove his shoes.

article-image

This use may have started amongst rowers, but it took off soon enough among other students and those not affiliated with the university at all. Those folks decided that if baggy was good, hugely baggy would be even better. The pants got bigger, and bigger. Twenty-four inches became, possibly as the result of a mixup between circumference and diameter, 44 inches.

As the trend of huge trousers moved beyond Oxford—it came to the U.S. very quickly, being rebranded and slightly retooled as “collegiate pants”—new parts of society began to realize that really baggy pants could actually be pretty useful. Workmen found that it was easier to move in looser pants, so discarded the wool flannel for hardier textiles like corduroy but kept the looser look. Criminals realized they could store all kinds of weapons alongside their legs. (In later decades, as baggy pants gained favor in various minority communities, this theoretically criminal use would lead to rampant profiling.)

The enormously wide-legged look fell out of fashion quickly, as all extremes in fashion do, but it came back a few decades later, as many extremes in fashion do. In the early 1970s, a new club trend started up in the cities of the north of England, spawning a movement which would come to be called Northern Soul. It was an unusual musical movement in that it didn’t actually involve new music; instead, it was essentially a fanbase of Northern English teens and twentysomethings with a passionate love of a particular brand of mid-1960s American soul. The music this scene favored was generally kind of sweet, up-tempo, doo-wop-inspired, pre-disco, pre-funk soul from Motown and Motown-inspired labels.

The fashion of Northern Soul clubgoers was just as specific and significantly older than the music they danced to: for men, it was, you guessed it, Oxford bags, paired usually with a tank top. But as with the likely original use of the Oxford bags, the Northern Soul kids liked Oxford bags because they were utilitarian: Northern Soul was very serious about its dance moves, which involved a lot of spinning and kicking the air and dropping down for splits.

Northern Soul dancers needed pants that would allow them to move, and the Oxford bags provided that, but they also gave a bonus: all that fabric looked extremely cool in an intense spin move or kick.

Northern Soul also had a bit of a bad reputation; the drug favored by the high-kicking dancers was amphetamines, and there were definitely reports of crime around the scene, though it’s kind of hard to tell how much of that was just reporters doing some good old-fashioned “look at the kids these days!” fearmongering. Still, the idea of extremely baggy pants as being somehow rebellious or intimidating stayed.

Head on up to the 1990s! Hammer pants, a riff on harem pants popularized by MC Hammer, had much of the same background as Northern Soul’s pants: as a dancer, he needed freedom of movement, but as a showman, he wanted something flashy. A bit later, brands like JNCO, which made ridiculously large jeans, began marketing to various subcultures and those who admired them: skateboarders, ravers. These were sort of worse than previous takes on the big pants concept; made of heavy denim, it wasn’t actually easy to skateboard, dance, or walk in them. But parents and school administrators hated them, which probably did a lot for the brand.

Big pants are starting to make their inevitable comeback, especially for high-fashion women, and they actually look a lot like Oxford bags: Light materials, essentially classic in their construction and design, but outsized in their dimensions. Those wearing these pants today may not know it, but they’re perfect for slipping on over a pair of rowing shorts.

All the World's a Puppet Show at France's Biannual Festival

0
0

We first learn the concept, intuitively, as kids: Pretending that objects are alive and making up epic stories about them is fun. A teddy bear can be a medieval warrior-king, a rubber duck an evil sea monster. Perhaps that’s why puppets are such a universal form of art and play that spans eras and cultures across the world. Marionettes—literally “little, little Maries” were often used to tell Bible stories in medieval France. Shadow play is a mainstay in China and Southeast Asia. And Japan’s bunraku is puppet theater with singers, musicians, and half-life-size dolls.

These and more forms of puppet theater are currently on parade in Charleville-Mézières, in northern France's Ardennes region, at the biannual World Puppet Theater Festival.

article-image

The festival was started in 1961 by Jacques Félix, a man who is considered the “father of puppets” in France. He first got to know the art when he worked as a kids' entertainer in Nazi-occupied France. Félix's true passion was scouting, but when it was banned by the Nazis, he turned to child entertainment in Nazi-led summer camps.

Today, the 10-day festival attracts around 250 theater companies performing for 170,000 spectators—adults and kids alike—across 50 venues in town. The puppeteers come from all corner of the planet, from Brazil to India and Israel to the United States.

Charleville-Mézières is also home to the International Puppetry Union, a UNESCO-affiliated organization of puppet practitioners, and the International Puppetry Institute and its school, which currently trains 30 international students in a three-year puppetry course.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from current and past iterations of the festivities.

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

The Tsetse Fly Has Strange, Sucker-Tipped Fingers on Its Mouth

0
0
article-image

Sleeping sickness starts out as a fever, with joint pain and headaches. But by the time neurological symptoms set in—disrupted sleep cycles, confusion, loss of coordination—the disease's effects are irreversible and can be fatal. According to the World Health Organization, about 2,800 cases were reported in 2015, with an estimated 20,000 unreported cases, but an estimated 300,000 cases went unreported and untreated as recently as 1998. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the protozoa-caused disease is transmitted by tsetse flies, about 65 million people are at risk of contracting it. The disease is a major public health priority, so scientists around the world are trying to learn more about the protozoa, and the flies that can introduce it to a person's bloodstream. New images from British researchers suggest that we've been wrong in our understanding of how the tsetse fly's mouth works.

When a tsetse fly bites a victim, it tears through skin and the walls of small blood vessels. But before it starts sucking up blood, it inserts a small tube into the vessel to inject some saliva, which has anticoagulant properties and keeps the blood flowing. "The textbooks just show a plain pointed end to the saliva tube," said University of Bristol researcher Wendy Gibson in a press release. But when Gibson's team took advantage of a new scanning electron microscope on the school's campus and examined the tsetse fly's mouth, they found that all the textbooks are wrong.

article-image

Instead of that plain pointed end, the tsetse fly's saliva tube has "finger-like projections," and, the team writes in a report, "on the tips of some are small sucker-like protrusions." It's hard to say right now exactly what the suckers and fingers are for besides terrifying people, but Gibson and her coauthors put forth a few ideas that could guide future research. The structures might help the fly sense the blood's consistency or taste, or close off the end of the saliva tube. They could also regulate the flow of saliva or do something completely different. Understanding this is significant to understanding the disease pathway of sleeping sickness—and with such a serious infection, every bit of knowledge helps.

See the World’s Most Ordinary Animals as You Never Have Before

0
0

Usually, the highlight of a visit to a natural history museum is a display featuring a fantastic creature—a giant whale, a threatening dinosaur, or an otherworldly mammoth. But at the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London, a new project is taking a closer look at what the museum calls “ordinary animals”—the chickens, mice, cows, cats, and dogs of the world.

Living in such closer proximity with these animals, we often don’t think of them as holding the same intrigue as their wild cousins. Yes, we love to watch their antics, but a cow rarely elicits the same wonder as a manatee.

This new "Museum of Ordinary Animals" suggests that by paying attention to the animals we're most familiar and intimate with, we can notice again their strangeness and wonder. Atlas Obscura talked to curator Jack Ashby about the difficulty with frogs, the creepiness of cat mummies, and the allure of the animals we sometimes take for granted.

article-image

What is an ordinary animal? What makes an animal ordinary?

It’s basically the boring beasts in our everyday lives, the animals we encounter in the streets, in our gardens, in our homes, and in scientific labs. The ones that are really a commonplace part of human society and human culture. In the main, that’s domesticated animals we’re talking about, but there are a couple of other species that aren’t so much domesticated but have come to live alongside us, like snails and pigeons.

Were there any edge cases?

Frogs were contentious.

What was contentious about the frogs?

The animals that people find in their gardens, for example, or that might have been used in university dissection classes, are identical to the ones that live proper wild lives in natural habitats. Frogs can be considered everyday, ordinary animals because they have crossed or do still cross paths with people in fairly human ways. But they are also wild animals. The same frogs in those human environments are essentially identical to the real wild animals.

This differs from most of the other ordinary animals that feature in the exhibition, which are on the whole domesticated. Cats and dogs and domestic mice and feral pigeons are all sort of manmade animals. But frogs are bit questionable.

article-image

What can we learn from these ordinary animals that we might not be able to learn from studying the more unusual ones? Why should we pay attention to the ordinary?

The exhibition is split up into four themes that tackle that question from different angles. First is, how did they come to be? So, questions of domestication. Some animals played quite a significant role in their own domestication. Animals like dogs came to be because they started associating with human camps, and then people started to taking them into their camps themselves. Cats also kind of domesticated themselves, but perhaps not as fully as any other animal.

The second one is, how have we changed ourselves to fit around the lives of ordinary animals? What do we expect of them to fit into our society? Obviously they’re a huge part of language, of ritual, of civilization in general. So what does that tell us about us and our relationship with nature that we’ve incorporated these animals into our lives?

article-image

The real answer to your question is in the third section, about ordinary animals in science, what role they have played in scientific discovery. The most obvious is lab animals. There’s the traditional lab rat and lab mouse model. But, for example, pigeons played a huge role in inspiring Darwin and his theory of natural selection.

The center of the exhibition is a wall of 4,000 house mice skeletons collected from across the world on islands, used to study how living on islands affects mechanisms of evolution. Mice are perfect for that, because they’ve been transported across the world by people relatively recently.

article-image

So it’s really about showing our relationships with animals. These are ordinary animals to us because they're the ones that we have relationships with.

Exactly. Ordinary animals didn’t exist before humans, and they don’t really exist in the absence of humans, except when they’ve returned to wild living, when they go feral and invasive. That’s the fourth part of the exhibit, what’s the environmental impact of humans having created these ordinary animals? Particularly we're looking at themes of invasive animals—cats and rats—that just wipe everything out wherever they end up, particularly if it’s on an island.

How creepy are those cat mummies? They seem very creepy.

They are. One of them is clearly a bound mummy in mummy cloth; it’s got the face painted on it, and it’s clearly a ritualistic offering. The other one is not necessarily embalmed. It could have fallen into a tomb and just mummified itself. That whole one—well, the whole-looking one, it’s actually half a cat—but the one that much more naturally mummified is pretty gross.

The other one, the bound one, has only got two bones inside of it. The demand for cats in ancient Egypt as tomb gifts was so high that it outstripped the supply. The mummies often only had a couple of cat bones inside them. They made several mummies out of one cat.

article-image

What are the biggest and smallest objects in the show?

There are cow skulls. We’ve got fruit flies and blow flies. The biggest species would be an aurochs. They’re ancestral cattle. We’ve got part of an aurochs skull. We talk about their domestication and how in the Near East, shortly after cattle were first domesticated, aurochs skulls were being incorporated into furniture and walls and pillars in Turkey. As part of the domestication process, they literally brought them into the home, as part of the building.

article-image

Was there anything that you found while creating the exhibit that really surprised you?

One of the best stories that came out was about cancer-detecting dogs, who sniff urine samples. They’ve got a significantly higher strike rate for some cancers, particularly prostate cancer. It’s a really interesting model of animals in research, because it’s not a traditional lab animal. They’re essentially collaborators in the scientific research. They are creating knowledge themselves.

Someone in history of art is studying the gender associations of different pets. Traditionally, even up to the 1950s, having cats was a particularly feminine thing, perhaps because cats and women were associated with being indoor animals. We’re exploring what role animals can have in our gender identity, and we have an event as part of the series called “Is it okay to be a cat guy?”

article-image

Overall, what do you hope people take away from thinking more about animals that we maybe take for granted?

These are animals that are not normally seen in natural history museums. Most natural history museums will have vast collections of these species, because they’re so commonplace, but they very rarely put on display. There’s an extent to which these environments are kind of removed from nature, because they’re part of the human world and human society. All these animals we think of when we think about nature and amazing wildlife and biodiversity—that’s one thing. But we also need to think about the animals in our own life.

Found: An Iraqi City, Established by Alexander the Great and Forgotten for Millennia

0
0
article-image

In 331 B.C., Alexander the Great passed through what’s now northern Iraq, while chasing after Darius III of Persia, a recently defeated enemy, who would be dead within the year. In his takeover of the Persian empire, Alexander founded a city in this area, Qalatga Darband, which became a center of wine production before fading from history.

Sometime in the 1960s, an intelligence satellite passed over this area and took a picture of the city’s ruins. No one noticed for decades.

But after those spy pictures were declassified in 1996, archaeologists noticed signs of the city that once had been. Now, as part of a program to train Iraqi archaeologists, a team of British and Iraqi researchers have uncovered the remains of this long-lost city, The Times reports.

The team was able to relocate the city with the help of a camera-equipped drone, flown over the area. The images revealed “a large rectangular building hidden beneath fields of wheat and barley,” The Times reports.

Since then, the archaeologists have created a topographic map of the site and surveyed the area for surface pottery. Among their finds are a pair of Greco-Roman statues, which may portray Persephone and Adonis.

A Portrait of James I's 'Husband' Has Reappeared in Glasgow

0
0
article-image

A lost portrait of the man whom English king James I referred to as his "husband," "sweet heart," and the one he loved "more than anyone else" has emerged from conservation work and been authenticated, after having been mistaken for a copy for centuries, the BBC reports. George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, rose to prominence in court after catching the king's eye at a hunt. This 17th-century painting of him, now known to be by the Flemish great Peter Paul Rubens, had been concealed by layers of dirt, as well as later "improvements."

The painting was spotted by Rubens expert, art dealer, and historian Bendor Grosvenor, while he visited Pollok House, a stately home in Scotland, with his wife and daughter. "It sounds rather silly to say it, but it was a bit of a eureka moment," he told The Guardian. "I thought: ‘My god, that looks like a Rubens.’ This picture just seemed to shine out.” After a two-month investigation, he concluded that it is an original, though intended as a sketch for another portrait, which was destroyed in a fire in 1949. The unfinished work had been helpfully "tidied up" by another artist, Grosvenor said. "As a result, it began to look very stiff and more like a copy."

In the painting, Villiers is depicted wearing an elaborate lace collar and a sash. He was known for his good looks, and had been described as "the handsomest-bodied man in all of England," with a "lovely complexion." James I lavished attention and care on him, and called him "Steenie" after St. Stephen, who was said to have had the face of an angel. However, whether Villiers and James I were lovers in the modern sense of the word has been a source of some contention. In their letters, James I states how he wept so profusely at their parting, "that I can scarcely see to write." But scholars have argued that such sentiments are not atypical of male friendship in the 17th and 18th centuries. The rumors flared up upon the 2008 discovery of a secret passage in one of the king's homes linking their bedchambers.

Whatever the true nature of their relationship, it all ended in tragedy. Three years after the king's 1625 death, following a long illness, Villiers was stabbed in a pub in Portsmouth. His close relationships with James I and his successor, Charles I, made him deeply unpopular in court, and led to his assassination. Villiers is buried in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription on his tomb describing him as "the riddle of the world."

Fixing a Failed Whale Burial in Australia

0
0

Last week, a humpback whale migrating from its summer feeding waters in Antarctica got snared in a fishing line. It washed up on a beach in Australia and died there.

But this whale's tragic journey was just beginning. After being buried on the beach, the whale was recently exhumed, chopped up, and buried again.

As Agence France-Presse reports, the humpback washed up last week on Nobbys Beach, on the coast of New South Wales. Although authorities tried to drag the body back to sea, it got caught on some rocks, so they buried it instead.

Then the sharks started coming. Scientifically, it's unclear whether buried dead whales actually attract scavengers. But according to Yahoo 7 News, after the whale was buried, "at least 21 sharks" were spotted "swarming" in the area, freaking out locals, interrupting surf school, and inspiring a petition that garnered thousands of signatures.

"Under mounting pressure, the state government stepped in with enough cash to fund the removal of the decomposing animal," writes AFP. This was a difficult process, involving toothed excavators that ripped the carcass up, and a massive crane that lifted the remains off the beach.

The whale is now in a landfill, and the people of New South Wales are resting easy... for the moment. With everything that's happened to this humpback, they might want to keep an eye out for angry ghost whales.

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images