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

A Surreal, Pastel Perspective on the World's Largest Salt Flat

0
0

Dreamy images of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni.

Photographer Navina Khatib's trip to the world’s largest salt flat—Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia—in 2011 was a surreal experience. “Everything there is just otherworldly—the smell of sulfur, the profound silence, the thin air, the magical bright colors. When you are in the middle of it, you can turn yourself 360 degrees and see nothing but the horizon,” she says, by email. “It's a unique and magical place and has stayed with me ever since.”

Salar de Uyuni extends over 4,000 square miles in the Altiplano region, nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. Formed from the remnants of prehistoric lakes, it is a seemingly endless expanse of white salt, punctuated by few rocky, cactus-studded outcrops and, occasionally, small piles of salt. In the rainy season, the landscape is transformed to a shallow lake that reflects, with still, startling clarity, the sky above.

article-image

Such as landscape seems like it was made for photographers, but Khatib was a little disappointed when she rediscovered her images of Salar de Uyuni. “I instantly felt that there was something missing,” she recalls. “They didn’t bring me back to this place, they didn’t give me the feeling how it really was.”

So the Berlin-based photographer and visual artist began to experiment. She's had a long-standing fascination with filters and kaleidoscopes, and so adopted a specific technique to create a series of multicolored, dream-like images. She starts with her photographs, “usually landscapes that already have an otherworldly touch to them, or colorful photos abstracted with analog filters such as prisms,” she says. “I have a huge library of these shots, which are the key element of my work. In the second step, I use layers and multiple exposure techniques. In a way, I am remixing my own photos. Sometimes the whole process takes just a few hours, sometimes I sit for months on an image, always trying to get the perfect layer.”

With cotton-candy colors and abstract forms, Khatib’s photos take a surreal environment to new, unexpected heights. “In the end, every picture is an abstraction of an already beautiful landscape,” says Khatib. “These magical sceneries are my muse.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of Khatib’s images.

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

6 Unusual Objects From the Macabre History of Magic

0
0

Feathered death garlands, a pierced bull's heart, and more.

Maybe it’s the black background, but the feathery ring above has an eerie vibe to it. A ghirlanda—Italian for garland—like this one would have smelled “extremely nasty,” at least at first, according to one report. Woven among the feathers, there would be bone, hair, even old teeth, and it had a sinister purpose. Hidden in a person’s bed, it was supposed to cause them to fall ill and die. “Everyone believed I had bought the ghirlanda in order to get rid of my husband!” wrote an English historian living in Italy, in a letter to a friend who’d asked her to procure one—purely for research. (Or so the friend said.)

The ghirlanda above is just one of the objects associated with magic and witchcraft featured in a new exhibit, called Spellbound, at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which is dedicated to art and archaeology. The aim, according to the museum, is to “show how, even in this skeptical age, we still use magical thinking.” Astrology is such a booming trend right now that almost seems self-evident. The magic of the past, though, could be a bit more gruesome.

Below is a selection of the Ashmolean's macabre magical items.

article-image

Prognosticator, circa 1500

In the 16th century, the line between magic and medicine was thin, and this gorgeous device was used to determine the best times to treat patients with purges, bleedings, and baths. It factored in the stage of the moon’s cycle, the signs of the zodiac, the months of the year, and the man in the moon to figure out how to balance a patient’s four humors and restore health.

article-image

John Dee’s Crystal, 1562

John Dee was one of the best known magicians of the 16th century, and it’s said he used this crystal to tell the future and cure disease. According to his own account, the angel Uriel gave him the crystal, along with a recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone. Using crystals in this way was illegal, but Dee got away with it. The crystal was lated gifted to another alchemist, who stopped trying to use it in 1651 “when he believed a demonic ghost burst out from it,” the Science Museum of London notes.

article-image

Bull’s Heart Pierced With Spike, Age Unknown

As gnarly as this object is, it actually represents an attempt at counter-magic—protection from dangerous witches. This was found in the 1860s in the chimney of a house at Shutes Hill Farm, in Somerset, England. Often objects like this one would be planted at the vulnerable exits and entrances of homes to keep witches out.

article-image

Witch Trapped in a Bottle, 1850

Another form of counter magic. If a witch was threatening you, the defense was to create a “witch bottle,” to attract and capture the witch and her evil energy. Often these bottles were filled with wine or seawater to drown the witch, pins and needles to impale them, and herbs to repeal them. One analysis of a witch’s bottle revealed that it contained urine, iron nails, brass pins, clumps of hair, fingernail clippings, and perhaps bellybutton lint. The woman who donated this particular bottle to a museum noted, “They do say there be a witch in it and if you let un out there it be a pock o’trouble.”

article-image

Witches' Ladder, 19th Century

Like the ghirlanda, the witches’ ladder was an instrument of death and illness. Each knot would contain a feather and a curse. This one was found in the roof of a house in Somerset.

Remembering the Glory Days of the Video Rental Store

0
0

Here are our readers' greatest memories from the VHS age.

article-image

Though some specialty video rental shops survive, the golden age of the video store is over. Browsing the wide variety of online streaming options has largely replaced wandering the aisles of the local rental shop. But the memories remain. We reached out to our readers and asked them to recall their favorite moments from the rental days gone by. What we got were surprisingly emotional stories of warm family times, cruddy jobs, and cultural awakenings in the VHS age.

For many, the video store was a communal space where they could have their horizons broadened by little more than some shocking box art, or reliably find that favorite movie they'd seen a thousand times. Rental stores represented possibility, adventure, and very often, togetherness. See our favorite reader responses below.

Blockbuster Video

Fort Worth, Texas

“One time I was with my brother, my uncle, and my two rowdy cousins. We were at one of the Dallas-Fort Worth locations in mid-cities, for god knows what reason. It had to have been spring of 1990 (so myself, my brother, and the cousins were all like ages 10 to 13), because the film Prancer had just come out on video recently. I know this because the film's theatrical release was November of '89 and those movies took AT LEAST three to six months to make it to video, which sounds insane now. Anyway, I know the film was recently released because there was a store display of Prancer, the reindeer itself, in life-size blow-up toy form. Like, a HUGE Prancer. You know, to let the customers know that the magical reindeer movie had arrived or whatever. So, anyway, I'm browsing some stupid aisle—dawdling, one might say—and all of a sudden I hear a CLOMP, CLOMP, CLOMP. And I turn behind me, and there is my cousin Parker (who often suffered from ADHD, we were told), and he has straddled the Prancer blowup and is charging it down the aisle and screaming ‘YOU CAN RUN AND YOU CAN HIDE BUT PRANCER WILL FIND YOU!’ My uncle immediately shouted at all of us and we had to leave the store. We never saw that Prancer blow-up thing again, but that was the greatest video store visit of my lifetime. Thank you.” — Brian Abrams, Brooklyn, New York

Bridgeport Video

Bridgeport, Pennsylvania

“I must’ve been 7 or 8 years old, an only child and a latchkey kid. We were pretty poor and the only apartment we could find in a small Pennsylvania town was above a video store, the small, mom-and-pop kind that were all too common in the mid-'80s. My mom worked nights and my dad, well, he was never really around. I’m not sure if it was part of the rental agreement or the owner being very kind, but we were allowed to rent two free videos every day (as long as they weren’t from the new releases wall, of course). So nearly every day after I got home from school and finished making my afternoon snack, I would go downstairs and wander through the video store aisles. I did not have a particularly great childhood, and I definitely watched an unhealthy amount of horror movies at a very young age, but walking through and looking at all those giant, clamshell VHS boxes, the feeling of independence it gave me to pick out what I wanted to watch is one of my fondest childhood memories. I spent countless nights by myself watching almost every film the shop had to offer. The little notes, summaries and reviews the owner would write and tape to the shelf under each film, stuck with me, and helped create a love for small independent shops, and a love for movies that has lasted a lifetime.” — Daniel Patterson, Reynoldsburg, Ohio

article-image

Hollywood Video

Lubbock, Texas

“Perusing the horror racks and staring in awe at the amazing cover work from '80s & '90s B–horror movies was by far the best version of sneaking a peek at something that I seemed too young for.” — Pam, Austin, Texas

Showtime Video

Atlantic City, New Jersey

“I was 11 years old. My mother brought me into the store, by my neck, videos in hand, raging. She threw the DVDs on the counter and started screaming at the clerk. I was so embarrassed. (I had rented Mondo Magic and Shocking Asia, some late-'70s/early-'80s documentaries about the occult and taboo in other countries. They were chock full of nudity and sex, which of course I knew about—that's why I rented the f*cking things! My friend said nobody would know because ‘it's about culture, dude!’ He was wrong.)” — Herbert Holler, Bronx, New York

Hollywood Video

“My first job was at Hollywood Video and my favorite part was going through returned video cassettes to see if any needed to be rewound in our quick rewind machine. Sometimes we would find ‘personal’ videos returned within the rented box. Sometimes they were, ahem, very personal in nature but sometimes they were a variety of weird things recorded off their home TV. My favorite was a mix of Madonna videos and interviews mashed on to one video. We always watched them and I loved calling people at home to let them know we had their ‘personal video cassette’ and would they mind bringing back our copy of Titanic?” — Ashley Witt, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Hastings

Boise, Idaho

“I liked how I could go in and just browse, and no one pressured me to buy anything. It did feel like a community in a sense. The last time I was in Boise, my hometown, they were filling for bankruptcy protection. I hope they're okay. It's less one specific thing or time that I was there, and more the fact that they were there, period. They were the perfect escape for me growing up, and there really isn't anything like it today.” — Nic Schweitzer, Boston, Massachusetts

Blockbuster Video

Vancouver, Canada

“My 32-year-old daughter sent me a text a couple of weeks ago. ‘Do you ever get the feel of ‘oh I just want to go to Blockbuster and rent a movie’?’ It filled me with laughter and a wonderful feeling of nostalgia thinking back on the Friday nights of piling our three daughters into the car to pick out a movie. We always said ‘just one,’ but it always ended up being a stack of them! It was a fun family outing filled with the anticipation and excitement of an evening ‘at the movies,’ complete with popcorn, of course!” — J. McQueen, Vancouver, British Columbia

article-image

Blockbuster Video

Ahwatukee, Arizona

“There was a brief time period where video stores and cell phones existed concurrently so instead of everyone going to the store to argue only one member of the household could go to the store to search for a movie and report back to the other on new releases and debate which movie they'd select for the night. The person who actually went to the store was able to tailor the list of available titles to their taste and earned final veto rights by virtue of being the one physically in the store.” — Eric Haflett, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Blockbuster Video

Florin Area of Sacramento, California

“It wasn’t my favorite store, but it had the best memory. I was with a bunch of friends when we got the bright idea to rent The Princess Bride. We knew all the lines and we thought it would be fun to act it out as we watched. Well, almost all of us. As we got to the counter the cashier saw what we were renting and told us how much he loved the movie. In the pause as he scanned the barcode one of my friends blurted out “I’ve never seen The Princess Bride.” It’s was like someone dragged a needle across a record. Our jaws dropped, the cashier’s jaw dropped, and I swear everyone in the store turned and stared. My poor friend just cringed and smiled. He’s seen it many times since then, but I’m not sure he’s as big a fan as we were.” — Amy, California

Hollywood Video

Aurora, Colorado

“I was 19 and going through a very difficult time in my life, I was devastated emotionally and I isolated myself from everyone because I needed to get through it alone. I basically went to work and straight home every day and started a long bout of insomnia. I didn't have cable and after cleaning every inch of my apartment I had nothing to do. At the time my video store was a five-minute drive up the street. I'd go in and rent two movies at a time, watch them both twice (once with commentary, once without) and start over the next night. The staff started to notice my repetitive behavior and engaged me more and more. I took film suggestions and chatted with them and even once after their shift, the group invited me bowling. It was nice to have a group of people, who had no idea of the sad things that had happened to me, treat me like a friend and not like a fragile thing that could break.” — April, Denver, Colorado

Blockbuster Video

Flemington, New Jersey

“When I was little, Blockbuster offered ‘Kidprints,’ videos that parents could buy of their children answering questions about themselves in case they ever went missing and needed to be identified. My mom still has a couple of the ones made of me, and it's somewhat hilarious watching me flub the interview. When asked about my favorite show, I answered Muppet Babies. My only pet was a fish named Guppie. In addition to Kidprints, the thing I remember most about Blockbuster was the smell—a mixture of plastic, carpet, and Sno-Caps. I wish they would bottle it and sell it as a perfume.” — Kelsey Sollner, Pittstown, New Jersey

Blockbuster Video

Newton, Kansas

“I was a manager at Blockbuster for two or three years, I loved that job. Helping people decide what to watch, learning about what they liked and disliked, and of course getting to see all of the movies before they were available to rent. I remember when DVDs first came out, I said to my co-workers, ‘There is no way that this is going to be successful. They scratch, they get lost, they're easily damaged... no way they'll ever replace VHS.’ Before long, it was all we carried!” — Stephanie Huntzinger, Kansas

Spar Grocery

Melbourn, United Kingdom

“My village had a couple of video stores, but by far the most useful was the selection in the local branch of the Spar grocery chain. For some reason, the video selection was packed with excellent horror films, from Prince of Darkness to Return of the Living Dead. I'm guessing someone at head office had left choosing the films to their teenage kid. Also, the shop assistants were entirely elderly ladies, who were clueless about VCR technology full-stop, let alone film certification. So as a young teenager I could walk in and rent 18-certificate films with no more resistance from staff than ‘Ooh, this one looks a bit scary, I wouldn't watch it.’ Needless to say, I took full advantage of this.” — Mark Chapman, London, England

article-image


Blockbuster Video

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

“My mom took me to Blockbuster when I experienced my first adolescent break-up and we proceeded to grab all of the sappy chick flicks we could find. Including, The Vow, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and, of course, The Notebook. Once we paid for our rentals we ran next door to the grocery store for a few half-gallons of ice cream. We all know sappy chick flicks and endless amounts of ice cream is the only way to mend a broken teenage heart!” — Sara Steinbaecher, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Blockbuster Video

Medford, Oregon

“I remember I got suspended from a private middle school for something that was not worthy of suspension, and thinking my dad would be angry with me, instead he surprised me with taking me to pick out whatever movies I wanted for the time away from school. I just remember shining inside with delight as we walked around picking out my own movies, and candies in the rectangular boxes. I still remember the lighting inside and the sound of the employees constantly ‘speed rewinding’ the VHS tapes. I will always be thankful for that day with my dad.” — Gabriel Whetstine, Oregon

Blockbuster Video

Maryland

“There was a young man who worked at this Blockbuster who was adorably inept. We absolutely loved to be waited on by him because we knew he would take so long to complete even the simplest transaction, confusing himself (and us) multiple times during the transaction, that it made each trip to the video store a brand new adventure. I can't explain why we loved him so much, except that he was eternally pleasant and patient with every customer, so it was impossible to not be equally courteous and pleasant to him. We still miss him, he was a sweet young man, no matter now inept he was!” — Laura Hemly, Tampa, Florida

Cross Town Video

Newton, New Jersey

“I worked there in high school, Clerks-style. There was a little room in the back where the owner used to let her baby nap, but I was famous (and popular) in high school because I let lots of the skater kids who hung out in the parking lot watch R-rated movies back there. Conveniently enough, there was also an exit to a back alley that was perfect for smoking weed.” — Terri Bennett, Brooklyn, New York

Odyssey Video

Marina Del Rey, California

“I loved the thrill of discovering some obscure film by chance and the smell of freshly made popcorn. I also enjoyed the excellent selection of B-movie horror films of the '70s, '80s, and '90s that seem to have been lost somewhere in time like Ghoulies, Troll, The Gate, Terror Train, and many more.” — David Henry, Los Angeles, California

article-image

Blockbuster Video

Clearwater, Florida

“After my son received his first video game console for his birthday, I quickly realized that buying video games was an expensive venture. As a single mom, I wanted him to have the best, but we also had to stretch our budget to get by. So it was Blockbuster to the rescue when they began renting video games! My son would study each game and pick the one that he could get the most bang from his buck (literally, because sometimes they were on sale for 99 cents!). We loved our weekly trip to Blockbuster. It was quality time that we spent, discussing the day on our way to the store, wandering the aisles together, he would teach me about Tetris and Mario and I would talk to him about older adventure movies, which he still loves to this day. Thank you Blockbuster for providing just another way to spend precious time with my wonderful son.” — S. Law, Clearwater, Florida

Blockbuster Video

North Ridgeville, Ohio

“My husband had passed and I drowned myself in movies, so I spent a lot of time at the corner Blockbuster. They got to know me by name and when I would call they knew my voice and say ‘Hello, Mrs Staman, I was just going to call you. We got this movie in I think you'd like.’ They treated me with respect and privilege, it got me through a dark and lonely time in my life. I was so so sad when they closed. I miss my friends.” — Diane Staman, North Ridgeville, Ohio

Hollywood Video

Wrentham, Massachusetts

“Our regular video store was going out of business and my mom asked if we wanted to stop in and buy a movie (VHS of course). She was surprised when I wasn't enthusiastic. My mom, sister and I went in and looked around for The Chipmunk Adventure, a favorite of my sister's, and couldn't find it anywhere. After asking the clerk, he broke the bad news that someone had already purchased it. Little did my mom or sister know that it was already at our house! My dad and I had purchased the film a few days earlier as a surprise birthday gift for my sister. We wrapped it in multiple boxes so she could not guess what it was from the outside. She was so surprised, but my mom was even more shocked that my 8-year-old self had kept the secret!” — Christine, Massachusetts

Blockbuster Video

Henrico, Virginia

"I have so many great memories there, from walking around looking at all the cover art (and accidentally walking through the horror section and being terrified), my sister printing off pictures from her Pokemon Snap game cartridge at their N64 kiosk, and even discovering that mysterious newfangled video technology called the DVD in the late 90s. As a really little kid, I always insisted on renting Disney's Robin Hood, over and over again. And I remember before I got into anime, thinking the video store category name ‘Japanamation’ was really clever. I think my favorite memory has to be when I walked in and laid eyes on the three-movie VHS set of the original Star Wars trilogy—to buy! I'd already seen them on TV, and I begged my dad to buy it for us, and that started a tradition of me getting up really early on the weekends, watching one and memorizing the lines! I love my streaming media nowadays, but I have such a soft spot for video stores and VHS tapes that will never go away!" — Christina Wert, Atlanta, Georgia

...and one more long one for the road...

Civic Video

North Dunedin

"I worked as a video store clerk for several years during the early 2000s, when I was a university student. They were the most wonderful of times! I met the man who would end up being my partner of 12 years (and counting) there. I walked in on my first day, and there he was, wearing a Clockwork Orange t-shirt, curly hair, and his Scottish sense of humour! We worked the Saturday night shift together. We were both film students and on the screen behind the counter we’d play our favourite films. Him: classics from the 1980s, me: everything that Katharine Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock had ever made. The two of us fell into something of a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine. I would enthusiastically chat to the customers about their movie choices, while he phoned up the people on the Overdue List and told them off.

We had for our uniform garish, red Civic Video–branded polo shirts, with yellow and blue accents. They fit like tents. I tried to individualise the uniform by wearing it with embroidered shirts, ribbons, or bright nail polish, and later I dyed my hair black and had a Louise Brooks bob. But there was just no making that fire-engine-red polo shirt stylish! I secretly loved it in all its ugliness though. We wore it with matching Civic Video name stickers. I had a new name every week: Norma Jean, Artemesia, Ilsa…

At the time, the video store world was transitioning from VHS to DVD. Civic Video held on with the VHS tapes (while getting the DVDs also) long after everyone else did, so we had an excellent cult collection of films that you couldn’t get on DVD yet. The diverse collection of films attracted an eclectic clientele. Everyone from humanities professors, to drunk groups of students borrowing porn from the special room separated by saloon doors, to parents coming in for Disney films with their kids (sometimes they would hide a porn film amongst their stack of DVDs too), to a local guy who was a bit down and out and sung on the street for coins—if he’d had a good week, he’d come in on Dollar Day with a stack of five-cent coins and rent a movie.

I loved talking to people about their favourite movies and recommending mine! Film is such a personal thing, woven into the very fabric of lives, so you’d end up making surprisingly intimate connections with people. Because of this, I acquired a couple of admirers who would phone the store to ask Norma Jean/Artemesia out, or come up to me in the pub really excited to see the Video Store Girl in real life.

Next door was KFC, and then next door to that was Video Ezy. I think the two video stores were meant to be rivals, but the staff there were film students too—so I got to be friends with them. Customers would often return their films to the wrong store, so I’d run over and do a swap." — Ellen, Dunedin, New Zealand

These responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The Communist Cookbook Responsible for Prague’s Slow Culinary Comeback

0
0

For years, one book dictated how and what people could eat.

article-image

In the newly independent Czech Republic of the 1990s, cheap comfort food—such as goulash, pork knuckle, and dumplings—dominated every eatery. Meanwhile vegetarians were encouraged to feast on fried cheese and stewed cabbage. (The late Anthony Bourdain famously called it “the land vegetables forgot” in an episode of his travel show No Reservations.) For the most part, tourists loved Prague in spite of the food rather than because of it. But Czechs didn’t understand the criticism. After 40 years of communism, the culinary splendor that once dominated Czech culture was a distant memory due, in part, to one very specific cookbook.

As a former cultural capital of both the Holy Roman and Habsburg Empires, ingredients and ideas once flowed freely between Prague and major metropolises in Austria, Hungary, Italy, France, and beyond. By the time Napoleon’s army claimed victory in the Battle of Austerlitz, the city was an epicurean epicenter rivaling Paris and Vienna. Czechs were roasting goose better than Germans, using gnocchi in ways the Italians never thought of, and incorporating French techniques that made their meat sauces even richer. Royal banquets often featured delicacies including pheasant, turtle, and Španělské ptáčky (Spanish birds), a Czech version of roulade made from beef or veal. Economic and gastronomic excellence even survived the First World War.

It wasn’t until the Nazis invaded in 1939, implementing stringent rationing and 10-12-hour workdays, that Czechoslovak cuisine took its first big hit. Every person was issued coupons that signified the amount of bread, sugar, meat, and fat they could obtain (children under ten were given additional rations of butter and milk). But after a few years, Jews were forbidden to purchase fruit, cheese, and meat. Daily life was such a challenge and access was so limited that cooking was no longer a priority. Occupiers encouraged Czechs to cook Eintopf (a one-pot potato stew), but this was a far cry from traditional Sunday roast, and it never quite caught on. Those fortunate enough to have family in the country would meet them at quiet train stations to receive black market eggs and meat.

When communists came to power in 1948, citizens were hopeful they could return to a life containing more prewar luxuries. Though the quality of food improved, life under socialist ideas still proved restrictive. Twenty years later, when liberalization started to gain traction, the party saw a need for even stricter control. In an effort to consolidate power, they purged reformist officials from the government and established a range of restrictions on everyday activities. Eating was no exception.

The state Restaurants and Cafeterias company soon issued a national cookbook entitled Receptury teplých pokrmu, or Recipes for Warm Meals. Dubbed “normovacka,” or “the book of standards,” it dictated what cooks in the country could serve in 845 recipes. Ladislav Pravaan, curator of the Gastronomie Muzeum of Prague, explains that the book even specified sources and serving styles for everything from sauces to side dishes.

article-image

The cookbok’s authors, František Syrový and Antonin Nestával, were relatively well-known chefs at the time (Nestával had even represented Czech gastronomy at the 1967 Montreal Expo). But the book emphasized limiting food imports and cooking economically, so it didn’t include anything you might expect to try at a culinary competition. Nutrition was also a core component of the book: The idea was that the the better-balanced people’s meals were, the harder people would work. In the book, calorie count and vitamin details were listed alongside ingredients and instructions, and certain recipes were suggested for certain professions. Portion sizes were designed by the hundreds, indicating that select dishes were to be cooked in large quantities each day.

Cooks that wanted to deviate from these recipes had to get approval from the Ministry of Health, a request that could take years to go through. Most people opted for the easier route, which is how thousands of nearly identical menus came to be established across the country. Paired with limited ingredient diversity, the nation suffered a creative drought: It wasn’t just that all the same dishes were served, but the dishes were prepared exactly the same way, resulting in identical versions of dishes, too. Each bite was calculated as a means of productivity, and dining for pleasure was considered extravagant. “Special” meals were no longer considered, and the scope of Czech cuisine shrunk.

Yet as NYU Prague sociologist Vanda Thorne points out, people were eating outside the home more than ever before. Children ate at school cafeterias, and parents dined at work cantinas. Since prices were controlled and salaries were largely uniform, everyone could afford restaurants. “Meals at home were often prepared from prefabricated components as there was a noticeable lack of fresh produce,” Thorne says. Though homemade meals weren’t as strictly regulated by the state, there was still little opportunity for originality there.

Another problem? Farms became collectivized by the state, which meant even previously ubiquitous ingredients such as asparagus, broccoli, and thyme became largely unavailable. Pravaan recalls interruptions in basic supplies including onions and garlic as well. Imported fruits and vegetables were missed most, though. Jan Valenta, of Taste of Prague food tours, remembers craving oranges and receiving a rare treat of gift-wrapped bananas under the Christmas tree.

article-image

But after communism fell in 1989, the markets exploded. At the time, Valenta lived next to the first Western supermarket in the city. People would ogle the seafood section and ask how to cook fish, squid, and shrimp. Unsurprisingly, shop assistants didn’t have the answers. “You could not Google things back then,” he jokes.

Drawing back the Iron Curtain also meant that Czechs could travel more extensively, indulging in gastronomic delights they’d been deprived of for more than five decades. Self-described “gastronaut,” guide author, and Prague Food Festival creator Pavel Maurer says that before the Velvet Revolution, following the fall of communism, there were only three restaurants in the city serving foreign cuisine (Russian, Chinese, and Indian). To get a table, you’d have to book at least a month in advance.

Italian restaurants proved popular almost immediately, because the meals were cheap to produce and widely appreciated. American-style fast food and Czech spins on Asian fare thrived for similar reasons. But restaurateurs lacked both qualifications and experience. Without basic know-how, decisions about what to cook and how to train staff seemed inconsequential. So, in an effort to satisfy every customer, they’d offer an overwhelming number of options. This aversion to risk ended up disappointing more people than it pleased. It didn’t help that the same disregard awarded to chefs under communism remained long after the government changed.

The country was also undergoing an economic transition with lowered incomes and unstable agricultural output. Since vegetables and fresh fish were still relatively expensive, it took a long time for them to find their place on Czech tables. As Prague experienced a steady flow of foreign tourists and investment, these poorly-run establishments weren’t meeting expectations.

Plus, as communist-run and subsidized lunchrooms disappeared, Czechs longed for the affordability of state-provided sustenance. “Before 1989,” Pravaan explains, “we were eating much more for less money, and now we are eating much less for more money.” The notion of food quality didn’t interest the average citizen like, say, a new car or nice holiday did. For a long time, eating truly well was limited to international hotels and extremely expensive establishments.

It wasn’t until 2008 that the country earned its first Michelin star for Allegro, an Italian trattoria at the Prague Four Seasons. Run by Italian chef Andrea Accordi, it was the first restaurant in an Eastern Bloc country to be included in the prestigious guide. Now, there are two Michelin-starred options and six with the Bib Gourmand distinction. These days, restaurants offer food from more than 50 cuisines around the world, including Vietnamese and Mexican fare, and Uzbek, Brazilian, and Slovenian cuisines. Booking a table has once again become a challenge.

According to celebrity chef (a phrase you wouldn’t hear 20 years ago) and reality TV host Zdeněk Pohlreich, foreign chefs are to thank for incorporating standards of cooking and service into the scene. His Kitchen Nightmares-esque show, Ano, Šéfe! (Yes, Boss!) is among the influences name-checked in Prague’s post-communist culinary revival. Food bloggers and seasonal farmers’ markets are also helping to push Receptury teplých pokrmu further from the collective consciousness. And younger generations are prepared to pay more for good food. “We are in the first steps of transformation,” Pohlreich says. “It just takes time.”

It's a far cry from the days where one book dictated what people could and couldn’t eat. The latest turning point for Czechs has been returning to their roots. For a long time, chefs and cooks were too excited by new opportunities or scarred by past limitations to innovate seemingly-communist meals. Plus, Czechs weren’t particularly eager to spend big money on the meals they used to get at their cantina.

But all of that is changing. In fact, one of Prague’s two Michelin-starred restaurants focuses on elevated Czech fare that the communists couldn’t have imagined. A new cookbook from Eva Filipová, Czech Cuisine: A Modern Approach, features a compilation of recipes from Czech chefs integrating modern techniques, gastronomic trends, and impressive presentation into traditional dishes. With any luck, it will do what excellent recipes should: inspire innovation.

How Two Men Tried to Start a Hate-Free ‘Gay Town’ in the Nevada Desert

0
0

Stonewall Park was a mid-1980s dream that never quite came to fruition.

article-image

Fred Schoonmaker was the visionary; Alfred Parkinson, whom he called his husband, his most devoted disciple. The two men lived in Nevada in the mid-1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when legally sanctioned homophobia (there was a federal, enforced law against sodomy) combined with HIV-inspired hysteria. Many believed gay men represented not just a risk of moral contagion, but literal infection: morticians regularly refused service to the grieving families of HIV-positive men. Being gay was hard; being black and gay, as Parkinson was, still harder.

But Schoonmaker had a solution as drastic as he felt the climate merited. The two men would found a community exclusively for LGBTQ people, where they could walk freely hand-in-hand down its streets. Stonewall Park, named for the 1969 riots in New York, would be a literal gay village in the middle of the Nevada desert. It was for them as a couple as much as it was for their community, he told friends, but it was also his legacy to the younger Parkinson, whom he expected to outlive him—a “safe and peaceful place” away from the hatred of the rest of the world.

Schoonmaker had grown up far from Nevada, in Wellsburg, West Virginia. It was a river town with a steel plant, and a diminishing population with historically high Ku Klux Klan membership. At five, Schoonmaker realized he was “definitely different;” by 14, he was scrabbling change together for a $1.25 60-mile bus trip to Pittsburgh, home of the nearest gay bar. Somebody there would always pay his way back, he told the Washington Post in 1986. "I don't know where my parents thought I was going."

Being a gay teenager in the shadows of the West Virginian hills was no picnic. Though Schoonmaker found refuge at the end of the bus route, two of his close friends were unable to accept being gay, and killed themselves at the age of 16. These experiences, suggests historian Dennis McBride in his book Out of the Neon Closet: Queer Community in the Silver State, planted the seeds for Schoonmaker’s belief that gay people could only be happy in a segregated society, as did time in same-sex communal living situations in San Francisco in the 1960s. "You get tired of all the daily jokes, the humiliation. If you're not gay or lesbian, there's no way to put yourself in that position. I was never beat up or anything. But you don't have to be the victim of a fag-bashing every six weeks,” he told the Post.

article-image

Parkinson’s origins are less clear. He was from the Bay Area, and quieter than Schoonmaker: one journalist described him as “an oddly elusive man whom one always seems to see just disappearing around the edge of a building.” McBride recalls someone who had “internalized a lot of the horror and animosity that surrounded the gay community in those days”—less expressive or outgoing than his partner, despite being “very emotional,” he says.

They met in the early 1960s and moved to Reno, Nevada, where Schoonmaker had eventually drifted into casino work. Conversations between the men about a shared dream for a normal, socially accepted relationship, evolved into wondering how to make such a dream a reality—creating a place where gay people could not just be out, but utterly humdrum. “You're not making any statement, not providing an educational experience that everyone can participate in."

A small and dedicated group of local supporters began to form around the project: among them a retired librarian; a trans newspaper columnist; a prominent city attorney. Though not all felt as strong a pull to segregated life, many were captivated by Schoonmaker’s dream. “[He] was so charismatic that you couldn’t help but join him,” supporter Marguerita “Stormy” Caldwell told McBride. “With Fred’s enthusiasm, nothing was impossible. I was willing to work with him all the way.” From their base in Reno, they started a gay magazine, the Stonewall Voice, to disseminate information and advertisements for the community, and incorporated the Stonewall Park Association in February 1984.

In the spring of 1986, Schoonmaker and his team began to solicit donations. They left collection jars in gay bars across the state, hoping to accumulate enough coins and bills to get the project off the ground. Gay and lesbian groups around the country received mailings about this proposed segregated resort community. Schoonmaker envisaged “a casino, tennis courts, spas, condominiums and single-family homes,” and a place for over 24 million LGBT Americans—by his calculations—to live without prejudice.

“STONEWALL is telling the world we exist! That we have feelings!” Schoonmaker wrote, in one press release. “That we deserve equality! STONEWALL PARK is our living symbol to the world that we will no longer live in fear!” Nationally, it failed to attract the attention of mainstream LGBT organizations, who viewed it with considerable skepticism if at all; locally, however, the idea began to gain some traction.

As Schoonmaker began to look for a site, even people entirely unconnected to the group began to hear about their plans. Throughout Washoe County, local news outlets started to ask questions about this proposed community, and where it might be located; residents began to buzz angrily about how, and if, they might be affected. Janine Hansen, a member of the anti-gay Pro-Family Christian Coalition in Reno, said, “I can’t believe that under these circumstances with regard to AIDS that someone is trying to bring this into our community. ... I’m not just concerned about AIDS, but bringing the homosexual ‘death style’ to Reno would be a blight on our community.”

In fact, the location they eventually landed upon was far from Reno, and out of Washoe County altogether. Silver Springs, Nevada, is out in Lyon County. It’s desert—golden grasses and crumbling piles of terracotta bricks—with about nine inches of rain a year. (The national average is 36.) Here, by this depressed and desolate town, a retired builder was selling 116 acres of sage scrub: Schoonmaker’s money was as good as anyone’s. But the surrounding community was quick to fight what they saw as an assault on their morals, straight out of Reno.

One woman claimed the new town would be a “singles’ market” resort, rather than the “small, quiet, rural, clean, healthy community” she wanted to live in. More than that, they feared a kind of cultural colonialism: that gay people “would take over the area,” she said.

Lyon County Planning Commission meetings grew toxic and tense. The project managers who had offered to help the team, a straight couple called Robert and Margaret Askew, suggested an alternative: Schoonmaker should start over, taking out the word “gay” from his marketing material, and with a more ambitious plan for fundraising. “Schoonmaker took the Askews’ suggestion as more of the homophobia and bigotry Stonewall Park was meant to mitigate,” writes McBride. In the resulting lawsuit, people who had been carried by the camaraderie of the team, and the power of Schoonmaker’s vision, began to lose faith. Some fell away from the group. The Silver Springs dream was over and Schoonmaker and Parkinson were all but chased out of town.

article-image

But despite these setbacks, Schoonmaker was undaunted. Next, he set his sights on Rhyolite, Nye County, a still more remote Nevada location on the edge of Death Valley. Named for a kind of granite, this famous ghost town exploded into being in an early 20th-century gold rush, housing thousands of glint-eyed optimists, as well as the people who sought to make a living housing and feeding them. Between 1906 and 1920, its population had rocketed from zero to nearly 12,000, and then all the way back down again. Very quickly, it had newspapers, railway lines, sex workers, promises—and then nothing.

Now, it was ruin-pocked and unpeopled, making the town ripe for the taking from rattlesnakes and jackrabbits. It was a tourist destination of sorts, with a house made entirely out of bottles and a baffling and wonderful selection of outside art, including a life-sized fiberglass ghost standing next to its bicycle. More than that, it had an important advantage, writes McBride: “As an incorporated city, Rhyolite could be operated autonomously of state or county law; in theory, Rhyolite could write its own laws and ordinances decriminalizing homosexuality.”

In mid-October 1986, the corporation signed a purchase contract with the town’s owners. All up, the bill was a cool $2.25 million, with the first installment due from Schoonmaker in mid-December. They expected a few dozen “pioneer” residents in the first few months, Schoonmaker told the press, with more to come once closeted people throughout the country began to pour into their new, permanent home.

These pioneers would be housed in 225-square-foot cabins—everyone from busboys to neurosurgeons, he promised, taking a gamble on their promised land. Already, he and Parkinson had moved into a red railway caboose in the town with their four rangy dogs. Admittedly, there would be no jobs, at least at first, but contributions from residents and supporters would help fund their living expenses until the town could get on its feet.

article-image

Beneath an empty blue sky, Rhyolite’s scrub and ruins made it feel almost like another world, where the kind of refuge Schoonmaker envisaged might be a reality. Instead, it is just six miles from Beatty, a thoroughly terrestrial blue-collar hamlet of about 1,000 people on the edge of an atomic test site. It was the kind of place where you voted for your mayor by depositing a quarter in a jam jar; a place where, as Rye County Commissioner Bob Revert told the Post, "We accept atomic waste. We don't accept the gay community."

Today, Rob Schlegel is a realtor in Las Vegas. At the time, he was a friend of Parkinson and Schoonmaker and published the city’s LGBTQ newspaper, the Las Vegas Bugle. He remembers being part of a convoy of cars that came out to Rhyolite a dedication ceremony; how a Catholic priest who was a friend of the community used saltines for the ceremony. It seemed to have gone well enough, he says—until the only restaurant in town refused to serve them on the way back out, “because they didn’t want gays there. And I thought, ‘Hm. I’ve eaten here lots of times.’”

When the story broke in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the townspeople were furious. Schoolchildren in Beatty nicknamed Rhyolite the highly ingenious “Fagolite,” while their principal fretted publicly that it would become “a breeding ground for AIDS.” As the town caught the attention of the world’s media—international camera crews, the New York Times, pun-heavy headlines about fairy tales, pansy patches, and closet communities—the people of Beatty fumed. Youth threw rocks, bullets, and slurs at the caboose and its inhabitants, while others scrawled “Save Our Children from AIDS” in red aerosol. Even the highway marker for the turn to Rhyolite was completely obliterated with black spray paint. They’d simply picked the wrong place, Revert explained. This wasn’t San Francisco, but “redneck country,” a place where they weren’t “gays”, or even people, but simply “queers.” Whatever they were, they weren’t welcome.

Schlegel also doubted that the project would ever work—even if the men did manage to amass the funds. “They didn't realize that people didn't want to separate themselves from mainstream society,” he says—from gay bars and bookshops, community centers and infrastructure. “Which is why I think their whole idea, although noble, was bound to fail.” But Schoonmaker believed that such structures could be built, and were will within the remit of the dream. ″After awhile people will realize that gays and lesbians paint their house, plant flowers and take out the garbage like everyone else,″ Schoonmaker told the Associated Press. ″This community will simply open a few more closet doors.″

article-image

Hordes of tourists started to arrive to rubberneck at the homosexuals and their ghost town. With them were a scattering of pilgrims, who would be slung overnight on a sofa in the caboose. One 24-year-old from California, Tony Pflaum, told the Post how he had walked the six miles from Beatty with “about 100 pounds of luggage”—all he needed to set his roots for “you know, probably the rest of my life.” Between the litter and the sagebrush, perhaps Rhyolite wasn’t much to look at, but the promise of walking down the street “without having a brick hit me upside the head” was a deeply compelling one, as was a dream of owning his very tobacco shop “with a carved Indian out front."

Schoonmaker had always had plenty of dreams, but not quite as many dollars. McBride remembers him as an altruist, utterly dedicated to his fabulous ideas, but without “the means or resources to make it happen,” he says. “It's people like Fred that might anticipate something wonderful, but they need other people to make it happen for them.” Many of those people had fallen away at Silver Springs. And so, when the first installment of the $2.25 million was due to from Rhyolite’s owners in December 1986, Schoonmaker and Parkinson were unable to pay it. They had raised just $6,000 from supporters—not even enough to make a dent in their costs. Opprobrium from their Beattian neighbors, meanwhile, was continuing to mount. Schoonmaker and Parkinson drove back to Reno in their pick-up truck, their hopes in tatters, through “a bunch of rednecks,” one friend told McBride. “And he came home and he called me and asked me if I could come over and so I did. And he just fell into my arms weeping.”

Even now, Schoonmaker was undeterred. That same friend, Caldwell, had previously offered him a 40-acre abandoned goat ranch in Pershing County. It was still more desolate, in the shadow of Thunder Mountain, with a community even more conservative than those of Rhyolite and Silver Strings. Caldwell tried to talk her friend out of taking the property, but he refused to listen, giving her a down payment for the land. A public campaign appealing to the gay community of Nevada mostly fell on deaf ears, perhaps due to these two failed attempts and the utter inhospitality of the new site. Predictably, opposition from county residents and their local officials was swift, and loud. Republican Assemblyman John Marvel from Battle Mountain compared the founders to his cattle. “Since I raise animals, I’m very gender-conscious. If I have a bull that doesn’t know the difference between genders, he goes down the road.” They were threatened with a shotgun by an immediate neighbor, while more than 200 people signed a petition against Stonewall Park.

article-image

Throughout it all, Schoonmaker was getting sicker and sicker. It’s not clear whether he knew that he was ill, but in March 1987, he was officially diagnosed with AIDS. The two men, who were often known as Fred and Fred, returned to Reno, where they lived in a dingy apartment on Carlin Street, just a few blocks from the highway. Even in the depths of his illness, Schoonmaker continued to plan, announcing a fundraising Gay Summer Camp in Thunder Mountain for that forthcoming summer. “We are assured the sodomy law will be enforced,” he warned in a letter to supporters. “You must be aware that your presence in Nevada could lead to harassment and/or arrest. This will come in legal form during the day and there is every possibility of danger at night.”

But the summer camp never happened. Schoonmaker’s condition worsened, until he was first bedridden and then comatose. The couple’s few remaining friends continued to visit, bringing them food and support. Nine weeks after his diagnosis, on May 20, 1987, Schoonmaker died of an AIDS-related heart attack at the age of 44. “When Fred died,” McBride remembers, “it was a tremendous blow to Alfred. Many of us wondered if he was maybe going to commit suicide over it.” He didn’t, but instead returned to the Bay Area with his husband’s ashes, leaving Nevada behind for good.

A seemingly impossible pursuit had proven as fruitless as many had feared, and the dream was entirely burned out. But while some friends lamented what Schoonmaker had put himself through in the last years of his life, others applauded his unwavering commitment to the dream. “The idea of Stonewall should live on in all of us,” Caldwell told McBride. “Maybe it was a lost cause, but it was a good dream.”

Tell Us the Tale of Your Most Incredible Culinary Journey

0
0

We want to hear your greatest story of traveling for food and, more importantly, was it worth it?

article-image

People travel for a lot of reasons: sights, experiences, people—and, increasingly, food. As the endless variety of food-focused travel shows currently choking your favorite streaming service seems to illustrate, expanding your palate beyond the flavors of everyday life can be a worthy adventure by itself. But you don’t have to be Phil Rosenthal, Andrew Zimmern, or the late, great Anthony Bourdain to have experienced an exciting food adventure. We want to hear your incredible stories of the longest, most interesting, most arduous trips you’ve ever taken just to tickle your taste buds!

When you consider food itself a destination, you’ve probably taken more culinary expeditions than you realize. Maybe you hopped in your car for a day trip to check out a new restaurant. Or maybe you went to another country to experience a beloved regional cuisine first-hand. Or maybe, curiosity about a unique dish took you far, far out of your way. Short or long, we want to hear about the journeys you’ve taken for new food experiences, what made the trips special, and whether the food was worth the trek!

Fill out the form below to tell us your story, and we’ll share some of our favorite submissions in an upcoming article. If you have any pictures of your journey that you’d like to share, please send them to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Traveling for Food.”

The Cowboy Cartographer Who Loved California

0
0

Jo Mora poured the state's whole history—and his own life—into his incredibly detailed, whimsical maps.

article-image

Joseph Jacinto Mora knew all the dogs in Carmel-By-The-Sea, California. He knew Bess, a friendly brown mutt who hung out at the livery stables. He knew Bobby Durham, a pointy-eared rascal who, as Mora put it, "had a charge [account] and did his own shopping at the butcher's." He knew Captain Grizzly, an Irish terrier who went to town with his muzzle on and invariably came back carrying it, having charmed a kind stranger into taking it off.

If you spend time with Mora's map of the town—which was first printed in 1942—you'll know the town dogs of that era, too. They're all stacked in a column on the right side, lovingly described and illustrated, and looking as natural as those items you'd be more inclined to expect on a map: streets, land masses, the compass rose. On this particular map, those elements aren't so typical either: the streets are strewn with tiny houses, and both the land and sea are peppered with busy people. The compass rose is rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, and—as befits an artist's town—is helmed by a painter, a performer, a writer, and a musician.

Such is the way of a Jo Mora map. Over the course of his life, the "Renaissance Man of the West," as some have called him, packed history, geography, and personal details into a series of maps of different parts of California. Although well-known in his time—"Mora has produced works of art which have told their story to more persons, probably, than have the works of any other Californian," columnist Lee Shippey wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1942—he has largely fallen out of the public consciousness. But a few minutes with one of his maps plunges you back into his era, and his own worldview.

article-image

Mora was born in Uruguay in 1876. When he was four years old, his father, the sculptor Domingo Mora, moved the whole family to Massachusetts. He went to art school in New York City—a place full of "precipitous sided canyons and underground burrows," he later wrote—and worked as an illustrator for the Boston Herald, drawing scenes from the day's news.

Throughout, "he was really curious about the American West," says Peter Hiller, the Collection Curator of the Jo Mora Trust, and the author of an upcoming biography of Mora. Even as he was getting his degree and amassing an East Coast portfolio, he was spending long stints on the other side of the country. He worked as a cowboy in Texas, and rode on horseback from Baja, Mexico up to San Jose. He lived in a Hopi and Navajo community for two-and-a-half years, learning to speak both languages, taking photographs, and painting precise watercolors of Kachina dances. By 1907, he had officially moved to California, settling in Mountain View with his wife, Grace Alma Needham.

Over the course of his career, Mora explored a number of different mediums, including sculpture, painting, and coin design. "It's almost easier to list what he didn't do," says Hiller. But beginning with his first published map—of the Monteray Peninsula, commissioned as part of a local history book—cartography came particularly easily to Mora. "I've had this feeling from talking to Jo's son Joey that [the maps] were almost spontaneous," says Hiller. He would sketch a draft out in pencil, and then redraw it in black ink, on a large, heavy board. It would then be shrunk down during the printing process.

article-image

In final form, the maps are flamboyant and dense, giving an impression of near-limitless detail. "They're almost like books," says Hiller. "You look at a part of them and set it aside, and then come back the next day and look at a different part." When he's done exhibitions of Mora's work, he adds, the maps in particular are "like magnets … People just get totally absorbed in looking at them."

Mora referred to his maps as "cartes." ("I think it's based on the derivation from 'cartography,' and there may be a French component to it," says Hiller.) But stylistically, they belong to a genre called "pictorial maps"—detailed geographical illustrations that privilege engrossing storytelling over strict accuracy. Historians trace this trend back to the Wonderground Map, a 1914 map of London created by a graphic designer named Leslie MacDonald Gill. By the time Mora was making his, they'd become quite popular, used to advertise travel destinations or depict recent events.

Mora's experience and sensibility lent themselves well to the pictorial map. But even as he worked within the genre, his particular values and obsessions often stuck out. "[The maps] tell stories about the history of California," says Hiller. "He acknowledges the different eras," and the groups of people who shaped the state: Native Americans; Spanish missionaries; Anglo prospectors. At the same time, they're often steeped in the particular moment, full of inside jokes and local color. As Mora himself once put it, "I render my message in the humorous manner as I'd rather find you with a smile of understanding than a frown of research."

article-image

Take his 1942 map of Los Angeles, pictured above. The top strip is dedicated to detailed illustrations of Franciscan friars, and vaqueros on horses. They appear almost somber compared to the middle, which is a riot of visual puns and whimsical situations. A lion dances in the Griffith Park Zoo, and the Hollywood Bowl is a giant dining bowl, with two spoons. For the railroad rate wars of the 1880s, two bug-eyed train engines fight with boxing gloves.

To illustrate the city's increasing popularity, he draws a series of women, each dressed in the style of their era, inflating massive balloons with population numbers on them. "Aw heck!" reads the balloon of the 1950s woman, who is in her underwear, or perhaps a bikini. "There ain't space enuf in this derned drawing to show the future. And how should I know the way women are gonna dress!"

As such a joke indicates, if you engage in the kind of close reading that the maps demand, you'll find that they are fully of their era in another way, too. On the Carmel-By-The-Sea map, a drawing of a Native American is accompanied by a racist caricature of Native language. Few black people appear on his maps, and when they do, they are generally in service positions. Hiller says “he meant no disrespect of course, but he did a couple of times dwell in what you would call cliches. Social cliches.”

article-image

Some maps were commissioned, usually by businessmen who had a stake in drawing people to a particular area. "[Mora] was sort of like Gumby," says Hiller. "He was so flexible that if a project came his way, and he didn't know how to do it, or to execute it for the client, he would figure it out." In 1928, for example, Marston's Department Store hired Mora to draw a map of San Diego, which ended up a seamless assemblage of facts about the store and the city as a whole.

Others were dreamed up by Jo's son and business partner, Joey. "Joey suggested a lot of subjects over the years, and Jo would just sit down and do the maps," says Hiller. Joey would then go sell them at trading posts and gift stores. One of these—a 1931 map of Yosemite National Park, full of mini-wildlife and tourists getting into mishaps—was particularly popular. "There is so much of grandeur and reverent solemnity to Yosemite that a bit of humor may help the better to happily reconcile ourselves to the triviality of man," Mora wrote on the map's legend.

Sometimes, that humor came from shrinking himself. By studying the journals Mora kept during his own trip to Yosemite, Hiller has pinpointed two tiny Jos on the map—one taking photos at Nevada Falls, and one drinking from a canteen beneath Sentinel Dome. "Selling those maps got the family through the Great Depression," says Hiller. "People were willing to spend 50 cents on them at a time when money was hard for everybody."

Mora died in 1947, having made about a dozen maps. One of his last was the one of Carmel-By-The-Sea, where his family ended up living. Perhaps more than any of the others, you can see his life in this one. Hiller is convinced that the two tiny figures riding horses on the top left side are his children, Patty and Joey. And then there's that column of town dogs—one of which Jo must have known particularly well. "Mike Mora could climb a rung-ladder like a chimney sweep," he wrote, over a drawing of a smiling, shoe-wearing canine. It's his map—he's allowed to immortalize his dog.

The Murky Future of America's Lakes

0
0

Where have all the blue lakes gone?

article-image

The children of the future may have to lean on different crayons. According to a recent paper in Limnology and Oceanography, over the past five years, America's lakes have been steadily turning from "blue" to greenish-brown, a state officially known as "murky." The study, which is based off data from the EPA's National Lakes Assessment, found that between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of blue lakes in a representative set plummeted from 46 percent to 28 percent. At the same time, the percentage of murky lakes rose from 24 percent to 35.4 percent.

"I grew up on a lake," says Dina Leech, the study's lead author and a professor at Longwood University in Virginia. "The first thing that you notice about a body of water is its color." It's not just aesthetic: Compositionally, each hue means something specific. Green lakes are full of nutrients, which encourage the growth of algae. Brown lakes are steeped with organic matter, such as dirt and dead plants. Blue lakes are clear because they don't have much of either of these things. And murky lakes—"which are sort of greenish brown or brownish green, depending on your worldview," Leech says—have a lot of both.

article-image

During the NLA, which happens every five years, volunteers head out to over a thousand lakes across the United States and gather information about them, including size, depth, and water temperature. This new study focused on two parameters: amount of phosphorus, and "true color."

To get a true color measurement, volunteers take samples, filter out particulate, and visually compare the filtered water to a color wheel. Taken together, this "nutrient-color paradigm" allows experts to divide lakes into the four categories in question.

Besides "murky"—which tends to indicate poor water quality—none of these colors are inherently troublesome. Brown lakes, for example, are common near wetlands, which provide lots of organic matter. But a lake high up in the mountains will probably be clear and blue, because there's not a lot of runoff to absorb. "Lakes could naturally exist in any one of these states," says Leech. "What we're concerned about is over five years—this short period of time—we see lakes shifting to murky."

article-image

No one is quite sure why this murkification is occurring. Climate change, which can increase temperature and precipitation, is one possibility. Another is the success of the Clean Air Act, which has reduced acid rain, and therefore soil acidity. (More basic soil "holds less tightly" to organic matter, and is more likely to let it run off into lakes, Leech explains.)

Land use may be another factor: When the authors cross-referenced their lake color data set with one indicating land use, they found that "green lakes and murky lakes tend to have more agriculture in their watersheds"—the areas from which they receive runoff—says Leech.

"We can't say definitively that agriculture is what caused those lakes to be green or murky, but it's a place to start," she says. The researchers plan to dive into other public data sets in the future, to see if they can find more correlations. In the meantime, if you want to cool off in blue water, you might want to make haste.


The Secret World Inside Tiny Fog Droplets

0
0

From the Namib Desert to Maine, fog is teeming with life.

article-image

The Namib Desert, which cuts down the coast of Angola, all the way to South Africa, is one of the driest places in the world. Annual rainfall rarely exceeds two inches at the escarpment; the coast is even more parched. But the fog rolls in at night. Researchers there sometimes wake in the morning to find tendrils of it unfurling 30 miles inland from the ocean, where it gathers.

The fog can dampen and pock the sand, as though a brief shower had rolled in. As it crawls along, it conceals buildings and cars, and condenses on tufts of grasses until they’re dripping. It hangs low around the sea of sand dunes, looking every bit like clouds engulfing the lower portions of a mountain. “Maybe it doesn’t reach you, but you can see it sort of coming, the way you see a storm coming,” says Sarah Evans, a biologist at Michigan State University who conducts research in the Namib.

Both from a distance and in the thick of it, fog seems like a diffuse, undifferentiated mass. But, Evans wondered, what is is going on inside that veil—and at a much smaller scale?

She isn’t the only researcher mulling that over. Eli Dueker, an environmental microbiologist at Bard College, has been contemplating a similar question about the fog that cloaks Southport Island, in Maine. The researchers teamed up to analyze the bacterial composition of fog at both sites in a new paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

article-image

Fog is a sea of individual droplets, formed when water vapor condenses onto microscopic particles. Bacteria mingles there, too. Once airborne, these droplets bump into each other, become bigger and drop, or just evaporate back into vapor. In this way, fog is a dynamic ecosystem, one that’s in constant flux. While the droplets are tiny to us, Dueker says, “it’s a big world to a microbe, you know?”

To peer into the world in each droplet, the researchers first had to wrangle them. They rigged up simple surfaces onto which the fog could condense, then collected the water and sequenced the DNA in it. They also set out petri dishes to scout for living microbes. For comparison, they collected non-foggy air, too, and skimmed samples of ocean water near the shore.

Despite the vast distance and differences between the two landscapes they studied, the researchers found a lot of similarities between the microbial worlds rolling through them. The microbial makeup differed a bit in each place (and the researchers also studied fungi in the Namib, but didn't look for it in Maine), but there were clear commonalities. In both places, fog is a melting pot of sorts, with microbes that are often found drifting in the air sharing space with ones that usually reside in the soil or ocean.

Say you are a Marinomonas bacterium, from the family Oceanospirillaceae. Your life is mostly wet, because you probably live in seawater or marine sediments. But if you find yourself in a fog—cast out of the ocean by a breaking wave, for example—and drift across the Namib, you might end up cohabitating with microbes you’d never otherwise meet, ones that live and die far from the ocean. “Together, findings from both fog sites suggest that fog does not simply serve as a refuge to local bioaerosols, but as an effective microbial transport mechanism connecting marine and terrestrial environments,” the authors write.

Just how does this hitchhiking benefit you, little Marinomonas? That's not clear. “Maybe traveling or living in fog droplets makes a microbe more viable; maybe it’s growing, eating some of the other stuff in the droplet, or able to survive longer than if it’s traveling on dust,” Evans adds. It’s possible that a microbe sailing through a fog is insulated from UV rays, which beat down hard on the desert. “What we’re finding is that these microbes can metabolize, they can replicate, they can actually life a live. It may be short, but they are living a life within the atmosphere, and fog and clouds are how they do that,” Dueker says. “There’s a structure that’s provided for them.”

article-image

For however long that fog exists—be it minutes or days—it feeds and changes the ecosystems that it moves through. In some of notoriously foggy enclaves, plants and animals have developed adaptations specifically to help them harness it. Certain beetles funnel fog down their backs and into their mouths, and various trees, mosses, and bromeliads collect fog droplets on their leaves or blades.

But the fog isn't just a boon to these plants and animals—it may also cary risk. The researchers detected taxonomic groups that include fungal pathogens, though so far they haven't investigated whether or in what context these microbes might cause disease. There's a thought that pollutants from water and soil also move through the air in fog, and settle to the ground in places they otherwise wouldn't reach.

It seems that fog's impact doesn't vanish when it fades: Its signature lingers in the places it frequents. “When it dissipates, it will leave behind a changed microbial atmosphere,” Dueker says. Even as the sun bakes the stark desert back to its familiar state, it’s never quite exactly the same as it was before.

Found: A Secret Doorway to Caves Hidden Under a Castle

0
0

Archaeologists also discovered wine bottles in the caves.

article-image

Since the late 18th century, Culzean Castle has stood in its current form on the west coast of Scotland, less than 50 miles southwest of Glasgow. But the caves in the dramatic cliffs below the castle have been there for much, much longer. Recently, a team of volunteer archaeologists investigated the entrance of the Stables Cave and discovered a forgotten doorway, built hundreds of years ago to control access to the cave’s entrance.

Legends surround these caves—it’s said that they’re haunted, that they were used by smugglers, that fugitives hid here. The archaeology team also found wine bottles dating back to the 18th century, and it’s fun to imagine smugglers swigging down some booze while spending the day or night in the shelter of the caves.

article-image

But it’s just as likely the bottles have a more mundane story behind them. Before the current castle was built, Smithsonian notes, there was a castle here called House of Cove or Coif Castle, a nod to the caves below, and as early as the 14th century, there was a stone tower here. For many years, the caves were used as cellars, for provisions including wine.

Human use of the caves goes back even further—dating a charcoal sample from a different cave below the castle, the National Trust of Scotland says, shows evidence of human occupation in the Iron Age, somewhere between the years 135 and 325.

article-image

The most exciting discovery of the volunteer group, though, was the door, which was buried about three feet deep. They discovered two sides of the doorway, with stones stacked eight layers high, framing a space about 3.6 feet across. It could have “been secured with a draw bar,” according to the National Trust. If you have access to a good cave—all the more reason to keep other people out.

Remembering Bill Davis, a Dedicated Teacher and Friend to Atlas Obscura

0
0

He was an avid traveler, always on the hunt for the world’s quirkier corners.

article-image

Atlas Obscura was saddened to learn recently that one of our most active community members, William E. Davis, died in July 2018 while traveling in Uganda.

Davis contributed to Atlas Obscura under the username satxwdavis. He was an avid traveler, always on the hunt for the world’s quirkier corners. As a contributor to our site, he regularly wrote about the hidden places and histories within his hometown of Lafayette, Indiana, and his longtime adopted city of San Antonio, Texas, where he highlighted overlooked features of famous places such as the Alamo. He took trips across the United States and abroad to countries such as England, Scotland, Paris, and the United Arab Emirates. More recently he’d been planning a trip to Paris with his oldest daughter, who turns 18 next year.

article-image

Davis did more than share his love of travel with his family. A middle school teacher, he brought his enthusiasm for exploring the world into his classroom. Davis took groups of students on trips across the United States, to places including Washington, D.C., California, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “He very clearly understood how travel and exposure to different areas of the country and the world reauthored kids’ souls,” says Moises Ortiz, the principal of San Antonio’s Rhodes Middle School, where Davis taught for 23 years. “He really believed in getting anyone, adults and kids, to experience different parts of the world.”

During the last school year, Davis set up a pen pal program between his students and those at Lady Sarah Primary School in Kampala, Uganda. In July, he went to Uganda to deliver the last batch of letters his students had written, as well as some supplies and a plaque commemorating the friendship between the two schools. On July 17, Davis’s family and friends learned he had died in a car accident in Kampala.

article-image

Rhodes Middle School plans to rename its technology building the William E. Davis Technology Building. Davis was one of the founding members of the technology department, and by all accounts, he had a lasting impact on many of his students. “People have reached out to say they became a teacher because of Bill,” says Terry Davis, his brother. “You don’t realize how many lives you’ve touched, even in just a second, or how that will affect people down the road. I think that’s a good indication of just how he was.”

Since he joined the Atlas Obscura community in 2017, Davis added 74 places to our crowdsourced database of the world’s hidden wonders. Below, we’ve linked to some of our favorites among his entries. He also left behind several draft entries we have yet to publish. In the coming weeks, with the encouragement of his family, we’ll be publishing a few more of his place entries—it’s what Davis would have wanted, his brother says.

Some highlights from Davis’s Atlas Obscura contributions include:

All It Takes to Create a Ghost Is a Good Story

0
0

A tale of two bars in Portland, Oregon.

article-image

When Todd Cobb started writing his book, he believed in ghosts. By the time he finished, he did not.

One day back around 2006, Cobb saw an ad from a regional publisher that wanted to expand its line of books about urban ghosts, from Savannah to New York, to include Portland, Oregon. While he was waiting for a video to render, for his day job as a media producer, he wrote a proposal and the first pages of an introduction, and he got the gig. He imagined himself as a Carl Kolchak–type, a reporter drawn into the world of the supernatural. Kolchak had been the protagonist, played by Darren McGavin, of a couple of 1970s television movies and a short-lived series, The Night Stalker. He wore a perky straw hat with broad ribbon above the brim, as he investigated everything from vampires to murderous androids. So Cobb, then 30-something, with a long face and a furrowed brow, got a hat, put up an ad on Craigslist, and waited for Portland's ghost stories to start floating in.

If he were to do it again, Cobb says, he would have done it differently. He would vet the people before meeting them, for one thing. “I paid for a lot of coffee without getting much out it,” he says.

A “spiritual cleanser,” for instance, kept him in the coffee shop for almost two hours. He bought her two, maybe even three, fancy coffee drinks, and she told him in great detail about the ghosts that took over her house—how they moved glasses and furniture, smashed things, and worse. After he transcribed the long recording, Cobb went to his neighborhood pub and regaled everyone there with the tales. When he was finished, a woman told him, “That’s the poltergeist.Yeah, exactly, he explained—“No, no," she interrupted, "the movie—The Poltergeist.

Serial disappointments have a way of dulling one's ambitions. Cobb couldn’t help it if some of the supernatural anecdotes were a bit boring, or if Portland simply didn’t have enough well-documented ghost stories to fill a book. At least one time, he invented a story entirely. It always seemed odd to him to write about “true” ghost stories, but he did get nervous that he was stretching the truth a little too far. But the publisher accepted what he’d written and the book came out in 2007. He became known, at least for awhile, as Portland's “ghost guy.”

As the ghost guy, he heard more ghost stories, and then a strange thing started happening. He would hear the stories he wrote—parts he knows he made up—repeated back to him, by people he didn’t know and who didn’t realize that they’d read them in a book. He had written in the introduction, “When we move beyond the realm of science, we’re in the realm of faith. We believe because we believe.” But he was surprised that people believed so thoroughly and eagerly in ghosts that he’d just invented.

“The first requirement for there being a ghost in a house is someone believing there’s a ghost in the house,” says Christopher Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange, California, who has spent years studying paranormal beliefs in America. A good story can be enough. So now, two haunted bars featured in Cobb’s book—only one of which had a ghost story prior its publication—are equally haunted.

article-image

One of the stories in the book is about a bar called Scooter McQuade’s, though the old brown sign out front only says “Scooter’s.” Its history goes back to the Prohibition era, when it held underground parties—literally, in bootlegger tunnels under the streets. One night, Cobb writes, a gang dressed as police ambushed their drunken rivals, gunning down a whole group of people.

The bar—gloomy, dark, cool, and busy for a weekday afternoon—is just a block past a part of town full of “curated” stores, high-end chains, and white-tiled restaurants. Along one wall, under a red neon sign that says “Knotty Pine,” a couple of guys are hunched over light-up lotto machines.

When I tell the bartender—her name is Veronica—why I’m here, she doesn’t hesitate at all. The bar is definitely haunted, she says. People have strange moments here all the time. Just the other day, the camera in the basement flickered on and off for an hour, with no explanation, and then just started working again. And the ghosts were messing with the toilet seat in the bathroom. Mostly the bartenders notice small things, especially when it’s quiet. Footsteps. A shadow in the corner of the basement storage space. A chair dragging across the floor of the bar when no one’s there.

What makes these little moments seem supernatural? Shadows, stray sounds—those are everywhere. In my office (which, granted, is in a converted old factory building with plenty of quirks), I hear the floor creak, then a couple of pops. Hmm, the leaves of the plant by the window are moving. There are easy explanations—a colleague walking by, an old building's groans, an air vent. But if I were here alone, at night? Maybe those details wouldn't seem so harmless.

article-image

“When you think about what they’re actually reporting, it’s kind of nothing, right?” says Francis McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College. “It’s only when you’re in a place you believe to be haunted that you find this stuff to be scary.”

McAndrew knows a lot about creepiness. A few years ago he did a study that asked participants to rate how creepy people in a series of photos seemed, and he came to a few conclusions. Men are creepier than women. People think that collecting is a creepy thing to do, especially when it involves insects, dolls, or bones. Clowns are definitely creepy. Too much touching? Creepy. Fascination with death or sex? Also creepy. (Atlas Obscura? Maybe kind of creepy.)

These might not seem like great insights into the human condition, but having data to back them up showed McAndrew what connected them. There's nothing immediately threatening about insects or dolls or clowns or an extra touch on the shoulder or a cemetery enthusiast. But maybe if you stick around ... that could change?

“Creepiness is all about the uncertainty of whether there’s something to be afraid of,” McAndrew says. That ambiguity puts your body on edge and paralyzes your mind as you fight the urge to escape. In a bright sunny room, a floorboard creak can be dismissed as unthreatening. In a dark basement, a place that lends itself to haunting, it’s harder to ignore. An ambiguous sound or a cold draft can send part of the mind to the darkest possible place, even while another part insists that everything's fine.

article-image

Inside Crow Bar an old photo hangs on the wall, of the street it sits on maybe a hundred years before. The building has been around since then, and when the current owners took it over in 2009, they were told it is haunted. The space is long and skinny and, like Scooter McQuade’s, dark in the middle of the day. When I ask the bar staff about ghosts, the reaction is the same as at the other bar—they know there’s a ghost here, because they have had all kinds of spooky experiences. Unexplained sounds. A presence downstairs. Hammering. Shadows in the corner.

“One time I was here and a pint glass flew horizontally off the shelf,” says Anastasia Browning, one of the bartenders. She’d had other creepy moments there, too. “This was the first time I thought, ‘That was not natural.’”

The story about Crow Bar in Cobb’s book described the ghost as a soldier from World War I—so in theory he might be a different kind of specter than the ones at Scooter McQuade’s, who died in the violent gang massacre. The soldier had been sick and wasted away here, and his signature ghost move is supposed to manifest as a wheezing sound or a gust of air. But the experiences that Browning mentioned sounded very similar to the ones from Scooter McQuade’s.

article-image

Bader, the sociologist, has been in more haunted houses than he can count, and he says that this is pretty typical. “The things that people get excited about are minor things,” he says. The story that people bring to a place can change what they experience, but it doesn’t change what’s actually happening there. A ghost hunter might go into a haunted house and find herself talking to an old lady, but a demonologist in the same place is going to sense a demon.

One of the main ways our brains process all the stimuli out there in the world is to use what we already know as a framework. When you encounter a new type of tree in the forest, you know it’s a tree, without having to think—it’s tall, it’s got bark, it’s got leaves. Ghost stories work in the same way. When you "know" a place is haunted, your brain immediately identifies creaking board or a flickering light as having a supernatural cause.

Cobb got it right, though, when he wrote that faith is at the core of these stories. “There’s a very powerful desire amongst the general public to believe there’s life after death,” says Bader. “Everything tells us we have this innate desire to believe that it’s not over when we die.” Religion in America is declining, but belief in ghosts is staying stable. If no one wanted to believe in ghosts, Cobb’s stories wouldn’t have any power. But people do want to believe, which makes even newly invented ghosts every bit as real as ghosts that have been around for much longer.

In his book, Cobb wrote about the one time that he did see something he considered inexplicable, in the Commodore Grocery, a small, supposedly haunted, store in a large, old building. Cobb used to go there almost every day to buy cigarettes, and one day, not long after he'd started working on the ghost book, he saw an unnerving woman there—short, "with a dirty white coat and a long, dark ponytail," who appeared, disappeared, and the next moment appeared again, "blurry, amorphous, and insubstantial one second and solid the next."

"What I didn't put in there," he says, "was that I was so desperately hung over I thought I was going to die. Perhaps I was more sensitive to seeing things from the other world." When he was collecting ghost stories, he often found that the people who wanted to tell the stories were looking for attention more than anything else. But, though his faith in ghosts was shaken by these encounters, he hasn't written them off entirely. "When I was young, my grandfather died, and I swear I woke up that night and he was standing in my room to say goodbye," he says. "I would have sworn that happened, for years. I could have dreamed it. But I was comforted by that experience."

A Short History of America's 'Tamale Wars'

0
0

Their popularity made for some bloody turf wars.

article-image

Food trends don't usually incite extreme violence. But in early 20th-century America, the popularity of one recently arrived street food caused turf wars, which the media breathlessly sensationalized. That food, as it happened, was the humble tamale.

At the time, the tamale quickly became as popular in America as the hot dog. Tamales had made a splash at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and more and more Americans were moving West into what had previously been Mexican territory. There, they encountered cheap, filling tamales, and they liked them. Hilariously, the Atlantic Monthly explained tamales to unfamiliar readers in 1898: "The hot tamale (pronounced ta-molly)—a molten, pepper-sauced chicken croquette, with a coat of Indian meal and an overcoat of corn husk." For many white Americans, with their uninitiated taste buds, eating something so spicy was a revelation: The Atlantic Monthly went on to describe the taste of a tamale as "a diabolical combination that tastes like a bonfire."

article-image

Tamale vendors canvassed the growing cities of the West, serving their wares out of kettles, carts, and wagons. Cries of "Hot tamales!" or "Red-hot tamales!" soon became part of the soundscape. Men and women of all ethnicities became tamale vendors, and business was good as city-dwellers sought late-night and cheap eats. But perhaps business was too good. In 1893, a fictional short story, entitled Love and Tamales, detailed a Romeo-and-Juliet story of white and Mexican tamale vendors butting heads over business (with all problems eventually solved by a marriage between the two sides).

But the reality wasn't so harmonious. Soon, newspapers published lurid tales of "tamale wars": beatings and murders between rival tamale sellers. In 1921, the Omaha Daily Bee reported on a party held by "competitive 'hot tamale rings'" where one member of tamale-selling business hacked another to death with an axe. (The party had been an attempt at reconciliation between the two sides.) Other battles between tamale vendors consisted of near-riots over turf in Arizona, counterfeit tamales in Washington, and a saloon shoot-out between two rival vendors in Kansas.

article-image

While violence did happen, the ethnicities and social status of many tamale sellers also meant increased scrutiny. In a profile of legendary tamale seller Zarif Khan, New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz points out that tamale vendors in America were poor or minorities: Mexican, of course, but also Italian, Middle Eastern, and African-American. Tamale vendors were spun as hot-blooded stereotypes in the press and fiction, fighting over turf and business. Stories about their battles often became front-page news.

In the end, the waning of the tamale's popularity put an end to both tamale fights and most tamale vendors. According to Schulz, demand slackened throughout the 1910s as the tamale trend ran its course. Many former vendors turned to other careers: ones which, hopefully, involved less warfare.

How Escaped Pets Took Over Florida

0
0

When store-bought animals are released, they may go from pet to pest.

article-image

It was the end of November, 1929, and the holiday season was closing in. Maybe that’s why the pet store at 203 Tyler Street near Tampa, Florida, had recently ordered a shipment of monkeys, including a nursing mother and her baby. The shop was refreshing its winged offerings, too—a flock of canaries and parakeets had also just landed.

The store was sure to get loud and crowded—fast. But it was only a way station for these creatures, a stop between old homes and, presumably, new ones. To keep the inventory moving, the store placed an ad in the classified section of the Tampa Times. The monkeys were offered in the “Dogs, Cats, and Pets” column, beneath collie puppies and a wire-haired fox terrier described as “highly pedigreed, gentle, and affectionate.” The newspaper didn't specify what species the monkeys belonged to, but whatever it was, they weren't native to Florida, or anywhere in the United States—no monkeys are.

Across the country, and all over the world, families choose to keep pets that are wildly different from the ones that amble around naturally outside. In a new paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, Oliver Stringham, a graduate student in ecology and evolution at Rutgers University, points to the trade in “exotic” pets as the primary way that many creatures slink, slither, or swing into ecosystems where they weren't before.

article-image

Animals sold as pets sometimes end up outdoors when owners are forced to face smelly, inconvenient reality, or the realization that one's apartment doesn’t grow like a pet python does, or the fact that they simply don't want to be pet owners any more. That’s likely how red-eared slider turtles got into New York's water and how goldfish took up residence in Australian rivers, not to mention big, active wild animals like monkeys. "Owners may underestimate the space and costs needed to keep such animals as they grow into adults,” Stringham said in a statement. Boa constrictors and reticulated pythons, for example, grow to over eight feet long. African clawed frogs and Russian tortoises can live 30 years or more, he added. "Not wanting to euthanize, owners may resort to releasing them instead."

Stringham analyzed import, sales, and release data about 1,722 species of amphibians and reptiles brought to the United States between 1999 and 2016, and found that the “exotic” pets most likely to have been dumped over that period were those imported in the greatest number, sold for the cheapest prices, and having the greatest weight.

Florida has a particular mess on its hands. The state leads the country in number of introduced animal species. In a 2011 study synthesizing 147 years of data, Kenneth Krysko, herpetology collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, attributed 84 percent of these introductions to the pet trade. “If the trends continue, it’s likely we will have more non-native species in Florida than native species,” Krysko told the museum’s press office at the time. “It’s really difficult to comprehend, but I believe it can happen.”

Here’s an overview of how some of Florida’s feral exotic pets have changed things—and what the state is trying to do to stop them.

article-image

Green iguanas

In South Florida, these spiky, scaly residents manage to live a life of both repose and destruction. They sun on seawalls and patios, and sometimes splinter concrete when they burrow. They slaughter hibiscus and bougainvillea, and then leave nasty surprises behind in pools. They scramble infrastructure and the electrical grid, too: They’re said to be one of the largest contributors to power outages, behind vegetation and squirrels.

Florida’s green iguana issue is thought to have started in the 1960s, when the lizards—native to Mexico and Central and South America—were set loose by owners or escaped during hurricanes. Adult iguanas have no natural predators in the state, and they lay dozens of eggs a year. There's nothing there to hold them back.

“There’s no real way to come up with a valid estimate of the number of green iguanas in Florida. But the number would be gigantic,” Richard Engeman, a biologist for the National Wildlife Research Center, recently told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “You could put any number of zeros behind a number, and I would believe it.”

To deter the lizards, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission encourages residents to engage in what they call “humane harassment,” such as stringing up windchimes or hanging some CDs, which become annoying when the sun strikes them. Trapping and relocating the lizards is a no-go (they could pass disease around), but Floridians are allowed to kill the lizards by decapitating them, firing a pellet gun at their heads, or piercing their brains. Researchers from the University of Florida are fine-tuning strategies for making these tactics as painless as possible.

Burmese pythons

The splotchy Burmese python, native to South and Southeast Asia, is one of the largest snakes in the world—and they're ravenous. They entered Florida’s landscape a few decades ago, the same way that iguanas did, and have since more or less taken over the Everglades.

It’s now illegal to buy a Burmese python as a pet in Florida, but there are plenty already there, competing with gators for food, and sometimes even making gut-busting meals of them.

Local officials have periodically declared open season on the snakes, and invited hunters into the Everglades to take their best shots. It’s an unusual move, but the park’s superintendent, Pedro Ramos, told the Miami Herald that they’d exhausted more conventional options, such as trapping. "Maybe someday we'll find a way to really get the upper hand,” he said.

That task could get even trickier, because new research by a team from the U.S. Geological Survey, published this month in Ecology and Evolution, suggests that the marsh-loving snakes have interbred with the similarly non-native Indian python, which usually live higher up, off the wetlands. Researchers believe that these offspring possess what’s known as “hybrid vigor,” which might allow them to expand their range. "In an invasive population like the Burmese pythons in South Florida,” lead author Margaret Hunter said in a statement, “this could result in a broader or more rapid distribution.” Good news for pythons, bad news for everyone else.

article-image

Rhesus macaques

And now back to those monkeys. Pet monkeys weren’t a new phenomenon in the 1930s. As far back in 1888, there was a guide for simian custodians that promised to teach aspiring owners how to choose a companion and build a simple cage. (The post-and-platform alternative, something like a birdhouse for monkeys, was apparently an inferior alternative. From it, the author Arthur Patterson promised, “your tenant may pelt you with refuse from his larder, defy your efforts to catch or pet him, and otherwise be objectionable.”) Similar to the way a guide for prospective puppy owners might offer some impression of the personalities of certain breeds, this handbook distinguished between monkeys that were “fuller of devilry” and ones that possessed an “effervescence of fun.” The author was sure that monkeys could become standard-issue pets and a favorite of fanciers, rather than “a haphazard whim of a few persons here and there.”

article-image

In fact, by the 1930s, released pet monkeys were already carving out a place for themselves in Florida ecosystems. That’s when a colony of rhesus macaques settled in Silver Springs Park, a tourist attraction between Orlando and Gainesville. They were allegedly introduced by design, as a tourist attraction, before they escaped their initial confines.

For decades, the sand-colored monkeys roamed wild, or something close to it, in the park, where they learned to dodge the jaws of alligators that were said to rear up to snap at them. Tourists flocked to watch them from boats slicing across the spring's crystalline water.

Then, in the mid-1980s, state wildlife officials told the Associated Press that some of the primates had been scavenging in backyard garbage bins, gorging themselves in citrus orchards, and biting humans. Earlier this year, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the monkeys were also shedding DNA of a strain of the herpes virus that is transmissible to humans.

Bellies full of pilfered food were one thing; a potential public health issue was another. Wildlife officials have since pledged to boot the brigade from the grounds—though they're not saying exactly how.

Explore the Unforgettable Flavors of Your Favorite Off-Brand Foods

0
0

Check out our readers' top gems from the oft-overlooked world of off-brand eats.

article-image

There's a whole world of potential culinary wonders hiding right under your nose. Look past the brand names you probably instinctively reach for, and you'll find a wide variety of off-brand, house-brand, discount-brand, or small-brand prepared foods that most people overlook or dismiss as inferior. But if you ask for fans of these alternatives (we recently did), you'll find lots of personal favorites out there, waiting to delight the adventurous or thrifty.

From the fairly well-known not-Oreo, Hydrox, to a surprising number of Cheetos alternatives, there are all kinds of obscure eats that people swear are far superior to the ones that appear in commercials and take up prime shelf space. Our readers sent us more alternative favorites than we could shake a generically packaged stick at. Like Chex? Then you'll love Crispy Hexagons. Think you're a Dr. Pepper fan? Mr. Pig might win you over.

Check out some of our favorite submissions below, and maybe next time you'll give some unfamiliar bargain food a chance to wow you.

Bitterol

Like: Aperol

“The good thing about Bitterol is that it is actually a bit more bitter than Aperol. Where Aperol can sometimes be a bit too sweet, Bitterol always gives you the bitterness that can be so appreciated on a night of drinking. Tangy vibes for tangy people, Bitterol is the perfect Sunday afternoon companion for gossip sessions with your best friends about people you envy because they realized early enough that life is too short to not do what you love, resulting in a happy life—where you and your galz ended up in your boring hometown with your boring husband and terrible kids. Luckily your slightly inbred chihuahua Fiona can make up for all the misery. And, Bitterol.” — Laura, Berlin, Germany

Brim’s Cheese Puffs

Like: Cheetos

“Brim's Cheese Puffs are available in Dollar Tree stores. They are as good as the ‘name brand’ cheese snacks, and a whole lot less expensive.” — Ted Meberg, Orlando, Florida

Brooks Rich & Tangy Ketchup

Like: Heinz Ketchup

“Doesn't taste like stewed tomatoes, like the major brands. Grew up with it, and it’s only available in the Midwest, so I must order it online now.” — Billye Ann Clough, Prescott Valley, Arizona

Brownie Chocolate Drink

Like: Yoo-hoo

“I had it when I visited Alabama back in the 1980s. I thought it was richer than Yoo-hoo!” — Scott Shrum, Los Angeles, California

Bubba Cola

Like: Coca-Cola

“I started buying Bubba from a small and, at the time, dingy food chain because it was only 89 cents a bottle. I've tried to buy name brands since, and my husband vehemently complains. He even took a taste test by lining up every cola brand we could locate and sipping them blindfolded. I was shocked to see that he did, indeed, identify Bubba as the winner. I was sort of hoping to trick him. He claims it is less sweet than Coke but really, I can't tell the difference. It’s still 89 cents so I'm happy to still buy it for him.” — Deb, New York

Clover Valley Coconut Fudge and Caramel Cookies

Like: Caramel deLites Girl Scout Cookies

“These are one third the cost of the Girl Scout Samoas and are just as good (if not better!). What's more, they're available all year long. Great for my taste buds and wallet, not so good for my waistline :).” — Nathan, United States

article-image

Crispy Hexagons

Like: Crispix Cereal

“I just love the name. How often do you see the word ‘hexagon’ in everyday usage?” — Brian, California

Duke's Mayonnaise

Like: Hellman’s Mayonnaise

“Duke’s is super creamy, not sweet, and for some reason I feel that it makes whatever you put it on or in taste better! I live in Brooklyn, but grew up in Virginia. I get several jars every time I go home.” — Marie, Brooklyn, New York

Faygo Pop

Like: Sunkist Orange Soda, other candy-flavored soft drinks

“Faygo has so many crazy varieties that the big brands would never attempt! Cotton Candy, Raspberry Lemonade, Pineapple Orange, Candy Apple … the list goes on and on. Plus they are really good, and really inexpensive! Every time I go back to Michigan I grab some.” — Brandon Davis, Chicago, Illinois

Golden Flake Cheese Curls

Like: Cheetos

“Cheesier, crisper, and with a buttery flavor far beyond anything any bag of Cheetos could ever have, these are only found in the deep South, where they originated in 1923. When my mama used to send me a care package from home, she'd buy several bags of these since they were my favorite, and use the unopened bags as lightweight packing around my goodies. The best!” — Suzanne Barnes, Tucson, Arizona

Golden Grains Mac’n’Cheese

Like: Kraft Mac & Cheese

“It wasn’t just a rip-off of Kraft like the other off-brands. It had a distinct flavor and texture.” — Dani Matheson, Santa Cruz, California

Great Value Cheddar Cheese Crackers

Like: Cheez-Its

“These Wal-Mart-brand cheese crackers are head-and-shoulders better than any name brand cheese crackers we have tried. While there's the great upside of being considerably cheaper than the major brands, these crackers have a much more robust cheese flavor and just taste better. They are the only ones all my five kids will eat, which is no small feat, as well as my wife's and my personal favorite. When we offer them to other adults with us on outings, we notice a look of doubt on their faces, but always, next comes an expression of surprise and satisfaction. We can barely keep any stock of these because they are eaten up so quickly! You must try these and you'll be hooked!” — Jason A. Valdosta, Georgia

Hawkins Cheezies

Like: Cheetos

“Perfect, dense, crunchy cheese puff with intense cheese flavor. It’s the intensity of the crunch combined with the denseness of the texture that gives it complete mouth satisfaction. They aren’t too salty and are never oily. They are extruded and fried into oddly twisted and knobby little shapes. No two are identical. They don’t taste in any way artificial or chemical-y. They’re made locally in a family-run factory in Smith’s Fall, Ontario, and are only available in stores in the Ottawa Valley of Eastern Ontario. Recently, by chance, I stood next to a lady in a local Giant Tiger discount store. Without knowing it, we were both there to buy Hawkin’s Cheezies. (Giant Tiger sells them at the lowest price.) They weren’t immediately obvious on the shelf. Getting agitated, the lady loudly demanded, ‘Where’s the **** Haw-kins?!! I only eat Hawkins! They’re the best cheesies ever!’ In my small community it is not unusual for people to include bags of Hawkins in birthday gifts or hostess gifts at dinner parties. I always include a bag in each stocking at our house at Christmas. They have an insanely loyal customer fan base in this part of the country." — Sue Minro, White Lake, Ontario

Heee Haw

Like: Mountain Dew

“I think it tastes more lemony than Mountain Dew, though it’s slightly less carbonated. The ridiculousness of the name is what’s really the important thing here, as nothing is funnier to high schoolers than a good old game of Heee Haw pong. The three E’s are the best part!” — Anna Godfrey, Mason City, Iowa

article-image

Hydrox Cookies

Like: Oreo Cookies

“The stuffing is creamy, unlike Oreos. Oreos ‘double stuffing’ is just a lot of air beat into the stuffing and that makes the stuffing crack.” — Suzanne Melton, Elk Plain, Washington

“I have been a Hydrox fan since I was a kid. I always preferred Hydrox and Mint Hydrox over Oreos. For me it is both the texture and flavor difference. I buy them from Amazon because I can’t find them locally.” — Jim Prevo, Vermont

“It has the chocolate/vanilla flavor that reminds me of my childhood and having cookies and milk after school. Mom would listen to my 'news' of the day at school and offer suggestions for problems I was having.” — Katherine, Nebraska

Kroger Crunchy Natural Peanut Butter

Like: Jif Crunchy Peanut Butter

“I am 42 years old and have eaten peanut butter and jelly almost every day since I was about six. I have had a lot of different kinds of peanut butter. While crunchy is obviously superior to creamy, there are a lot of processed and natural versions to choose from. And what I've noticed is that Kroger's crunchy natural retains the big chunks without the gritty texture. When mixed and refrigerated it's the perfect consistency, at half the price (which is important given the volume we're talking, even for a grown man).” — Chad Ahren, Indianapolis, Indiana

Kroger Big K Diet Cola Soda

Like: Diet Coke

"It's more crisp, and under half the price! But more importantly, you need to start calling this stuff, ‘Twonkie.’ It's from an episode of That 70s Show, when Kitty gives Eric a store-brand Twinkie in his lunch. Ever since seeing that episode, anything off-brand is known as ‘Twonkie’ in my house. For example, that Kroger diet soda I like? Twonkie Diet Coke." — Amy Buss, Thousand Oaks, California

Martha White Self-Rising Flour

Like: Gold Medal Flour

“It is blended specifically for Southern-style biscuits. Gold Medal and Pillsbury, and even King Arthur brands blend soft and hard wheat, which prevents the best rise.” — Marjory Thrash, Poplarville, Mississippi

Millville Marshmallows and Stars

Like: Lucky Charms

“Due to a chemical sensitivity to food dyes like red 40, I must avoid them. Aldi has eliminated them from all of their store brands. Plus, a box of Marshmallows and Stars costs less than half as much as Lucky Charms, which is full of food dyes. Win-win!” — Jackie, New York

article-image

Moxie Soda

Like: Coca-Cola? Nyquil?

“Moxie's complex, vaguely medicinal taste easily beats Coke, which is the Budweiser of sodas, and thoroughly trounces the overly sweet Pepsi and RC Cola.” — Roderick Bates , Weathersfield, Vermont

Mr. Pig

Like: Dr. Pepper

“Mr. Pig is the Piggly Wiggly grocery store's knockoff of Dr. Pepper. In terms of taste it's ‘eh.’ But the name … It's perfect for a full-sugared soda. Unfortunately it's not available in diet, but then is that really a surprise? And, at least as of August 2018, it's still available in the Atlanta-area Piggly Wigglys.” — Blaine, Atlanta, Georgia

Mrs. Freshley's Cupcakes

Like: Hostess CupCakes

“The taste kicks six kinds of crap out of Hostess. The sponge is moist, the cream light-textured, the icing doesn't shatter into pieces when you bite into it. They also have great carrot cake, donuts, swiss rolls, etc. And they are MUCH cheaper!” — Scott Erickson, Minneapolis, Minnesota

NikNaks/Kirkland Popcorn

Like: Cheetos/Orville Redenbacher

“I enjoy these both SO much better than their recognized counterparts (Cheetos/Orville Redenbacher) because they taste great without a weird feeling of oil/preservatives left on your tongue. While I’m able to get the popcorn easily (and cheaper!), shipping cheese snacks from South Africa is a lot more difficult, so I usually have to settle for the inferior name brand.” — Rachel, California

Polar Cola

Like: Coca-Cola Products

“They took Coca-Cola to court, for using their polar bear symbol in Coca-Cola ads on TV and packaging. They lost, because the courts said Polar was only a small company and Coke was huge, and no one would confuse the two. Try using the same lettering as Coke, and watch them freak out! The battle earned my respect for the Polar Beverage Company of Worcester, Massachusetts.” — Bob Bolduc, Auburn, Massachusetts

RC Cola

Like: Coca-Cola

“RC has a richer cola flavor than those heinous ‘other’ two and after all if you choose to drink a cola soda, it's about cola taste, and RC has the most.” — Chipp Ross, Portland, Oregon

Stop & Shop Neufchâtel

Like: Philadelphia Cream Cheese

“More balanced acid-to-cream ratio than Kraft's Philadelphia, and creamier texture.” — Howard Isaacs, Brooklyn, New York

Stouffer's Whales Crackers

Like: Goldfish

“They're so much more flavorful than Goldfish. They are cheesier-flavored and have just the right amount of saltiness, which I find the lack of makes goldfish crackers taste more dull.” — Alyssa Valenti, Clinton, New Jersey

Trader Joe's Mayonnaise

Like: Hellman’s Mayonnaise

“It is one of the few brands that has no added sugar. The result is that it tastes more like mayo used to taste before manufacturers started adding more sugar to everything. It tastes tangier than most brands but still creamy and enhances everything it is put on. It is delicious and has more flavor notes than other mayos.” — Sue Harrison, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Trader Joe’s Scandinavian Swimmers

Like: Swedish Fish

“Leaps and bounds above Swedish Fish are the brightly-hued Scandinavian Swimmers, a diverse array of delicious, delicate gummies ranging from dolphin to rockfish, and coming in as many flavors. With the gummies occasionally warping their shape, your imagination itself can create an entirely new cast of nautical figures! Why waste the signature texture Swedish Fish popularized on one cough-syrup flavored fish? Scandinavian Swimmers spread the Nordic love to all creatures, both above and under the sea.” — Annie, Boston, Massachusetts

Treet Meat

Like: Spam

“It competes with Spam, but has a finer texture and slightly sweeter flavor when fried vs Spam's super-saltiness. Treet's also significantly cheaper. My grandmother used it in vegetable soup and as a breakfast meat.” — Eric L. Johnson, Pikeville, Kentucky

Uncle Ray’s Brand Chips

Like: Lay's Potato Chips

“They are the oddest of off-brand chips ever. The chips are delicious and ALWAYS coated in seasoning, But on the back there are always just strange, old-timey stories about falling out of row boats or sometimes odd stuff it’s hard to believe.” — Jay Sullivan, Edwardsville, Illinois

These replies have been edited for length and clarity.


Decoding the Unusual Shape of the Nepali Flag

0
0

Where did all those angles come from?

A very strange thing about national flags is how similar they are. More than 75 percent of all national flags include the color red, and more than 72 percent include the color white. A whopping 30 national flags have the red, white, and blue color combination. Stripes, stars, and crosses are exceedingly common. There are no rules, no international governing bodies, that tell a country what a flag can and cannot be, and yet all but three flags are rectangles. Two—Switzerland and Vatican City—are squares. And then there’s Nepal.

The Nepali flag consists of two overlapping triangles, of different sizes defined with mathematical precision. It is the world’s only five-sided national flag, and the only flag that does not have two parallel sides. Other countries could do this and do not, and probably never will. So how did this happen?


National flags are a more recent creation than you might think. Prior to the 17th century, nationalism wasn’t something for most people to participate in, as travel between countries was expensive, arduous, and rare. National identity wasn’t the most important identity; you’d be more aware of a local municipality or individual lord. A king might have flown a flag, but these were more like representations of a coat of arms and tended to change when a new ruling family came to power.

article-image

Aside from the royal families, the only time one would really need to identify as part of a larger whole was in battle. Flags and banners were used to identify military units, but they were usually specific to the regiment or group of soldiers rather than the country as a whole. This all started to change during the Age of Sail, especially around the late 18th century. “It comes from trade on ships, which were moving between different places with the beginnings of globalization,” says Scot Guenter, a professor at San Jose State University, senior fellow at the Flag Research Center, and avowed vexillologist (that’s someone who studies flags).

article-image

The vast majority of national flags began to appear in the mid-1800s, along with the emergence of the nation as a concept rather than just the place one’s king ruled. This was the first time national flags were flown outside of war settings, and within a hundred years or so, flags became strangely homogenized in shape. They were simply tools to recognize a ship’s origin at a distance, and a rectangular flag is an ideal shape to catch wind and appear taut, allowing those far away to understand it.

But flags weren’t always rectangular. Pennant flags—tapering and triangular, or sometimes forked at the end, and sometimes called “pennons”— also began appearing, particularly in Asia. It was the European countries, though, that dominated the Age of Sail, sailing to the New World and creating colonies and trade routes, and their flags tended to be rectangular, so by the mid-19th century, most Asian countries had changed their flags to be rectangular as well.

Nepal never did.


The Nepali flag is currently red with a dark blue border, in the shape of two pennants. The pennants are not the same size (the upper one is smaller) and they overlap in the middle. The upper triangle includes a white stylized moon; the lower has a white sun.

article-image

“Nobody knows who exactly created it,” says Anil Pandey, the founder of the nonprofit Motherland Nepal. The history of the flag of Nepal is maddeningly vague. A reproduction of the flag in a French book from 1928 shows a very similar flag to what’s used today, except with a green border rather than blue and faces on both the sun and moon. Shortly after that, the color was changed to blue; by the time of the country’s constitution, in 1962, the flag’s colors were firmly red, white, and blue. It’s unclear how or why this change happened.

Dayaram Shrestha, a prominent academic and professor in Nepal, traced the history of the double-pennant flag back to the time of King Mandev, the last king of the Lichhavi dynasty, sometime around the year 450, but documentation is scarce. Flags, until quite recently, were changeable and not really considered important enough to describe in much detail.

Nepal was unified during the reign of the Gorkha king Prithivi Narayan Shah in the mid-1700s, and many accounts date the creation of the double-pennant, sun-and-moon flag to around this time, or to the early 1800s. But there still aren’t historical reproductions of a flag recognizable as the Nepali flag from this period; it’s likely that some version of the Nepali flag began to be standardized sometime in the 1800s, but nobody knows for sure. This is not unusual, timing-wise; the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the decades when most modern national flags became formalized.

article-image

The meanings of the sun and moon are also not known, but it’s less that the specific meaning has been lost and more that national flag symbols tend to represent different things to different people during different times—sometimes good, sometimes bad. Some suggest that the moon and sun represent the Shahs and the Ranas, the two most powerful ruling dynasties of Nepal over the last 500 years. Some say that the moon and sun represent pride and peace. Or maybe permanence; “As long as we have the sun and moon, Nepal will always be there,” says Pandey. These are all correct and also none of them are correct. “The flag of Nepal does not just mean one thing; its meaning will change over time,” says Guenter.

It has also been proposed that the double-pennant design is meant to replicate the Himalayas. Both Guenter and Pandey dismiss this.

Nepal, along with other countries in the region, including neighboring India, has always favored pennant flags over rectangular flags. “There are other forms of pennant type flags, mostly used in Hindu and Buddhist temples around Nepal,” says Biraj Bista, a former politician in Nepal. “The color of the flag is often yellow or orange and there could be ‘OM’ written in the middle of the flag.” The double-pennant is unusual but not unheard-of, and there isn’t any particular symbolism in it. It’s just two pennants.

article-image

But the specific design of the pennants is something else. Upon the writing of the country’s constitution in 1962, an entire section was dedicated to the precise mathematical proportions of the flag. People were, probably, drawing it incorrectly, at least according to the ruling power. It requires a ruler and a great deal of patience to draw correctly, but the Nepalese constitution is very clear on exactly how it should be composed.

This document also produced one minor change; prior to 1962, the sun and moon both had faces in them. Now, they don’t. Nobody knows exactly why.

article-image

The colors are also interesting. Pandey explained that the national color is red, that it might indicate bravery while the blue represents peace. Bista echoed this, saying that the red color symbolizes the “hotheadedness” (his word) of the Nepalese people, and blue for peace. But red and blue are also, by far, the most popular colors to use on a national flag. What do the red and blue colors represent on the American flag? Anything? Nothing? (Nobody knows this either.)

Theoretically, any country could at any moment decide to change its flag to something non-rectangular. But even countries with incredibly simple flags—Poland, are you serious with this—would have trouble doing that. “There's no reason why other countries can't do this; it'd be good for branding,” says Guenter. “But people have an attachment to the flag.” National flags are vital symbols, even if they’re ugly or boring.

article-image

The Nepalese flag would have been interesting and a bit of an outlier before the Age of Sail; there were other pennant flags, but double-pennants were rare. Now, though, the Nepalese flag is something totally different, completely unlike any other national flag. Guenter thinks the relative isolation of Nepal might have something to do with this; unlike, say, the former Soviet republics, nobody ever conquered Nepal and forced some new flag onto them, and Nepal was not really a participant in the Age of Sail. So the flag just sort of formed naturally and then stayed the way it was for a while without outside interference.

By the 1962 constitution, Nepal had never had any particular reason to change its flag, and suddenly, here was the opportunity. But there was no real reason to change it, and by this time it was clear both that national flags are an important symbol and that the Nepalese flag is unique. Pandey, as well as a few other Nepalese people I talked to, told me that the flag is a real source of pride for Nepal. “Most people feel proud to have such a unique flag,” says Bista. “Personally, I look at it as a symbol of unification in diversity we have in Nepal.” It’s something that immediately elicits a reaction, something unlike any other place on Earth.

Remembering the Clandestine 'Aunty Bars' of Prohibition-Era Bombay

0
0

Grabbing a drink once meant moonshine in a neighbor's living room.

article-image

When Roland Francis’s father didn’t come home on time, he knew something was wrong. It was 1962 when the Bombay-born 13-year-old set out in search of his dad. He ran into a friend, who told him that a cordon of officers had formed around one of the neighborhood buildings. Though he wasn’t old enough to drink, Francis was old enough to understand what this meant during the city’s prohibition era. The police had busted one of the neighborhood bars, and his father must have been caught up in it.

Moments later, Francis recalls, his father, accompanied by another man, coolly strode towards him. He had lucked out—his drinking buddy had been an officer.

“When they found out that this guy was from the police, they let him and my father off,” Francis recalls. “They told him to just disappear fast before they arrested the other guys.”

In prohibition-era Bombay (now known as Mumbai), police raids could be bad news for drinkers. But, for the most part, few were deterred. In fact, raids became commonplace, a sometimes terrifying, sometimes comical element of city lore surrounding the illicit alcohol industry of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Even police officers found ways to imbibe.

“Everybody’s daddy and uncle had a wild story about almost being caught by the police or shimmying down a drainpipe,” says Naresh Fernandes, editor of the digital publication, Scroll.in.

Prohibition often gives rise to its own memories, nostalgia, and mythology—and Bombay was no different. However, it seems some of these stories are at risk of being forgotten by younger generations. Much of the prohibition nostalgia that younger Mumbaikars harbor, Fernandes notes, is for something else entirely. “The wonderful irony is that every now and then, some kid will set up a prohibition-era themed bar, but the prohibition it’s modeled after is always Chicago!”

While there would be organized crime, large bars, and a bit of glamour during Bombay’s prohibition era, that would all come later. Before the city’s illicit liquor trade became a booming business, there was another, much smaller, operation at play. And it could be found in the humble, single-room apartment of a middle-aged aunty.

The aunty bar itself was nothing to raise a glass to. At a glance, it was a small, grimy room where thirsty men furtively guzzled rotgut and moonshine behind dirty curtains. But behind those curtains, too, were highly resourceful women who did whatever it took to provide for their families.

In India, prohibition began with the Independence Movement. Mahatma Gandhi considered liquor a “serious defect,” and believed drinking was an obstacle in gaining control over one’s self and one’s country. “Nothing but ruin stares a nation in the face that is a prey to the drink habit,” he once said. "History records that empires have been destroyed through that habit."

article-image

After India gained independence, the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949 was put into place, banning the sale and consumption of all liquor—from whisky to cough syrup. The following year, a “directive principle” written into India’s constitution declared nationwide prohibition, but left it up to each state to determine whether or not to implement the dry laws. The state of Bombay enacted the laws to the fullest extent. But, as is often the case with prohibition, even the law couldn’t separate citizens from their spirits.

To the south of Mumbai lies Goa, a state on India’s western coast that was colonized in the 16th century by the Portuguese, who brought with them cashew trees and Catholicism. After nearly three centuries of forcefully converting Hindus, Muslims, and Jews to Christianity, both cashew trees and Catholic customs took root. Goans began crafting kaju feni, a potent spirit made from distilling the red, bulbous fruit of the cashew tree. Many adopted Portuguese surnames, began eating pork and beef, and incorporated feni into their lives—often as a part of Catholic feasts, rituals, and celebrations. In the late 19th century, many Goans migrated to Bombay in search of employment, bringing with them feni and religious beliefs that embraced drinking.

Prohibition presented both an obstacle and an opportunity for those with a taste for liquor. At the end of the day, men of all classes and creeds wanted a drink. And so it was mostly middle-aged Goan Christian women, often widowed or with unemployed husbands, who met the demand. Relative to most Muslim and Hindu women, they held relaxed views on alcohol—and most importantly, they needed to feed their families.

In the early days of prohibition, the aunties typically sold feni or moonshine, which was often concocted from a somewhat random assortment of old, fermented fruits. According to Bombay-based journalist Sidharth Bhatia, the liquor could be made at home or “brought in large bottles, containers, and even rubber tubes from other distant distilleries in remote parts of town, slums, where police presence was minimal.”

article-image

Transporting the liquor required a bit creativity. To keep police officers at bay, individuals affected by Hansen’s Disease (what was then referred to as Leprosy) often transferred moonshine from the distilleries to the aunties’ homes. In other cases, rubber bicycle tires, tubes, or hot water bottles filled with moonshine might be stuffed under a woman’s garments, creating an unassuming bulge that could be mistaken for a baby.

The joints themselves, however, required no such disguise. Run out of the women’s homes, they were indistinguishable from surrounding apartments—unless you knew where to look. At first they tended to cluster in Goan and Catholic neighborhoods, such as Dhobi Talao and Bandra, but soon, they could be found across the city. The only surefire way to track one down was through word of mouth. Aside from being in the know, there were very few ways to identify a joint.

But, according to one former patron, there was one subtle yet reliable sign that an aunty bar was near: boiled eggs. A vendor selling boiled eggs, often alongside another roasting kaleji, or fried liver, served as a sort of directory to your local joint. When asked, these street vendors could direct patrons to the nearest aunty, perhaps in the hope that departing drinkers might swing by for a convenient nighttime snack on their way out.

According to Francis, visiting an aunty bar felt less like going to a bar and more like stopping by a neighbor’s house. “These aunties’ joints were really a part of their homes,” he says.

Patrons were expected to treat the bar like someone’s home, too. “Respect was paramount,” says Bhatia. “No drunken behaviour, no tomfoolery—drink quietly or get thrown out.”

A typical “bar” often consisted of a single room, where you could find a table, a few chairs, and perhaps even a bed, which might provide cozy overflow seating. “Their homes were no more than, say, 500 square feet,” says Francis, “and about half of that room would be reserved as a sitting place.” Whenever a customer walked in, the home became the aunty bar, and the aunty bar, for some, became a home—or at least a space with which customers became intimately familiar. Loyalties ran deep, as the aunty in charge would offer a full cup and, at least in legend, a pair of eager ears. “That was part of the mythology,” says Fernandes. “She would listen to your stories and get to know your sordid life.”

Aunty-bar hopping certainly wasn’t standard, and some men continued to frequent their local aunty even once legal bars and clubs opened up. And this cut both ways—aunties could be fiercely loyal to their patrons. According to Francis, the women sometimes bailed out jailed customers following a raid. “They didn’t want to stop them from coming to their places the following day.”

The late journalist and satirist Behram Contractor, under the pseudonym Busybee, has written in his column, Round and About, on the forced intimacy that arose from such close proximity between families and patrons. In one post, he describes in detail one of his favorite drinking spots: The second-floor apartment of an elderly woman and her unemployed husband.

“I suppose … prohibition was a great boon to them,” he writes. “Without illicit liquor to sell, they would have had no livelihood and would have died of starvation. At least that was the rationale of my drinking there.” When the daughter of the elderly couple passed away, Contractor dropped by to pay his respects. “She was lying in the bed, candles all round her. In the opposite corner of the room, customers were sitting and drinking.”

As more and more aunties transformed their living rooms into bars, patrons from all walks of life trickled into their local aunty’s bar. According to Bhatia, customers ranged from “middle class professionals” to “down and outers” to journalists—and lots of them. College students, too, snuck in to gulp down a half bottle of feni before a night out—some, admittedly, equally nervous to run into their fathers as to get caught in a raid.

All customers did have one thing in common, however: They were all men, some of them well-educated and from well-to-do families. Several enterprising aunties saw this as an opportunity to become both bartender and matchmaker at once. According to Francis, some of these pairings did, in fact, lead to marriages. “It became a meeting place,” he says. “But nothing untoward or sexual happened there.”

article-image

There likely wouldn’t have been time for it. With limited space and the ever-present risk of raids, most customers stayed at the joint for an hour or less. “It was not a relaxed watering hole,” says Bhatia. “People wanted to drink and get out.”

Raids were a threat to customers and aunties alike—but more often than not, policemen preferred the bars to stay open. According to several people living in Bombay at the time, there was a kind of informal agreement that allowed both to coexist. Each Monday, the police came around to demand their “hafta,” a weekly cut of the aunties’ earnings. This system typically worked for both parties, but when an argument arose, it wasn’t uncommon to see an aunty chase the officer straight out of her home.

The women who ran these bars were tough, because, as the family’s breadwinners, they had to be. They not only took on antagonistic police officers and kept customers under control, but also persisted despite public disdain. While most showed the aunties respect behind closed doors, the profession was widely frowned upon outside of the establishments.

Nevertheless, the women bold enough to sell the brew saw a payoff. At its peak, the aunty bar was a successful venture that, in the end, allowed for vast economic mobility among families that had started out relatively poor in Bombay. According to Francis, many of the aunties’ children were able to go to school and become doctors or lawyers. It was, perhaps, a risky business, but it was the aunties’ way of giving their children a better life.

Once people realized how lucrative the business was, it spread beyond Catholic aunties. Gangs and bootlegging businessmen entered the underground trade, building larger, more professional venues. Many believe that profits from these larger operations gave rise to the “underworld” of Bombay—often associated with gambling, sex work, and even the infamous mob boss Vardarajan Mudaliar.

In the mid 1960s, prohibition laws were relaxed, due to increasing difficulty in implementation, along with mounting pressure from the state’s sugarcane lobby, which saw potential profits in legalizing liquor. By 1972, prohibition had been abolished. In its place, a permit system was erected, requiring all drinkers—those who need liquor for the “preservation or maintenance of health”—to possess a license. Unbeknownst to many first-time visitors to Mumbai, the permit system still stands today. Though not commonly enforced, there have been several recent cases of officers raiding popular nightclubs and arresting unsuspecting imbibers.

Bootlegging, too, persists in Mumbai—bringing cheap, unregulated booze into the city for those who can’t afford licensed liquor. It’s not uncommon for a particularly bad batch, spiked with pesticides for potency, to kill dozens of people, disproportionately those who are impoverished.

But the aunty bar, a widespread relic of early prohibition-era Bombay, seems to have vanished as quickly as it arrived. The bustling nightlife of modern-day Mumbai bears no resemblance to the rushed visits to cramped apartments in the ‘50s and ‘60s. For better or for worse, the remaining residues of the neighborhood joint seem to exist mainly in the collective memories of former patrons and their relatives, some of whom still have a misty-eyed fondness for their local aunties' bars. Others, however, don’t seem to mind its disappearance.

“There’s nothing romantic about drinking rotgut in a smelly tenement,” says Fernandes, “though everyone would like to believe there was!”

Students Are Collecting Photos to Remember Brazil’s Destroyed National Museum

0
0

After a fire tore through the institution, visitors' images have become an informal archive of its collections.

article-image

After a fire destroyed Brazil’s Museu Nacional this weekend, the students at UNIRIO, the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, started sharing photos among themselves—images of their visits to the building and of the collection. Quickly, they decided to expand this informal collection to the public and sent out a request: Send us your photos of this place that we lost.

Already, they say, they have received thousands of images—photos, videos, selfies—of the museum’s lost treasures.

article-image

The collection at the Museu Nacional dates back 200 years; it’s been housed in this particular building since the 1890s. The palace was once home to the exiled royal family of Portugal and of Brazil’s leaders post-independence. Today, the museum is run by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and over the past few years, the museum administration has been plagued by budget problems. The building was in need of repairs—parts weren’t structurally sound enough for visitors to enter.

article-image

Inside the old palace, though, the museum held wonders from around the world, around 20 million items in total. The collection included the oldest human fossil found in Brazil, mummies from Brazil and Chile, an Egyptian coffin dating to the 11th century B.C., and the throne of the king of Dahomey, gifted to a Portuguese royal in the 19th century. The museum's natural history department possessed the largest lace bug collection in the world, along with an herbarium and an extensive arthropod collection, including specimens of local wildlife that aren’t held anywhere else.

article-image

The museum also had an extensive collection of art and culture drawn from the many indigenous peoples across Brazil, including costumes, ornaments, and unique objects. The museum’s audio collection had recordings of indigenous Brazilian languages that have since died out.

article-image

Most of this collection was lost in the fire. One of the only large objects to survive was the five-ton Bendegó meteorite, the largest found in Brazil. There are some reports among scientists on Twitter that parts of the natural history collection survived, as well.

The UNIRIO students collecting photos specialize in museum studies, and they’re hoping that what they collect can become a virtual museum or a memory space of some sort. The thousands upon thousands of photos that people have taken at the museum now count as some of the most extensive documentation of the collection: They preserve, at least in some form, what remains of the history the museum was meant to protect. Searching the museum's geotag on Twitter gives some sense of what's been lost, and anyone with photos to contribute to the students' collection can email them to: thg.museo@gmail.com.

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

For Sale: Writing Advice From Mark Twain

0
0

The famed author didn't think much of young writers (unless they experienced great personal tragedy).

article-image

Mark Twain is famous, in part, for writing about adventurous boys and young men—but he certainly didn’t think much of their abilities as writers themselves. At least that's what he expressed in an 1881 letter to a young writer seeking thoughts on a manuscript. The 21-year-old Bruce Weston Munro, from Newcastle, Ontario, must have been elated to receive a reply from the eminent writer, who by that time had penned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Innocents Abroad. (Huck Finn was a few years away.) The letter itself, however, must have stung.

“You make a conclusive argument against your book first,” Twain writes, in just the second sentence, “when you mention your age ...” He continues for a generous five pages, but the core of his critique is built around this point. “I do not see how any but a colossal genius can write a readable prose book before he is 30 years old," as “Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted … ”

Helpful or not, the letter is heading to auction later this month at Bonhams, part of an auction titled, “Exploration and Travel, Featuring Americana.” Darren Sutherland, a specialist in books and manuscripts at Bonhams, says he is unaware of another letter, from one writer to another, that offers such sustained advice on writing. “It’s so Mark Twain,” he says. “It’s a little bit caustic, a little bit sentimental, a little bit sweet.”

article-image

Twain did offer an exception to the young-writers-can’t-be-great-writers rule: “those Bronte sisters.” They are, in his estimation, among those “gigantic geniuses” who produced “readable prose” before middle age—and only then because their early lives were consumed with tragedy.

Striking as Twain’s letter to Munro is, even $50,000 would not set the record for the sale of one of his letters. An 1887 missive to the dean of Yale Law School—offering to help an African-American student pay for his education—sold for $59,700 in 2002.

Exploring a 'Treasure Trove' of Medieval Egyptian Recipes

0
0

A newly translated cookbook provides a tantalizing glimpse of Cairo's past.

article-image

The markets found in medieval Egypt were spectacles to behold—or rather, to taste. From street vendors selling fried-pigeon snacks to streets lined with jars of foamy beer, descriptions of streets like Bayn al-Qaṣrayn can make one salivate centuries later. Now, a newly translated cookbook offers one of the only comprehensive looks at this culinary world of 14th-century Egypt.

Kanz al-Fawa’id Fi Tanwi’ al-Mawa’id, or Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table, features 830 recipes for medieval Egyptian dishes, desserts, digestives, and even scented hand perfumes (to apply after the meal). From traditional sweet chicken dishes to desserts resembling threads of a silkworm cocoon, these recipes bring to life an important yet oft-forgotten moment in Cairene culinary history: In the 1300s, the city was a diverse, thriving metropolis known as the “mother of all nations.”

Nawal Nasrallah, who translated the Kanz into English, is an independent scholar and food writer. But her translation may also qualify her as a detective. While a shorter iteration of the cookbook had been translated into English in 1993, there were omissions, Nasrallah noticed, and recipes that simply didn’t make sense. Often, she notes, two recipes were unknowingly combined into one, or a lack of linguistic knowledge led to a strange translation. “I’m familiar with the Arabic language—it’s my language,” she says, “so I could see things the others couldn’t see.” Nasrallah’s years of parsing through the medieval manuscripts has finally brought forth a fuller, more fleshed out Kanz—complete with an extensive introduction, glossary, and adapted recipes for the modern reader curious to recreate medieval Cairene cuisine.

Though the author of the Kanz is anonymous, Nasrallah was able to determine that the author likely drew from several specialized pamphlets for various recipes—one for fish, another for pickles, even some medical manuals from physicians—to compile the cookbook. Thanks to this anonymous author, these recipes that otherwise would have vanished have been preserved in a single source.

Extensive as it is, the Kanz offers a colorful culinary lens through which readers can glimpse into the markets, plates, and people living in a bustling, 14th-century Cairo. For instance, Nasrallah notes the abundance of fish dishes. “There are recipes for fresh (ṭarī) fish, salt-cured (māliḥ) small fish … and condiments of small crushed fishes (ṣaḥna).” Fish were popular and widely accessible, she writes, since during the Nile’s flooding season, even children could catch them. They were often consumed alongside sour ingredients and spices to aid their digestion.

article-image

Another beloved meat was pigeon—and young, ripe, plump ones at that. Known as zaghālīl, these pigeons differed from house pigeons, as they were raised in cotes located outside of the city. They could be enjoyed fried, stewed, or smothered in various sauces, or even in omelets.

Particularly intriguing, Nasrallah says, is a recipe that uses lemon juice to flavor sugar. The result is the traveler’s lemonade. By simply adding a bit of cold water, says Nasrallah, those on the move could create “something like today’s Kool-Aid.” The author of the Kanz includes several such travel provisions, which allowed traveling Egyptians to preserve food. For instance, the Kanz includes a recipe for dried mustard. “It’s prepared in a clump,” she says, “like a cookie shape, so when they’re on the road and have to grill meat, they can simply add water to create the sauce.”

Those with a sweet tooth could draw on an extensive collection of desserts and sweets. The cookbook includes a delightful array of somewhat playful recipes, ranging from “sandwich cookies … named chanteuses’ cheeks,” to “dainty cookies shaped like breasts … called virgins’ breasts.”

Stretching beyond food, the Kanz includes medicinal foods (meant to aid conditions such as mild lethargy or indigestion), recipes for distilled perfume waters, and even a bit of magic. “Surprise your master,” one recipe reads, according to Nasrallah, “with a plate of lusciously ripe fruits with verses inscribed in green and you will be in his good graces.”

One of the most notable aspects of the Kanz is its flexibility. Though likely intended for middle and upper class diners—specifically those who could afford a kitchen or even chefs of their own—it offers cheaper versions of recipes for Cairenes on a tighter budget. That flexibility extended, too, to an awareness of the varying tastes of Cairo’s unusually cosmopolitan population. One recipe for a table sauce, Nasrallah writes, noted to “add garlic if making it for a Turk; and not to add it if it is for a local person (baladī).”

In addition to translating the Kanz, Nasrallah has adapted some of the recipes for today's cooks. She’s put together 22 modern versions, some of which appear on her blog, that swap a mortar and pestle for a food processor. And perhaps, you might try whipping up a syrupy digestive to consume after your meal, or an aromatic hand perfume so as not to continue smelling like what you’ve eaten, because, as Nasrallah notes, the Kanz isn’t simply about eating. “It’s the whole experience,” she says. “It doesn’t only cater to the stomach but also the whole well-being of the body.”

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live


Latest Images