There are more than 100 enormous topiary sculptures in the Municipal Cemetery in Tulcán, Ecuador, five miles from the border with Colombia. (All photos: Eric Mohl)

Across the Americas, border towns can be sketchy, Wild West-like places with an aura of desolation. Usually, the only reason to stop is to endure the draconian and dismal passport stamping procedures required to travel from one country to another. However, the border between Ipiales, Colombia and Tulcán, Ecuador features the most improbable church in Colombia and the most high maintenance cemetery in Ecuador. 

On the Colombian side, less than ten miles from the border with Ecuador, the Las Lajas Sanctuary dominates a narrow, deep gorge with its stony bulk. The Gothic revival style church, built between 1916 and 1949, rises 330 feet from the bottom of the canyon. The Guáitara River rages below the structure, which is accessed via a 160-foot-long stone foot bridge. 

The incredibly ornate Roman Catholic cathedral, called the Sanctuary Las Lajas after the Spanish word for the shale-like stone in the area, has humble roots. In 1754, a local indigenous woman named Maria Mueces and her deaf-mute daughter, Rosa, were walking through the gorge when Rosa meandered into a small cave and suddenly spoke, saying she’d seen a woman carrying a baby. This was eventually interpreted as a sighting of the Virgin Mary and the deaf-mute woman’s sudden ability to speak was considered a miracle. The devout also believe that Rosa had many interactions with the Virgin Mary, and was even brought back to life by her.

Las Lajas Sanctuary, built into a gorge near the border between Colombia and Ecuador, is said to be the site of a Virgin Mary miracle.

People began making pilgrimages to the cave, which now featured an image of the Virgin Mary that “miraculously” appeared on one wall, to ask the Virgin for their own miracles. By 1802 a simple shrine had been built over the site, and this was expanded and improved year after year until it finally reached its current grandeur, from simple stone slab to stone masterpiece. 

A museum inside the sanctuary has exhibits which recount the story of the miracle and photos that show the evolution of the cathedral. The original laja from the cave,bearing the image of the Virgin Mary, is now part of the altar. The grounds around the sanctuary include paths through the gorge, a few basic eateries and a waterfall. Visitors picnic and take pictures in an atmosphere that is part church and part park.

Thousands of pilgrims come to the Sanctuary Las Lajas every September to mark the date of Rosa’s recovery, which is said to have taken place on September 16. Many of them sleep at the Casa Pastoral, which is run by nuns living on the rim of the canyon. At around $9 for a double room, it’s a basic guest house with hard, lumpy beds and cold water bathrooms, but magnificent views of the striking Gothic cathedral inspired by a religious apparition from 261 years ago.

Four miles from the border with Colombia and 12 miles from the church, the town of Tulcán, Ecuador, holds two distinctions: it’s the highest city in Ecuador at 9,680 feet above sea level, and it’s home to one of only a handful of topiary cemeteries in the world. For the latter, you can thank local gardener Josè Maria Azael Franco.

   A team of gardeners, including sons of the creator of the topiary garden in the Municipal Cemetery in Tulcán, work full time to maintain this unique cemetery.

In the 1930s, Mr. Franco began sculpting the cypress bushes that grew in the cemetery where he worked, shaping the plants, which can live for 500 years and grow more than 100 feet tall, while wearing slacks and a jacket. He never stopped, and eventually every cypress had been transformed until the cemetery was, in Mr. Franco’s own words, “so beautiful it invites one to die.” The Municipal Cemetery of Tulcán now has more than 100 enormous, intricate creations covering the three-acre site. 

You might expect somber religious themes in a cemetery topiary garden, but from day one the designs here were meant to celebrate Ecuadorian flora, fauna and indigenous cultures, including animals from the Galapagos Islands. Mr. Franco also found inspiration in Roman, Incan, Aztec and Egyptian themes as well. Long walkway tunnels connect different areas of the cemetery, creating tall chambers that feel private and unexpected. Dr. Edgar Anderson, a past director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, called the topiary here “the most elaborate in the world,”and Mr. Franco’s vision and hard work give the cemetery a lush, uplifting feel. Locals visiting long-lost loved ones in the cemetery are happy to point visiting tourists to the best vantage points for photos of Mr. Franco’s handiwork.

Mr. Franco passed away in 1985, two years before Ecuador’s Ministry of Tourism named his creation a “natural tourism site of interest.” Of course, Mr. Franco is buried in the cemetery he helped create, and a team of full-time gardeners, including some of his sons, continues to maintain and expand the topiary. 

For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands. When a freakishly large catfish appears on camera, she calmly explains that it’s probably not a mutant—“They are just that way because nobody catches them,” she says in a video, watching a six-foot-long catfish, eerily like a shark, swim around a murky pool of water.

In a few non-Chernobyl-related videos, she pours liquid mercury over her bare hands, comparing the feat to smoking a single cigarette: not dangerous in limited doses, she claims. Her most popular videos are driven by a need to explain why things commonly seen as dangerous are in fact not, hence her typical lack of protective gear. It’s so odd to see her protecting herself, in fact, that she will begin some videos with an explanation about why she felt the need to don something as basic as a pair of gloves.

What is her secret? “Push away your fears and everything you've heard, and embrace the Zone,” she writes Atlas Obscura in an email.

While her style runs counter to many YouTube hosts (her flat affect can sometimes verge on robotic), Bionerd23 has become mildly famous in the various corners of the internet dedicated to radioactive spelunking. Since the spring of 2012, she has posted over 60 videos on YouTube documenting her trips in and around the plant, measuring radioactivity levels of various debris, as well as frequently experimenting on herself and measuring her own radioactivity. None have gone truly viral but they have not been ignored either: her more audacious Chernobyl stunts net somewhere north of 100,000 views, some twice that.

Bionerd23 (as she wants to be known) might be German, or, at least, has spent a great of time in Berlin. She is a student, probably, though of what and where, I don’t know. Opening queries (who are you, where are you from, how did you get into this) went nowhere.  “I don’t talk about that, because my person is entirely unimportant,” she wrote,  “Nobody should adore a scientist, one should adore his or her work. The person is of no importance.” She posts frequently on a forum called Fusor, which has a section next to each post for basic information, including “real name.” She leaves this blank.

But her face and voice are well-known to the radioactive fan community. She is referenced in scattered blog posts around the internet, and also actively participates in the comments section underneath her videos, which has the effect of making them remarkably civil, for YouTube. Comments range from unexpectedly knowledgeable suggestions about how to chemically isolate graphite using nitric acid to fanfare like “You already have superpowers - you are an awesome, badass girl!!”

Chernobyl, at this point, is a kind of tourist destination (buses run through) but Bionerd23 pushes farther than most. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is huge, around 1,000 square miles emanating out from the site of the 1986 disaster. It is perfectly legal to enter the Zone, even to go very close to the reactor, though official visits are heavily regulated through government tour guides. Trespassing and poaching of animals, which include deer, bears, foxes, and various birds, are both illegal and common. Bionerd23 does not mention her legal status in any of her videos, but research in the Zone is popular and ongoing. “At first, it was just about the radiation, the contamination, measuring what is going on,” she wrote. “By now, it's a love for the place.”

Her speciality is unearthing bits and pieces of Chernobyl that would normally go unseen. A video titled“chernobyl 2013: radioactive ant bites & 115 mSv/h of pure gamma radiation” begins with this quote: “Oh, shit, yeah. This is hot.” She finds a fragment of uranium sitting in the grass a few kilometers from the reactor, “guarded by radioactive ants.” Dressed in military hues and armed with an array of blocky handheld sensors, she squats down, where ants promptly crawl into her (rarely wielded) gloves and bite her. The fragment of uranium immediately maxes out all of her sensors; she is not scared, but excited. She actually says, “Yay!”

But her fears are not about radiation poisoning, nor developing cancer, but more about the simple structural damage in the Zone. “Some of the old buildings are rather unsafe to enter, as they are starting to fall apart,” she wrote, and also mentioned that she is quite scared of rabid animals. One popular video finds her fleeing a red fox that, in her mind, showed far too much comfort around humans. She ends up locking herself in a car and swearing.

Bionerd23’s risky ways have not gone unnoticed by YouTube commenters, who often ask why she risks her life to go tromping through a crumbling basement in the Zone. Frequently, she replies with a Marie Curie quote: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”

Her reasons for continuing to document Chernobyl are more personal, though. “If you've been there and experienced the zone as it truly is—a time capsule—you will understand,” she wrote. “Time stopped the moment the reactor blew, and I don’t just mean the readings on the clocks... And if you embrace it, you can understand the Zone's true meaning.”

A candy elephant at Amezaiku Yoshihara. (Photo: wombatarama/Flick.)

At a tiny shop in the old downtown of Tokyo, you can see an art form that almost died out—and eat it, too. The craftspeople at Amezaiku Yoshihara make intricate candy creatures by hand as you watch, forming sugary starch into delicate legs, wings, and ears in just the couple of minutes before the candy hardens. 

Amezaiku was once a common street entertainment for children, but the traditional carts were outlawed in the late 20th century and until recently it could only be seen at festivals and special events. Amezaiki Yoshihara, which opened in 2008, was the first permanent shop devoted to this craft. Its owner apprenticed with a master for two years and worked by himself for four years before going into business. You can buy ready-made items, but for the full experience, customers pick a creature from their catalog and have it made on the spot.

The artisan sculpts the sugary concoction. (Photo: wombatarama/Flickr)

To start, the artisan grabs a glob of the hot white starch from the pot, adds a little coloring, kneads and stretches it like taffy, and puts it on a stick. Then, using just his fingers and a small pair of scissors, he quickly forms the details. The possibilities range from pretty birds to cute dogs to challenging forms like the rhinoceros beetle, an insect traditionally kept as a pet in Japan.

The completed creature is left to cool completely and then packaged safely for carrying, since surely nobody could have the heart to eat it on the spot.

More eye/actual candy. (Photo: wombatarama/Flickr)

Legend has it that amezaiku goes back to the 8th century and began as a temple offering, while other stories tell of ninjas disguising themselves as candy craftsman to steal methods and develop ever more intricate techniques.

Candy making in the Muromachi Period. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

Through much of history the candy was hollow, blown by mouth like glass, until health regulations outlawed that method in the 1970s for hygienic reasons. Amezaiku Yoshihara has brought the craft into the 21st century in ways the ninjas couldn't dream of, with a Facebook page, an online shop, and their own mascot: a white rabbit, offered in seasonal variations, dressed for holidays like Halloween or Christmas. And instead of just watching,  now everyone gets to take photos and video of the process.

Photo: National Museum of Denmark/Roberto Fortuna

The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen has a formidable collection of animal-skin garments once worn by the indigenous people of Greenland, North America, North Scandinavia, and Siberia.

Among the usual furry boots, mittens, capes, and leggings made for these perilously cold climates is a garment worthy of particularly close inspection: Item Ld.132.4, a 19th-century beaded seal-fur g-string.

The indigenous people of East Greenland made this sort of underwear, known as naatsit, by sewing strips of seal pelt together using a thread of reindeer or whale sinew. The naatsit above, decorated with glass beads tied onto seal-skin fringe, was made for women and worn under seal-skin trousers. Explorer Captain C. Ryder acquired the item in the southeast Greenland settlement of Ammassalik during an expedition in 1892.

According to Peter Toft, the National Museum of Denmark's Greenlandic fur clothing expert, this beaded, furry thong was intended to be displayed not just during intimate moments, but in polite company. Inside the warm homes of the Greenlandic Inuit, a naatsit "was the only thing worn even when having guests or visiting the houses of other families," says Toft. "This shocked the Danish missionaries of the 18th and 19th century, who tried to convince the Inuit to wear European linen (longer) underwear indoors. This attempt was not very successful."

As to why the Greenlandic Inuit made their thong undergarments out of seal skin rather than reindeer, fox, bear, or dog, Toft says that in addition to their durability, seal pelts were best because they provided less insulation than caribou fur. "Sweat building up inside your garment is just as dangerous as being underdressed for the cold," he advises, "as your perspiration will eventually freeze." Seal skin thongs, therefore, were less likely to result in frozen sweat being trapped between the buttocks.

For a closer look at this naatsit and more Greenlandic seal fur underwear from the 19th century, either visit the National Museum of Denmark or delve into the museum's digitized skin costumes collection online. Other highlights of the archive include Siberian squirrel-fur boas, a diaper made of reindeer skin, and a sealskin jumpsuit waterproofed with whale blubber.

Photo: National Museum of Denmark/Roberto Fortuna

Oh hello. Thanks for the house. (Photo: ITU Pictures on Flickr)

Gotham City isn't the only place with a batcave. All over the world, bats have taken advantage of the cozy nooks and crannies created by us gullible humans. From abandoned tunnels to freeway underpasses, bats have set up shop in the dark corners of the modern world like it's no big deal. Whether it's due to the adaptability of winged rodents, or our continued creation of shadowy space, we keep creating bat caves in our own backyards. Here is a look at six unnatural spots where bats have taken roost.

1. CONGRESS AVENUE BRIDGE
Austin, Texas

People actually come to this bridge to get swarmed by bats. (Photo: Eric on Flickr)

Austin is home to a number of hip sites, but maybe the coolest is the largest colony of urban bats in America. These street-wise Mexican free-tails have hung their hats (and themselves) beneath the Congress Bridge. On dry summer nights, the one and a half million bats under the bridge like little, flying trolls come bursting out in swarming black masses, often to the delight of onlookers standing above. Seeing bats display all of their urban resourcefulness sure beats waiting in ATM lines at SXSW.   

Everything is bigger in Texas. Even the bat colonies. (Photo: Dan Pancamo on Wikipedia)

2. STUMPHOUSE TUNNEL
Walhalla, South Carolina

  Walk towards the light. That's where bats aren't. (Photo: MarkScottAustinTX on Flickr)

The first of a few such tunnels on this list, the Stumphouse Tunnel in Walhalla was created as the beginning of a railway tunnel, but after the project was abandoned, an empty cave tunnel was all that was left, just filling up with bats. Work on the Stumphouse Tunnel first started in the 1800s, the idea being that a train tunnel could be simply dug through a mountain, not around it. The theory was sound, but the funding was not, and when the money dried up, the tunnel was abandoned. It was later used to age cheese thanks to the cool, constant temperatures inside the cave. This pleasant environment also attracted the colony of bats that live there now.

Before entering any great bat-cave, one must pass through a great bat-hole. (Photo: The_Gut on Flickr)

3. THE BURLINGTON HOTEL
Port Costa, California

Let's be honest, this looks like the type of place that would have bats. (Photo: Shannon OHaire on Atlas Obscura)

The oldest operating hotel in California has seen a countless number of guests stay the night behind its walls, but the only permanent residents in the building today are bats. Opened in 1883, the hotel quickly became the favored boarding house for travelers coming off the Trans-Continental train, and getting violently sauced in the saloon across the street. Remarkably, the little hotel managed to stay afloat for more than a century, despite its continued reputation for debauchery. Recently the owners are making efforts to clean up the space, and refurbish the building but so far, the bats living in the ceilings and walls remain.  

That couple is in for a bat-filled evening. (Photo: Shannon OHaire on Atlas Obscura)

4. OLD TUNNEL BAT COLONY
Fredricksburg, Texas

Definitely not an old rail tunnel full of screeching bats. No way. (Photo: Larry D. Moore on Wikipedia)

Closed since 1941, the perfectly named Old Tunnel is a railroad tunnel that actually saw some use before being made obsolete with the rise of the automobile. Well, obsolete to humans at least. Once it was abandoned, the empty expanse became home to millions of Mexican free-tailed bats. During the summer months, the bats come surging from the tunnel mouth in a writhing black cloud. Visitors can watch the emergence from a couple of spots, including one behind glass for the faint of heart.   

5. DULARCHA RAIL TUNNEL
Landsborough, Australia

This bold cameraman doesn't seem to known this is bat turf. (Photo: darkday on Flickr)

This abandoned Australian tunnel was created for a sight-seeing train that ran through the lush wilderness of Dularcha National Park, but when the line was moved, the long cement passage was left to hikers, explorers, and of course, bats. Unlike some of the craggier tunnels on this list, the Dularcha passage is a clean cement arch with little place for flying rodents to find purchase. Nonetheless a small colony of beasts have managed to find some small cracks and crevices, where they have been able to make a home. It is a micro-colony, but the airborne vermin maintain their foothold anyway.    

Do bats see in black and white? Trick question!, They're nearly blind! (Photo: Nate3856 on Atlas Obscura)

6. THE OSTWALL FORTIFICATION
Międzyrzecz, Poland

My, what a delightful Nazi tunne-OHGODBAT! (Photo: Leszek Kozlowski on Flickr)

The Nazi defensive complex known as the Ostwall Fortification has been abandoned since the war. Well, other than the 37,000 bats living in the old tunnels. The sprawling underground military complex was built to defend against Russian attacks, and probably would have been able to had the base not been staffed with only 1,000 troops. The Nazis were quickly routed, leaving behind 25 miles of underground passageways and chambers. Today the vast warren is home to the largest man-made bat reserve in the world. Luckily the base is better at protecting bats than it was at protecting Nazis.   

One tunnel leads to bats, while the other leads to bats. (Photo: Michael on Flickr)

 
Early tavern signs at the Connecticut Historical Society. (All photos: Luke Spencer)

The early American colonists were ferocious drinkers. It’s thought that the average person back then inhaled around six gallons of booze a year, compared today’s average of two. Hot ale flips, warming wassails and planter’s punches were consumed in such alarming quantities that Benjamin Franklin published over 200 synonyms for being tipsy in the Pennsylvania Gazette on January 6th, 1737. “Gather'd wholly from the modern Tavern-Conversation of Tiplers," he wrote, "I do not doubt but that there are many more in use.” 

Such was the standing of the tavern in the fledgling society, that colonial law actually required every town to have one. In low-ceilinged rooms, the early colonials would gather and, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, start the evening “loose in the hilts,” gradually becoming “nimptopsical,” finishing the night “wamble Crop’d,” before stumbling home “right before the Wind with all his Studding Sails out.”

The signage, though, was a rather difficult design challenge. While today restaurants and bars are often easily identifiable by the form and shape of their buildings, historic watering holes were virtually indistinguishable from the private residences on either side of them: They were literally public houses. The painted and carved saloon signs hanging outside would signpost to visitors that food, drinks and lodging were to be had inside. 

Being made of wood, many of the old tavern signs have been lost to time. Between 1750 and 1850, there were approximately 50,000 of these signs mounted up and down the Eastern seaboard. Only a fraction of them still exist. The largest collection of colonial-era bar and inn signage in the country, at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, counts 60 specimens. 

In addition to demanding each town should have a tavern, colonial law also stipulated that a sign should be hanging outside of it. In Connecticut, the law stated “some suitable Signe set up in the view of all Passengers for the direction of Strangers where to go, where they may have entertainment.” Over in Massachusetts, every tavern, “shall have some inoffensive sign, obvious, for the direction of strangers posted within three months of its licensing.”

While their English counterparts enjoyed fanciful names, such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (Fleet Street, London, opened 1538), or the Hung, Drawn & Quartered (situated near London’s site of execution, Tower Hill),or were named in honor of a monarch or local nobleman, American alehouse signs were much simpler in style. The earliest signs favored bold visuals with little text, indicative of a period when not everyone could read. Trees and horses were popular motifs. For coastal towns, ships, anchors and whales were common. 

The earliest example, from 1748, was painted on a plain piece of wood advertising “Entertainment for Man and Hors.” The next stage of tavern signs incorporated the name of the proprietor offered hospitality inside, such “Entertainment by R.Angell - 1808.” This addition of the innkeeper’s name actually led to the current scarcity of early signs: When the taverns changed hands, the old sign was either painted over or replaced. 

As travel within the newly consolidated United States increased in the early 19th century, the local drinking dens morphed into places to stay, too. Inns such as the one Jared Carpenter opened in Killingworth, Connecticut in 1823 were advertised as “Stranger’s Resorts,” with a sign showing a military officer sharing his table with a well-dressed businessman, a carafe of red wine, and a roasted chicken.

While the majority of tavern signs have been lost to time, the Connecticut Historical Society’s remarkable collection evokes the earliest days of America’s boozing habit, where establishments such as William Gordon’s in New London, Connecticut generously invited “gentlemen” to “sit down at your ease"—"Pay what you call for & drink what you please.” 

Marianne North painting a Tamil boy in Ceylon, 1877. (Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron)

This is the first part of a five-part series about early female explorers. 

Born into wealth in 1830 as the eldest daughter of an English member of parliament, like many upper class women of the time, Marianne North devoted herself to painting flowers. Unlike other Victorian women, though, North could not be satiated by roses. At age 40, she set off alone to travel the world, braving rough ship and living conditions to document over 900 plant species in just 14 years. She has four plant species named after her.

It helped, of course, that she was both rich and single. Financially independent following the death of her father,  North used her spinster status and the freedom it allowed her to her advantage when she embarked on the first of many far-flung trips to paint the world’s flowers. “Marriage? A terrible experiment,” she once wrote.

North's great journey started in 1871 with a trip to Canada, the US, and Jamaica. She then moved on to Brazil where she bushwhacked through the Amazon for eight months to paint its as yet undiscovered flora. Over the next 13 years of travel—an odyssey that would take her around the world twice over—North would discover numerous plants.

"Honeyflowers and Honeysuckers" (1882), South Africa (via WikiPaintings)

But unlike most male naturalists of the time, she didn’t stuff rare flowers in her suitcase to show off back home. She simply painted what she saw with a scientific accuracy that would make her paintings vital botanical records. And by eschewing ‘ladylike’ watercolors for oil paints — all the better for capturing the rich colors of the tropics with — and painting flora in their immediate environment rather than as individual plants against a white background, North’s style was unique.

Marianne North knew how to live: Wherever she was in the world, her days would begin at dawn when she would take her tea outside to watch the world awaken. She would then paint frantically outdoors till noon, consumed in what to her was “a vice like dram-drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one.”

Rainy afternoons were spent painting indoors, while evenings were given over to exploring outdoors and returning home well after dark. Her life, as she described it, was one of “wander and wonder and paint!”

North may have been privileged — her family name granted her letters of introduction to ambassadors, viceroys, and rajahs all over the world; she even traveled to Australia on the personal recommendation of Charles Darwin — but by traveling mostly alone (she found company tiresome) and battling her way through hostile terrain, often on rickety transport, there’s no doubt that Marianne was an adventurer.

 
Marianne North (courtesy A McRobb/RBG Kew)

Despite her connections, North preferred a simple life: Rather than travel with trunks full of clothes to serve her well at colonial soirees, North’s entire wardrobe could be contained in one small suitcase. In fact, the thought of having to appear at formal dinners in sticky evening dress was akin to torture for her, and she wrote to her sister from Jamaica: “These unthinking croqueting-badminton young ladies always aggravated me and I could hardly be civil to them.”

In 1882, a gallery of North’s work opened at England's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Funded by North at a time when photos were still in black and white, North’s paintings provided the scientists at Kew and the general public an intriguing glimpse of the world beyond Europe.

With her health failing, no doubt as a result of the harsh conditions she endured during her travels,  North died at home in Gloucestershire in 1890. She was 59.

Over 130 years later, North’s 832 paintings are still on show in the same tightly packed formation—like a giant postage stamp album—as when the gallery first opened. The only permanent space dedicated to a single female artist's works in Britain, the Marianne North Gallery is also one of the most important collections of botanical art in the world.

The Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens. (Photograph via Wikipedia Commons)

 
Pitcher plants of Borneo (1876) (via Wikimedia)

 Holly at the Central Park Shakespeare Garden. (Photo: James Adamson on Flickr)

Edmond Bronk Southwick had been the official entomologist of Central Park for almost 30 years in 1913. That was the year he was given an unusually literary task: to create America's first Shakespeare garden.

The big idea, courtesy a former park commissioner, was to assemble plants that the Bard had mentioned in his works and arrange them in a two-acre plot. This would give young readers a window into the horticultural predilections of the world's favorite playwright, from the cockles he mentioned in Coriolanus to the cuckoo-flowers of King Lear. (For a more detailed run-down of the plants in Shakespeare's plays, delve into the Reverend Henry Ellacombe's 1884 book The Plant-Lore & Garden-Craft Of Shakespeare.)

Southwick, an avid reader of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, took to the job with gusto. When the garden opened to the public, it was an instant hit. More than that, its highbrow nature encouraged even the most rambunctious ruffians to be on their best behavior. A New York Times article published on April 2, 1916 detailed this:

“The fence around the garden is low and can be stepped over in any part, but Dr. Southwick says that no one has ever intruded, and that there has never been any demonstration there of the spirit of destruction which so often reveals itself in the New York urchin.”

So inspiring was the Shakespeare garden that New York Police Captain Edward J. Bourke penned a poem in its honor in 1916. Printed in the Times on October 15, 1916, it tells of an "evanescent, dew-flushed scene" where "fairies lent their magic toil."

The gruff cop with the heart of a poet was far from the only one stirred by the beauty of the garden. Central Park's Shakespeare Garden became the model for many more made in the playwright's honor. The tercentenary—300-year anniversary—of Shakespeare's death in 1916 provided the perfect opportunity for gardening groups across the US and beyond to establish their own pseudo-Elizabethan plots.

In 1916, Vassar College's Shakespeare garden in upstate New York, Northwestern University's Shakespeare garden in Evanston, Illinois, and the Shakespeare garden of Cleveland, Ohio all popped up. After the excitement of the tercentenary had abated, Shakespeare gardens experienced another boom during the mid- to late 1920s. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden established its bard garden in 1925, while San Francisco's Golden Gate Park built one in 1928. An enterprising group of Shakespeare-loving gardeners in Plainfield, New Jersey created their own version in 1927. 

All of these gardens, and many others devoted to Shakespearean flowers, herbs, shrubs, and trees, still exist today. Though they differ in layout and composition, they are united by some common features: a bust of Shakespeare often makes an appearance, as does a sundial, the ubiquitous time-teller of the Elizabethan era. But the most important components of a Shakespeare garden are the plaques or laminated signs quoting the plays from which the plant references hail. To walk among the flowers reading rhyming couplets from the trees is an enchanting experience for any Shakespeare aficionado.

The Shakespeare Garden at Central Park in New York. (Photo: Ingfbruno on Wikipedia) 

 
The Shakespeare Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. (Photo: Courtesy of Brooklyn Botanic Garden)

The Shakespeare Garden in Evanston, Illinois. (Photo: Thshriver on Wikipedia)

An overgrown Shakespeare Garden at Lightwoods Park in Birmingham, England. (Photo: Elliott Brown on Flickr)


A tree at the Stanley Park Shakespeare Garden in Vancouver, Canada. (Photo: Wendy Cutler on Flickr)

The Shakespeare Garden at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. (Photo: Poughkeepsieman on Flickr)

Can a computer look... sad? (Photo: Marcin Wichary on Flickr)

It shouldn't be too much longer until computers the world, so its important to understand the roots of where our future overlords. Computing already has a rich history of innovation and evolution, crammed into a relatively short span of time. But there are some places that made it their business to remember the massive mainframes and hilariously obsolete technologies of the recent (and not-so-recent) past. Check out these computer museums that are kind of like genealogical libraries for your iPhone.

1. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF COMPUTING
Bletchley, England 

"Cold Cathode" would make a great band name. (Photo: Marcin Wichary on Flickr)

During World War II, England's Bletchley Park was home to the codebreakers working hard over innovative number crunching machines, trying to bust Hitler's secret cyphers. Today, one of the buildings on the historic grounds is carrying on the legacy of pioneering computers in the National Museum of Computing. The collection celebrates the pieces of bygone technology that would seem to be useless in the face of progress, even working to bring some of them back to working order. Some of the more incredible machines on display include the oldest working digital computer, known as the Dekatron, and the giant Colossus, a room-sized codebusting juggernaut.    

These guys are so old they are almost stylish again. (Photo: Timitrius on Flickr)

2. COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM
Mountain View, California

While this was clearly not a home computer, it would cool if it was. (Photo: Antti T. Nissinen on Flickr)

As the largest museum in the world devoted to the history of computing, this sprawling tour through the computers of the past is packed to the gills with some of the greats. The collection a series of Cray supercomputers found nowhere else on the planet, recreations of the original server stack that Google used as they grew, and a fully operational replica of a Difference Engine that Charles Babbage was never even able to build in his lifetime. Recently the museum has also begun collecting and preserving aging software and code languages before they are lost to time.       

We have one of these in the Atlas offices, and it still runs the paint program in the picture. We pretend it's the dog's desk. (Photo: Simon Davison on Flickr)

3. CHIPPEWA FALLS MUSEUM OF INDUSTRY AND TECHNOLOGY
Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin 

 
That blue pillar there is what it took to power the calculations of this monitor. (Photo: Property of the Chippewa Valley Museum of Industry and Technology)

While this museum is a bit smaller than most on this list, it still holds a whole lot of computing power. The Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology is not entirely devoted to computers, with other mashed-up sections covering topics like a beer brewing company and a cookery company, but their section on Cray, Inc. is worth the visit. Seymour Cray was born in Chippewa Falls and they have not forgotten. The collection includes a number of examples of his company's supercomputers as well as the desk at which Cray would dream up the powerful machines using little more than a pencil and paper. 

 This Cray supercomputer should have been named the Cray groovycomputer. (Photo: Jitze Couperus on Wikpedia)

4. AMERICAN COMPUTER MUSEUM
Bozeman, Montana

Has anyone seen my old computers? (Photo: Nick Taylor on Flickr)

The other American museum devoted solely to the origins of the information age is not as grandiose as the one in Silicon Valley, but its devotion to old tech is no less fervent. Owned and operated by a Montana husband-wife team, the collection was started in 1990 with a simple mechanical calculator. The collection has boomed since its founding however and now contains such important relics as an Apollo rocket guidance system, and an Apple I computer signed by Steve Wozniak himself. 

The design of the new PDP-8 droid in Star Wars was met with criticism for being... "boxy." (Photo: Nick Taylor on Flickr)

5. MARK I
Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Its like an automat, for numbers. (Photo: Sara D. on Flickr)

While this historic computer is not a collection in and of itself, it does take up a giant section of Harvard's Science Center. This massive World War II calculator hearkens back to the days when "computer" was a job title. The long computer was built in the 1940s, and was used by the Navy to solve military math problems. As America's first programmable computer, the Mark I was quite the marvel. However, as computers inevitably do, it became obsolete and was decommissioned. Portions of the beast were placed in the Smithsonian, but the main body of the almost impossibly large comp was put on public display at Harvard where it was initially created.   

It kind of makes you want to go back to the abacus. (Photo: Ted Eytan on Flickr)

Ten years ago today, the very first video ever was uploaded to YouTube, “Me at the Zoo,” by the site’s cofounder, Jawed Karim. It’s a fantastically interesting piece of history despite the fact that the video itself is, frankly, kind of terrible; poorly shot, boring, with Karim standing in front of an elephant pit and explaining that elephants “have really, really, really long, um, trunks.” It got us thinking about the first examples of the major points in the history of film, and how mundane—and fascinating—so many of them are.

The First Motion Picture

This is a trickier question than you’d think; for an invention as basic as “moving pictures,” there were a whole mess of competing nascent technologies in the late 19th century. So your definition of the “first” depends less on dates and more on what you define as an actual motion picture. One of the frontrunners would be the zoopraxiscope, invented by Eadweard (!) Muybridge in 1879. The zoopraxiscope is a device that rotates images painted on the edges of a circular piece of glass rapidly, to create the illusion of movement. It’s kind of like a flipbook, creating an image that looks like a GIF.

A later invention from Thomas Edison’s lab, the kinetoscope was perhaps more similar to today’s motion picture cameras, replacing the zoopraxiscope’s piece of glass with a strip of perforated film. The first film for the kinetoscope was called Monkeyshines, No. 1. It depicts an employee of Edison’s lab kind of flailing around for a few seconds, and because of the way the kinetoscope worked, you had to stare into a pinhole to see it. Movies have gotten better since then.

The First Color Film

Again, sort of unclear. The very early devices like the zoopraxiscope and kinetoscope could certainly display color; they weren’t projected, so all you had to do was draw the individual slides in color and, well, you’d see color. But photographs didn’t display color, so film had to wait for photography to catch up before implementing color in film. Certainly one of the earliest would be Le Voyage dans la Lune, a silent film French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès. 

Le Voyage dans la Lune, which appeared in 1902, was actually hand-colored, like with paint. Pretty amazing! The story depicts some French people being shot to the moon with a cannon and fighting with moon-men before returning to Earth.

The First Porno

As with any transformative new technology, one of the first applications of the wide-eyed new world of film was...porn. The very first pornographic film is a debatable prize, but we’ll go with Fatima's Coochee-Coochee Dance, a short film from 1896 depicting a belly dancer.

There’s no nudity, but because it was, probably, the very first censored film, we can assume that at least somebody considered it pornographic.

The First Talkie

Movies had accompanying sound for just about as long as they’ve existed; both the zoopraxiscope and the kinetoscope were sometimes displayed with sound alongside. But when we’re talking about real talkies, a full-on movie in a movie theater with sound, we’re talking about The Jazz Singer, a huge, smash hit feature from 1927. There are barely a few minutes of spoken dialogue in the whole movie, but the first spoken words are pretty killer: Al Jolson addresses the audience, saying, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet.”

The First TV Broadcast

Television emerged well after talkies and color movies, and the difficulty with TV wasn’t so much the technical effort required to display the picture and sound as it was syncing all that up with a radio-like transmission. The very first scheduled TV broadcast--meaning, not a demonstration, but a legitimate broadcast, was on April 30th, 1939. It showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address at the World’s Fair, in New York, to, well, a few dozen people who could actually tune in. The quality isn’t as bad as expected!

The First Live-Streamed Band

Livestreams today are as popular as ever; tech events, music festivals, presidential addresses, and plenty of other subjects are filmed and broadcasted over the internet simultaneously. But in 1993, this was a crazy feat. The very first band to ever be livestreamed over the internet is a Palo Alto garage band called Severe Tire Damage, which happened to be playing a gig at Xerox headquarters on June 24th. Xerox at the time was working on a system called Mbone (“multicast backbone”) for showing live events over the internet, and figured, hey, why not try it out by filming this band? You can see an interview with Severe Tire Damage here.

The First Animated GIF

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) was an early image file format, a competitor to Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG). The Daily Dot interviewed the reclusive creator of the format, finding out that the very first GIF was, the creator thinks, a simple image of a plane. But the format’s strength, as we know now, is that every web browser, straight back to Netscape, can display GIFs with multiple frames--animations, in other words. One of, if not the first, animated GIFs is a kind of spooky white window created by web artist Olia Lialina in 1997.

But, there was something that predated the GIF by about 155 years that has become known as a spiritual predecessor. This is the phenakistocope, an invention from a Belgian physicist named Joseph Plateau. In essence, he set items in motion using spinning disc attached to a handle, and with that motion, achieved the illusion of moving pictures.

 
The GIF of a pre-GIF GIF. (Photo: Courtesy of Richard Balzer collection.)

The First 3-D Film

Three-dimensonional film might seem like a fad now (especially since there’s 4-D), but it’s a fad that’s been in movie theaters for longer than sound. The very first 3-D film to be screened before an audience was called The Power of Love, which was shown once in 3D, in 1922. Weirdly, 3-D film has not really developed very much at all since then; the setup was, essentially, the same as it is now, using the red-and-green glasses we’re all familiar with. The film actually had two endings, which is kind of cool: you looked through either the red side or the green side to see a happy or a sad ending. The movie has, unfortunately, been lost for years.

"I say we make base camp here, and start again in the morning." (Photo: Tim Green on Flickr)

The lush, green hedge maze has long been a symbol of baroque opulence and slightly creepy mystery. And while the classic garden ornamentation has declined in popularity in the modern age, a number of downright magical examples of the hedge maze are still growing. Take a look at seven examples of twisting garden architecture where a person can still get lost in green corners, and verdant dead ends. Just don't get lost. Remember what happened at the end of The Shining?

1. LABYRINTH PARK OF HORTA
Barcelona, Spain

If you can find yourself here, you are probably safe. (Photo: dusanmil89 on Atlas Obscura)

Barcelona's oldest garden is a lovely, angular hedge maze surrounded by historic follies. Begun in the late 1700s, the maze covers over 2,000 feet of twisting corridors that lead to and around Italian-inspired terraces and balconies. Anyone who manages to wind their way to the center of the labyrinth can find a statue of Eros, the Greek God of Love. Which is unlikely a coincidence, since it's easy to be smitten by this fantastic historic garden.    

You could follow the arrows, but that's weak. (Photo: dusanmil89 on Atlas Obscura)

2. PEACE MAZE OF NORTHERN IRELAND
Castlewellan, Ireland 

That guy won't look so happy when he's been lost in there for three days. (Photo: bishib70 on Flickr)

This shaggy Irish labyrinth is not only the second largest permanent hedge maze in the world, but it is also an ever growing monument to peace in Northern Ireland. Opened in 2001, the maze is composed of over 6,000 yew trees, each planted by a Northern Ireland citizen. The maze is intentionally left a bit shorter than most as yet another aspect designed to promote communication between visitors. The center of the maze holds a Peace Bell that stands for more peace. Just don't starve just trying to find it.  

Yeah, man. We see you. (Photo: bishib70 on Flickr)

3. GLENDURGAN GARDEN MAZE
Glendurgan, Cornwall

Just because you can see over the top doesn't mean you can't get lost. (Photo: Tim Green on Flickr)

Planted over 170 years ago, this curving, and twisting puzzle continues to confound visitors to this day. The Glendurgan maze was designed to look like a messily coiled serpent, and it shows. The closest thing the maze has to a center is a gazebo that pokes out above the foliage, but the design of the labyrinth is such that even this feels like simply a half-way point. The original designer made the maze intentionally difficult by not designing it in the mostly symmetrical fashion that most hedge mazes are fashioned in.   

So close to the edge and yet so far away. (Photo: Jim Champion on Flickr)

4. HAMPTON COURT MAZE
East Molesey, England

Spoiler alert. (Photo: Yakov Perelman on Wikipedia)

While it is not the largest or most difficult maze on this list, the Hampton Court Maze clocks in as one of the oldest having been confusing challengers for over 300 years. The oldest remaining hedge maze in the United Kingdom, the Hampton Maze was planted in the late 1600s for King William III. It is what is known as a "multicursal" maze (technically all "mazes" are multicursal, and all "labyrinths" are unicursal, but the two phrases tend to be interchangeable in modern speech), which means that it has multiple possible paths to choose from. It is this plethora of choice that have been entertaining people for centuries.   

That is one ominous corner. (Photo: William Marnoch on Flickr)

5. ASHCOMBE MAZE
Shoreham, Australia

 
The center of the maze is worth it. (Photo: Heather Aitken on Flickr)

Australia's oldest traditional hedge maze actually only dates back to the 1970s. Built out of over 1,000 separate plants, the hedges have grown together so seamlessly, that they look like one bulbous, seamless, maze plant. In fact the the maze is trimmed and kept up without the use of physical guide lines giving the whole thing a much more organic feel. A fountain is located in center of the maze, but the more popular objects for guests to seek out are the little named gnomes hidden throughout the maze during an event called the Great Gnome Hunt. If you are going to create something this magical, might as well lean into it.

Take the left path. Truuuuust us... (Photo: Heather Aitken on Flickr)

6. VANDUSEN GARDEN'S ELIZABETHAN HEDGE MAZE
Vancouver, Canada

That poor tree can't find its way out from the middle of the maze! (Photo: Stan Shebs on Wikipedia)

This Canadian garden maze is not only made of trees, but offers a bigger tree in its center as a reward. Its just trees all the way down. Supposedly one of only six traditional hedge mazes in all of North America, this Vancouver gem is made of over 3,000 cedar trees in a deliberate recreation of an Elizabethan maze. The maze is open every day of the year excepting Christmas, so really anytime you need a North American maze fix, this is a safe bet. 

Lookin a little shaggy. (Photo: Ruth Hartnup on Flickr)

7. LONGLEAT HEDGE MAZE
Warminster, England

This maze is a total show-off. (Photo: John Candy on Flickr)

This is it. The longest (but not largest) hedge maze in the world. Composed of 16,000 yew trees that define almost two miles of pathways, the Longleat maze is the king of modern hedge mazes. The gorgeous maze features six-raised bridges scattered throughout, and a tall central tower so that visitors can look out and see just how lost they have become. If this grand puzzle is not enough to sate your desire, the grounds around the maze have been expanded to include smaller garden mazes such as the "Sun Maze" and the "Love Labyrinth."

None of these people ever came out of the maze. Maybe. (Photo: Fribbleblib on Flickr)

The giant, random crystals of Silithus (All images by Eric Grundhauser)

As more and more of our time and lives move into the digital world, the online landscape is becoming so vast, we have begun leaving some things behind.

Namely, much like the physical world, whole swaths of towns, islands, forests, palaces, and simple shacks have been constructed digitally and then abandoned. These are the forgotten wonders of the digital world—in this case, the World of Warcraft.

For the uninitiated, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). Players download the game and pay a monthly fee to login, taking part in a shared world called Azeroth. The essential size of the world is fixed but at any given time, WoW has around 10 million active subscribers and to manage the unbelievable number of players, there are hundreds of realms that split up WoW subscribers. What this means, structurally, is that not of all of Warcraft's millions of players exist in the same space at the same time,

And the world is vast. At the game’s launch in 2004, Azeroth consisted of just two continents, split into 41 zones that can best be thought of as countries. Each one defined by their own look and flavor. The Barrens is a bit of the African veldt, while the Burning Steppes are a blasted, molten wasteland. In real world terms, Azeroth has been compared both in size and thematic construction to Disney World. (For geography nerds, the real world-game world comparison ratio has been explored a few different ways including delving into the code to find the in-game distance measurements, as well as using the average stride length of a player’s sprite to extrapolate some numbers—people tend to agree that the original continents are around 8 miles long).

 
The world of Azeroth

As the game has grown, new continents have been introduced in add-on content expansions that players can purchase—and whenever players rush into the newer areas, the original spots get ignored. Among them, the Asian-inspired Pandaria, the icy northern lands of Northrend, and Outland, which literally exists on the remnants of another world. Today, there are 91 zones split across six land-masses, saying nothing of the dozens of dungeon spaces that exist as separate little places for specific adventures. With new continents providing players quicker ways to advance and novel locations to explore, many older zones have simply become bygone curiosities.

So what are the abandoned parts of WoW? Unfortunately, the game designers declined to comment, so it was left to me to do some on-the-digital-ground reporting.

What an attractive young man. 

I reactivated Baerf, my level 86 troll rogue. Turns out he was right where I had left him countless months before, in Pandaria, the fifth continent to be introduced. I had purchased the Mists of Pandaria expansion, which gave me access to a new continent, but I quickly canceled my account because I knew it would be too much of a delightful time drain. Adulthood is a bummer.

I hearthstone'd (an item given to every player at start, that can be used to return you to a populated place) back to Orgrimmar, the central Horde city, located on one of the original continents. When I had last played, this orc metropolis was bustling with so many other live players that it made my computer wheeze. Now it was almost empty.

Entering a command that listed all of the players in the zone, I found that there were just 19 people in the hub city. The computer controlled, non-player characters (NPCs) were there of course, but flesh-and-blood players were scarce. Nonetheless, I sent out a public chat to everyone in the city, asking after the least inhabited places.

In the nearly empty city, I got little response. A couple of players responded with their favorite corners of the world, inspired more by nostalgia than any confirmed numbers. But my question may not even have been understood. WoW is a game designed to be shared with other players. It is its raison d'être. Looking for places that no one goes is kind of antithetical to most players’ view of the game. Nonetheless, some of the most beautiful moments in the game occur in its loneliest locales.

The Scarab Wall in Silithus

Venturing out into the world in search of solitude, my first stop was Silithus, in the south of the continent of Kalimdor. This zone was part of the original release and was designed for players between the levels of 55-60. As the world grew, better options to grow characters emerged and Silithus, despite being an evocative wasteland, seems to have lost its appeal. The overriding theme is bugs. The area is full of titanic crystalline plinths floating against an orange sky, and ant mounds buzzing with rings of pests. Organic claws reach out of the ground everywhere you look, and if you run for more than a few seconds in any direction, you will end up in a pit filled with chittering Silithid enemies.

The Swarming Pillar in Silithus

Nearby is another zone from the original game, the Un’Goro Crater, which was inspired by the very real Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. A strangely disconnected area even in the beginning, this massive depression is a mist-shrouded primordial jungle full of gorillas, dinosaurs, and mysterious ancient ruins that look like they could have been created by Roman artisans. The jungle forms a ring on the crater floor with a roiling volcano at its center. The ground is littered with bones left behind by the prehistoric beasts roaming the grounds, juxtaposed by the colorful natural crystals that grow nowhere else on Azeroth. Meant for players around the 50-55 level range, the Un’Goro Crater suffered much the same fate as its insect-infested neighbor.

Fire Plume Ridge in the center of the Un'Goro Crater

The Shaper's Terrace

As I flew through the zones there were just over 20 players in either of them.

The gates of Bogpaddle in the Swamp of Sorrows

Across the sea on the continent known as the Eastern Kingdoms, there are zones such as the Swamp of Sorrows. One of a handful of areas in the game designed as a dank swamp environment, the Swamp suffers for being a small sliver of an area sandwiched between two zones with more bombastic scenery. However its sunken temples and oppressive hanging moss create a haunting space to explore. When I visited, there were only 14 others trudging through the swamps.

The sunken Temple of Atal'Hakkar in the Swamp of Sorrows

One of the more recent areas that seems to have been almost immediately tossed aside is the underwater zone of Vashj’ir. Introduced in the Cataclysm expansion that saw a number of the original zones reshaped to try and bring people back to these forgotten lands. Vashj’ir was a newly introduced zone, and the first one in the game to be entirely underwater. The sub-oceanic playground is big enough to be split into three separate zones itself. All three are jam packed with wonders like fantastical forests of rising kelp, the titanic shells of dead crustaceans that can be explored like a cave system, and a swirling abyssal vortex that sucks players off to a dungeon instance. As of my visit, there were all of nine active players exploring the vortex.

The massive living caves of Nespirah

The Abyssal Breach

 
Kelp'thar Forest

However, maybe the most unloved areas of WoW may not even be on Azeroth. Outland, introduced in the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was a whole new continent existing through a legendary portal, where players could join the battle against demons and evil(er) orcs. Unlike the more-often seamless continents of the original game, Outland’s landscapes seemed like a barely connected selection of dreams. You could walk from the spiked geological impossibilities of the Blade’s Edge Mountains right into the scattered scraps of untethered land known as the Netherstorm. It was bright, crazy, and now, almost entirely empty. I visited every zone on Outland for this piece and not one of them had more than 30 players.

Hellfire Citadel in Outland's Hellfire Peninsula

The anti-dragon spikes of Blade's Edge Mountains

Eco-Dome Midrealm in the Netherstorm

The most recent expansion to the World of Warcraft, Warlords of Draenor, was released in November of 2014, drawing players to the newly created areas. Nonetheless, all of these older corners of WoW still exist. The generated bugs of Silithus still hunt; Vashj’ir’s kelp forests continue to sway in the currents; and the demon hordes are still waiting in Outland. Like the real world, it can get lonely wandering solo through a kelp forest or spiky mountain range, but it can be beautiful, too. 

Baerf flies on.

A 1751 sea otter illustration by Georg Wilhelm Steller. (Drawing and all photos via Wikipedia Commons)

In 1741, Georg Wilhelm Steller became the first European to step foot in Alaska. Marooned there for nearly nine months after his boat ran aground, the German-born naturalist went on to discover several spectacular animals, many of which would be named after him. The list of animals that carry Steller's name is long and impressive--even more impressive given his incredibly brief career as a naturalist.

Steller’s finds range from arguably the world’s largest eagle to a whale-sized relative of the manatee to the iconic sea otter. Steller was one of the pioneering naturalists of the 18th century, yet his story — equal parts tragedy and dark comedy — is largely unknown. Steller’s life veered from the halls of Bavarian academia to shipwrecks on remote Aleutian islands. He loved animals and was chiefly responsible for one notable extinction. And he mystifies scientists to this day with a detailed description of an animal nobody has ever seen again: Steller’s Sea Ape.

Steller, whose birth name was originally Stöller, was born in 1709, near Nuremberg. Like many naturalists of his era, he was mostly interested in plants, and earned a degree in botany while in university in Berlin. But Steller had no interest in exploring the lush jungles of the tropics. Instead, he moved east, ending up in the Russian army as a surgeon for a brief time. While there, he befriended another naturalist, and when that man died, Steller married his widow, Brigitta.

Soon afterward, in 1741, Steller met Captain Vitus Jonassen Bering, who commanded a ship called the St. Peter, which was chartered for exploration. The St. Peter, along with a sister ship, the St. Paul, were due to traverse what we now think of as the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska. Since the ships’ primary duty was discovering new lands, the crew had several naturalists on board, though apparently Steller did not get along with them. The feeling was mutual.

Steller, along with other 18th-century naturalists, like Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, the man whose wife Steller married, were part of the new wave, treating exploration less as a lark and more as a serious scientific effort. They adopted a system to carefully describe and categorize all life, from lichens to manatees, which was probably seen at the time as kind of fussy and nerdy and annoying.

In any case, the trip was a disaster. The two ships got separated almost immediately in a storm, though both ended up landing on various parts of what is now Alaska. The St. Paul crashed into one of the Aleutian Islands, but the St. Peter was the first to actually hit mainland Alaska. And guess who stepped out first? Yep, Steller.

The ship’s landing wasn’t pretty. They crashed roughly, and in late summer, which meant the crew had to attempt to survive an Alaskan winter with not much more than the skeleton of their boat. Steller became pretty handy here, and led the hunting and boat reconstruction efforts. The crew attempted to stave off scurvy by eating otter meat, which has a small amount of vitamin C.

When he wasn’t doing that, Steller was practicing what was, at the time, cutting-edge science, in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Here’s a short list of the animals he discovered:

The Steller’s sea eagle, the world’s heaviest eagle, a spectacularly large bird with a goofily prominent yellow beak that makes it kind of look like a cartoon animal: 

The Steller’s sea lion, a sea lion almost as big as a walrus that is now on the near-threatened list:

The Steller’s jay is the West Coast version of the blue jay. This jay is the only one of Steller’s discoveries that isn’t currently either endangered or extinct, and it was actually the evidence Steller had for declaring, correctly, that the St. Peter had made it to the North American mainland. It’s similar to other North American jays, and totally unlike anything in the Old World.

The Steller’s eider, a vivid, noble-looking arctic duck:

The sea otter. Steller was the first to scientifically describe the sea otter! Unfortunately for him, no one today calls it the Steller’s sea otter. 

Most disastrously, Steller discovered, described, and named the Steller’s sea cow. Related to manatees and dugongs, the Steller’s sea cow was a gigantic marine mammal. At thirty feet long, it was one of the largest marine mammals to have ever existed in modern history. Sadly, it had no defense against the hungry shipwrecked men of the St. Peter. The Steller’s sea cow ate kelp, but was slow-moving, floating along the surface while it munched, which made it an easy target. Steller wrote that it didn’t taste particularly good, but it had a lot of meat and it seemed as easy to catch as a falling apple. Steller’s reports made it to the next round of Alaskan explorers, who hunted it to extinction within three decades. 

Easily the most mysterious of the discoveries is Steller’s sea ape. Steller described, in his usual painstaking way, a marine mammal that seems incredibly strange. In his words, from the English translation of his posthumously published book, De Bestiis Marinis, or Beasts of the Sea:

 “The animal was about two ells long. The head was like a dog’s head, the ears pointed and erect, and on the upper and lower lips on both side whiskers hung down which made him look almost like a Chinaman (Editor’s note: he seems to have been referring to the Fu Manchu moustache). The eyes were large. The body was longish, round and fat, but gradually became thinner toward the tail; the skin was covered thickly with hair, gray on the back, reddish white on the belly, but in the water it seemed to be entirely red and cow-colored. The tail, which was equipped with fins, was divided in two parts, the upper fin being two times as long as the lower one, just like on the sharks. However, I was not a little surprised that I could perceive neither forefeet as in marine amphibians nor fins in the place.”

There have been no confirmed sightings of any animal that matches this description, ever. (One sailor, in 1969, claimed to have seen something like it, but no photos were taken.) A 2006 biography from Dean Littlepage suggests that it was a young fur seal, perhaps a bit malformed, but Steller’s description implies a healthy and playful animal. It’s unlikely he made it up, as in the descriptions of mermaids that littered the “scientific” work from that time; Steller was self-serious about his scientific mission. These days, some of the more creative Bigfoot and yeti hunters include Steller’s sea ape in their wheelhouse.

Animal illustration by Georg Wilhelm Steller. (via Wikidi)

Steller and about half of the crew of the St. Peter (not including the captain, Bering, who died in Alaska) survived the winter and managed to build some kind of rat-trap boat out of the scraps of their original ship. They made it back to Russia, where they informed everyone that Alaska, despite being cold and dangerous, had plenty of Steller’s sea cows to eat and plenty of sea otters to hunt for their pelts. Those species promptly went extinct, or very nearly extinct, which likely wasn’t what Steller had in mind.

Regardless, he never made it back to Alaska; he died some four years later in Siberia on his way back to St. Petersburg, an unfairly quiet death for a man who accomplished so much in his mere 37 years on Earth.

NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed Steller's names to him. In fact, he gave the animals latinate names in accordance with Linnaeus. We regret the error.

At one point, all these rocks were covered by weeds. (All photos by Luke Spencer.)

In 2008, a retired woman named Eileen Markenstein and a small group of volunteers decided to clean up Jersey City’s cemetery. Named the Historic Jersey City and Harsimus Cemetery, it was a storied gravesite: incorporated in 1831 and privately owned by the plot holders, this is the oldest cemetery in New Jersey. By 2007, the last Board of Trustees president died, and with no more space for new lots, and no money to pay for upkeep, the venerable old cemetery closed its gates. Nature rapidly began to reclaim the graveyard.

Their first job was to start uncovering tombstones long hidden from view by weeds, lying at right angles half buried in the earth. It was a chaotic scene: Homeless people were living on the grounds in tents. The old caretakers’ cottage, dating back to 1831, was in a sorry state. Vandals had written all over the walls and the floor was littered with hypodermic needles.

On the floor of a wardrobe in the cottage, Markenstein found a metal canister. Inside was the original map of the cemetery from 1831. They had been clearing away the dense undergrowth plot by plot, lane by lane, but the map showed that the graveyard continued up the hill to the west, where now there was only dense forest.

One day, clearing undergrowth, a volunteer stumbled upon a stone step. Like a modern Cair Paravel from Narnia, the stone staircase led up the hill and ended in an old rusted iron door set into the hillside. Breaking open the old door and stepping inside out of the clear Jersey sunlight, they found an antechamber. It had been undisturbed for over 100 years. Torchlight showed a series of tunnels disappearing into the hillside, snaking left and right.

The week after this discovery, Markenstein went to see her doctor complaining of crushing chest pains. She was rushed to hospital where, for 21 days, she underwent tests but no one could find out what was wrong with her. Finally, a doctor asked her if she’d been anywhere unusual recently. Well, she replied, as it happens I have. No wonder the medical staff struggled to diagnose Markenstein—she was suffering from an ailment more commonly found during the 19th century. Markenstein had pleurisy. 

Remarkably, what they found is still there, buried away in the Jersey hillside virtually unknown and undiscovered. I went to explore it for Atlas Obscura.

The cemetery is situated at the outskirts of Jersey City, the second largest city in the state, although its population actually peaked in the 1930s. Now boxed in between Newark Avenue, the New Jersey turnpike and the railroad, the cemetery had once been commanded the highest views of the Hudson River. The rolling hills had once been home to the Lenape tribe of Native Americans, until Dutch farmers settled the land. Such was the strategic importance of the high terrain that it was the historic site of several battles during the War for Independence. 

In 1780, the French General Marquis de Lafayette camped here with 4,000 troops at the request of General Washington, from where he fought the British. It remained a key military stronghold during the War of 1812. 

A log of who's buried, and how they died. 

As the population of Jersey City expanded in the 1820s it became apparent that the old graveyards attached to churchyards were becoming increasingly ill-equipped to deal with the growing numbers of deceased. A cholera epidemic in the early 1830s saw the city create a larger municipal cemetery on the outskirts of town, and 5 acres of the old military base became the Jersey City and Harsimus Cemetery. Privately owned, and run by a board of trustees, the cemetery would be funded by the selling of plots in what was to be one of America’s very first landscaped garden-style graveyards. Sculpted lawns, flower beds and trees heavy with blossom would be the backdrop for the grand mausoleums and decorative tombstones that would be mimicked by Green-Wood in Brooklyn (founded seven years later in 1838) and Woodlawn in the Bronx (1863).

At first, the Jersey City cemetery was a runaway success. Many of the well-heeled members of Jersey society bought plots, amongst them William Colgate, founder of Colgate-Palmolive; the President of the Board was David C. Colden, son of the Mayor of New York. But while Green-wood and Woodlawn have thrived, becoming designated as National Historic Landmarks, Jersey City fell by the wayside. In 2007 the last active member of the old Board passed away. Worse still, there were rumors of financial mismanagement.  The Jersey Journal newspaper in 2008 wrote a report asking where over $100,000 of the cemetery’s maintenance fund had gone. 

With no money coming in, the gates were locked and the cemetery was forgotten. 

For Markenstein, the mission to resurrect the cemetery is personal. She has four generations of her family buried there. As we met on a spring afternoon, she proudly showed off the huge improvements made by her and her team in the past seven years. Large parts of the cemetery now resemble the smooth greens of a golf course, but others are still in a terrible state of disrepair.

The now-uncovered stone staircase that leads up the western hill to the door is cracked and falling apart and the earth has sunk in many places, swallowing the Victorian tombstones into the ground. Unlocking the old rusted iron door, we stepped inside. The first antechamber was covered in marble walls. Markenstein explained that after the military vacated the property, the cemetery had planned to turn the bunker into luxury vaults. But with no takers, the marble walls remained intact. Stepping further into the pitch black, the light of the torch showed blackened brick tunnels heading in both directions.

Heading to the left and walking into another room Markenstein told me to “be careful in there.” Piled up against the wall were wooden boxes about 2 feet long, that Markenstein claimed contained live munitions left over from the War of 1812.

Beyond that were two slightly larger boxes, this time made of metal, that Markenstein explained were unburied child’s coffins.

“The Spoiler Hath Come With His Cold Withering Breath,

And the Loved and Cherished Lies Silent In Death.”

             —Grave of Henry Drayton, died 1847

During the winter months of the late 19^th century, with the ground too frosted over for the gravediggers, the old military bunkers were appropriated for cold storage for the dead. The neglect that would eventually close the cemetery was already well under way by the late Victorian period. The Urn, a monthly journal dedicated to the interests of cremation, ran a report in July 1894 under the heading “Cemetery Abuses” talked off the deplorable conditions at Jersey City; “rapid decomposition....coffin after coffin has been stacked one upon the other until half a dozen in a tier are jumbled together in such a manner as to be almost inseparable.” It proved too much for the Colgate family, who had their forebears re-interred at Green-Wood in Brooklyn.

Top: Boxes of munitions. Above: When this antechamber was first opened a few years, no one had been inside since the 19th century.

Walking through the tunnels, into the old receiving vaults, human bones lined the floor. Markenstein explained how the tunnels were supposed to carry on through the hillside, and eventually ended up in what was now the basement swimming pool of neighboring Dickinson High School. Empty liquor bottles on the floor showed that the tunnels had received visitors over the years. Markenstein told me how an former student had come to the cemetery whilst they were restoring the graveyard and presented her sheepishly with a human skull he had once taken from the tunnels, saying he’d had nothing but bad luck in his life since then

Continuing on into the right-handed tunnel, my torch shone upon something glittering in the darkness. Another coffin, but this one adult- sized, highly ornamented with harps, flowers and decorative handles. It had clearly once been the height of luxury. Inside, Markenstein explained, was the skeleton of a 19th century Viennese Count. He’d been visiting New York and had passed away on his travels. Unclaimed and forgotten, he’s still in the Jersey hillside without a marker to remember him by

Beyond the Count’s coffin was another tomb, as plain as his was fancy. A simple metal box, it is the final resting place of Alice Holmes, also known as the Blind Poetess of Jersey City.

Holmes was nine when her family sailed for America from England. Contracting smallpox on the voyage she was left blind before reaching New York.

She went onto publish four volumes of poetry. She was also rumored to have been plagued by visions, and would offer psychic readings to the citizens of Jersey City. Lying forgotten in the mysterious tunnels of the cemetery, one of her poems makes somber reading:

To me the variegated earth,

Would seem one dark, unbroken plain,

If in my heart, I had not hid

Bright visions that oft come again.

 

For I through nine fair summers passed,

With scarce a cloud to shade my way,

And loved the face of nature more,

With each returning day.

 

But ere a tenth had fully come,

My gladsome heart was wrapt in gloom;

Lo! I was banished from the light,

Condemned to a living tomb.

Today, Jersey City cemetery is protected by its own unique private security force: two veterans of the Vietnam War, John “The Digger” Wilson and Tommy G. Forced out of their homes by the rising housing costs in Jersey City, and with nowhere else to go, the cemetery became their new home. They now live upstairs in the old caretaker’s cottage in return for working the grounds and protecting the tunnels from vandals. Tommy G. had been a POW in Vietnam, and Markenstein says that bringing the cemetery back to life had helped him deal with trauma from the war.

The recovery of Jersey City cemetery is similarly well underway. Running as non-profit, Markenstein and her volunteers have steadily rescued much of the cemetery. With no city or government funding, the major hurdle is raising money. Their goal is to get State and National Landmark Preservation status to ensure a stream of future funds, as well. It seems remarkable that such an historic site could be left forgotten. Sadly, the abandonment of this historic site isn’t uncommon. Just south of Philadelphia, where Mount Moriah, once every bit as grand as flourishing Green-Wood, now lies in neglect.

But to get placed on the National Historic Landmarks register takes money, and Markenstein struggles to raise money and awareness for this little forgotten cemetery. Regular fund raising events are now held on the grounds as are Shakespearian plays, film screenings, as well as tours and lectures. HBO used the graveyard as a location for several burial scenes in The Sopranos.

As more of the cemetery gets uncovered, there are more discoveries. “We’ve found incredible artifacts. Remnants of soldier’s boots, entrenching tools, shell casings, bowls,” Markenstein says. Next to the cottage, volunteers uncovered the ruins of a Victorian greenhouse and flower garden where visiting mourners would buy forget-me-nots, roses and peonies. The plan is to have a museum onsite. The cottage still holds the original undertakers’ ledgers, detailing who he buried, and more remarkably, the unusual ways people used to die in the 19th century, “killed by pile driver....cholera infantum, overdose of opium”. Markenstein also has the original minutes of the first meeting where the cemetery was incorporated, as well as their signed constitution.

Other finds are more gruesome; An entire section of a mass infant grave, from a cholera epidemic, completely unmarked and forgotten.

For Markenstein, it is all about fighting back the undergrowth little by little, clearing away the years of neglect that have covered over the final resting place of her ancestors. Soon she will have help in the form of a herd of goats. Rented from a farm upstate New York, the goats will spend the entire summer mowing down the weeds.  They will be kept company by the snakes, wild turkeys and an eagle that have made this mysterious graveyard their home, or as Markenstein calls it, “my favorite garden.”

This post first appeared online in In the Artifact Lab,  a blog run out of the .

My family has a tradition that we honor at the beginning of every school year that we call “goodbye old pals.” As kids, it was a way to celebrate the start of the new school year and, maybe for our parents, the fact that we weren’t going to be around the house as much (but don’t worry – they always threw us a “hello old pals” party at the end of the school year). Well, today I’m throwing myself and Pinahsi, our New Kingdom mummy from Abydos, our own little goodbye old pals party here in the Artifact Lab, because he is leaving the lab on Monday to go back on exhibit in our Secrets and Science gallery.

Pinahsi has been in the lab for several months for conservation treatment and documentation. I’ve already written a bit about the treatment here and here, but I’ll provide a summary below using some of the before and after treatment images.

The treatment of Pinahsi’s remains was limited to the external wrappings – nothing, with the exception of a very light surface cleaning, was done to any of the exposed human remains (and only his feet are exposed). The goal of treatment was to stabilize the wrappings that were susceptible to further damage and deterioration. After surface cleaning, tears in the linen were repaired with tiny strips of Japanese tissue paper and methyl cellulose adhesive, all carried out from the underside of the linen.

During Japanese tissue and methyl cellulose repair (left) and after mends were complete (right).

After tear repair, very fragile areas were encapsulated with nylon bobbinett, toned with acrylic paint to blend in with the original linen.

Before encapsulation with nylon bobbinett (left) and after (right).

Here are some overall before and after treatment images. The difference is pretty subtle, but that was pretty much the goal – to stabilize what’s there using the least invasive methods possible.

Overall view from above of Pinahsi before (left) and after (right) conservation treatment.

View from the right side of Pinahsi before (above) and after (below) conservation treatment.

Notice the new support board under Pinahsi in the after treatment image above. This board will eliminate most direct handling of his remains, and will also provide support for his remains while on exhibit. This additional protection will also help to prevent further deterioration of the linen wrappings.

With Pinahsi stabilized and on his new support board, we were able to safely move him down to our new digital x-ray lab, and with the assistance of Dr. Janet Monge and Dr. Morrie Kricun, Conservator Tessa de Alarcon and I captured a complete set of x-ray images. While full interpretation of the images is underway, I will share a few of the initial findings that were impossible not to miss.

First, we can confirm that this is a mummified man, who was around the age of 30 when he died. We can determine sex from looking at the skull and pelvis:

X-ray images of Pinahsi’s head (left) and abdomen/pelvis (right).

Age is determined by examining the condition of the bones and teeth.

You may notice some things that are out of place, like the teeth that appear to bein the cranial cavity and the ribs and vertebrae where they shouldn’t be, and the pelvis askew.

X-ray images of Pinahsi’s skull and abdomen, labeled with elements that are out of place. Note the very tiny pins—these are actually part of the new storage support, being used to secure the fabric to the board—they’re not part of Pinahsi at all!

Another observation of note is that Pinahsi’s arms are crossed over his chest.

X-ray image of Pinahsi’s chest and arms.

This arm position was generally not seen until the New Kingdom, when it wasreserved for royalty. Does that mean that Pinahsi was part of a royal family? Maybe! But maybe not. We’ll need to do some research to answer this, and to try to understand why his remains are so disturbed under the wrappings. I’ll share information as we learn more.

Well, Pinahsi old pal, it’s been an honor to have you in the lab. I’m glad that we were able to spend this time together, and I’m also happy to know that our work is not complete, so we have more fun times to look forward to!

This post first appeared online in In the Artifact Lab,  a blog run out of the .

My family has a tradition that we honor at the beginning of every school year that we call “goodbye old pals.” As kids, it was a way to celebrate the start of the new school year and, maybe for our parents, the fact that we weren’t going to be around the house as much (but don’t worry – they always threw us a “hello old pals” party at the end of the school year). Well, today I’m throwing myself and Pinahsi, our New Kingdom mummy from Abydos, our own little goodbye old pals party here in the Artifact Lab, because he is leaving the lab on Monday to go back on exhibit in our Secrets and Science gallery.

Pinahsi has been in the lab for several months for conservation treatment and documentation. I’ve already written a bit about the treatment here and here, but I’ll provide a summary below using some of the before and after treatment images.

The treatment of Pinahsi’s remains was limited to the external wrappings – nothing, with the exception of a very light surface cleaning, was done to any of the exposed human remains (and only his feet are exposed). The goal of treatment was to stabilize the wrappings that were susceptible to further damage and deterioration. After surface cleaning, tears in the linen were repaired with tiny strips of Japanese tissue paper and methyl cellulose adhesive, all carried out from the underside of the linen.

During Japanese tissue and methyl cellulose repair (left) and after mends were complete (right).

After tear repair, very fragile areas were encapsulated with nylon bobbinett, toned with acrylic paint to blend in with the original linen.

Before encapsulation with nylon bobbinett (left) and after (right).

Here are some overall before and after treatment images. The difference is pretty subtle, but that was pretty much the goal – to stabilize what’s there using the least invasive methods possible.

Overall view from above of Pinahsi before (left) and after (right) conservation treatment.

View from the right side of Pinahsi before (above) and after (below) conservation treatment.

Notice the new support board under Pinahsi in the after treatment image above. This board will eliminate most direct handling of his remains, and will also provide support for his remains while on exhibit. This additional protection will also help to prevent further deterioration of the linen wrappings.

With Pinahsi stabilized and on his new support board, we were able to safely move him down to our new digital x-ray lab, and with the assistance of Dr. Janet Monge and Dr. Morrie Kricun, Conservator Tessa de Alarcon and I captured a complete set of x-ray images. While full interpretation of the images is underway, I will share a few of the initial findings that were impossible not to miss.

First, we can confirm that this is a mummified man, who was around the age of 30 when he died. We can determine sex from looking at the skull and pelvis:

X-ray images of Pinahsi’s head (left) and abdomen/pelvis (right).

Age is determined by examining the condition of the bones and teeth.

You may notice some things that are out of place, like the teeth that appear to bein the cranial cavity and the ribs and vertebrae where they shouldn’t be, and the pelvis askew.

X-ray images of Pinahsi’s skull and abdomen, labeled with elements that are out of place. Note the very tiny pins—these are actually part of the new storage support, being used to secure the fabric to the board—they’re not part of Pinahsi at all!

Another observation of note is that Pinahsi’s arms are crossed over his chest.

X-ray image of Pinahsi’s chest and arms.

This arm position was generally not seen until the New Kingdom, when it wasreserved for royalty. Does that mean that Pinahsi was part of a royal family? Maybe! But maybe not. We’ll need to do some research to answer this, and to try to understand why his remains are so disturbed under the wrappings. I’ll share information as we learn more.

Well, Pinahsi old pal, it’s been an honor to have you in the lab. I’m glad that we were able to spend this time together, and I’m also happy to know that our work is not complete, so we have more fun times to look forward to!

The counting of steps, the smell of gunpowder, the sound of clashing swords. This is the duel; gentleman’s right, settler of disputes, restorer of honor, a really easy way to get yourself killed. Duels took many forms over the years, including some very unusual conflicts. In the first installment of a four-part animated video series,  we recount history's most unusual duels along with the lessons learned.

To paraphrase Kathleen Hanna, girls to the front. Duels between women were rare, and duels between topless royal women of the late 1800s, yet rarer still. But this duel was special not just for its manner of undress or the gender of its participants. It actually represented a leap forward for science. 

Medical thinking played a large role in this fight. It should also be noted that Baroness Lubinska was far ahead of her time, in that germ theory was still new and largely dismissed by the medical establishment at the time. This duel would be a lot less delightful if one of them died of an infected arm in the end. Lesson learned: Always fight naked. The duel's winner, Princess Pauline Clémentine von Metternich, should be recognized for her style, her love of music and painting, and for performance with a sword.

Princess Pauline von Metternich, daguerreotype by Hermann Krone, 1854. Source Wikipedia. Public Domain.

Sometimes one city doesn’t like the look of another city. There’re many reasons for that – rankable reasons, too – and they’re explored below. If your city isn’t mentioned or there’s a category you’ve missed, feel free to contribute below using #dayofrivals on Twitter.

Minneapolis, that bastard. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) 

1. Minneapolis v. St. Paul

Length of rivalry: 120 years, on and off.

Best/worst fight: In 1890, St. Paul was bent on hanging its hat on an aspect of civic pride: the size of its population. Meanwhile, demographic trends pointed toward Minneapolis becoming the bigger city. Both looked to the census as a means of asserting dominance. The low point (or high point, depending on your point of view) was when seven Minneapolis census-takers were basically kidnapped by St. Paul police.

As The New York Times wrote:

“They were arrested by United States Marshall Daggett on warrants alleging fraudulent actions in connection with their census labors … Every little point in the history of the case has been greatly magnified and the consequent indignation at what was considered improper and outrageous interference in Minneapolis affairs by the city of St. Paul has been intensified.”

The census-takers received bail. "The citizens of Minneapolis," per the Times, were "greatly aroused."  Nevertheless, and despite this, both cities went on to commit fraud, so much so that the government instituted a recount in both cities." As brutal as were the census wars, though, it was far from the only example of civic discord: the fight over grain-selling agencies was pretty pointed, too

Are sports teams involved? No, but if you had “dueling mayoral media presences,” the current mayor of Minneapolis would win single-handedly. She created a “Die Hard Night” at City Hall (first annual, she told me), and then live-tweeted the film. When Pointergate happened, she cracked jokes. She photo bombs. She talks about uploading Merle Haggard CDs and then pivots to– "Going to call it a night, tho. I've gotten this far without anyone asking don't you have a city to run, but I don't want to push my luck."

Best Insult of A City By Another City? “St. Paul is like an oasis for me, because I never go there.” (Source.) 

Who is the winner? Minneapolis.

The Bambino. (Photo: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

2. Boston v. New York

Length of rivalry:  86 years. Potentially longer.

How it started: The Boston Red Sox had a pitcher by the name of Babe Ruth. In 1919, he was traded to The New York Yankees. After that, the Red Sox couldn’t win a World Series for the next 86 years. During that time, The New York Yankees won 26 World Series titles.

Best/worst fight: Pedro Martinez and Don Zimmer. During the 2003 ALC between the Red Sox and Yankees, a bench-clearing brawl erupted after Roger Clemens intentionally tried to hit Manny Ramirez after Pedro Martinez hit a Yankee batter. Don Zimmer, then 72, charged Pedro Martinez. And it’s not everyday that you see a 72 year old man try and pick a fight – but then Pedro Martinez grabbed Zimmer by the head and threw him off to the side and to the ground, which was an awful sight to see. 

Are sports teams involved? Are there sports teams involved? Are there sports teams involved? Is Derek Jeter’s name legally pronounced, “Jee-tah?” Did I play Little League with Wade Boggs’s son and still know what a big deal that was even then? (For those of you who might not be picking up on this: yes. There are sports teams involved. It’s pretty much the only thing involved here. There’s no kind of socio-political crossover at the level you saw between Madrid and Barcelona, what, with Franco temporarily renaming the Copa del Rey after himself.)

Best Insult? “You know what a New York accent is? It's like a Boston accent if you took out your vocal chords, rolled them around in sharp glass and gravel, and then sent them to live platonically with 1993 Marisa Tomei.” (Source.)

Who is the winner? New York is a wonderful city but—Yankees suck.

Obviously the fighting spilled over onto the ice. (Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

3.  Edmonton v. Calgary (aka, "The Battle of Alberta")

Length of rivalry: About 100 years, though some would claim it's been going on longer, starting as early as fur traders squaring off against buffalo traders in the 18^th century.

How it started: One reason: Edmonton was named the capital of Alberta in 1905. Calgary wanted it. Calgary didn't get it.

Are sports teams involved? The Oilers! The Flames! For a time, they were the two best teams in the NHL. They traded playoff runs between each other like they were a neighbor asking to borrow some sugar -- and they did this for nearly a decade. Also, Wayne Gretzky was playing.

Best Insult? Q: Why can't you have coffee in Calgary??

A: Because they only have one cup!!! (Source.)

Who is the winner? Edmonton. More cups. More parks. (The Edmonton River Valley is 22 times larger than Central Park.) More festivals. (It hosts enough festivals to earn the nickname “Festival City.”) More, more, more.

Carbs can split us apart. (Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

4.Glasgow v. Edinburgh

Length of rivalry: Possibly 300 years ago. (See below.)

How it started: Possibly over a loaf of bread. The Herald noted in a story from two years ago that one of the first recorded fights happened in 1656, when Glasgow’s city council “expressed concern at the bad quality of bread the local bakers were producing.”

According to Robert Crawford, a professor at St. Andrews University:

"Two bakers from Edinburgh offered an easy solution and also managed to one-up Glasgow – they would happily bake Glaswegians bread that met higher quality, Edinburgh standards.”

Are sports teams involved? There's "The Old Firm," but that's between two teams based in Glasgow, Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C., and though – in examining the two clubs – one can point to sectarian divisions between ‘Ulster’ Scots and ‘Irish’ Scots, Catholics and Protestants, and – for a time – conservative divisions versus left-leaning divisions – it is not a matter of Glasgow versus Edinburgh.

Best Insult? "Edinburgh! A castle, a smile and a song. One out of three isn't bad."

"If you see a Weegie on a bicycle, why should you never swerve to hit him?"

"It could be your bike."

(Source: Ian Black’s Weegies v Edinbuggers: Why Glasgow Smiles Better than Edinburgh or Why Edinburgh is Slightly Superior to Glasgow.)

Who is the winner?

The cliché is that Glasgow is filled with nice people but Edinburgh is prettier. On the balance, it’s a tie.

Turku Central Railway Station, the site of a cruel diss. (Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

5. Helsinki v. Tampere v. Turku (Finland)

Length of rivalry: 18 years. Potentially longer.

How it started: Turku is currently the designated runt of Finland’s metropolitan litter. If you want to make an easy joke while visiting Finland, for instance, you could inform people that the best place to visit in Turku is the Turku railway station. Regrettably, other than through a natural difference in city size, there seems to be little available information about the origin of this rivalry, nor the wonderfully creative responses it’s birthed. (See below.)

Ilmari Ivaska, Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, characterized the rivalries to me as "stemming from the tensions rising from bourgeois vs. socialist ways of life and, later, ideologies ... in many ways, [it] stems from the historical moving of the capital city of (then province) Finland from Turku to Helsinki by the czar in the early 19th century, after Russia took over Finland from Sweden ... Turku had served as the provincial capital and coastal commercial center for centuries, while Tampere was growing around the blooming industrialization based on the textile industry, logging, and dammed rapids that penetrate the city."

Best Insult? Here, the insults levied at Turku might take the cake, as– "Since 1997, students at Tampere have made annual excursions to Turku to jump on the market square, doing their part to undo the post-glacial rebound and push the city back under the sea. Students from Tampere also go to the border of Turku and hammer wooden nails to the ground, in order to make the city drift off the mainland someday."

Who is the winner? There are no winners here.

 
A Harry Potter showdown between Cambridge and Oxford students. (Photo via Jeffc2u/Flickr)

6. Cambridge v. Oxford

Length of rivalry:  800-plus years.

How it started: Cambridge was founded by academics fleeing Oxford in 1208. For a time, they were the only universities in the country. A natural rivalry developed.

Are sports teams involved? There’s rowing, sure.

Best Insult? Lagrangian densities.

Who is the winner? In terms of numbers of Prime Ministers produced, Oxford wins. In terms of bike theft, Cambridge wins. In terms of needlessly "academic" language being produced that stultifies scholarship–well, there, nobody wins. In terms of a fictional detective solving murders in a specific city– there, Oxford wins. In terms of producing comedians and other noteworthies, Cambridge –with The Footlights (feat. Eric Idle, Peter Cook, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, David Mitchell, John Oliver, Graham Chapman, Emma Thompson, Douglas Adams, John Cleese, Sasha Baron Cohen, et. al.)–wins by a mile. A tie.

 
A march for Catalonian independence. (Photo via SBA73/Flickr)

7.Madrid v. Barcelona

Length of rivalry: 125 years.

How it started: The War of Spanish Succession brought Catalonia under Spain's domain in 1714. Catalonia drifted towards a degree of autonomy, which was crushed during Franco's rule. (The Catalonian language itself was even declared illegal.)

Catalonia has sought independence since then. Madrid has had none of it.

Are sports teams involved? Yes. Barcelona v. Real Madrid. And not only is there incredible (and often awful) socio-historical crossovers with what was happening between Franco and the Catalonian region as a whole, but —if we can divorce ourselves of the region’s history for just a moment—where else will you see Xavi produce a goal so artful it becomes a beautiful animation in its own right? 

Best Insult? That you're not eating Spanish, Basque, or Catalonian food right now.¡Debería darte vergüenza!

Who is the winner? Barca! Or – as one individual on Twitter put it– “I've only lived in Spain for a matter of weeks but already I fucking hate Real Madrid with an illogical fervour.”

From a different era of Toledo: redlining maps. (Courtesy of Ohio State University Libraries,) 

From our smug (though extremely temporary) perch atop history, we can safely say that we know exactly where the U.S. city of Toledo is: It’s in Ohio, of course. But in the 1800s, the answer wasn’t so easy—and the resulting battle was incredibly bitter.

Michigan and Ohio share a border and in 1800s they also shared something else: an unwavering, unassailable belief that Toledo belonged to their state, and their state only. Now, looking back, it may (sorry, Toledo) seem a little surprising that the city inspired such a passionate need in both states.

But, two hundred years ago, Toledo was a much hotter property than it is today, due to its position on the newly constructed Miami and Erie canal, which both states (mostly wrongly) assumed was the key to untold riches.

What began as a border dispute escalated rapidly, until soldiers from both states were gathering to face each other down. Facing each other was, fortunately, almost the full extinct of the mostly bloodless conflict. It was finally resolved in 1837 when, as part of Michigan’s deal for statehood, Ohio finally got the sole claim to Toledo.

Commenter offline-swenson has the further tale of just how the skirmish unfolded — plus the twist at the end that perhaps lets Michigan claim a late, partial victory:

If you’ve ever looked at a map of Michigan, you’ve probably noticed that rather than being a straight line, the southern border has a jog in it.

But this is not that story.

No, this is the far weirder story that you’ll discover when you look even closer at Michigan’s southern border. Look at the eastern half. Yes, it jogs south—but then instead of going straight east, it slants up north again. Whyever could that be?

Looking it up on Google Maps might give you a clue. You see, just south of Michigan’s current border is Toledo, Ohio. Back in the 1800s, Ohio was a state but Michigan was still just a lowly territory seeking entry to the Union. And in the course of this, a huge debate arose over where, exactly, Toledo was. Ohio pulled out some laws that implied it was in Ohio (and the southern border of Michigan should slant north). Michigan pulled out some different laws that implied it was in Michigan (and that part of the southern border should go straight east). I know Toledo isn’t that exciting to most people, but it was an incredibly valuable port on the Great Lakes. So whoever got control of it got all that sweet, sweet tax revenue.

Things started getting out of hand. Both Ohio and Michigan raised militias which sat on either side of the Maumee River glaring at one another. There was even an occasion where shots were fired, albeit just into the air. Each side even passed laws making it illegal for citizens from the other side to perform “governmental actions” in the Toledo Strip. Law enforcement from both sides started arresting people on the other side (for things like voting in Ohio elections). Finally, on July 15, 1835, during a scuffle over arresting an Ohioan, a Michigan deputy got stabbed. Completely non-fatally, but it was still the only blood spilled in the entire “war”.

Eventually, Congress and President Andrew Jackson were like, “this is incredibly stupid, you guys” and pressured Michigan into accepting a deal that at the time seemed terrible for Michigan—Ohio would keep the economically valuable Toledo Strip, and Michigan would get the useless Upper Peninsula.

Then, five years later, they discovered copper and iron in the Upper Peninsula and Michigan got to laugh all the way to the bank. So much for that “useless” Upper Peninsula. EAT IT, BUCKEYES.

 

This post originally appeared on io9, a website about futuristic culture and entertainment, bridging the gap between what’s real now and what will be possible tomorrow. For more stories, read io9.com.