Virginia Beach tries to get in on the whole crab thing (Photo: m01229/Flickr)

Everything you thought you knew about East Coast summer seafood is a lie. What's up is down, what's down is up, and Maryland crabs, it turns out, are actually from Virginia.

Earlier this month, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe made a bold statement.

"You know, Maryland talks about its crabs," he told a local radio host. "All the crabs are born here in Virginia and they end up, because of the current, being taken [to Maryland]. So really, they should be Virginia crabs."

This assertion, as reported by Politifact, is somewhere between an attack on a neighboring state's culinary pride and a declaration of media warfare. Maryland is rightly proud of its crabs. They are the state food, and they adorn all state drivers' licenses.

About half of the U.S. haul of blue crabs comes from Maryland. If you're on the Maryland shore during the summer, you must indulge in a feast of steamed crab meat, seasoned with Old Bay, ready to be pulled from the bright red shell.

Virginia-born, Maryland-eaten (Photo: Krista/Flickr)

According to the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, the first printed instance of the phrase "crab cakes" was in "1930 in Crosby Gaige’s New York World’s Fair Cook Book, where they are called 'Baltimore crab cakes.'"

According to Politifact, though, McAuliffe's audacious claim is more or less true.

After talking to two biology professors, the political fact checking website concluded that, indeed, Chesapeake Bay crabs are conceived and born in the lower, Virginia section of the bay, where the water is saltier and conditions are right for crab baby-making. The crab larvae drift to the salty Atlantic Ocean for a bit and then waft back up the Bay towards Maryland.

It's understandable that Virginia might want to get in on the crab action: its state foods are frankly kind of boring. Blueberry muffins serve as the state muffin, and ice cream is the state dessert. But until Alexandria starts producing more crab cakes than Baltimore, menu items by that name are going to be a hard sell.

Come on, people, no one calls them Virginia crab cakes.

(Photo: jojo nicdao/Flickr)

Death could take you at any time, so it is always a good idea to have some instructions in place for how you would like to be buried. But why settle for a boring underground burial when you could have your body stored for its eternal rest in all sorts of interesting places? In fact, all over the world, people have been burying the dead in unexpected locales.

To help inspire you, here are eight weird places around the world where people have been interred. 

1. Between the tables of a restaurant

(Photo: ynaija.com)

India's New Lucky Restaurant brings new meaning to a place people are dying to eat at. Owner Krishnan Kutti had already purchased the land where his eatery was to be built when he discovered that it was in fact a cemetery. Undeterred, Kutti leaned into the problem and simply built his restaurant around the graves and headstones, making them a selling point for his unique establishment. The green sarcophagi can be seen resting in the floor behind a small white fence. Diners don't seem to mind the graves, which seem to drive sales as much as it might drive them away.    

2. In a tree

(Photo: Matt Paish/Flickr)

The Toraja people of Indonesia are known for their elaborate and involved funeral rites which often include mummy parades and graves built into the side of a cliff, but one of the stranger aspects of their traditions are the grave of children and babies. When tragedy takes the life of a young child, the Toraja often inter the little body in a tree hollow, building a crude wooden door over the burial site. It is a sad thing to be sure, but it also ends up creating some evocative imagery, and ultimately a grave to remember. 

3. Under a little house

(Photo: Raymond Bucko, SJ/Flickr)

At the intersection of Russian Orthodox religious tradition and Native Alaskan funeral rites, are the Burial Spirit Houses standing outside of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Eklutna, Alaska. According to tradition, when someone dies their body is buried and a blanket is placed over the grave. After the blanket has been there for a while, a little wooden house, about the size of large dollhouse, is placed over the grave, and is painted in the family colors. Unlike more traditional burial sites, the little houses are not kept up or restored, and are simply allowed to disintegrate back into the ground. In fact this decay is part of the tradition.  

4. Hanging from a cliff

(Photo: Rick McCharles/Flickr)

The people of the Sagada region of the Philippines aren't afraid to show off their dead. In fact they are known for their tradition of hanging exposed coffins from a cliffside. In a practice that dates back thousands of years, the Sagada carve their own coffins before they die (or a family member does it for them), and then they are hoisted up to literally hang around with their ancestors. Many of their hanging coffins are hundreds of years old, and they all have a unique look and feel since they were made by the person inside of them. It almost looks like a cross-section of a traditional in-ground cemetery. 

5. In a piece of modern art

(Photo: warosu.org)

Being buried in the San Cataldo Cemetery wouldn't seem so strange if the whole wasn't an ultra-modern box for filing away the dead. Created as a proof of concept 1972 by architect Aldo Rossi, the "cemetery" is stark to say the least. It takes the form of a bright orange cube with nothing adorning the exterior but a grid of square windows that would have been where the dead were buried. Unfortunately Rossi himself died in 1976, and he was never able to see his super-efficient body box put to use. It won a number of design awards, but no body has yet to be buried there. Maybe you could be the first.   

6. Behind a Walmart

(Photo: Anita White/Atlas Obscura)

Tucked away in the parking lot behind a Walmart super store in Decatur, Georgia is a entire historic cemetery that has stuck it out through the march of progress. First created in the early 1800s the Crowley graveyard grew to hold 13 bodies, buried on a small hilltop. However times changed, and Decatur grew up around the cemetery, leveling down the hill to make room for a mall parking lot, and leaving the Crowley family plot high and dry. A mausoleum was built around the graves and the parking lot was built around that. While the mall is no longer there, a Walmart stands in its place. But just out back, near the dumpsters and the workers on a smoke break , the Crowley graves remain unmoved.   

7. In an airplane runway

(Photo: Google Maps)

If you look out the window of your plane while taking off or landing at Georgia's Savannah Airport, you might be able to see two concrete rectangle sitting askew in the blacktop runway. These are in face the headstones of Richard and Catherine Dotson, a deceased couple who refused to be moved as the airport grew right over their graves. As is often the case when expansion threatens a historic graveyard, most of the bodies surrounding the Dotson's were moved as the airport expanded outward. However the surviving Dotsons refused to give consent to move the grave since they believed that Richard and Catherine, who struggled to purchase and maintain the land, would have wanted to stay. Unfortunately the dead rarely stop progress and the graves were simply paved over. They are just one more reason to say prayer when taking off. 

8. In a secret graveyard of shame

(Photo: Stranger20824/Wikipedia)

This is actually a rather normal graveyard save for the fact that it has been effectively disappeared existence. Plot E in the Oise Aisne American Cemetery in France holds the bodies of 94 American soldiers who were convicted of capital crimes during World War I and World War II. Every person in the plot was executed for their crimes and buried beneath tiny graves with just a number and no name. The plot itself is hidden behind tall hedges, and can only be accessed through the caretaker's office. No flags are allowed to fly over the plot either. The dead in Plot E are buried to forget. 

"Passports to Adventure", 1939. (Photo: Library of Congress)

In 1935, as part of his New Deal program to put Americans back to work during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt established the Work Progress Administration. The WPA (its name was changed to the Work Project Administration in 1939) employed millions of people to carry out major public works projects, and within it, there was a smaller, creative arm: the Federal Project Number One.

The goal was not just providing funding and work for artists, but also promoting and sharing the work being done by American musicians, writers, and theater professionals. It reflected the belief of New Deal administrators that art could, and should be, a part of everyday life. 

"The government unwittingly launched a movement to improve the commercial poster and raise it to a true art form," Richard Floethe, who headed up the Poster Division in New York, wrote in an essay.

The group designed posters for art programs as well as for public parks, and organizations devoted to health and education. The posters were first made by hand before moving to the silkscreen process, which allowed for a greater volume to be printed. From 1936 to 1943, over two million posters were printed. The lion's share of the Work Project Administration poster trove is held at the Library of Congress. 

Below, we've gathered some of the most striking and thought-provoking posters created for libraries in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 

"For greater knowledge on more subjects use your library often!", V. Donaghue, 1940. (Photo: Library of Congress)  

"A trip around the world at story hour time", S. Weisburg, 1940. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

"September: Back to work, back to school, back to books", 1940. (Photo: Library of Congress)  

"For greater knowledge on more subjects use your library more often", 1941. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

"The vacation reading club - join now at your public library", 1939. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

"Wee Willie Winkie", Cleo Sara, 1940. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

"In March read the books you've always meant to read", 1941. (Photo: Library of Congress)

"Be kind to books club Are you a member?", Greg Arlington, 1936-1940. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

"January - A year of good reading ahead", 1941. (Photo: Library of Congress)  

"Young and old visit the library on the parkway", Nathan Sherman, 1937. (Photo: Library of Congress)

"October's 'bright blue weather': A good time to read!", Albert M Bender, 1940. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

"Funny Side Up", Albert M Bender, 1939. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

Tunnel system beneath the Platterhof Hotel, now part of the Documentation Centre exhibit. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Deep in the mountains of Bavaria is a concrete doorway set into the side of the mountain. Even in the height of summer, the thick steel door is cool to the touch, and drips with condensation. From the edges of the door frame comes a chilling cold breeze. It isn’t marked on any tourists guide maps, as the government would prefer that you had no idea that it exists.

Behind the steel door lies the underground secret bunker complex of Adolf Hitler. 

Forgotten in the forest, the emergency entrance and exit to Hitler's bunker beneath the Berghof. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

This multi-roomed subterranean compound is composed of an apartment and a set of underground chambers for fellow Nazi inner circle members—over four miles of tunnels, bunkers and hidden rooms in total. Above ground, an entire village was built as an Alpine retreat for the Nazi government. 

But with the war failing, the mysterious underground complex was to be the last redoubt of the Third Reich. Carpet bombed by the Royal Air Force in April of 1945, then locked up by the occupying U.S. Army, it was handed back over to Germany in 1952 with the proviso that the remnants be blown up again out of existence. But not everything was destroyed, and today, you can still visit the secret ruins of the Nazi’s planned Alpine fortress.

The Beautiful Berchtesgaden

Berchtesgaden is one of the prettiest towns in all of Europe. Surrounded on all sides by the soaring Alps, the secluded picturesque town is marked by domed church steeples, terracotta tiled houses, wild flowers and beer gardens. The river in the center of town runs with water fed from the lake of the Konigssee. The unspoiled beauty of Berchtesgaden and its cheerful way of life has made it a beloved holiday destination for centuries of Germans. 

Its most infamous tourist started coming here on holiday in the mid-1920s. Hitler stayed in a modest rental cabin overlooking the town that he wrote the second half of his autobiographical work, Mein Kampf. By the time of his appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler had earned roughly 1.2 million Reichsmarks in royalties from his book (the average annual income of a teacher in 1933 was around 4,000 marks). With his newfound wealth (rumored to be supplemented with the annual royalties he received from appearing on postage stamps), Hitler began to build a mansion not far from his small cabin, in the mountain retreat of Obersalzberg, overlooking Berchtesgaden. Called the Berghof and completed in 1935, Hitler’s Alpine home was as imposing as it was luxurious, dominated with giant 25-foot picture window which looked onto the mountains of his native Austria. 

The entrance to Berghof, in 1933. (Photo: German Federal Archives/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The sweeping window was chosen deliberately by Hitler. Legend has it that Charlemagne, the ancient unifier of Western Europe slept in those mountains, awaiting the next leader to rule Germany. If Bismark’s second reich was relatively short lived, Hitler’s third, was supposed to take the mantle from Charlemagne and rule for a thousand years. Hitler spent around a third of his time in power at the Berghof, entertaining such luminaries as David Lloyd George, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Mussolini and Neville Chamberlain. It was from his plush mountain mansion that Hitler decided to annex Austria, invade Czechoslovakia, and set into motion the evil that would ultimately cost the lives of over 60 million people. 

For his 50th birthday, an even more impressive house was built for Hitler, this time soaring 6,000 feet high on the Kehlsteinhaus, above the Berghof. Today it is known by its more infamous name, the Eagle’s Nest. 

The Eagle's Nest, Hitler's 50th birthday present. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

A remarkable feat of engineering, the Eagle’s Nest was reached by what is still Germany’s highest altitude road. At the end of the road, a tunnel was bored into the mountainside that ended in a solid brass elevator. The gleaming elevator (that still runs today)  would have carried Hitler to his mountain top retreat. 

Despite its magnificence, Hitler rarely set foot in his expensive birthday present; he was rumored to suffer from chronic claustrophobia and vertigo.

Today the Berghof and Eagle’s Nest remain well-known symbols of Hitler’s reign in power. What is less well known is that surrounding Hitler’s home, grew an entire village both above and below ground. 

The entrance to the Eagle's Nest tunnel, taken by a US soldier in 1945. (Photo: WikiCommons/CC BY 3.0)

Life in the Nazi Summer Homes

Beginning around 1936, the leading figures in the Nazi party began building similarly grandiose homes near Hitler. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Party Chancellery, was in charge of the project, which entailed clearing Obersalzberg of the farms, inns and hotels that had catered to generations of holiday makers.

Soon, Goering, Himmler, Hess, and Goebbels also had opulent mansions A children’s asthma clinic, situated there to benefit from the clear mountain air, was occupied and turned into a house for Bormann himself. Obersalzberg became a village community for around 2,000 high ranking Nazis and their families.  It featured a bowling alley, cider press, cinema, a model farm, kindergartens and outdoor swimming pools. They even kept bees. A workers camp for the highly paid Italian laborers, experts in mountain road building, was constructed. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer kept a design studio in a valley that featured a giant luxury hotel on the overlooking ridge called the Platterhof. 

Over four miles of tunnels connected the mysterious underground Nazi headquarters. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

By 1943, the Allied gains in North Africa and Italy made the threat of imminent air raids a distinct possibility, casting a shadow over the idyllic mountain retreat. Again orchestrated by Bormann, the Nazis started to burrow deep into the mountain for safety. All the principal Nazi mansions soon had matching subterranean apartments spreading out from their basements. Linked by a complicated 4-mile-long tunnel system, facilities for storm troops, secretaries, medical staff and families were established underground. These dwellings replicated the homes above them, complete with air ventilation systems, dehumidifiers and central heating. Goering’s bunkers contained his formidable collection of rare wines, champagnes, spirits and seized priceless art.

This was to be the Nazi’s Alpine fortress, a “national zone of retreat”, from where Hitler and his inner circle would conduct the grand finale, the “Gotterdammerung”— twilight of the gods. 

Over 200 feet below the surface and safe from Allied air raids. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Germany’s foes got wind of the complex thanks to aerial surveillance photography carried out between 1943 and 1945. Allies knew about the mansions and the British Secret Service had been formulating plans to assassinate Hitler. But the large scale underground earthworks being carried out at Obersalzberg remained mysterious. It is thought that the Allies suspected not a giant underground community, but that this was a new site for German arms manufacturing, especially of the feared atomic bomb. In April 1945, hundreds of Lancaster bombers from the Royal Air Force left Northern Italy to obliterate not only the mansions of Obersalzberg, but whatever was going on underground. The air raid missed the Eagle’s Nest but devastated the rest of Obersalzberg, destroying most of the buildings, including the Berghof. A testament to their formidable mountain defenses, though, is that of the 2,000 inhabitants taking refuge in the secret bunkers, only six died. Weeks later, the French and US Army took Berchtesgaden, what was left of the model Nazi village and the Eagle’s Nest.

A US Army aerial photo showing the ruins of the Berghof at lower right. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The U.S. remained on the mountain until as recently as 1996. What survived from the air raid was re-appropriated; the giant luxury hotel became the hotel General Walker. Speer’s studio and home became private residences, as did some surviving SS barracks. The Eagle’s Nest became a restaurant and beer garden in the 1950s. Only open today in the summer months, due to the dangers of avalanches, it attracts up to 3,500 curious visitors daily. 

But the vast underground complex was simply sealed off.

What the Museums Don't Tell You

There is a delicate balance between the historic importance of such sites, and the overriding compulsion to wipe it from the face of the earth. Presumably this is what led the U.S. to insist that Germany dynamited surviving structures of Obersalzberg in 1952. 

Museums and “Documentation Centres”  were built at Obersalzberg and Nuremberg. At Obersalzberg, the museum, which all Munich school children are required to visit, along with a trip to Dachau, speaks unflinchingly of all the evils of Nazi Germany. The Documentation Centre also opened up a small stretch of the tunnels, which were originally built as a refuge underneath the hotel. 

The race to capture Obersalzberg took place between the French and the men of Easy Company, US Airborne. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

My contact in Berchtesgaden was one half of a husband and wife team that have been providing tours of the area since 1990. Christine Harper was born to a German mother and a father in the American Air Force. Her husband David’s aunt was the last wireless transmitter working in Paris for the French Resistance, and was ultimately killed by the Germans. Together they have been providing fascinating in depth tours that include not just the Eagle’s Nest, but the whole incredible secret history of Obersalzberg. 

For decades, Harper says, “the problem in Germany was that education on World War II wasn’t mandatory, so they didn’t have to talk about it.” Times have changed, though. “The younger generation are allowed to be interested in the subject where before it was taboo,” she notes.

But while the museums are a definite step forward, large parts of the ruins of Obersalzberg are pointedly not mentioned; there are no sign posts for what hides in the woods.

Across the street from the old General Walker is a power station by the side of the road. Behind the concrete structure, about a minute’s uphill walk into the forest, are a small collection of stone foundations. This is all that remains of the original cabin where Hitler wrote the second half of Mein Kampf.

Countless signs in all languages at the Documentation Centre lead the way to the buses for the Eagle’s Nest. But if you walk five minutes in the opposite direction, into a the forest, you can see a small clearing with concrete remains of what was clearly a giant structure. A long wall embedded into the tree line is all that remains of the Berghof. Standing in the ruins of where Hitler’s most evil plans were formulated is a chilling experience. There is a plaque here, placed by the German government that indicates the location of Hitler’s home.

Climbing down the steep incline from the ruins of the Berghof, you can find the steel and concrete entrance into Hitler’s bunker system. A nearby red door forms the emergency doorway into Martin Bormann’s bunker.

The entrance to Martin Bormann's bunker; the mastermind behind Obersalzberg. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Further down the path, is a small inn, the Hotel zum Turken. A popular resting stop on the mountain, Brahms once stayed here. The owner, Karl Schuster, a veteran of the Turkish Front in World War I, for which he named his guesthouse, refused to sell to the Nazis and was forcibly removed from the mountain.

The hotel was converted during the war into headquarters for the SS-Fuhrerleibwache, Hitler’s own personal bodyguard. Underground, as part of the tunneling project, the hotel contained SS prison cells, as well as living quarters for the guards, as well serving as a conduit between Bormann and Hitler’s  bunkers.

As with most of Obersalzberg, the Hotel zum Turken was heavily damaged during the RAF raid. After the war, Schuster’s widow and daughter, petitioned to have their family property back, and in 1949 they purchased the hotel back from the German government. The inn was rebuilt and is open today.

While the Documentation Center up the hill oversees a rigidly supervised few hundred yards of the tunnels and bunkers to the public the other four miles remain sealed off. But privately owned, and not advertised at the visitor center, the Hotel zum Turken is the way into the large parts of the secrets of the mountain.

Connecting tunnel between Martin Bormann's bunkers and Hitler's personal SS bodyguards. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

The Remains of an Underground City

Descending into the basement of the hotel down a narrow stone spiral staircase, the first thing you will encounter are the old wood-lined SS cells. The surface of the tunnels begin around 250 feet under the ground. These passageways would have linked Bormann’s underground chambers directly to the Hitler’s rooms underneath the Berghof. Dripping with condensation, lined with stalactites and green mold, the air is chillingly cold and undisturbed. If the Reich had fallen, it was from here that the war would have been plotted while the rest of Germany burned. Security was paramount. At the end of each tunnel and stairwell, a further hidden chamber was built behind the wall, where an MG-42 heavy machine gun team lay in wait for intruders.  

Further down into the heart of the mountain is a room with the tiled remains of a bathtub. This was the underground living quarters of Hitler’s bodyguard. The wall next to subterranean barracks is mostly and crudely bricked up. Scrawled on the wall in rough paint, “access to Hitler’s house and private rooms.” written by the owners to help intrepid explorers navigate the labyrinth of tunnels.

Harper has explored further into the miles of secret tunnels. Some, she says, have become waterlogged and decrepit through decades of neglect. Another Berchtesgaden resident, historian and film maker, Florian Beierl has completed extensive research and mapping of the underground lair, in conjunction with the Bavarian state government, tracking down and interviewing many of the original engineers and exploring its deepest depths for a book, Inside Hitler’s Mountain.

His work tells the story of Hitler’s secret mountain headquarters, and how when the U.S. Army first entered the Berghof bunker they found cellars of wine, champagne, hordes of silver and shelves full of works of art from the galleries of Europe. Many mementoes from the bunkers, including Hitler’s personal folio of Shakespeare found their way back to random mantlepieces back in America.

American soldiers at Berchtesgaden toast victory. (Photo: US Army/Public Domain/WikiCommons)

A week before the Allies took Berchtesgaden, the SS started to burn the countless sensitive documents in giant pyres. According to Beierl’s research, these included Hitler’s old diaries, notebooks and confidential letters from his relations that he kept away from the public eye. One U.S. soldier discovered in the ashes a notebook called “Ideas and Creation of a Greater German Reich.” Others found vials of bottles for the cocktail of drugs that Hitler had been prescribed for what we now think was the onset of Parkinson’s disease.

Ultimately, Hitler never retreated to his mountain sanctuary, deciding to remain in Berlin where he committed suicide. The Allies found Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg and the Eagle’s Nest deserted, most of its inhabitants escaping through an old 12th century salt mining trail in the mountain.

Today, visitors to Hitler’s second home can expect to find great information from the local museums. But still, large parts of the secret mountain complex remain untouched and forgotten. Deep underground, a chilling air blows through the now-empty rooms of Hitler’s subterranean city. 

Sunken treasure is real sometimes (Photo: Queen Jewels)

Three hundred years ago this summer, a fleet of Spanish ships set sail from Cuba. Their timing was bad: about a week out, a hurricane blew up and sunk 11 of the dozen ships off the coast of Florida. 

Although it's been combed over for centuries, many people believe that the site of the wreck still contains hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loot. And they might be right. Just recently, a family of treasure hunters found more than 50 gold coins and a golden chain, worth, altogether, more than $1 million. 

One of those coins was particularly special. A Tricentennial Royal, it's a rare coin, minted for display rather than regular use. That coin alone is worth about half a million dollars–basically a treasure hunter's dream.

Bonus finds: A mini Russian submarine, cannibalistic frogs with teeth

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

(Photo: wavebreakmedia/shutterstock.com)

It’s 2015, and living half your life online is unavoidable. Our personal computers have become like extensions of our brains and bodies, portals to a world where we can assume new identities, interact with strangers across the globe, and learn once unimaginable things.

But computers are also tools. Not only do we store our sensitive information within the nebulous web of hardware and software, but we also search. Want to know a person’s secrets? Check their Google history.

This is why data security plays into our deepest, darkest fears. The risk of exposing our personal information to the rest of the internet causes paranoia. In a post-Snowden era, security controversies dominate headlines.

We spoke with Karsten Nohl, a Berlin-based crypto-specialist, to get a better handle on these issues. Karsten views himself as an ethical hacker who exposes the security flaws of large corporations, including GSM mobile phone carriers and credit card companies, in order to better protect the customers.

And his research is fascinating. From developing USB "condoms," to working to help over a billion people in India connect to the internet securely, Karsten is something of a renegade, trying to make the online world a bit safer for us all.

 (Photo: Courtesy of Karsten Nohl)

Is there a specific job title you would use to describe yourself?

I work at Security Research Lab in Berlin, and my title is Chief Scientist. We look at everyday technology­–past, present, and future–so anything from a 20-year-old payment card to what is now being built, like autonomous cars. We want to understand whether users of these technologies are exposed to unnecessary risks.

Of course, there are risks everywhere. Credit cards can be cloned and cars can be crashed, even with no hackers involved. There is always risk, but we want to understand whether these risks are acceptable, and whether the risk ownership is in the right place. We criticize when a big organization, let’s say a telecommunications company like AT&T, or a credit card company or bank, creates risks, but then has ordinary users [the customers] suffer from the risks.

Whenever companies are holding on to customer information, sometimes even just in transit, there’s a risk. Think about the phone call that we are having right now. It’s going over Microsoft technology, so we’re trusting Microsoft with our private information, and they may or may not protect it very well. If this leaked out, and there are negative consequences, it would be us suffering from it–Microsoft doesn’t actually care whether this call is confidential or not.

So that’s what our research focuses on: finding technology weaknesses that should be advertised much more publicly, because many people are affected by them. 

Are you ever hired by specific corporations to test their security, or are you just playing more of a watchdog role? 

We are often in the watchdog position first, and predominately. That’s why we started this whole operation, which began extremely non-commercially. As you can imagine, by calling out big companies, you may get publicity, but certainly not revenue.

As a follow-up, and strictly a follow-up—never as a first step—we then help some companies dig themselves out of the mess. But not everyone is interested in it. If they were aware, the problems wouldn’t exist in the first place.

But there are always a few people in the industry who want to be better than average, who actually care about their customers, or, more likely, have some marketing message that they want to emphasize, trustworthiness or whatever. 

Can you speak to some examples, or is that confidential?    

Lots of our research is around mobile security. First, we broke the encryption of GSM phones. In the U.S. this would be AT&T and T-Mobile, for instance. We then went on to finding bugs in SIM cards–so that affects pretty much everybody.

Last year, we found some vulnerabilities in roaming technology in 2G and 3G, and in parts, even 4G. So we keep coming up with these results that really affect most people in the world, or could potentially. 

Out of the 800 or so telecommunications companies that exist worldwide, we work with about 30 of them. So it’s a tiny fraction, but then often these companies liaison with other companies, or we help the GSM-A [an umbrella organization for the telcos], to spread the word.

Every day we are reaching more companies that actually pay us money. But those who engage us are basically getting an advisory and assurance service. They understand the issues, and want help making them go away. So it’s a very fine line to walk.

If you approach it slightly differently from how we do it, it’s borderline blackmail. First, we create a problem, and then we help them solve it. Right?

But this is where we differ. We help them solve it anyway, through our publicity. If they want to fast track it, that’s when we fly out, and of course that costs the company money. 

(Photo: Ken Easter/shutterstock.com)

Have you ever received volatile, or extreme reactions from people? Or are people mostly willing to improve their companies?    

I’ll give you an example of somebody else in this space. These guys get results. They’ll say: ‘We can crash your mobile network.’ They’ve shown it across Europe. They can take out a mobile network, and it takes like an hour to reboot.

That would be terrible, right? So they say to the companies: ‘If you want to understand how, you can buy this database. It’ll cost you $100,000, and that’s the only way to get access to that information.’ But this is closer to blackmail than what we do. 

We say: ‘Here’s this vulnerability. And now, you can all go fix it.’

We do send the data to all the mobile networks, usually three months ahead of when we release it, but there’s no guarantee that no criminal is reading it, or that we can actually fix it in three months. It’s always the one security guy who understands the issues, but nobody else at the company is interested, up until a deadline approaches.

Why do you reveal these security holes so publicly?

Everyone is entitled to the information, including the criminals, right? If they want it, free information is free information.

We get criticized for releasing things with too much publicity pressure. At the same time, if we didn’t have the publicity, the impact would be much lower. People do need to look into the void to understand how bad their issues are. 

So the publicity is just a tool you use to leverage your case, in a sense. By going public with this information, you want to give some weight to your argument?

Exactly. In a sense, that’s even reversing the causality. Our primary goal, with all the work we are doing, is to inform about security issues, and make them go away. So the publicity is very much a part of that. If there were an option that we could just publish a security vulnerability to the GSM-A, the GSM-A would work with all 800 networks to fix the problem, and the risk goes away–that would be fine too.

But this isn’t how the world works. With no publicity whatsoever, we would maybe convince this group of 30-odd telcos that we work with intensely to fix the problems. With the publicity, we probably reach more on the order of 100 or 200 companies. Still way off target, but much, much more than would otherwise would be possible. 

I know you have a PhD in computer science, but what is your background? How did you get into this space, and how did you find yourself where you are today?

I started off wanting to be an inventor! Of course as a child you have very romantic ideas as to what it actually means. There’s this one figure in Donald Duck comics – you know the one with the little light bulb sitting over his shoulder?    

Yes, he was one of my heroes.

That guy is who I wanted to be. But it doesn’t really fit any real-world college degree or job description. So the closest thing to that–putting together different parts, and making something technical out of it­­–was electrical engineering, so that was my undergrad.

But through electrical engineering, you understand that most functionality rises from software. So it’s not so much the plugging together of electrical and mechanical parts that makes things magical–it’s the software actually running on it. That was then my actual path to computer science. 

(Photo: AngeloDeVal/shutterstock.com) 

 You’ve been working a lot in India lately. What you are doing there?

India is on the verge of finally becoming an internet-connected country. There’s already millions of Indians on the internet, obviously, but it’s still a tiny proportion of the population.

They have 950 million phones–almost a billion phone lines connected–of which only 5 percent are connected to the internet. So there’s a billion people ready to jump, as soon as you give them a smartphone, and a little bit of money to pay for the internet plan. They will be the next big cohort on the internet.

But these people face challenges that we [in the West] didn’t face when first connecting to the internet. The first passwords that I chose in the ‘90s were crap, but nobody broke passwords back then!

I didn’t have to worry about phishing, and I clicked on every email because I didn’t receive that much. There was very little spam, and certainly no phishing. I grew into the internet as the internet became more and more evil. As such, I can now behave in more or less secure ways.

Somebody entering the internet for the first time right now does not have that luxury, especially somebody who’s illiterate, or mostly illiterate, who can barely use a tablet computer.

This is a huge problem, in choosing passwords, for instance. Part of what this venture in India is doing is bringing education to people. So you get onto the internet, to get your basic education, for literacy, to then use the rest of the internet to your advantage.

I’m the person responsible for the security and privacy of all these new internet users. I make sure the scammers and the phishers don’t abuse these internet virgins. 

That’s a really interesting notion. I grew up in Canada and you in Germany, and we’ve basically been on the internet since the mid-1990s. Whereas in India, they don’t have that 20 years of awareness, as you said, of the internet “growing more evil over time.”

The technology is becoming cheap enough, the access is becoming cheap enough, and they are achieving a socio-economic status where they can afford it. And then they are in the same situation.

They’ll end up receiving emails, they’ll click and respond to them, they’ll volunteer personal information to everybody. So India is in this unique situation where the benefits of the internet for those people will be infinite. They don’t all currently have access to good education, and the internet can modernize this. They don’t have very good communication tools within their workforce, and a lot of people earn far too little, or they’re working in the wrong job, so this can all be modernized. 

What are the downsides?

Imagine somebody getting onto the internet with all these promises, and then their bank account gets pillaged, and their personal information gets abused through identity theft, and then all their friends get bombarded with spam. It may well be that these people will decide the internet isn’t for them, foregoing a huge opportunity. 

When I was in Delhi last summer, I noticed that a lot of people who had never owned desktop computers had smartphones.

Most people in India have these very low-end Android smartphones that cost around $30 or $40. Those providers are much worse than the Android providers we are familiar with, like LG and HTC, that are always criticized for security that is relatively worse than Apple’s or BlackBerry’s. In India, the phones are kind of fly-by-night. They have new models all the time, and some never get updated anymore. You use them for one year, and they break anyways.

This, plus illiteracy, plus the lack of experience, with nobody to turn to… it’s just bound for disaster, but hopefully not a disaster that’s large enough to discourage people from using the internet. So now you see why I like to work over there, and how this is a really fulfilling project, being able to contribute to a few hundred million people getting onto the internet, with fewer bruises than would otherwise happen. 

It’s certainly a noble goal.

The culture there is so different from ours. It’s profound, you know, in five or so years there’s going to be a billion new people on the internet. It’s going to change things so much.

I’ll give you one example of how India is different, in both a good and a bad sense, security-wise: A few years ago, the government of India introduced a citizen registry system–the first of its kind. So far, the government has very little idea of who is actually living in the country. Through this government database, they have now captured about half the population, and it’s growing quickly. This database includes all ten of your fingerprints, and your iris scans. It’s a full biometrics database.

The government’s building this database, and they make the telcos (that’s how I’m involved) collect the data. In India, you cannot get a phone contract right now without giving your ten fingerprints and two iris scans to some random Vodafone shop on the corner. Your information is then transmitted in maybe secure ways, stored in maybe secure ways. Again, it’s another disaster looming.

Somebody could legitimately steal all ten of your fingerprints and both of your iris scans. And they could do this for upwards of 600 million people. In a Western country, this biometrics database would not happen at such a low-quality level, and on that scale, so quickly.

To flip it around, this has the potential to make Indians not have password problems in the future. If this database is used carefully, people will be able to authenticate against anything on the India internet with just their fingers. And the Indian Government itself is vouching for these identities.

They are leapfrogging into a very different internet from ours. They never got used to passwords, so why use them in the first place?

Is that what you are trying to do–make that technology actually useful? 

Well, what’s actually more interesting to us is authenticating transactions. One of the things we’re building is a PayPal competitor–with a modest target of having a few hundred million customers. Everything in India is always on a massive scale. If you could get rid of PayPal passwords, and instead just have a fingerprint–if you could pay for goods at a store with just your fingerprint, that would simplify people’s lives a lot. It would also have the secondary effect of saving some of the security problems, like phishing, that we currently encounter. And this government database is a huge enabler.

If we already have a mandate to collect everybody’s fingerprints, why not use it in the customer’s benefit? The privacy risk is always there. That’s the law and I can’t argue with that. But if the law is already creating this risk, why not create opportunity in the same step?

Just to get a larger understanding of this concept: in an ideal India, a customer could just swipe their fingerprint at a store, and that would have all of their payment information? The opposite side of things, is that with low-data security, identities could be stolen down to someone’s fingerprint?

Let me put it in a more pointed way. There’s a single identity authenticator in India right now, and that’s the government. The government can vouch for everyone’s identity, and certainly everyone who can afford smartphones is already in that database. So, you don’t need to worry about passwords anymore. It’s like the Facebook password. You type in the Facebook password in every single dingy website these days, and it just opens up everything. In India, it’s not Facebook, it’s the government, and it’s not passwords, it’s your fingerprints. So that’s great.

But what I’m criticizing is that they are doing it at such a massive scale, and at such a low quality level. It could very well be that large chunks of this dataset leak out at some point. But then, unlike passwords, your finger cannot be changed. So they are jumping way ahead in the biometrics game, collecting all ten fingers at the same time, and possibly burning all of them. What are you left with once they’ve taken your ten fingers?

I can see how this gets risky.   

And it’s not like they are just starting with one finger. It’s all ten, all stored in the same place, with various companies that they work with. By being so ambitious, they are taking away the security foundation, and kind of burn it for everybody, forever. Or at least until you can grow an eleventh finger.

At that point, it’s not just your hardware that’s compromised; it’s your fingers–a part of you. And how can you change that? 

That's the biggest question, and that's why we are doing this work!  

(Photo: Robert Hoehne/shutterstock.com) 

 I read a piece about USB system security that had some funny but unsettling quotes from you, about how you can’t be safe unless you physically block up the USB ports on your computer. Can you explain what the issues are?

That research was structurally different from everything else we have done, because, in this case we aren’t finding a vulnerability, and demanding a fix for the vulnerability as we usually do. That’s because there is no easy fix. 

It’s not one company’s responsibility, or even 800 companies’ responsibility to fix it for their customers. The USB issue is more of a systemic risk.

The risk is this: Everything you plug into a USB port can masquerade as any number of devices. In the good old days, you plugged in a printer to the parallel port. You had to install the specific printer driver. As a user, were in the loop as to what was happening.

But USB got rid of all that extra work. You plug anything into a USB port, be it a storage device, a keyboard, a printer, or anything that works right out of the box. But in some sense, you lose control over what attaches to your computer. You plug something in, and just by its physical shape, you think, “this is a storage device, or this is a printer.”

What takes people by surprise is that any of these devices can pretend to also be any of the other devices. And that’s not necessarily a vulnerability, but it’s a big risk. And it’s a risk that we all accepted when we started using this plug-and-play technology.

There’s no human in the loop, no decision required. But the risks have been under-emphasized. People are not really aware of how much they are actually trusting every single USB device that they plug into their computer.

There’s a product that came out because of our research, called a USB Condom. So you have this great metaphor of sticking one thing into another thing. And we don’t do this with unfamiliar people’s parts, right? There must be a condom in between [laughs].

What this USB Condom achieves is that you can charge a phone without transferring any viruses or any data. The USB Condom [now called SyncStop] selectively wires the charging wires, and not the data transfer wires. 

There’s a whole STD parallel here, for sure.

We want to warn people about risks they may not be taking consciously, and the risk here is that when you plug any USB device into your computer, you are at risk of that USB taking over your entire computer. And you are at an additional risk that it does so in a way you can never recover from. A virus that is already aware of USB’s possibilities doesn’t necessarily have to install itself into the hard disk.

It can just as well install itself into other USB devices, let’s say, the webcam, which is usually connected over USB. So now you have a virus living in your webcam, and you reinstall your operating system, but the virus is still there.

To make matters worse, there’s no way to know what’s running on your webcam–it’s a complete black box. You will end up in a somewhat paranoid state. You know your computer was infected once, but you’ll never know whether you can recover from it.

So the only way to recover from that would be to get totally new hardware?    

Well you’d need a new computer entirely, but also every single USB device that also attached to your old computer could be infected, so you’d also want to get those replaced, including your keyboard, your mouse, your thumb-drives, and printer. But also all the computers that those devices were ever plugged into could be affected, like your TV or even your girlfriend’s computer. So the paranoia is…. bottomless.  

It’s like mono, or even chlamydia. But there’s no test for it. So you know that the ex-ex of your girlfriend was showing symptoms for chlamydia, and there’s a slight chance that it will be transmitted to you, but there’s no way of knowing until you see the symptoms. It really puts people into a paranoid state. This USB research resonated very strongly with a lot of people, and not just in the corporate world.

The way I heard it summarized best is: USB is a hole in your computer. You can read this in two ways. It’s both a physical hole, in the enclosure of your computer, but it’s also a gaping security hole. 

Are these attacks becoming more common?

When we did this research, there was very little evidence that these attacks were actually happening. This goes for a lot of our work. We venture into unknown territory and see what we find. And oftentimes we find possibilities that criminals haven’t really used yet.

In the case of bad USBs though, the plot is thickening with state-sponsored adversaries doing this a lot. Out of the NSA papers, you know, the stolen papers, some evidence came out that they actually were using [USB hacks] offensively.

But then, more interestingly, even pre-dating our research from last year, there was a large government agency that got infected by a virus, and in response, they didn’t just re-image their computers [reformat the hard drives and reinstall everything]. They destroyed all their computers, including mice, keyboards, everything!

Wow.

They smashed it. They had to get new keyboards, because they were worried the virus had spread everywhere. You’d think that’s going a little bit overboard, right?

But they didn’t even want to explain why they needed to get new keyboards, even though everybody was making fun of them. Probably if you Google that, you'll get a lot of cynical remarks over burning up taxpayer’s money.

But let’s say you are the NSA–then you know what’s going on. And if you are part of the same government, the NSA advises you that it’s probably a good idea to also throw away the keyboard if the Russians have broken into your computer.

For you and I, and probably most of your readers, it still seems like science fiction paranoia. But it’s certainly not science fiction as in time travel. It’s already here. It’s just a matter of who your adversary is. 

Adding to that thought, malicious USB attacks aren’t actually that difficult to pull off anymore. You don’t need a $10 billion per year budget to do it, like the NSA has. The source code is on the internet now, published by some U.S. researcher.

With just a few weeks of preparation, you can pull off a beautifully bad USB attack. If you do it the right way, by using a normal virus, for something that’s on a million computers already, you can make that virus infect all the USB devices connected to it, and make those infect all the computers that they are connected to. This could spread very widely, and at relatively little cost.

And like you said with the STD metaphor, it can almost take on a life of its own, even beyond the scope of what the original planners thought of, right?

Absolutely, yeah. 

I love these human metaphors with the computer network. It’s so fascinating.

And it seems like a lot of people do. This USB research we did was pretty simple, but it got huge attention. Everybody felt affected by it. And I think everybody was reminded of using USB, and maybe having a slightly bad feeling, and then running a virus scan on a new USB stick and finding that there’s no virus.

Being told that you were doing it wrong all along, since it’s not necessarily detectable by a virus scanner. The idea that there may be viruses actually living inside the hardware, I think, resonated with people very strongly.  

And, I’m sure, also terrified them.    

It’s everywhere, right? When you have one person with Ebola running around, or in an airport, or a crowded mall in the U.S., who knows what’s next? Thousands of people could die, or maybe nothing will happen. Who knows, right? But the possibility is just so immense. 

(Photo: Security Research Labs/Courtesy of Karsten Nohl)

(Photo: Christopher Michel/Creative Commons)

Imagine it: you're an astronaut and launch day for your first spaceflight has arrived. Years of intense study and training have culminated in this moment. You're suited up and ready to go. In mere minutes, you'll be getting strapped into your spacecraft and blasting into the cosmos.

So, how do you spend these final precious moments on Earth?

If you're flying from the U.S., you'll probably play poker. If you're flying aboard a spaceflight leaving from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, you'll be ordered to pee on the back-right tire of a bus.

It's tradition.

Such rituals, many of which pay homage to the launch-day behavior of spaceflight pioneers, help to soothe frayed nerves on a day filled with excitement, according to former NASA astronaut Paul Lockhart. Lockhart, who piloted two Space Shuttle missions to the International Space Station during 2002, recalls participating in "comforting actions that make what you’re doing approachable, so that you’re more calm." Though some of these traditions have a high quirk factor, they also provide a sense of stability and make astronauts feel linked to those who have traveled before them.

The November 23, 2002 launch of Endeavour, piloted by Paul Lockhart. (Photo: NASA) 

“People become very comforted in doing the same routine before launch," says Lockhart. "And sometimes that has to happen two or three times for a single mission, because your launch could be delayed if there was weather or if a system failed."

For spaceflights leaving from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the pre-launch traditions begin with a hearty breakfast and a celebratory sheet cake—regardless of the time of day or night.

"The breakfast is a tradition that’s been held since probably the early days of the space program," says Lockhart. A few hours before launch, the astronauts, dressed in their crew shirts and slacks, gather for a feast of steak and eggs, accompanied by a celebratory cake. The breakfast serves as a last-minute photo op, as well as an opportunity for the crew members to line their stomachs with sustaining fare for the long flight ahead. But nerves often get in the way of nourishment.

The Gemini 8 crew having a super-casual pre-launch breakfast in March 1966. (Photo: NASA)

In his memoir, Riding Rockets, Mike Mullane, who flew three Space Shuttle missions between 1984 and 1990, recalls a communal loss of appetite on launch day: "Most of us ate nothing or very lightly. I had a piece of toast."

For Mullane, the standard steak, eggs, and coffee was not on the menu. "One bite of that fare and I would have vomited. Nobody drank coffee. That would have been bladder suicide," he wrote.

Since the early days of NASA's manned flight program, the breakfast has been an exercise in seeming calm while freaking out on the inside. "Launch breakfasts always have an air of studied casualness," writes Michael Collins, the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo 11 mission, in his book Carrying the Fire. On the morning of that fateful mission to the moon, "anyone overhearing our conversation would think that we five were slightly bored at the prospect of another empty day." 

The Gemini 11 crew getting their steak and eggs on in November 1966. (Photo: NASA) 

After breakfast and the cake that no one eats, astronauts don their launch suits and, with minutes to spare before the van arrives to transport them to the launch pad, sit down to play cards. Lockhart explains the rules of the game: "It’s not a game of who has the best hand, it’s who has the worst hand," he says. "And you can’t leave until the commander has the worst hand at poker. So you sit there playing cards and you’re saying, 'Come on, let’s hurry up, you need to win by losing so that we can go.'" 

Sometimes, if the cards aren't falling as they should, this game of bad-on-purpose poker can come perilously close to messing with the launch schedule.

"I recall one time we got everything completed about one minute before we had to walk out the door," says Lockhart. "But it all came out in good order."

Having completed the crucial poker game, Lockhart, front left, walks toward the van that will carry the STS-111 crew to the launch pad. (Photo: NASA)

Following the termination of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, manned launches from Kennedy Space Center are on hold. Until at least 2017, when stateside human spaceflight launches are projected to resume, American astronauts fly from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where a whole other set of pre-launch traditions is in place.

Most of the Russian rituals pay tribute to Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who, in 1961, became the first human to go to space. The preparations kick off about two weeks before launch, when the astronauts visit Gagarin's old office in Star City and sign a guest book. Five days to a week before launch, the astronauts, now staying at Cosmonaut Hotel in Baikonur, go to a grove on the Avenue of the Cosmonauts and plant a tree. Every space traveler who has flown from Baikonur, going all the way back to Gagarin, has planted a tree at this grove.

Crew members of Expedition 36/37 plant a tree at the Avenue of the Cosmonauts in May 2013. (Photo: NASA/V. Zelentsov)

In the 48 hours before launch, the Gagarin homages really ramp up. Two days before leaving earth, crew members get a haircut. On the night prior to launch, it's time to watch the 1969 movie White Sun of the Desert, a high-action tale set during the Russian civil war. When the new day dawns, crew members depart the Cosmonaut Hotel, signing their room doors as they leave. All of this mimics the pre-launch behavior of Gagarin prior to his historic 1961 flight aboard the Vostok.

Crew members of Expedition 42 sign their hotel room doors in November 2014. (Photo: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

Once the crew has left the hotel, each member participates in a newer tradition: prayers and blessings performed by a Russian Orthodox priest. A man in gold-accented black robes flings holy water onto each space traveler while pushing a golden cross into their face. Every crew member is invited to receive the blessing, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof. Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American, Muslim woman who traveled to the ISS as a self-funded space traveler in 2006, recalls in her memoir that "the Russians had asked me if I had any objection to participating in a Christian ceremony, and I replied that a prayer in any language and any religion is still a prayer."

Russian Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev gets blessed at Baikonur prior to the March 2014 launch of Expedition 39. (Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The blessing is one of the few Russian traditions not linked to Gagarin. According to the European Space Agency, it was established in 1994, when Soyuz TM-20 mission commander Alexander Viktorenko requested that the rocket be blessed prior to departing for the Russian space station Mir. Ever since, the blessing has been performed on the rocket, the crew, and even members of the media, who get doused in holy water after assembling on the desert steppe.

The power of Christ compels you to follow the rule of thirds. (Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Following the blessing, crew members board a bus to the launch pad. But it's not a direct journey—there is a mandatory bathroom break along the way. According to the ESA, Gagarin was on his way to the launch pad in 1961 when he realized he needed to urinate one last time. The bus was stopped, and Gagarin got off, headed to the back-right tire, and relieved himself. As a tribute, each bus trip to the Baikonur launch pad now incorporates a stop, during which crew members pee on the back-right bus tire.

“Much is made of this as a tradition, but really, if you’re going to be locked in a rocket ship, unable to leave your seat for quite a few hours, it’s just common sense,” writes retired astronaut Chris Hadfield in his book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. The only problem is that, when clad in a launch suit, one cannot simply unzip one's fly. Hadfield writes that “the suit techs on board had to help us undo all the tricky fasteners they’d painstakingly closed not an hour before, so we were able to urinate manfully on the tire without spoiling our plumage.”

Women are excused from participating in the urination ritual, but may bring a vial of their own urine to pour on the tire if they so desire.

All of these rituals help calm nervy space travelers, but what of the astronauts' families who are tasked with nervously watching their loved ones launch into space? They, too, participate in traditions designed to keep the acknowledge the specialness of the experience while keeping worrying to a minimum.

Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka gets a trim at Baikonur, two days ahead of the March 27, 2015 launch of Expedition 43. (Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

“For the shuttle launches, the family are taken down to the launch control center," says Lockhart, who, in addition to flying for NASA, served as an "astronaut escort" at Kennedy Space Center, during which he accompanied families on launch days. According to Kennedy tradition, children are rounded up in front of a whiteboard, given markers, and allowed to draw anything they like. 

"They do this to keep the children occupied while the countdown process is occurring," says Lockhart. "NASA covers that whiteboard with plastic and it becomes wall art. So if you go over to the launch control center at Kennedy Space Center, and you walk through the halls, you’ll find dozens of these whiteboards that have been drawn by the children." 

The whiteboards provide a fascinating kid's-eye view into what it's like to have a family member blast off into space. "You get a big perspective of a young child who is six or seven and who doesn’t really understand what’s happening," says Lockhart. "Then you’ll get the art from the teenage sons and daughters, or maybe someone who’s just entered into college, and their drawings portray what’s happened to their family. Some of them are really enlightening."

Following a successful launch, families visit the launch director's office and place their loved one's mission patch on the door. Then, they are invited to participate in one last tradition of unknown origin: tucking into a meal of beans and cornbread alongside NASA crew. "My wife did not like this one," says Lockhart. "The kids are running everywhere, and they serve the family cornbread and some sort of cold beans. Who knows why."  

Post-launch cornbread and beans: an inscrutable NASA tradition. (Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls) 

(Photo: Union County Historical Museum/Used with Permission) 

This story was sponsored by the fine folks of Enjoy Illinois.

Every war has its heroes, but some go more unsung than others. Others become king.

One of Illinois’ proudest homefront warriors was just such a royal figure, and he wasn’t even human. King Neptune was actually a fat Hereford swine who managed to raise over $250 million dollars (in modern dollars) for the U.S. Navy by selflessly auctioning off every part of his porcine being for a battleship that never got made.

Born in 1942 on the Boner family farm in West Frankfort, Illinois, the pig who would be king was originally named Parker Neptune, taking the name of his father, Parker Sensation. The runt of 12 piglets born in his litter, Neptune got singled out early when young Patty Boner took a shine to the animal and began to raise him as a project for her local 4-H club. Later that year, her father Sherman, began talking to Marion, Illinois Navy recruiter Don C. Lingle (originally from Anna, Illinois) about pork. Like so many things during World War II, pork was a rationed commodity, but Sherman Boner told Lingle that he could provide him with some pig meat. He was talking about Parker Neptune.

Lingle had intended to use the piglet for a Navy fundraising dinner, upon being presented with the young Neptune, he found that he couldn’t slaughter him, describing the pig in a later interview as “an innocent-looking thing.”

Yet where Lingle saw doe-eyed innocence, he also saw opportunity. If those adorable little piggy eyes could keep this animal from the dinner table, maybe they could open a few charitable wallets as well. Thus, the runty little piglet once known as Parker Neptune, was rechristened King Neptune.

Lingle joined up with local auctioneer, L. Oard Sitter, and took his porky new Navy mascot to a Marion fundraising auction. According to a piece provided by Stu Fliege, Vice-President of the Illinois Historical Society, the war bonds were to help pay for the floundering USS Illinois battleship. On a whim, he draped the pig with a Navy Blue blanket. Maybe it was the blanket, or maybe it was the look in his eyes, but bits of Neptune began flying off the stage. As told in an article in the Southeastern Missourian, people were pledging $100 in war bonds for a leg! $300 for a shoulder! By the end of his first appearance, King Neptune had raised $11,200.

After the massive success of his first appearance, by his next, he was given a little crown that was strapped on top of the blanket with an elastic band, and he was adorned with silver earrings and painted hooves. By his third appearance, King Neptune was drawing around $50,000 in bonds. Lingle and Sitter began parading him around fundraising events all across southern Illinois. At each auction, parts of the growing pig would be sold off to the highest bidder, who could have demanded their pound or so of flesh, but no one ever did, and Lingle was able to keep King Neptune each time. As the pig’s fame grew, larger fundraising auctions across the state began demanding an appearance from the Navy’s increasingly rotund mascot.

King Neptune began to be known as the “red, white, and blue pig,” for his red and white coloration, and the blue of his eyes (or possibly his blanket). In 1943, then Illinois governor Dwight H. Green straight up bought King Neptune for a million dollars. Of course, he too returned the porker. Many of Neptune’s appearances were sponsored by local chapters of the Elks, and the famous pig eventually even became an honorary member of a number of chapters of the fraternal organization.

By the time the war ended, Lingle and King Neptune had raised over $19 million for the Navy, which in today’s dollars would read more like $250 million. Unfortunately despite raising more money than possibly any other single pig in the history of the world, it still was not enough to fund the creation of the USS Illinois, which was cancelled in 1945 after 22 percent of the ship had been completed. Nonetheless, King Neptune still raked it in for the Navy.

(Photo: Eric Crowley/Flickr)

With his fundraising life seemingly at an end, the Navy moved to have King Neptune sent to the Chicago Stockyards in 1946, but Lingle swept in once again before the King was made into bacon. Lingle sent the pig to live on the farm of Ernest Goddard, who continued to load the pig into his truck and parade him around.

By the time King Neptune made it to the Goddard farm, his celebrity lifestyle had seen him plump up to around 500 pounds, and he continued to grow until he weighed a whopping 700 pounds, and was so fat that his hanging eye folds had essentially blinded him. According to an NPR interview with Goddard’s grandson Jim, they had to lead King Neptune around by tapping his head with a stick.

King Neptune finally died in 1950, a couple days short of 8 years old. For his services, King Neptune was given a Navy funeral with full military honors, and buried just outside of Anna under a headstone noting the pig’s efforts “to help make a free world.”

Unfortunately not long after he was buried the creation of a new highway saw his grave moved to a new site where vandalism and neglect soon took over. In response to the damage being caused to King Neptune’s headstone, a brass memorial plaque was installed outside of the Trail of Tears Tourist Information Center located at a rest stop off of I-57.

Speaking both with members of the Illinois Historical Society and members of the Union County Clerk’s office, it seems that older generations are well aware of King Neptune and his heroic legacy, but it be being forgotten by many younger people. But we should all salute, the hero, the pig, the King. God Oink the U.S.A.!

The tooth (Photo: Musée de Tautavel)

What did you do on your summer break? Two young archaeology volunteers from France found the tooth of a human who likely lived in what's now southwestern France about 560,000 years ago.

A 16-year-old named Camille found the tooth while working with another young volunteer at a site in Tautavel, one of the most important prehistoric sites known. The tooth isn't the oldest human fossil found in Europe -- but it is the oldest bit of human remains found in France, the Museum of Tautavel says.

A tooth by itself can't tell researchers as much about early humans and their development as, say, a skull. But as a treasure to find on a volunteer archaeology gig, it's hard to beat.

Camille and her partner (Photo: Musée de Tautavel)

Bonus finds: Catholic relics buried with Jamestown founders, an ancient wine cellar

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

"Rubber Duck" hangs out in Pittsburg in 2013. (Photo: Denis Bocquet/Flickr CC-BY 2.0)

If you were to come across “Rubber Duck” floating placidly in the harbor of your major city, you would probably, like most people, stop and stare for a bit. You might admire the way its roundness contrasts with the angularity of its fellow vessels, and how its smooth yellow head stands out against the sky. You might chuckle at how it makes the whole port look like one big bathtub.

You probably wouldn’t think, in this world of Jeff Koons's Balloon Dogs and Damien Hirst's expensive art sharks, “wow, this must be among the most divisive creaturely artworks in the modern pantheon.” But it is.

“Rubber Duck” is the creation of Dutch sculptor Florentijn Hofman, and is, in the words of one of its most vocal critics, “easily the most visible public conceptual artwork in the world today.” When the duck visits cities, hundreds of thousands of people flock to visit it.

But where some see joy and innocence, others see a scourge on the landscape. One critic in Belgium chose to let actions speak louder than words, and stabbed it 42 times in the dead of night. This caused community members to rally around it, establishing a Giant Duck Night Watch for the remainder of its term.

Why do we love this duck so much? Why do we hate it? And, perhaps most importantly, why can’t we escape it?

A sojourn in Seoul. (Photo: Travel Oriented/Flickr CC-BY 2.0)

In art years, "Rubber Duck" is only a baby. Its first public appearance was back in 2007, in Saint-Nazaire, France. Nestled comfortably into the Loire River harbor, perky tail feathers abutting old German U-Boat pens, the duck “became the mascot” of an annual arts festival simply by gazing serenely at onlookers and being 100 feet tall.

In the following years, rubber ducks made their way to Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Canada, and elsewhere. People all over the world were drawn in. When one got to Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor for a monthlong stint in spring 2013, a swarm of expectant fans had somehow found the test inflation site, “a shipyard like 20 minutes outside the city,” and were lining up to shoot photos, Hofman told Bloomberg.

By the time it reached Azerbaijan in late 2013, one journalist touted it as a “worldwide celebrity.” The Chrysler Museum of Art, host of the duck’s May 2014 trip to Norfolk, Virginia, seems almost bemused by its success: “We set attendance records every day,” the museum's website announced. “We sold what we thought would be two weeks worth of souvenir merchandise in a day and a half. We had people taking pictures at a rate of 2,500 per hour... Crowds were present at all hours of the day.”

The duck draws crowds in Sydney. (Photo: Alfred Hernandez/Flickr CC-BY 2.0) 

But, ironically, the duck’s biggest sin may be its own ubiquity. Art and architecture critic Kriston Capps argues that the sculpture has nothing to do with any particular space—its message is the same wherever it is, which defeats the purpose of place-based art. “When it's done right, public art expresses some unique value about a city's particular cultural vantage point,” he writes on Citylab. “Rubber Duck has all the nutritional value and regional identity of a Diet Coke.”

The instantly recognizable features that made the duck a great toy can also make it seem like lousy art. "With the repetition… it feels like it’s almost become more of a meme,” Donovan Hohn, author of Moby Duck, said in a phone interview.“It feels like advertising, the way that people like to look out for the Goodyear Blimp. For me it becomes less interesting the more he does it.” 

But why do we love rubber ducks so much? Where did they come from, and when exactly did their body mass start increasing so dramatically? 

Ganine's rubber duck patent application, featuring his original design. (Image: US Patent Office/Public Domain)

The story of the rubber duck starts small. In the late 19th century, following rubber’s introduction to the marketplace, many people decided, apparently independently, to shape the new material into ducks. Patents floated by every couple of decades—there were rubber duck hunting decoys, ducks that couldn’t fall over, and hollow duck-shaped bath toys with holes in them that could be squeezed “to produce an attractive fountain-like effect, and also to enable the playing of pranks by one person upon another.” For whatever reason, none of them quite took off.

Eventually, a sculptor named Peter Ganine began experimenting with ducks too. Ganine was an inveterate anthropomorphizer—he is most famous for redesigning the chess set by adding “austere, thoughtful faces” to the pieces, and for a grinning whale toy that won him a design prize from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1949, he patented a toy that finally brought all the rubber duck’s most salient features together. His version squeaked, floated, stayed upright, and, perhaps most importantly, smiled. He sold millions of them.

Soon, the cute yellow creatures were synonymous with childhood, for a few major reasons. Their natural habitat is the bathtub, where most people don’t hang out after a certain age, and so they’re inextricably associated with a splashier, more innocent time, says the National Toy Hall of Fame. They also have an immediate psychological effect on us. Primary colors, smiling faces, and baby animals all “have the almost narcotic power to induce feelings of happiness in the human brain,” Hohn writes in Moby Duck, a book about his experiences chasing a flock of normal-sized rubber ducks lost at sea after a shipping accident.

Little Richard adds some rock and roll cool to "Rubber Duckie" in 1993.

Plus, there's that distinctive squeak. It’s an effective enough combo that “Rubber Duckie,” a song written for the children’s show Sesame Street, hit #11 on the generally adult-oriented Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1971.

Ducks are also a cultural blank slate. Unlike even the teddy bear (which used to mean you had the fuzzies for President Roosevelt), or the lawn flamingo (flush with class-related undertones), the rubber duck has always just been a basic bath toy—it’s ceaseless presence and its historical and emotional smoothness make it the epitome of its category. “In the bestiary of American childhood, there is now no creature more iconic than the rubber duck,” writes Hohn. 

The rubber duck is so ubiquitous it serves as a kind of non-statement, a red-beaked blank slate upon which individuals can perch whatever type of identifying characteristic best encapsulates the message they hope to send. That’s why tchotchke shops are full of ducks wearing sports jerseys and city paraphernalia, charities worldwide can safely adopt them as symbols, and computer programmers use “rubber-ducking” as shorthand for “explaining something to a non-human interface.”

The rage-inducing waterfowl visits Rotterdam in 2008. (Photo: Mirko Tobias Schafer/Flickr CC-BY 2.0)

Sculptor Florentijn Hofman counts on all of these attributes for his controversial ducks’ success. But instead of a hat or a prop, its special sauce is sheer size. “By making huge sculptures, you downsize the human,” Hofman told Bloomberg last year. “That takes away our ego and makes us communicate easier with each other." 

Hohn, remembering his own duck-chasing experiences, thinks there’s an element of taming the wild in there, too. “So much of the ocean feels really inhuman and hard to comprehend,” he says, “so there’s something about a toy duck washed up on a wild beach somewhere, or this giant duck on the ocean, that humanizes it.” The duck’s artificial sublimity and natural appeal ushers in warm associations for people from Azerbaijan to New Zealand.

Which, some argue, is exactly the opposite of the point. Not only does the duck's omnipresence not discriminate between cities, it also locks many of their citizens out of the revenue stream. Hofman’s decision to enforce copyright over all rubber ducks when his art project is in town funnels the cash flow it generates into certain approved channels, and he and his organizers have been known to sue people over infringement, or even to saddle up ol’ Quacky and leave town.

“It makes me crazy to see this show arrive to cities, deprive all of the local businesspeople from the income that these spectacles generates… and then kind of take off,” Capps said in a phone interview. “I can’t believe people don’t see rage when they see these rubber ducks.”

The iconic Tiananmen Square photo, duck-tered by a satirist. (Image: Imgur/Weibo)

The duck’s salvation may come in its limited, and somewhat accidental, capacity to surprise. Its iconicity can still be subverted and localized—in 2013, Chinese authorities banned searches for “giant yellow duck” after an artist subbed the sculpture in for tanks in an infamous photo of Tiananmen Square. It also can pull some physical tricks. The statue is made out of a hollow PVC pipe skeleton, seated on a giant pontoon and wrapped in plastic that blows up with the help of a generator.

Thanks to a computer in its head, the duck automatically deflates again when wind speeds become threatening, so that one of the first art critics to look for it instead saw it as a giant yellow puddle. Ducks have also deflated, for various reasons, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Philadelphia ("It's like a very large bicycle tube,” said one man tasked with patching Philly’s). In 2014, a typhoon sunk a duck in Guiyang, China, and it was never found. Such performances, Hohn says, make it a bit more interesting: “maybe I’ve kind of been hoping that’s what’ll happen to it.”

After all, when a legend swells up this big, what is left for it to do but pop?

The duck deflates in Taiwan.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The neighborhood menace chews on some wildlife. (Photo: LisaSympson/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Curfews are usually reserved for unruly teens and convicted felons. But increasingly, governments are trying to apply them to an even more slippery target—cats.

Earlier today, felines were once again put on notice, as Australia announced its intention to encourage a curfew that would keep cats off the streets and, more importantly, out of the woods.

Australian Threatened Species Commissioner Gregory Andrews hopes to slowly impose a 24-hour curfew for roaming-prone house cats. Although the federal government can’t actually mandate this, Andrews plans to work with local and state branches and educate people until it’s an accepted practice, saying “it’s a journey that Australia has to go on.”

The Australian federal government is merely the latest in a series of of authorities who have tried to protect other species by slapping cats with curfews. Some Australian towns are ahead of the game—cats living in certain Sydney suburbs can’t show their paws out of doors from dusk until dawn, for fear they’ll go tearing through nearby wildlife preserves (they also must wear two bells at all times). And since the Yarra Ranges community council imposed a wall-to-wall curfew last year, cats seen off their property are subject to formal complaints, trapping, and, worst-case scenario, a new, fully caged life in the local pound.

The northern quoll, cat victim. (Photo: Wildlife Explorer/Picasa CC BY 3.0)

The impetus? Australia is full of smaller, rarer mammals that make great cat snacks. Zoologist Chris Johnson writes that “cats and foxes can account for practically all of the [Australian] mammal extinctions of the last 200 years,” starting when felines were brought over to the continent by European settlers. 

Cats killed the lesser bilby and the Darling Downs hopping mouse. They’ve also interrupted reintroductions, like that of the rufous hare-wallaby, and continue to menace dwindling species like the northern quoll and ringtailed possum. Minister of the Environment Ted Hunt recently called feral cats "tsunamis of violence and death for Australia's native species.” Australia's Feral Cat Plan was just released, and it aims to exterminate two million strays over the next five years. 

Domestic cats are less responsible for the slaughter than their feral counterparts. But Andrews hopes keeping them indoors will prevent them from supplementing their canned food, mating with their wild brethren, and killing for sport.

Cats enjoy a nighttime snack at a cat cafe in Japan. (Photo: Takashi Hososhima/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

In recent years, other countries have gotten in on the cat curfew act. Thanks to a 2012 ordinance, cats and dogs can now only strut down Las Vegas’s Sunset Strip between the hours of 5 a.m. and noon. (It passed unanimously, despite an Elvis impersonator’s pleas to be able to keep performing at all hours with his gold-jumpsuited dog.) Nominally, the rule is meant to keep animals from overheating, but some think its real goal is to cull strays and keep out the city's pet-owning homeless population.

Japan jumped on the bandwagon in 2012, when a revision to their animal protection code banned the “public display of cats and dogs” after 8 p.m., Though the authorities meant to target late-night pet shops, the ordinance has taken a toll on the popular cat cafes, which cater to stressed-out after-work businessmen.

“Everybody knows cats are really happy in the evening, with their big, cute eyes,” one cat cafe owner told Reuters. “So I just can't understand why the people at the top are ignoring this.”

A cat attempts to forage indoors. (Photo: The27thmaine/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Other places have even bigger plans. A New Zealand group called Cats To Go, led by well-known economist Gareth Morgan, wants to ban all felines from the island in order to reduce noise and protect native birds. The group provides opportunities to report nearby strays, education in the form of pages like “your cat is not innocent,” and encouragement for pet owners to “make this cat your last.” Other New Zealanders have proposed a less extreme three strike system.

The highest-profile cat curfew proponent in the United States is probably Jonathan Franzen. The bird-obsessed bestselling author uses his books, his nonfiction, and his public pulpit to advocate for keeping cats indoors. “I would stress that I personally am not anti-cat,” Franzen told The Daily Beast in 2011. “But with songbird populations falling all across North America, I do think it's time for a movement.”

Of course, cat curfews are difficult to enforce. As Sydney-based veterinarian Dr. Anne Fawcett pointed out on her blog, Small Animal Talk, last year,“animals have NO IDEA of the rules.” And even if they did understand human laws, cats of all creatures would probably have no qualms breaking them.

Good luck implementing this, Australia!

Cats enjoying their potentially numbered outdoor days. (Photo: Worak/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

The US Army Corp of Engineers work often goes largely unseen and unappreciated—why they make the news, it's usually when things have gone wrong. Think of, say, when the New Orleans levees failed, or species are endangered by dams. Critique of the 245-year old agency crosses party lines: Mother Jones has called them "plodding, complacent, careless" while the Cato Institute makes regular calls for their dismantling.

But the US Army Corp of Engineers does have small moments of strange beauty. The Mississippi River Basin Model is one such example.

Built to model flooding along the Mississippi, work began in 1943. Wartime workers were hard to find, so Army Corp used the manpower that was available to them—Italian and German prisoners of war. Many of the laborers were capable engineers, handpicked for the project, and they proved to be hard to replace when the war ended.

The model, was built at a skewed ratio, with a horizontal scale of 1:2000, but a vertical scale of 1:100 (meaning the Rocky Mountains would be a towering 50-feet tall) saw 79 simulations run over its active period, with each simulation taking anywhere from weeks to months. In 1952, information gathered using the model prevented major flooding in Omaha, avoiding as much as $65 million in flood damages. The model also became a tourist destination for a time, drawing over 5,000 people a year to stride like giants along walkways above the banks of the tiny Mississippi.

Aimed to have been completed by 1948,  the model wasn't finished until 1966, a full 26 years after it was started. Six years later it was used for the last time. Today it sits abandoned in a Jackson, MI park. As the largest small-scale model ever built, it is a piece of beautiful, if unintentional, art. The USACE should be proud.. 

An artist's impression of the aurora (Image: Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan/Caltech)

Eighteen and a half light years away from Earth, there's an object that we call LSR J1835 + 3259. It's the type of body astronomers call a brown dwarf, or a failed star—more massive than Jupiter, but not quite big enough to be a star. The strange thing is: it's throwing off radio waves that we can measure here on Earth.

That surprised scientists, and they started looking for a cause. Now, they've concluded in a Nature paper that the signals from the failed star come from aurorae—the sort of celestial display that's known, on this planet, as the northern or southern lights.

Aurorae are connected to planets' magnetic fields: they occur when electrons stream through a planet's atmosphere and run into other molecules. These collisions give off bright, colorful light. 

In our solar system, Jupiter's aurorae are the strongest. But the ones the scientists detected at the brown dwarf are even more extravagant–about 1 million times brighter than aurorae here on Earth.

"If you were to somehow stand on the brown dwarf's surface and survive—the surface gravity is maybe 100 times more intense than Earth's, and the temperature is several hundred to several thousand degrees—you'd see a beautiful bright-red aurora," one of the scientists told Space.com.

Bonus finds: Possible MH370 debris, a cat that survived underwater for an hour, an amazing peacock spider, a drunk badger

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Animal bones and horns are stacked high at a stall at the Fetish Market. These items are usually ground up for use in powders, pastes, or other potions. (All photos: Angelica Calabrese)

Got a big test coming up? Powdered chameleon will help you pass with flying colors. Training for a marathon? Rather than protein powder, try horse’s skull. Or, is unrequited love getting you down? A simple wayinoue, or love charm, should convince your future partner of your true worth.

Whatever your ailment is, the traditional healers at the Akodessewa Fetish Market in Lome, Togo have a solution. From buffalo skull to antelope horn, desiccated cobra to bear skin, the healers, or fetish priests, in West Africa’s largest “Marché des Fetiches” have a world of decaying animals at their fingertips, ready to be ground up, burned, imbibed, or whatever else the gods may decry.

Sitting under a shady tree in the center of an open plaza, Elias Guedenon, the son of one of the market’s fetish priests, describes Akodessewa as something of a pharmacy for practitioners of the voodoo religion.

A fetish priest's shack at the Akodessewa Fetish Market in Lome, Togo.

But this market has one striking difference from the others dotted across Togo and its eastern neighbor, Benin, where leopard heads and dog skulls and secret herbs can be purchased to cure everyday maladies. At the Fetish Market in Togo’s capital, voodoo practitioners and tourists alike can, with the help of a fetish priest, consult the gods directly to discuss whatever is ailing them.

Voodoo is an animist religion indigenous to West Africa that spread across the Atlantic to Haiti and Brazil with the slave trade. There are over 40 different gods, or fetiches, in the voodoo religion, and each god selects his feticheur, or fetish priest with whom he will communicate through dreams, broken shells, and other means. The conversations between the gods and the fetish priests take place in the priests’ hut or shacks, where they usually construct small statues to act as channels for communication. 

In centuries past, customers would travel back and forth between consultations with the gods at the fetish priest’s home, and the market to purchase whatever objects the gods had deemed necessary. The Fetish Market, established in the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) way back in 1863, streamlined the process by adding the religious mediation stations to a commercial area where remedies were sold.

In the center of the Fetish Market, this iron sculpture houses the Vodun Gou, or Iron God, who protects the market.

Today, the markets offers visitors a glimpse not only into the realities of the often misunderstood voodoo religion, but also into the ways that contemporary Togolese are synthesizing tradition and modernity, finding creative ways to attract business and tourism alike.

The easiest way to get there is on a zemidjan, or motorbike taxi. You’ll bounce down a potholed dirt road just outside of downtown Lomé until you reach a misspelled sign advertising the Marché des Fetiches. Inside, a few young boys and women stand beside tables piled with animal parts: warthog skulls, the scaled skin of an armadillo, legs of rabbits, limp squirrel tails and curved parrot beaks, the still-brightly-colored feathers of small tropical birds. A breeze stirs a pungent scent of decay through the air, but a few of the Togolese vendors still manage to eat lunch among the heads, scooping their pate with their fingertips as fat flies droop past.

Beside the shady tree in the center of the plaza where Guedenon collects the entrance fee for visitors who want a guided tour, is a blackened, spiky iron sculpture bedecked with the skulls of sacrificed goats: this is the channel for the protector god of the market, the Vodun Gou, or Iron God.

To satisfy the Vodun Gou, the priests routinely sacrifice goats and cows. 

The fetish priests do their work by transforming everyday objects–from the tree at the entrance to the statues inside the fetish priests’ shacks–into channels through which they can communicate with the gods. The ability to communicate with the gods often runs in the family, Guedenon says. “You don’t become a fetish priest,” he emphasizes, “you are born a fetish priest.” When pregnant, the spouses of fetish priests consult with the gods to determine whether or not their child will also have the powers of communication.

Though his father was a fetish priest, Patience Dako was not chosen by the gods. But Dako, who now works as a guide at the Fetish Market, is nevertheless knowledgeable about the various protections and treatments that fetish priests offer. He pulls up his shirt to show us three small, black lines on his sternum, scars that mark the spot where his father made small cuts and rubbed them with a powder designed to protect him against evil and black magic. 

The fetish priests at the market practice white magic, Dako explains, not black magic. Even though they use dead animal parts, their goal is always to help and to heal, not to hurt. Ebony seeds dried in a powder made of chameleon, monkey’s head, and secret herbs will improve your memory, he explains, and if you want to become a stronger and faster runner, he suggests a combination of secret herbs with the skulls of a horse and a deer and the heads of a dog and rabbit. 

Patience Dako's father was a fetish priest, but he was not chosen by the gods for the profession. Today, he enthusiastically guides visitors through the market.

The macabre objects sold in the Fetish Market’s traditional pharmacy come from a number of entrepreneurial individuals who collect and sell dead animal parts. “We have relationships with people from all over Africa,” Dako explains. But he stresses that the animals sold to the market cannot be killed for the purpose of their sale to the market. “The feticheursconsult the spirits to be sure that the animal was found rather than killed. If it was killed, it’s not accepted,” he explains. 

The objects in the market range from everyday bats and goats and dogs sold by Togolese living nearby, to the foot-wide skin of an enormous boa constrictor from the jungles of Nigeria. But the market has an international audience that stretches far beyond West Africa: Dako tells us that objects arrive from Haiti and Brazil, as well as from West African expatriates living abroad in America and Europe. He pulls out a few ragged pieces of thick fur, far too thick for any animal living in a tropical area: a bear pelt. A Ghanaian living in Europe had used the pelt as decoration in his home; when it began to break down, he sold it to the Fetish Market rather than simply throwing it away.

The bear pelt that was sold to the Fetish Market once it began to break down. 

A few years ago, desperate patients might even be able to get their hands on an intact lion’s head, elephant’s foot, or hippopotamus skull at the Fetish Market – if they were willing to pay around $1,000 for it. But current governmental regulations have significantly curtailed the trade in parts of such protected animals, and they are rarely seen at the market today. But this doesn’t actually pose much of a problem, Guedenon explains. If lion’s head isn’t available, the head of less ferocious animal can be used. “It’s like Western medicine,” he says. “When you don’t find a specific product, you can use the generic version.”

Thanks to globalization, the market has changed significantly since it was first established 152 years ago, but it has always been a savvy operation. The original Beninese founders of the Marché des Fetiches were not only healers but also shrewd businessmen, and they soon realized that the market for fetish objects and traditional pharmacies was oversaturated in Benin. But in Togo, where the voodoo religion was also important, there were far fewer of such markets. In order to bring in more revenue, the Marché des Fetiches was moved from Dahomey to Lomé in the early years of the 20^th century.

At first, the new market was set up in Lomé’s main market at Assigamé. But as the needs of the city grew, vendors began squeezing stalls full of food in between those piled high with dog paws and rotting birds. A clear health hazard, it was eventually relocated to its current location in Akodessewa. Today, the scent of rot and smoke that emanates from the market fills only the abandoned hallways of half-constructed cement buildings nearby.

Inside of their shacks, fetish priests sell ebony wood seeds for good memory, good luck charms, and love amulets to tourists and Togolese practitioners.

But in spite of its dismal surroundings, the site continues to attract tourists from all over the world. For the equivalent of about $10 U.S. dollars, tourists can visit the market with a knowledgeable guide and take photos, and for an additional fee (one negotiated with the gods) they can even purchase fetish charms, and have their ailments diagnosed and treated by an experienced feticheur like Thomas Zonnontin.

Zonnontin presents visitors with his business card upon entrance into his corrugated tin shack, advertising his services as an “herbal healer in traditional medicine.” A framed, monogrammed, and color-printed certificate hanging on the tin and reed wall asserts his qualifications in traditional medicine. But in the center of the floor of the small shack is his legba, or the statue through which he communicates with the gods: two roughly hewn stone faces with curved, protruding noses, and cowry-shaped eyes covered in drippings of wax and animal parts.

Thomas Zannontin's son blesses a good luck charm, while his father's certificate in herbal medicine hangs on the wall behind him.

A visit works like this: A fetish priest like Zonnnontin markets his good-luck charms and fetish objects, and the visitor selects what he or she is interested in purchasing by placing each object in a tortoise shell before the legba. Each object is blessed with an incantation, and then Zonnontin begins the price-negotiation process by tossing and re-tossing a collection of broken cowry shells on the dirt floor. When a price is agreed upon and the purchases are made, he bids his visitors a warm goodbye, and insists that they be in touch to tell him how the charms and remedies are working. Zonnontin points out not only his phone number, but also his email address on the business card–you can contact him from wherever in the world you might be.

Good luck charms are placed in tortoise shells in front of the two "legba" in Thomas Zannontin's hut

The fetish priests have kept the Marché des Fetiches in operation for over 150 years, fielding relocations and a dwindling trade in animal parts, and responding to the contemporary demand for certifications, qualifications, and even email addresses. Today, gaggles of tourists taking photos mix with Togolese customers carrying plastic bags overflowing with purchases out of the market on the back of motorbikes.

If you can make the trip, stand the stench, and suspend your disbelief for a few hours, perhaps someday you might end up becoming a faster runner, throwing away your datebook because your memory has gotten so good, or convincing a dubious lover of your true worth. 

 A busy street in Havana prepares to become somewhat busier. (Photo: Stefan Vetter/Flickr)

What will Cuba look like in twenty years? Right now, as the lifting of most remaining travel restrictions and embargoes seems increasingly imminent, people all over the hemisphere are betting on the answer to this question. Hotels and cruise ships are moving in. Other businesses are gingerly following. And Cuban citizens are gearing up for great things.

But some fear that Cuba’s future smells like something other than conviviality. With more business and more tourism comes their less nourishing trappings—lots and lots of garbage.

“There will be people touring the islands in volumes and numbers that Cuba has never seen,” explains Dr. Sarah Hill, an anthropologist who has been traveling to Cuba since 1982. “And they’re going to bring stuff that they don’t want to carry around with them for the entire trip, and so they’re going to leave it behind. And that alone will generate a waste stream that will be new to Cuba.”

This dry-up of goods also made Cuba a haven for classic cars. (Photo: Steven Rushing/Flickr)

Twenty years ago, Cuba was technically filled with trash. But it was trash that didn’t look like trash. Thanks to various trade embargoes and the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba in the 1990s was essentially a closed system, cut off from most of the world’s goods. “There was nothing new to replace anything that you used up or broke,” says Hill, who studies “what people do with stuff they don’t want.”

So people made do with what they had, turning Coke cans into containers and dumps into public gardens. Hill knows people who became “artisanal plastic producers,” beach-combing for washed-up trash, melting it down, and pushing it through molding machines they had fashioned out of scavenged truck pistons.

Garbage is a problem that, from the outside, looks as straightforward as simple addition. More people + more goods = more trash. If there’s no way to get rid of the trash—say the place in question lacks infrastructure, or landfill space—that trash builds up. Cycle through over and over, and you’ve got quite a heap. 

The subtraction that would let you cancel out that heap, though, is often not so simple. This is true especially if the people bringing the extra trash are vacationers, or refugees, or otherwise transient, because it becomes difficult for governments to build up the necessary waste management revenue through regular channels, like local taxes. This is why so many burgeoning tourist hotspots, quickly-developing cities, and places with porous borders end up with more trash than they can handle. Not everywhere can act like New York City and ship extra rubbish to Virginia. 

Workers sort through trash on Thilafushi, the man-made trash island in the Maldives. (Photo: Shafui Hussain/Flickr)

At some level, Hill says, Cuban cities are already preparing. As credit card companies move in and entrepreneurs work to scale up wifi and other informal infrastructure, Santiago de Cuba, the country's second largest city, has quietly been rolling out brand new trucks, installing dumpsters, and adding street-sweeping shifts.

But look at places that have faced similar changes, and these measures don’t seem like quite enough. Take, for example, the Maldives, where the government has decided to turn the 300 daily tons of tourist garbage into their own artificial trash island, called Thilafushi. Or Beirut, Lebanon, where a huge influx of Syrian refugees, combined with protests blocking the city’s overtaxed landfills and general municipal disarray, has filled the streets with “mounds of stewing garbage.” Mainlanders and ecotourists have given the Galapagos much more than it can handle, and there is so much trash in Bangalore, India, that some travelers, paradoxically, go there to see it.

Trash doesn’t have to be forever, and in recent years, many relatively small places with relatively big trash problems have come up with ingenious, if arduous, solutions. Just look at Puerto Rico. After thousands of Puerto Ricans lost their homes in the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, officials directed them to the Martin Pena Canal, once a mangrove-bordered channel that flowed into the center of the capital city, San Juan. Swampland is a hard area to settle, so they filled it in the only way they could—with dirt, debris, and lots of garbage. The shantytowns they built on top grew steadily over the decades, and by 2010 the area housed about 30,000 people.

The Martin Pena Canal shantytown circa 1970, with San Juan rising in the distance. (Photo: John Vachon/NARA)

That many people meant even more trash. The heap grew up and out of the immediate swampland, and the channel, once 400 feet wide, shrank to a three-foot trickle. People started getting sick. When the garbage begun threatening the safety of entire estuary, people realized it was time to clean up Martin Pena Canal and rebuild on something more solid. Beginning in the 1970s, Puerto Ricans steadily drummed up local money and support to start the process; by the end of this year the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is slated to finish the job, and begin building bridges, sewers, and power lines.

This effort has taken decades. But sometimes, quick fixes are worse than no solutions at all. Oahu, Hawaii, the state’s most populous and popular island, found this out the hard way in 2009. Oahu is a tourist mecca, home to Honolulu and many of the state’s most pristine vistas. But it stays that way partially because Honolulu shunts all its trash off to the Leeward Coast, far from the common vacation spots. When the one landfill on the island filled up, officials accepted a private company’s offer to ship the extra trash up to Washington State.

There was just one problem: the private company didn’t have the necessary permits, and the residents of the Indian reservation in Seattle where they had planned to dump the trash made sure they never got them. Thus, bales of the trash ended up moldering in the yard of an industrial park on the island for nearly a year before the plan was abandoned. They were eventually incinerated in-state.

A "private landfill" in Santorini, Greece, another small island with a large trash problem. (Photo: Norbert Nagel/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The best defense against this kind of issue is a good offense, and one of the best offenses in the world belongs to Taipei City. Taiwan is an island nation, and its capital used to be swamped with trash. In 1998, the country's Environmental Protection Administration implemented a waste management program that seems draconian by mainland standards: residents must sort their junk, bag it in official, color-coded trash bags, and heave it onto the local garbage truck, which shows up five nights a week at a designated pickup spot.

It’s a complex system, and many a forum thread is dedicated to explaining its ins and outs to newcomers. It’s also efficient and effective—revenue from the special bags pays for the program, and Taipei City’s recycling rate has more than quintupled since it started. Devotees describe the nightly wait for the truck (which signals its arrival by jingling Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” at high volumes, like a demented ice cream van) as “one of Taiwan's liveliest communal rites.” Most importantly, there’s way less garbage kicking around.

A singing garbage truck makes its nightly rounds in Taipei City. (Photo: Jin/Flickr)

To those Cubans used to making household necessities out of flotsam, the ban’s lift still seems more like a promise than a threat. ”One friend told me that if the coming of the Americans means more garbage, then ‘let the city be covered in it,’” Hill writes.

But as things start ramping up, all involved parties would do well to be proactive and keep their noses peeled. After all, everything looks different from under the heap.

A Cuban street sweeper gets ready for the influx. (Photo: Diana Simmons/Flickr CC)

(Image: Library of Congress)

When someone talks about being "read the riot act," it usually means they've been caught engaging in antisocial behavior and chastised accordingly. But it's not just a quirky idiom—the origin of the phrase comes from a real Riot Act designed to quell discord. And it had to be read, out loud, in order to take effect.

Back in 1714, the original Riot Act was passed by British parliament. It took effect 300 years ago, on August 1, 1715. It was aimed at "preventing tumults and riotous assemblies," and made provisions for "more speedy and effectual punishing" of those who engaged in civil unrest. 

If a group of a dozen or more people gathered and showed signs of being unruly, the Riot Act enabled an officer of the law to approach the crowd and tell them to disperse. To do so, said officer had to literally read the Riot Act, in a manner similar to the United States' practice of reading someone their Miranda rights before interrogating them. 

The proclamation part of the Riot Act, which had to be recited aloud to the letter, went thusly:

"Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!"

Once the officer—who could be a mayor, bailiff, sheriff, or justice of the peace—read this wordy sentence, ideally in a booming and authoritative voice, the group received a grace period of one hour. After 60 minutes elapsed, any members of the crowd who remained had officially committed a felony. The punishment? Death.

Ideally, rabble rousers would listen to the reading of the Riot Act, reflect upon their wrongdoing, and each saunter away in silent contemplation, thus avoiding further confrontation and eventual death by execution. In practice, however, assembled crowds were less inclined toward such peaceable resolutions.

If the situation was spiraling out of control, the officer upholding the law was under no obligation to hang back for the full hour while things escalated further. In those cases, said officer could recruit any able-bodied bystanders to help subdue the rambunctious rabble.

Soldiers and protestors clash during the Gordon Riots of 1780. (Image: Painting by John Seymour Lucas/Public domain) 

During a Special Commission for the trial of rioters who participated in London’s massive anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, Lord Loughborough clarified the post-reading-of-the-Riot-Act procedures:

"If the mob, collectively, or a part of it, or any individual, within or before the expiration of that hour, attempts or begins to perpetrate an outrage amounting to felony, to pull down houses, or by any other act to violate the law, it is the duty of all present, of whatever description they may be, to endeavor to stop the mischief, and to apprehend the offender."

The Gordon Riots, which ran rampant over London for the better part of a week and resulted in hundreds of deaths, were among many skirmishes that occurred in that stormy era of class conflicts and religious clashes.

"[T]he Riot Act was in constant use throughout the turbulent eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries," writes Frances Webber in "Six Centuries of Revolt and Repression," published in the journal Race & Class. London in particular, "suffered mini-riots on almost every public occasion; elections, fairs, executions were accompanied by window-smashing and looting by the poor, who were able to disappear speedily into the maze-like back alleys which were 'no-go' areas for gentlemen and troops alike."

During larger protests, the reading of the Riot Act could further antagonize an already violent crowd. In 1768, a protest in south London against the imprisonment of radical John Wilkes turned into a deadly melee, as Jerry White writes in A Great and Monstrous Thing:

“The Surrey magistrates read the Riot Act but the violence intensified and the soldiers were ordered to fire. Two volleys of musketball were shot into and over the crowd. Seven died that day, including a woman orange seller and a man driving a hayrack, unluckily hit by a ball fired over the people’s heads.”

The incident became known as the Massacre of St. George's Fields.

Protestor David Kirkwood is detained by police during the Battle of George Square in 1919. (Photo: Public domain) 

According to the BBC, the last attempted reading of the Riot Act took place at the Battle of George Square in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 31, 1919. On that occasion, protestors fighting for shorter working hours clashed with police. During the conflict, a sheriff began to read the Act, but the sheet of paper was, in the words of the BBC, "snatched out of his hand" by protestors.

The Riot Act was finally repealed in England and Wales in the Criminal Law Act of 1967, which rendered a slew of old legislation obsolete. Though British police officers are no longer required to stand in the middle of an unruly crowd reading from a sheet of paper, the concept of reading someone the riot act survives.

Even 300 years after it first came into effect, to be threatened with "the riot act" is to be told: stop causing trouble, or there'll be trouble. 

A Wall Drug billboard (Photo: Jennifer Kirkland/Flickr)

Driving through South Dakota, it's impossible to avoid Wall Drug. The billboards start before you even enter the state, and they're arrayed, hundreds of them, alongside I-90, for more than 400 miles. They lure you like a tractor beam, and whether you intended to or not, by the time you reach Wall, odds are that you're going to stop.

Another Wall Drug billboard (Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

And another (Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

Billboards are the reason Wall Drug Store exists. Back in the 1930s, when the Hustead family was trying and failing to eke out a living running a small drugstore in the tiny town of Wall, Dorothy Hustead had a flash of inspiration: They would give out free ice water, and they would advertise it on boards flanking the highway.

It worked. The ride through South Dakota, in the summer, is long and hot, and the promise of a cool drink brought customers.

Ice, too, was something of a luxury. "When they first started operating free water, they were cutting the ice in the winter, and storing the blocks of ice between layers of sawdust in an ice house," says Rick Hustead, Dorothy's grandson and the current chairman of Wall Drug. "When my dad was little, he had an ice wagon, and he would take blocks of ice and sell them to people to put in their ice box."

The original pitch (Photo: Jennifer Kirkland/Flickr)

The billboards kept the drug store in business, doing well enough, even, to expand to a bigger space in the 1940s. But it wasn't until 1951, when Bill Hustead, Rick's father, returned home as a registered pharmacist that Wall Drug started growing into a kitschy, comforting mecca of roadside Americana.

Hitchhiking during the war, Bill would tell his rides he was from Wall, and they'd recognize it, as the home of "that little drug store with all those signs."  But Bill wanted the business to be better than a little drug store, to be something spectacular. "Bill had a vision for the drug store," Rick Hustead says. "That people, when they stop at Wall Drug, they won't be disappointed. He expanded everything."

Today, Wall Drug is no longer a little drug store with a lot of signs. It's the ultimate rest stop, where you can get coffee, donuts, buffalo burgers, cowboy boots, cheesy Western paraphernalia, and, yes, ice water. You can sit on a rabbit-deer hybrid called a jackalope, pose as a pioneer, or visit with a dinosaur. But the first secret of Wall Drug is still the billboards.

There are a lot of these (Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

"We advertise heavily," says Hustead. "That's how we started in business and that's how we stay in business." But, he says, "Once people get here, we try to deliver. We don't want them to be disappointed."

We're here! (Photo: m01229/Flickr)

Here we go! (Photo: Brendan Baker/Flickr)

In the summer, the day at Wall Drug begins with cooks coming in at 4:30 a.m. to start making Wall Drug donuts, and the other food the store will serve that day. There is still a drug store at Wall Drug, but it's one of the quieter corners of the business. "Travelers, when they come to Wall Drug, they want to be able to get something to eat," says Hustead. "They want clean restrooms. They want to look around. Maybe do a little shopping. Wall Drug is an experience."

This is Wall Drug. (Photo: Brendan Baker/Flickr)

In case you were wondering (Photo: Liz Lawley/Flickr)

Wallcome! (Photo: Liz Lawley/Flickr)

Inside Wall Drug (Photo: Qfamily/Flickr)

A tour might start in the restaurant. It seats 530 people, and it serves simple food, with a twist: Hot beef sandwiches are popular; so are buffalo burgers.

One unusual attraction of the restaurant is that it's hung with a collection of more than 300 original paintings, worth millions of dollars, by Western artists including Andrew Standing Soldier, Harvey Dunn, and N.C. Wyeth. Bill Hustead had good taste: he bought most of the art before it was worth as much as it is today. "We couldn't put together today the collection we have," says Rick Hustead. "Bill was kind of drugstore cowboy. He was a pharmacist. He liked to ride horses. He had a taste for it." 

The restaurant (Photo: Britt Reints/Flickr)

Bill Hustead also felt very strongly about the donuts. In the 1950s, he went to the West Coast to learn how to make them; he bought a donut machine; the recipe evolved over the years. (They come in maple, vanilla, and chocolate.) He told Rick that Wall Drug could never run out of donuts—that Wall would always offer free coffee and free donuts to military veterans, and, for that reason, they would always need them on hand.

A genuine Wall Drug donut (Photo: Jill/Flickr)

In total, Wall Drug's total sales rang in at $12 million last year, Hustead says; $3 million of that came from the restaurant's gross sales.* But it's one of the hardest parts of the complex to run. "One of the things that has driven us crazy this year is trying to find enough donut flour," says Hustead. Their supplier had a hard time getting ahold of it. "You'd think getting those things would be simple. But sometimes they're not."

Coffee is just five cents. (Photo: Natalie Maynor/Flickr)

But ice water is free. (Photo: m01229/Flickr)

Most people who stop at Wall Drug spend a fair bit of time in the backyard, and take lots and lots of pictures. There's a covered wagon to ride in, a mini model of Mount Rushmore. and those brightly painted boards that you can stick your face in and become a pioneer or stereotypically head-dressed Indian. The two main attractions of the backyard, though, are the giant jackalope and the T-rex.  

Here it is—Mount Rushmore! (Photo: Sarah German/Flickr)

Maybe not quite as cool as the real thing (Photo: Justin Baeder/Flickr)

"The T-Rex, really, he's a standalone attraction," says Hustead. "People go to see the T-Rex, and that's mainly what we got him for. Because he's pretty impressive." In the summer, every 12 minutes, he rises his head up and roars. Smokes comes out of his nostrils. It's not even close to terrifying; it's exactly how you'd expect a mechanical T-rex in the middle of South Dakota to perform.

The T-Rex at rest (Photo: Jeri Gloege/Flickr) 

The jackalope, on the other hand, is both delightful and uncanny. It is an unusually tall specimen of a creature that doesn't actually exist—a jackrabbit that's somehow grown antelope horns. Jackalopes first started appearing in the west in the 1930s (always dead because, of course, they don't actually exist in the wild), and they're a staple of the Wall Drug experience.

This is a jackalope (Photo: Chris M Morris/Flickr)

You can ride it (Photo: Konrad Summers/Flickr) 

Besides sitting on the jackalope in the back, you can buy one in the gift shop. Asked where the jackalopes come from, Hustead said, "We have a supplier. A closely guarded supplier." There is, he allows, a lot of competition to supply tourists with jackalopes. "But ours are the cutest. And they have real horns."

A jackalope, as real as they come (Photo: Jeri Gloege/Flickr)

After the backyard, there are plenty of other options for entertainment. If you're going to eat at the restaurant, Hustead recommends budgeting two and a half hours for the entire Wall Drug stop. There's gold panning and mining. There are water shows, an arcade, and a country store with homemade fudge. You can buy t-shirts (one of the most popular items), shot glasses, coffee mugs, toy wooden guns, stuffed animals, caps—thousands and thousands of items. There are 6,000 pairs of western cowboy boots on display.

Boots (Photo: Susan/Flickr)

More boots (Photo: sellke/Flickr)

Hello, buffalo (Photo: Sarah German/Flickr)

Pappy will tell your fortune (Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

You can also buy a black powder pistol for hardly any mark-up. "We have them because you need to be able to go into a Western drug store and buy a black powder pistol," says Hustead. "They're real. They're what they used in the Civil War." You can also stop at the Traveler's chapel, dedicated to religious leader who have served the area since 1909.

Traveler's chapel (Photo: Qfamily/Flickr) 

A hall of history (Photo: jvoves/Flickr)

Just hanging out (Photo: Jennifer Kirkland/Flickr)

The real secret of Wall Drug is that not much has changed. The souvenir department was already going strong in the 1950s. The big expansion—half of the mall, the giant dining room, the backyard with the dinosaur—were all built before Rick Hustead came back home to work for the business in the early 1980s. "I just hoped that I could keep it up," he says.

Wall Drug in the 1970s (Photo: John Lloyd/Flickr)
Wall Drug in the 1980s (Photo: abbamouse/Flickr)

This summer, Wall Drug has 212 staff people working, including Sarah Hustead, Bill's daughter. Right now, they are bracing for the 75th anniversary of the Sturgis bike rally, a gathering of motorcycle enthusiasts in South Dakota's Black Hills, on the western side of the state. In a less popular year, 450,000 bikers might come to the rally, and many of them stop at Wall Drug. This year, there could be as many as a million.

After that, though, Wall Drug's season will start slowing. "We start losing staff right after the rally," Hustead says. Employees go on vacation themselves; kids start heading back to school. In the fall, buses still come through, to eat, to drink, to shop, to rest, but by December, says Hustead, "things are pretty slow." There are, he says, "all kinds of winter specials." 

Mainly, they're trying to keep busy, until the season warms up again, and cars start plowing down the highway, full of people who are hot and thirsty and maybe in the market for a cup of free ice water.

So true (Photo: Kyle Taylor)

(Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

(Photo: Kurt Magoon/Flickr)

(Photo: Kurt Magoon)

*This sentence has been updated to clarify that Wall Drug's total sales were $12 million, including the restaurant's sales that totaled $3 million.

Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph, Goshen, New York. (All photos: Ty Cole)

Brutalism is one of the more controversial architectural styles of the 20^th century. Named from the French word for rough concrete, béton brut, the blocky, rugged aesthetic of buildings from the 1950s to the 1970s is revered by some, but disliked even more intensely by others. 

In Britain, one of its most prominent critics is Prince Charles, who once derided the style as “piles of concrete.” London actually knocked down many of its brutalist buildings prematurely in the 1970s, but remainders like the Space House have since become iconic.

In the U.S. this year, the planned destruction of Paul Rudolph’s brutalist Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York garnered months of outraged articles from newspapers and architecture magazines around the country. The $71 million project is moving forward anyway. 

Meanwhile colleges, like the University of Massachusetts and the University of East Anglia, that adopted brutalism at the height of its fashion are frequently accused of having sterile, totalitarian-looking campuses. Brutalist municipal and apartment buildings dotted around both countries are often in danger of being demolished or inappropriately renovated. 

For his “Brutalist” series, photographer Ty Cole shot many distinctive buildings in the U.S. and in London. His photographs highlight the beauty in the austere shapes and concrete. We spoke to Ty about this project, the history of brutalism, and the buildings that fascinate him most. 

Northwestern University Library by Walter Netsch - SOM, Illinois

Can you tell us a little bit about the history of brutalist architecture?

First off, I am in no way an architectural historian or theorist. I come to the subject as a pure enthusiast. But I’m happy to share what I’ve learned.

The highly controversial style was most commonly expressed in buildings constructed from the mid-1950s to early 1970s. It came out of the modernist movement and the interest in stripping ornamental elements and instead relying on clean lines and 'honest' detailing. Although most of the modernist ideals can be applied to brutalist buildings, brutalism has no official definition, and is associated more with a feeling of the viewer than a defined list of requirements. 

Northwestern University Library

Why did we start calling this style “brutalism”?

While most buildings with the brutalist label are concrete, that is not part of the origin of the term. The architects Alison and Peter Smithson used the term to describe their construction method of exposing the structure and not masking the interior with finishes, allowing occupants to see how the building was built and functions.

It was later, when Le Corbusier described his use of breton brut, raw concrete, that brutalism was associated with concrete. It was Le Corbusier’s aspiration that the building feel like it was created by man and not a machine, as with steel and glass–to differentiate it from the modernism exemplified by Mies van der Rohe. 

Northwestern University Library

What is the appeal of brutalism for you?

My attraction to this style of architecture deals more with the sculptural aspect rather than the sociological, although the social aspects are very intriguing. 

Brutalism is a very particular aesthetic that represents a moment in time. What does it tell us about the post-war world, where it was born?

First and foremost it was a cost­-efficient building method. Thanks to the evolution of modernism, and a growing need for municipal buildings, universities and low­-income housing, there was an explosion of brutalist buildings. I think it tells us that the artists, including architects, wanted to express themselves in a more humanistic way, hence Le Corbusier’s desire for architecture that felt like it was created by man.

Since concrete was inexpensive and efficient, it was often selected in this time period when many public buildings were constructed. 

UMass Darmouth by Paul Rudolph, Massachusetts

UMass Dartmouth, Massachusetts

What prompted you to create this series?

Pure fascination with architecture in general. In 2010, when I started shooting this type of architecture, many buildings were being slated for demolition. 

I love looking at these buildings! But full disclosure: if I had to work or live in a brutalist building I could very easily change my tune.

What’s your approach when shooting a large­-scale brutalist building, and does it differ from when you’re shooting traditional architecture?

My approach doesn't differ much. The majority of images you see of brutalist architecture are shot during overcast skies and in flat light, only enhancing the building’s potentiality for “doom and gloom.” I don’t see it that way. I see beauty in the forms of these buildings and that is what I try to accentuate. I try and only to shoot with direct sun and clear skies. When the building has contrast and the forms are more pronounced the architect’s intention is better understood.

Temple Street Parking Garage by Paul Rudolph, Connecticut

Which building was the most challenging to shoot?

The most difficult buildings are ones that are less visually stimulating, like Silver Towers or Kips Bay. Coincidentally both of those buildings are by I.M. Pei. It's not that I like them less; they just have a little less personality than say, Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center. 

Kips Bay by I.M Pei, New York

Which building was the most fun to shoot?

This is a very hard question to answer. The Orange County Government Center is my most notable brutalist photograph and possibly my personal favorite. However, I was recently in London to shoot for this series, which will be released in the upcoming months, and they have some of the best examples of brutalist architecture. Balfron Tower, and its surrounding buildings, and Rowley Way are just magnificent.  

Pirelli Building by Marcel Breuer, Connecticut

Is there a building you would love to shoot but haven’t yet?

There are so many! But I must say that there are two Corbusier projects in France that I really look forward to visiting: Saint Marie De La Tourette Monastery in Lyon, and Unite d’Habitation in Marseille. My goal would be to work my way east and visit eastern European sites all the way over to Japan, where there are some amazing buildings. 

Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science by Marcel Breuer, Connecticut

University of Illinois by Walter Netsch - SOM

Orange County Government Center, Goshen, New York

If you're going to drop an iPhone, might as well be from a plane (Photo: redlegsfan21/Flickr)

Ben Wilson, of Texas, owns a company that sells propane storage tanks and gas plant equipment. Also, he owns an iPhone. And on the way back from Houston, in a private plane, that phone sailed out of the plane.

The small Beechcraft Bonanza plane was flying 9,300 feet above the ground. But when the pressure changed, the door popped open just a bit, the Wichita Falls Times Record News reports. Of course, 9,300 feet is pretty far for an Apple product to fall, considering that a drop of a few feet from your clumsy hands to the ground can already ruin a perfectly good iPhone screen. But Wilson's phone still worked well enough that he was able to locate it with the Find my Phone app.

The Times Record News reports:

“It was by the side of the road south of Jacksboro, under a mesquite tree,” said Wilson, chuckling. “The donkey pointed out where it was.”

Wilson told the paper that it was "scratched a bit on the corners." But otherwise it still works just fine. Whatever phone case he has, the rest of us need to purchase, stat.

Bonus finds: A new species of wolf, a remarkably close rocky exoplanet

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.