(Photo: Random House/ Wiki Commons)

Here's a little quiz for you. Remember that book series, about the family of bears? Papa Bear had overalls, Mama Bear had a weird spotted bonnet, and Brother and Sister were always bickering over something. Likely you read some of the illustrated paperbacks and learned some cheerful lessons about Messy Rooms or Too Much Junk Food. Maybe you also caught an animated special or two. 

Okay, take a deep breath. What were those bears called? The Berenstein Bears, right?

Wrong. The series is The BerenSTAIN Bears, because it was written by Stan and Jan Berenstain. Wikipedia knows this. The Library of Congress knows this. The Official Berenstain Bears Website is totally positive.

Many people, though—people who grew up with the Bears, and are now adults determined to pin down the objects of their childhood nostalgia—are less sure. Reddit users have been collecting proof in an attempt to de-stain the legacy. A typical reaction comes from Reddit user Hovanova: "I personally remember it being "stein" and will never change my mind about this." A quick poll at your average after-work gathering will almost certainly reveal a large percentage of your cohort to be firmly in the -stein camp. 

What is going on?

(Photo: Random House/Wiki Commons)

The easy answer, for most of us, is that we're remembering wrong. Berenstain is an unusual name; cursive is hard to read; the books on tape pronounced it "steen" and that was enough for us lazy kids. Others have a different, more sinister theory, one that doesn't require them to admit any wrongdoing. It's called the Mandela Effect.

First posited by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, the Mandela Effect occurs when significant chunks of the population remember things happening differently than they actually did. The discrepancies might be as large as an extra U.S. state or as small as an alternate spelling of “definitely” (or, in the case of the Berenst#in paradox, sort of vertiginously small-large, forcing you to question your entire childhood based on one letter). These false cultural memories, Broome says, could be proof of parallel realities, or “timestreams,” that some of us once lived in but have since been shunted from.

Broome has been collecting examples of the Mandela Effect on her website, Mandelaeffect.com, for years. The name comes from a widely held conviction that South African president Nelson Mandela died in prison decades ago, rather than surrounded by his family in 2013. Many Mandela’d memories center around the deaths of famous people; other common themes are television plotlines that never occurred, landmarks placed differently than visitors remember, and products with alternate names (Jif or Jiffy Peanut Butter?) or histories (when was the Segway invented?).

(Photo: Laura/flickr)

Of the hardcore Steiners—those who have searched their bookshelves and their souls and still know the Bears to be Berenstein—some believe in the timestream theory: many, like Mary Garcia, are comforted by the fact that they are at least “from the same reality” as each other. Others blame a meddlesome time traveler who, presumably, made a surprisingly consequential typo en route to interrupting the Y2K disaster. Still others pin the bear paradox specifically on a conspiracy of dubious provenance: “Somewhere along the line the name has changed to the Berenstain Bears,” a man named Louis wrote to Broome in 2014. “No record of “stein” which is definitely how it was when i was younger. No question about it.” 

The Berenst#in Bears taught us many things—how to share, how to deal with nannies, and how to clean up after ourselves, for starters. But even they could not prepare us for the ravages of time, the strangeness of our own brains, or the contingencies of the Internet. So: when did Mandela die? How many states are there in the Union? Berenstein or Berenstain? Each of us, it seems, must decide for ourselves.

A piece of the Old Spanish Trail, Milton, Fla. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

In the past 15 years, while hunting for missing pieces of the Old Spanish Trail, Charlotte Kahl would sometimes find herself following pick-up trucks. She could be in a town she'd never been in before, at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning, and everything would be quiet. But when she found the shop with the pick-up trucks, she would find the farmers. They'd be done with feeding their animals, in town for their morning coffee.

"And those old farmers, if they can't tell you where the highway was, they'll tell you who to go see," she says.

Kahl is the chairperson of OST100, an organization dedicated to one of the country's original interstate routes, first conceived 100 years ago and now faded into a ghost road, buried beneath six-lane highways, suburban sprawl, or sometimes dirt, brush and feet of desert sand. The Old Spanish Trail, when it was completed in 1929, was 2,743 miles of brick, asphalt, concrete, and wooden plank, and it crossed the southernmost states from East to West, starting in St. Augustine, Florida, and ending in San Diego, California. 

It's still possible, if difficult, to make that trip on the old road. But Kahl and her organization aim to restore the Old Spanish Trail to its former vigor, as one of the country's great interstate routes, the kind of road people fantasize about traveling from end to end.

And if her plan works, in 2029, a celebratory caravan of cars will start in St. Augustine and travel all the way to San Diego, on the the very same trip the road's founders made 100 years before, when the trail was finally completed.

Florida (Image: drivetheost/Flickr)

This road was built just as the dream of the American road trip took shape. For the first time, really, Americans could get in a car and drive west, west, and further west, until they hit the Pacific and had to wonder if they'd found what they were hoping for. In 1929, 70 percent of the road was paved, "and the rest is good going," an advertising circular promised. Three years before, when just 50 percent was "paved or under contract," Colonel Ed Fletcher drove the entire distance in 75 hours and 33 minutes, averaging 37 miles per hour, in the family Cadillac. The whole trip took a little over a week, and included a 14-mile boat ride across Mobile Bay, ferry trips in New Orleans and Beaumont, Texas, and a stop to take moving pictures in Yuma, Arizona.

From the beginning, the Old Spanish Trail was very deliberately laden with mystique. Harral Ayres, the road's chief booster and director of the Old Spanish Trail Association, sold the road, not entirely accurately, as the "route first traveled in American by Spanish Conquistadors more than four hundred years ago." It needed a little romance, though, because building it required tackling very practical and expensive problems. The tributaries rushing from the continent's heart into the Gulf needed to be spanned with bridges; a road that ran along the Gulf also needed protection from the sea and waves. Further west, in the desert, roads were still being built of wooden planks, in sections which, when covered in sand, could be lifted at one end and cleaned off. In the end, the road cost about $80,000,000 to build—more than a billion in today's dollars.

Although much of the original road has been subsumed by I-10 and other large highways, it's still possible to drive long stretches of the road, at least as it existed in the 1930s, through Florida, Louisiana and Texas. And where the original route has been lost, Kahl is trying to convince others to find the road, map it, preserve it, and pretty it up. She is planning a centennial motorcade that will travel along the road all the way across the country. 

Mossy Head, Fla. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Preparations for that celebration begins this year, a century after planning for the road began. This winter, OST100 will convene a conference in Mobile, Alabama, where the first meeting of businessmen interested in building the road met, in 1915. At the time, there was no formal, federal system of interstate highways; instead, businessmen and activists from the Good Roads Movement were banding together to advocate and fundraise for roads where none had been. This new and growing network of roads was already rooting down into the south from points north. By the time the Old Spanish Trail's founders first met, the Atlantic Highway connected Maine to Miami. The Dixie Highway, and the Jackson Highway were coming on down to other Southern cities. But there were no roads connecting the southern border states to each other.

Ellaville, Fla. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

At that first meeting, the Old Spanish Trail was conceived as a road that could connect east to west, Florida to California. Harry Locke, a mapmaker and "pathfinder," showed up with a route that would connect Houston and Los Angeles. But the exact route would take shape over years, as the Great World War delayed planning and different cities and regions vied to be on the road. There was a trickle of federal money for road-building, after the first highway funding bill passed in 1916, but the most part, roads went where businesses or communities would pay to build them. The early Old Spanish Trail Association was a dues-paying organization, and not paying had consequences.

"In Texas," says Kahl, "there was a city that didn't pay their dues. Another city wanted the road, and they were willing to pay for it." The road jogged south—to the city that would pay.

Locke, who became the field engineer for the project, had a huge amount of power over the where the road would go, too. "He was strong-arming people to get advertisements," says John Murphey, an architectural historian and old roads enthusiast, who's driven the trail more than once. "When they were thinking of termini, in Florida, he was basically telling Miami: You put an advertisement in this map, or you're not going to be the terminus." (Apparently Miami did not budge, since the terminus is St. Augustine.)

By 1923, at least, the San Diego terminus had been chosen and the zero-mile stone set. And finally, after almost a decade and a half of construction, the road was declared complete in 1929, and the stone in St. Augustine dedicated. By then, the federal government had started work on system of numbered federal highways (the Old Spanish Trail would be part of what's now called Old U.S. 80 and 90) and, less than a decade later, would start thinking about larger, better interstate roads—the country's first superhighways, which would make early auto trails like the OST obsolete.

 The Old Spanish Trail Association's map of the road (Image: Courtesy of OST100)

Driving the Old Spanish Trail, if you want to stick to the original route as much as possible, is a bit of a challenge. Before Murphey and his wife set out on their first trip on the road, they had to go through a massive data gathering project, paging through old maps and publications, trying to plot that over current highway maps. "We probably missed some really vintage or private land alignments," he says. "But we hit most of it. We did a lot of trespassing."

Their effort paid off.  "When you hit a place that hasn't been changed and there's not modern development, it's a little bit transcendent," he says. "There's a section east of Tallahassee that's still red earth road. You can just imagine bobbing along in the 1920s."

A stretch of original OST in the Florida panhandle (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Of course, in many places, things have changed. In cities, the route of the old highway goes through run-down areas; outside, suburban sprawl lines roads that once would have been almost empty. These roads were built before the infrastructure to support travelers, and early roadtrippers would not have had the luxury of roadside motels and diners.

On some stretches, the OST has just been forgotten. Kahl first started researching the trail back in 2000, after a San Antonio road crew clearing room for equipment found a strange, stone bench hiding in the brush in a corner of her neighborhood.

"In south Texas, when we say brush, it's pretty prickly," she says. "You just don't go in there. That's the way it was saved for decades. We don't even know how long it was overgrown."

Besides the bench, there was a metal decoration with the letters OST woven into it, and when she went online to start puzzling out what it could mean, all she found was references to oysters and smoked turkey from Great Britain, University of Tennessee computer courses, and geographical references in German.

The bench in San Antonio (Image: Courtesy of OST100)

Even once she had found out the OST was a road, that didn't help her find the actual route. She and a few others decided they would focus on documenting the 50 miles that run through San Antonio's Bexar County. That's how she found herself following pick-up trucks through small Texas towns and interviewing farmers.

Sometimes there'd be other clues, too. In Texas, the OST beautification committee planted palm trees along the road's route, and as a result a straight row of palms heading straight off the curve of a road still echo the OST's route. Low water crossings didn't get bridges; old Model Ts had to cross them at an angle to make their way through. Any crossing built at a 90 degree angle to a small trickle of water is a hint to get out of the car and search in a farmer's field for the trace of a road coming through the creek. At a ferry crossing, Kahl tramped through bushes and muck to find the dock and wharf. Sometimes the road would be abandoned, and she would have to take a metal pole and poke down to find where the asphalt was, under the overgrowth of the bushes and grass in the field, she says.

A county line marker along the old road (Photo: Courtesy of OST100)

This is the type of work that Kahl's now trying to convince other people to take on. Her goal, by 2029, is to have the entire route historically designated. She's also trying to convince the 67 counties along the route to build hiking and biking trails all along the way. "We call it cleaning up for the party," she say. "We're hoping by '29, tourists will be driving, walking, barnstorming and biking the trail."

By then, she'll be 87. But she's still planning on traveling across the country to celebrate the centennial. "People will have to help me on and off the bus when we take that grand motorcade tour," she says.

It seems like a massive project, but she figures that if the road's founders built it in 15 years, her group can clean it up in that same time. And if they don't, most likely the Old Spanish Trail will soon fade in obscurity forever. Once, the federal government might have funded this sort of historical preservation, but budgets are tighter now. As Murphey puts it, "It's up to the communities to investigate their auto heritage and bring it to the fore." And the Old Spanish Trail, he says, is really Charlotte's baby. Now she just needs more people to sign on to help.

Wellborn, Fla. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Whitehouse, Fla. (Photo: drivethost/Flickr)

Des Allemands, La. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Huey Long Bridge, Jefferson Parish, La. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Lake Charles, La. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

OST bench, San Antonio (Photo: Courtesy of OST100)

Biloxi-Ocean Springs Bridge, which no longer exists (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Mesa, Ariz. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

Yuma, Ariz. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr)

The lovely vista of a 1994 gem, Beneath A Steel Sky. 

The 1990s were a good age for adventure, if your idea of adventure is playing video games. Point-and-click adventure games were at their peak, offering new worlds and new mysteries to explore. Companies like Sierra Games and LucasArts were publishing titles that often simply dropped players into a new world and let them test and explore in order to find their way, searching for the correct item or action that would let them progress. Clues were often infuriatingly hard to come by, but when you could finally solve that tricky puzzle, you felt like a real genius.  

And now, adventure games of the '80s and '90s are making somewhat of a comeback via modern titles, and remakes of classic versions. Titles like The Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis (LucasArts is the undisputed king of the genre), are still hot topics among gamers, but there are many other games that have fallen by the wayside, or been forgotten completely. Well, thanks to the awesome Internet Archive and their vast collection of old software, we can take a look at some of greatest forgotten and unknown gems of the genre.   

1. ZORK 1: THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE (1980)

Possibly the original adventure game. Gamers of a certain age will recall the Zork series, which eventually expanded to full graphics adventures. However it was this original, text-only quest that set the playful (sometimes goofy) tone of the entire genre, and established the find-item-solve-puzzle formula that would become the hallmark of the genre. All without a single bit of graphics.

2. SHADOWGATE (1987)

This short, grim illustrated adventure leads you through a fantasy castle on a quest to defeat the evil Warlock Lord. Equipped a minimum of information, and static setting shots. A surprisingly spooky adventure. 

3. MANIAC MANSION (1988)

One of the lesser known LucasArts games, this prequel to the much more famous Day of the Tentacle, is often overshadowed by it's follow-up. Maniac Mansion was many people's first taste of the genre, offering the chance to lead a cast of archetypical teens through a mad scientist's house of terror (and laughs).

4. LOOM (1990)

Another LucasArts classic that is sometimes overlooked, Loom used a unique system of musical notes that allowed the player to interact with the world. The world itself was dark and foreboding. Loom was a surprisingly serious game for a story about exploring a world that is strangely obsessed with string. 

5. MARTIAN MEMORANDUM (1990)

This sequel to the much more fondly remembered Under A Killing Moon sees series star Tex Murphy continue doing his weary-gumshoe-in-a-dystopian-future schtick. Murphy's science fiction investigation is notable for its early, and only somewhat, successful use of digitized actors and dialogue.

6. LURE OF THE TEMPTRESS (1992)

A fantasy classic that deserves to be ranked with some of the funnest games in the genre, Lure of the Temptress lets you play a peasant that has to deal with dragons, sorceresses, and demons using his wits and clever dialogue. It's a terrific one-off adventure story.   

7. STAR TREK: 25TH ANNIVERSARY (1992)

The Star Trek franchise has seen a lot of video games in its time, but most of them want to focus on controlling a ship or blowing things up. But the 1992 point-and-click game lets you play out a bunch of "episodes," both fighting from the bridge of the original Enterprise, and solving mysteries on surface of alien worlds.    

8. BLOODNET (1993)

This adventure game drops players into a grim cyberpunk future where they need to battle vampires to save the 'net. It's a noir-ish quest through some of the more regrettable trends of the 1990s.   

9. DRAGONSPHERE (1994)

Another fun delve into a familiar, but enjoyable medieval fantasy world. The graphics were considered pretty great when the game came out and they still create an engaging, rich world today. It also features a character named, the Soptus Elipticus, which earns it extra points. 

10. DEATH GATE (1994)

Death Gate was based on a series of novels by fantasy legends Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and uses almost entirely characters and settings from the books, giving this game a fittingly epic scope and feel.    

11. BENEATH A STEEL SKY (1994)

From the makers of Lure of the Temptress comes one of the masterworks of science fiction adventure gaming. Take a little Blade Runner and a bit of Raymond Chandler, and you've got one hell of an adventure through a future gotham.

12. THE FLIGHT OF THE AMAZON QUEEN (1995)

Everyone remembers Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, but what about this much goofier (and raunchier) knock off? Take the role of Jones-lite hero Joe King as he saves a starlet and a tribe of amazon women from being turned into dinosaurs. The 90s were weird.

13. DISCWORLD (1995)

Based on Terry Pratchett's series of satirical fantasy novels, the Discworld adventure game manages to hit the correct mix of funny and adventurous that many games in the genre could only try for. The main character Rincewind was also voiced by Monty Python alum, Eric Idle! 

14. FULL THROTTLE (1995)

Another LucasArts one-off, Full Throttle is sometimes forgotten in the breathless discussions of the companies other releases, but it may be one of their best. A sort of Mad-Max-homage, the game takes place in a futuristic desert wasteland where the player takes control of Ben, a burly biker in a world of hover vehicles. The game may remain of LucasArts' funniest games, and one of the best looking.  

15. I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM (1995)

Unlike a number of adventure games, which end up being relatively linear, straight forward, and fairly whimsical, Harlen Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, based on his award-winning short story, is a total downer. The basic outline of the game has to do with a supercomputer named, AM, which is torturing the last five humans alive by creating scenarios that destroy their self-esteem. The player controls the last five humans, and the game is essentially unwinnable. It is one of the most philosophically mean games ever made, but one hell of an adventure.    

16. SANITARIUM (1998)

This creepy adventure allows players to jump into the role of an amnesiac car crash victim who mentally travels to a series of nightmarish worlds ranging from a horrific circus, to a future dystopia overrun by robots. It's dark and sad quest, but the worlds one gets to explore are unforgettably unique.

While the Internet Archive offers files for all of these games, or their demos, complete versions of many of them can also be found on GOG.com and Steam. 

The Mengenlehreur clock in Berlin. (Photo: Muritatis/Flickr)

Since the advent of standard time, we've relied on clocks to keep us on track. But clocks are not merely a simple collection of hands and numbers. From sundials to set theory, and iPhones to hourglasses, the art and science of timekeeping is a wide world indeed.

Below we've selected 11 of the most fascinating clocks, all of which push the boundaries of time-telling as we know it. 

1. Barnwell Sundial

Barnwell, South Carolina

(Photo: Barnwell Chamber of Commerce/Public Domain)

Just outside the courthouse in the town of Barnwell, South Carolina, lies a most interesting clock. Gifted to the town in 1858 by Captain Joseph D. Allen, the Barnwell sundial uses an unusual square shape to chart the months and days.

The clock has been keeping (almost) perfect time for close to 150 years, despite being installed 26 years before the advent and widespread adoption of standardized time.

2. Mengenlehreur

Berlin, Germany

(Photo: Morn/WikiCommons)

In the modern digital era, you can be forgiven if it takes you a second to tell the time on an analog clock. However, reading this clock on the Budapester Strasse in Berlin is more akin to solving a math equation.

German for "set-theory clock," Mengenlehreur is divided into a series of 24 illuminated lights. The yellow blinking light at the top denotes the seconds, the top row the hours, and the bottom row the minutes. In the image below, for instance, the time displayed is 10:31.

The clock in its original location in 1979. (Photo: Willy Pragher/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

3. Jantar Mantar

Jaipur, India

(Photo: Vberger/WikiCommons)

The Jantar Mantar astronomical observation site is ancient astronomy at its finest. The massive clay and brick structures, known as equinoctial sundials, are intended to measure the time of day down to a half-second of precision, along with the declination of the sun and other heavenly bodies.

The Rajput Maharaja Jai Singh II constructed four Jantar Mantars across northern India during the 18th century, although the most magnificent one is in his hometown, Jaipur. The primary purpose of these installations was for astronomers to compile exceedingly complex astronomical tables, which helped them predict the movements of the moon, planets, and sun.

4. Timewheel

Budapest, Hungary

(Photo: Jason Tinkey/Flickr)

On the site of a former statue of Lenin lies the largest hourglass in the world, and possibly the largest hourglass ever built. Weighing over 60 tons, the sand in the hourglass takes a full year to completely filter through.

At the dawn of each new year, the Timewheel is rotated 180 degrees manually by four burly Hungarians (with the assistance of a pulley system) to start counting all over again. 

5. Duquesne Brewery Clock

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

(Photo: Joseph/Flickr)

The largest clock face in the United States sits on the side of the Duquesne Brewery building, lording its timekeeping abilities over all the residents of south Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Far larger than its more famous cousin, the Big Ben clock, the Duquesne Brewery Clock has a 60-foot face, and a minute hand that weighs a literal ton.

The brewery sadly shuttered its doors in 1972. However, in true American fashion, AT&T bought the rights to the clock in 2009—reminding everyone within eyesight to pay their phone bills. 

(Photo: Thomas Harper)

6. Timeball Tower

Williamstown, Australia 

(Photo: whoalse/Flickr)

Just like the famous Times Square tradition, the Timeball Tower in Williamstown, Australia tells the time by hoisting and dropping a giant metal ball on the hour, every hour.

Perched on top of the Williamstown Lighthouse, the clock was originally used so that passing ships could synchronize their clocks. Now obsolete, the Timeball Tower continues to drop at 1 p.m. every single day, harkening back to a time before smartphones.

(Photo: avlxyz/Flickr)

7. Elephant Clock

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

(Photo: Jonathan Bowen/Wiki Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

We owe much of our modern world to the advancements that came out of the medieval Golden Age of Islamic civilizations. We can trace both social and intellectual achievements such as algebra, the concept of zero, and religious tolerance to the geniuses of the era. A little less enduring, but equally amazing, is the Elephant Clock. 

First designed by the polymath al-Jazari in the 12th century—and diagrammed in his surviving manuscripts—the Elephant Clock is a weight-powered water clock, that for some reason, takes the form of an Asian Elephant. Water is channeled through a small hole in the elephant that drives a series of complex mechanical interactions, including serpents and seesaws, that end with the elephant driver loudly clashing his symbols, marking the passing of each half-hour.

Two working reproductions of the Elephant Clock still exist: in the upscale Ibn Battula Mall in Dubai (pictured above), and at a clock museum in Le Locle, Switzerland.

8. Rathaus-Glockenspiel

Munich, Germany

(Photo: Douglas Wacker/Wiki Commons/Public Domain)

Built in 1908 to commemorate the 16th-century wedding of the Bavarian war hero Duke Wilhelm V, the Rathaus-Glockenspiel stands 260 feet over downtown Munich, carved into the side of the New Town Hall. At 11 a.m. every day, the mechanical clock puts on a show. 

For 15 minutes, 43 bells, and 32 life-size figures spring to action. Mechanical jousters in blue defeat mechanical jousters in red, and a bunch of coopers, or barrel-makers, dance around, somehow signifying the end of a horrible 1517 plague. The clock luckily escaped serious damage during WWII, though subsequent renovations have left it slightly out of tune.

(Photo: Douglas Wacker/Wiki Commons/Public Domain)

9. Mechanical Dragon Clock

Blois, France

(Photo: Wolfgang Meinhart/WikiMedia)

Every hour, on the hour, this unassuming villa in the small town of Blois, France, springs to life. Created by the French installation artist couple Michell and Jean-Pierre Hartmann in 1998 as an homage to Blois' most famous son—and a clock-maker himself, Jean Robert-Houdin—the clock contains six mechanical dragons and a ton of moving parts.

When the hour strikes, the dragons, which are each over 21 feet long, bust through the windows, gnashing their jaws and scraping their paws against the facade of the building, to a backdrop of eerie music. The show lasts for about five minutes, after which the dragons slowly retreat back to their respective lairs.

(Photo: drumaboy/Flickr)

10. The Astronomical Clock of Besancon, France

(Photo: Arnaud25/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The most complicated astronomical clock in the world sits inside the Besancon Cathedral, in a town known as the watchmaking capital of France.

Installed in the cathedral in 1860, this ridiculously complex device has 30,000 pieces, 70 dials, 122 indicators, and tells the time for 17 cities around the world. Moreover, it has a perpetual calendar, and can even tell the tides in eight ports along the French coast. 

(Photo: Arnaud25/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

11. Clock of the Long Now: Prototype 1

London, England

(Photo: Courtesy of longnow.org)

The futuristic brainchild of the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco based non-profit that aims to seed long-term thinking and "creatively foster responsibility for the next millennium, the Clock of the Long Now is a mechanical clock that is supposedly designed to keep accurate time for the next 10,000 years.

The clock ticks once a year, with a cuckoo demarcating the passing of each millennium. The clock (still a prototype at this point) is supposed to be carefully constructed so that it would need no external power source, and could be understood and maintained by primitive societies in the wake of total economic collapse. The prototype began to tick on December 31st, 1999, and is on loan to the Science Museum of London.

While the protoype ticks away in London, the actual Clock of the Long Now is under construction in the remote mountains of Ely, Nevada. The power is expected to come from two helical weight drives on either side of the timepiece, and the clock will be able to recalibrate itself to solar noon on sunny days.

(Photo: Courtesy of longnow.org)

(Photo: Courtesy of longnow.org)

Shechem Scatt cleaning a headstone at the Gracie lot in Woodlawn Cemetery. (All photos: Ella Morton)

It's a Wednesday morning in August, and a heat wave in New York has turned the city air thick and hazy. Freed from the demands of school for the summer, most teenagers would choose to hit the beach or play video games. But 18-year-old Shechem Scatt has been spending the last few hours happily cleaning 19th-century gravestones. 

Scatt, clad in a white hard hat, bright orange t-shirt, and sturdy pants, is one of a dozen interns who have been chosen to spend the bulk of their summer learning how to spruce up mausoleums, monuments, and headstones at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Recruited from trade schools, colleges, and social programs around the city, they are the first participants in the cemetery's Preservation Training Program, created in partnership with the World Monuments Fund. The 12 interns will receive nine weeks of training in the art of stonework restoration. 

A typical workday, which runs from 8 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., may involve fine-tuning their caulking skills on planks of plywood, studying stone types in a trailer classroom located across the street from the cemetery, or cleaning the headstone of Titanic survivor Archibald Gracie IV.

Applying to work at the cemetery for the summer, Scatt says, was "one of the best decisions I have made."

Many of the interns had never been to Woodlawn Cemetery before beginning the program. Teddy Espinal, 18, hadn't spent much time in graveyards at all. "I look at the cemetery differently now," he says. Before this I used to be like, ‘Oh, dead people.’ But now I think about stones, and maintaining and cleaning and working on stuff. It’s less scary."

The idea of spending summer days among the dead never fazed intern Melanie Ayala. Growing up in a Mexican family where the Day of the Dead was celebrated each year, Ayala always revered cemeteries, an attitude that has influenced her approach to the daily tasks at Woodlawn. 

"I always talk to the headstones," she says. "I was cleaning this one, her name was Sophia. Sophia Stark. And I was like, ‘I got you, Sophia. I’m going to clean you right up.'"

When working on the stones, Ayala thinks about the lives of those buried beneath. "I pay attention to the names, and I pay attention to the dates," she says. "I saw a few headstones that had my birthday. It just makes you be happy that you’re above ground for another day."

Many of the interns preferred the cemetery to office jobs. Scatt's school, the Williamsburg School for Architecture and Design in Brooklyn, "has had lots of other internship opportunities and apprenticeship opportunities," says Scatt, but the cemetery program was the one that drew his attention. 

Fellow intern Ayala agrees. The lone woman among the dozen young workers, Ayala was interning for New York State senator Kevin Parker when she became aware of the Woodlawn program via an email. At first, she hesitated, wondering if it was right for her.

"Maybe this doesn’t cater to me, because I’m a girl," the 23-year-old recalls thinking. But another thought followed: "What I just said in my mind is what all of me stands against." Long accustomed to being the only girl on soccer teams and in dance crews, Ayala applied to intern at Woodlawn. Having learned a range of construction and restoration techniques at the cemetery, she now plans to work with her father, a construction foreman, before eventually becoming a paramedic.

Melanie Ayala.

At this end of the program, two of the 12 interns will then be selected for a 19-month apprenticeship in masonry conservation and maintenance at Woodlawn. Competition is fierce, and everyone is working hard to impress while being supportive of one another. "We’re making it really hard for them to choose the two that will stay here," says Luis Liz Cruz, who is 20. 

As for the 10 who won't continue on at Woodlawn, there are several other post-internship employment options. During the final week of the program, the group will be at the International Masonry Institute (IMI) training center, where they will take certification tests in occupational safety and health as well as scaffolding training. Dennis Holloway, a director of training at the IMI, has been observing the interns in action and is eager to find new workers for stonework restoration projects around the city—his projects include New York icons like the Chrysler Building, the Museum of Natural History, and the Empire State Building.

Of course, the main difference between cleaning gravestones at Woodlawn and restoring the eagles on top of the Chrysler Building is the altitude. As a trainer and restoration worker, Holloway has encountered people who say they have no fear of heights, but then run into trouble at a crucial moment. "Everybody comes to me and says 'I don’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem,'" he says. "Then I stick them on the Empire State Building and they have a problem."

Regardless of where each intern ends up after the Woodlawn program, their summer in the cemetery has already made a big impact. Not only have they learned a wide range of practical restoration skills, but spending time among the headstones has made them reflect on the nature of remembrance. Some of the inscriptions on the stones have become obscured by years of built-up dirt and biological growth. To carefully scrub that away and reveal the name of someone who died long ago is to revive their memory and honor their life—regardless of who they were.

"When you hear someone say that somebody will never be forgotten, it’s usually said in reference to somebody that made an impact on a huge amount of people’s lives, like a celebrity or something like that," says Ayala. "But everybody’s life matters. Everybody was here for a reason."

(Image: RT on YouTube)

Russian president Vladimir Putin has finally taken a stand against his country's eternal enemy: food.

Thanks to mutual sanctions between Russia and Europe, a no-tolerance policy has been placed on imported "Western" foodstuffs. As reported by the New York Times, a ban on food imported from Europe was put in place around a year ago in response to sanctions placed on Russia by the EU, which in turn were put in place in protest of Russia's actions in the Ukraine.

The end result of this political boxing match hit home on Thursday, when hundreds of tons of sanctioned food items collected by supporters of Russia's ban were destroyed in a staggeringly wasteful display. In one case, over a hundred tons of illegal ham was simply fed into an incinerator, while in Smolensk, contraband tomatoes that got sauced.

Illegal food, and this includes any food that is not properly labeled or cannot be accurately sourced, has been trickling across the Russian border ever since the ban was put in place, coming in from places like Belarus and Kazakstan. According to a report on the Latvian Public Broadcasting site, a shipment carrying 20 metric tons of Latvian cheese, which had been marked as Russian, was confiscated in the city of Orenberg, and added to the nauseating (for a number of reasons) pile of food to be mechanically destroyed and put in a landfill.

According to that same report, while this grand gesture was just the beginning, Russia will be destroying contraband Western foods on a daily basis from now on, if need be. The specter of Soviet-era bread lines does not seem to be rattling its chains quite loud enough.

See video of the destruction below, via Ruptly.

(Image: Wikipedia)

Weevils destroy your crops? Pig maim your children? Dying to get back at these creatures? In Europe during the Middle Ages, you could bring them to court, where they could face sentences ranging from gruesome mutilation to excommunication. Or at least that is what many reports say, although the hard evidence of such legal actions is scant.

And somehow, the surreal practice of trying beasts as though they are people continues to this day.

The main issue with our understanding of the strange practice, according to Sara McDougall, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is the sourcing. “The sources are 19th century scholars who didn’t bother to give a whole lot of explicit information on where they found the stuff,” she says, “With a lot of the medieval ones we know that some of them were either made up or they were textbook cases that were kind of a way to keep students from falling asleep.” In an even stranger reasoning for an fake animal court story, McDougall says that one of the most famous cases of beasts on trial, involving a bunch of rats, was “completely made up just to defame the lawyer who supposedly defended the rats."

Even with so much uncertainty about which animal trials were real, McDougall stresses that some did still take place.

The most detailed source of case studies (whether real or imagined) we have for the medieval (roughly between the 13th and 16th century) practice of putting animals on trial is E.P. Evans’ treatise on the subject, The Criminal Prosecution and Capitol Punishment of Animals, published in 1906. Evans points out two distinct types of animal trials that would occur:

[There is] a sharp line of technical distinction between Thierstrafen and Thierprocesse; the former were capital punishments inflicted by secular tribunals upon pigs, cows, horses, and other domestic animals as a penalty for homicide; the latter were judicial proceedings instituted by ecclesiastical courts against rats, mice, locusts, weevils, and other vermin in order to prevent them from devouring the crops, and to expel them from orchards, vineyards, and cultivated fields by means of exorcism and excommunication.

In other words, most large animals were tried for offenses such as murder, and generally executed or exiled, while smaller, more diffuse pests and offenders were more often excommunicated or denounced by a church tribunal. But all were thought to have been given their day in court.

Evans’ book lists around 200 cases where all creatures large and small were brought to trial for a plethora of reasons.

Most complaints against smaller animals leveled for infestation or destruction of crops ended up in some sort of excommunication from the church, or official ecclesiastical denouncement. Evans explains that this was largely done as an effort to make people feel better about exterminating them. Since even weevils, slugs, rats, and such were considered God’s creatures, the devastation they inflicted was likely part of his plan, so to just destroy them would be to act against God’s will and creatures. Of course if they were tried in a church court, and excommunicated (or condemned in the case of animals and insects), that could mitigate guilt.

One such case in the 1480s saw the Cardinal Bishop of Autun in France rule against some slugs which were ruining estate grounds under his purview. He ordered three days of daily processions where the slugs were told to leave the area or be cursed, thus making them free game for extermination. A similar case was said to have taken place just a year later.

(Image: Gutenberg.org)

In the case of larger animals such as bulls, pigs, dogs, cows, and goats, the offending beasts which could, in theory, actually be brought to court to stand trial. The sentences for these animals tended to be more severe.

Pigs often got the worst of the human legal system, for a simple reason. “They were killing people,” says McDougall.

In an age where animals were often roaming the streets and children were found in the fields, accidents were pretty common. Evans describes one, fairly typical case in 1379 in which two herds of swine were feeding together when a trio of pigs became agitated, and charged the swinemaster’s son, who died from his injuries. All of the pigs from both herds were tried, and “after due process of law, were condemned to death.” Somewhat luckily, all but the three instigating pigs were implicated as accomplices, and later pardoned.

In most cases, the court endeavored to try the animal as closely as it could to the same way humans were tried. This included how they were punished. Just like some murderers of the day, condemned animals (again, in most cases, pigs), were horribly executed for their crimes. Evans described a pig in 1266 who was publicly burnt for the crime of mutilating a child, and another in 1386 that was “to be mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs, and then to be hanged, for having torn the face and arms of a child.”

Beastiality was also an occasional accusation that led to the trial of an animal, although this charge was actually known to go in the animal’s favor. “Both the human and the animal might be put to death, but in some cases, they seem to have managed to say that it wasn’t the animal's fault, that the animal didn’t consent,” she says, “So the animal wasn’t punished.”

Still other animals were imprisoned right along with human criminals. In this case, as no one honestly believed the animal was solemnly considering its actions, the owner was charged for the animal’s board as a form of second-hand punishment.

As barbaric, strange, or just silly as animal trials may seem, they continue well into the modern day. In 1916 an elephant named Mary murdered her trainer and was hanged in Tennessee using a crane. In 2008, in Macedonia, a bear was convicted of stealing honey from a beekeeper. The parks service was forced to pay $3,500 in damages. It seems like the human thirst for justice, no matter how irrational or silly, continues to know no bounds.

'Map of Matrimony' by George Skaife Beeching, c1880. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

Cartography is all about creating accurate, detailed maps so that travelers know what to expect when setting out on a journey. But not all of these journeys involve physical travel—matrimonial maps provide a visual guide for the adventure that is courting, engagement, and marriage.

Matrimonial maps emerged in the 18th century, but were most prominent during the 19th century. They depicted states of emotion, milestones, and stages of intimacy in as geographical features. With these fanciful maps for reference, a single gal could chart a course from the Land of Spinsters to the Region of Rejoicing, bypassing Lonely Isle along the way. Likewise, unmarried gents could envision themselves setting off for a voyage from the Country of Single Men, navigating the choppy waters of the Sea of Introduction, and arriving in Valentine Bay, the gateway to the City of Dames. 

Rod Barron, a British-based antiquarian book and map dealer, has assembled a delightful array of matrimonial maps dating from the mid-1700s to the 20th century. Below are some highlights from his collection.  

An Italian Matrimony Map from 1766 by Eustache LeNoble. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

Eustache le Noble, author of the map shown above, did time in "at least four French prisons" for crimes including forgery and adultery, writes Barron. During one of his prison stints, he fell in love with fellow inmate Marie-Gabrielle Perreau. Both were married to other people, but the two still went on the run together in 1695. Things ended badly—le Noble was re-arrested in 1697, and Perreau's husband banished her to a convent, where she died in 1701. 

Given all of this wretchedness, it's no wonder the matrimonial map that le Noble created is a less-than cheery piece of cartography. With its central province of Cuckolds bordered by the Discontented, the Incompatible, and the Widowed, le Noble's Island of Matrimony seems a bleak place indeed. 

Land of Matrimony, Barbauld Johnson, 1772. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps) 

The Land of Matrimony, created in 1772, "boasts an assortment of interesting topographical features and settlements, many of which indicate the perils of a loveless marriage or one based purely on money and status," writes Barron. Such perilous places include Henpeck Bay, the Dead Lake of Indifference, and Divorce Island, which is located right beside Cuckolds Point.

A Map of the Island of Matrimony, John Thomson, c1815. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

The work of Scottish cartographer John Thomson, the map above throws some classical mythology into the usual matrimonial mix. Temples scattered around the Island of Matrimony are named after Greco-Roman gods, Fates, and Furies. The province of Possession, for instance, contains the Temple of Venus, while the province of Approbation is home to the Temple of Psyche.

A Map of Matrimony, author unknown, from c1825. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

Created in the form of a voyage by an unknown author, the Map of Matrimony above is notable for its central Mountains of Delay, Inhabited by Lawyers. A triumphant Cupid stands at the top right holding a torch lit from an eternal flame that burns atop the Altar of Love.

The Voyage of Matrimony: A Study for Youth, 1826. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

"The potential happiness of married life is alluded to in a couple of locations" within the above map, notes Barron, "though with no great enthusiasm from the author." Samuel William Fores, the author in question, was married twice and reputed to have between 14 and 17 children. No doubt he spent some time wading in his own real-life version of Squabble Marsh, which is mapped beside Peak Indiscretion.

Matrimonial Voyages, c1820-30. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

The journey to marriage as depicted in Matrimonial Voyages above is meandering and fraught with peril. To get to the Land of Matrimony, a bachelor must resist the temptations lurking on St. Magdalen's island, Coquette Isle, and Bacchus Isle. Should he not be dashed upon the Rocks of Disappointment, he will eventually arrive at the Land of Matrimony, after which his final task is to seek entry to the Temple of Hymen.

The State of Matrimony, GA Moray, 1909. (Photo: Courtesy Barron Maps)

Matrimonial maps survived into the 20th century, as evinced by the above creation, designed and published by New York restaurant owner George Edward Moray to promote his two eateries. This map is unusual in that the vast majority of the locations plotted are real place names. Three railroads labeled Ceremony, Elopement, and Common Law run into the State of Matrimony, while the Divorce Rapid Transit railroad runs out.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

(Photo: superdumb/shutterstock.com)

Blood is a terrible thing to waste, and for centuries, the ways to stop blood from leaving the body were inefficient at best and not exactly easy to use.

In the time of ancient Egypt, honey was used in wrapping wounds. Later on, sugar was used for similar reasons. Hippocrates, the noted Greek physician whose name is directly tied to the Hippocratic Oath, was known to treat ulcers with wine and cover them with fig leaves.

But it wasn’t until 1920, when the First World War was long over, that we finally had an effective bandage for simple injuries that didn’t need to be stitched. One evening, a man who worked as a cotton-buyer for Johnson & Johnson spotted a problem that his wife was having and came up with one of the most brilliant solutions that the world had ever seen.

Earle Dickson was perhaps the perfect person to invent the Band-Aid. He worked for a medical supply company, he knew how to get access to a ton of cotton, and he had someone in his life who really needed them. That person was his new wife, Josephine.

Achilles bandaging Patroclus, c500BC. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Working in the kitchen, she would get cuts constantly from all the knives and kitchen tools she had to work with. “Like most new brides, Mrs. Earle Dickson, of New Brunswick, N.J., soon learned that hot pots and pans produced nasty burns on delicate hands,” began an article in Kiplinger's Personal Finance. While they’d tape up her cuts with cotton balls, this proved time-consuming and imperfect.

But Earle didn’t give up—he came up with a process to secure strips of cotton to surgical tape. First placing the surgical tape upside down, he took the cotton gauze, placed it in the middle of the tape, and secured it using crinoline fabric, a material better known for its usage in dresses. By combining the two materials, he could easily cut the tape into pieces and ensure that the cotton bandages stayed secure without much fuss.

And when he told his superiors about his invention, they ran with it almost immediately—and soon enough, Earle had a patent on his simple-but-brilliant idea.  

Earle Dickson's 1929 patent for the band-aid. (Photo: Google Patents)

It took a while to get things moving, however, because the cotton strips, initially, were made by hand, which made them expensive. Also, they were too large, over 17 inches long and more than two inches wide. Eventually, Johnson & Johnson created a machine to specifically make Band-Aids, which allowed them to make smaller bandages that could treat minor blisters, burns, and cuts.

There was just one problem: The bandages weren’t selling. So the marketers at Johnson & Johnson decided to hand them out to Boy Scout troops around the country, free of charge. The logic in this decision was perfect—it introduced parents everywhere to the new product, which it turned out they needed. Band-Aids have saved countless pints of blood, and maybe a few lives, since that canny move.

In a way, though, the company’s success worked out a little too well. While the bandages went on to help billions of people, it ensured that Band-Aids would eventually go the way of aspirin and Kleenex—a brand whose overwhelming recognition led to it being used for pretty much every other kind of tape-on bandage. Nonetheless, the company maintains a huge market share for their product—a Companies and Markets report found that, in 2012, the Band-Aid brand had a 38 percent market share for all wound care products in the U.S., along with a 64 percent share for adhesive bandages. 

Variations of Band-Aid packaging from the 20th century. (Photo: Courtesy Johnson & Johnson)

The Band-Aid is a great tool, but it’s not perfect—as anyone who has ever removed a bandage from a hairy arm or leg can tell you. Fortunately, science has come a long way since Earle Dickson found an inventive way to impress his new wife.

For the past couple decades, scientists have been trying to design bandages that can help seal wounds, not just protect them from the world. They’ve also been working on a type of computerized bandage that can tell the wearer how the injury is healing.

Now, if you could make bandages that clot just like blood, imagine how quickly you could stop a wound from bleeding. Indeed, the the U.S. military and the Red Cross have focused on this sealant strategy–in the form of bandages and dressings–for the last couple of decades. In 2008, the military began using QuikClot, a body dressing that uses the chemical kaolin to help speed up the clotting process, and it’s probably saved a lot of lives on the front lines.

Even more ambitious, however, is the plan that researchers have for flexible bioelectronics, a technology that’s being touted as something of a replacement for the band-aid. These bandages would go far beyond what Dickson’s invention was able to offer, giving people with chronic wounds like ulcers an easy way to track the treatment and understand what’s actually happening. 

“Current wound care or band-aid technology is designed to protect the wound area from environmental assault,” Harvard associate professor Reza Abdi told the National Science Foundation of the technology. “However, it is a simple technology, which does not provide any information about the state of the wound.”

Cosmas and Damian dressing a chest wound, 1748, by Antoine de Favray. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London)

Just think: what if our bandages weren’t simply devices that we wore on wounds and constantly had the urge to lift up to check what was underneath, but actually told us how the wound was doing?

Another technology, which is being worked on by a number of universities, would help stop one of the most dangerous parts of the bandage process—the removal portion, which can expose an open sore to disease. The bandage, which would be made out of liquid, would change color if, for whatever reason, the wound isn’t healing correctly.

“Most of the technology was already there,” Massachusetts General Hospital’s Conor Evans told Scientific American last year. “We’re trying to translate it and make it applicable and simple to use in real clinical situations.”

And then, because there’s a crowdfunding project for everything, there’s also an bandage-style wearable that would provide a zap to an area that’s suffering from pain. That project, Cur, would replace physical therapists by detecting pain-causing changes in the body electronically and adjusting. One problem: the FDA hasn’t approved it yet.

For whatever reason, some of these new technologies, despite their obvious benefits, have not been met with much enthusiasm by the pharmaceutical companies. In the case of QuikClot, its blood-stopping factor is actually an odd detriment. It “sounds too good to be true,” company CEO Brian Herrman told Hartford Business in 2010.

Where are the goody bags for Boy Scouts when you need them?  

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail

Astronaut Scott Kelly tends to a crop of space lettuce. (Photo: NASA Johnson/Public Domain)

For several years, NASA has been trying to grow veggies in space, in order to nourish astronauts' bodies and souls. Today, crew members on the International Space Station will enjoy the fruits of this labor for the first time. 

The fruits are actually veggies: specifically, red romaine lettuce, chosen for its hardiness and its radiation-canceling antioxidants. Astronaut Scott Kelly planted this batch in early July, and it's been growing ever since, watered carefully by the crew and fed by a combination of LED lights and exhaled carbon dioxide. Previous crops have been sent back to Earth for safety testing, but today, for the first time, the astronauts will swipe the leaves with "food sanitizing wipes" and chow down.

The salad-bration will take place at 11:15 Eastern Time and will be broadcast live on NASA TV. 

Before and after, you can watch cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko improve handrails, fix antennae, clean windows, and take photographs around the Russian segment of the International Space Station. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com. 

A shot from a film documenting the making of The Day the Clown Cried (Photo: Screenshot from making of footage)

The Day the Clown Cried, a 1972 Holocaust movie starring comedian Jerry Lewis, was never lost, exactly. Lewis has had a copy for years—and he's kept it under lock and key. For years, movie buffs have been obsessed with seeing the film, which only a handful of people have ever viewed. And, recently, they have discovered that it's now in the Library of Congress—and that it might one day be opened up to some type of public screening.

Made in 1972, mostly in Sweden, the film tells the story of Helmut Doork, a washed-up clown who's sent to an internment camp for mocking Hitler. He begins to perform for Jewish children also locked up in the camp, and, by the end of the movie, has been accidentally shipped off with them to Auschwitz, where his role is to comfort them on their way to death in the gas chambers. Here's how Lewis, who also directed the film, describes that final scene: 

"I had the cameras turn and I began to walk, with the children clinging to to me, singing, into the gas ovens. And the door closed behind us."

By the time the film had been completed, it had run into financial and legal troubles. The producer had basically skipped town; the production did not own the rights to the story. That's at least part of the reason the film was never released. But it was also just…too much.

People who had seen part of it described it to Spy Magazine as "almost unwatchable"…"beyond normal computation"… "so awful–you can't even laugh at it."

Some critics, though, are more sympathetic. "Even in the early seventies, when Lewis worked on the film, his attempt to confront the practical details of daily life in an extermination camp was, at the very least, unusual and original," New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote in 2013. 

Either way, it sounds profoundly weird. Now that the Library of Congress has the film, though, more people may eventually be able to judge for themselves: the Library of Congress "just acquired" the collection of which the film is part, the Los Angeles Times reported, and "agreed to not show the film for at least 10 years." But not never.  

Lewis, for what it's worth, doesn't seem to think the movie is bad. His critics, he said in 2009, are "putting it down because I won’t let them see it! That’s all. They have no idea what they’re talking about." But he's also said: "I was ashamed of the work...It was bad, bad, bad. It could have been wonderful. But I slipped up. I didn't quite get it."

Bonus finds: Gliding possum, flesh-eating prawn, cannabis residue in pipes found in Shakespeare's garden

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: Federal Government of the United States/Public domain)

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

Standing on a grassy clearing in Red Gate Woods just outside Chicago is a gravestone with a most unusual inscription: "CAUTION—DO NOT DIG."

The grave marker pays tribute not to a person, but a project: nuclear research. Buried beneath the stone is radioactive waste from Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial nuclear reactor. (Why "artificial"? The title of "world's first nuclear reactor" was claimed in Oklo, Gabon circa two billion years ago, when uranium-rich mineral deposits became flooded with groundwater, setting off a natural self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.)

Nicknamed CP-1, the reactor was an experiment, built in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project, the United States' initiative to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The reactor was a literal pile: in a squash court beneath the stands of Stagg Field, the University of Chicago's disused football field, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists built a stack of uranium pellets and bricks of graphite, interspersed with cadmium control rods. Fermi believed that with this humble-looking pile, he could produce the world's first artificially initiated, controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. 

A drawing of CP-1. (Image: Melvin A. Miller of the Argonne National Laboratory/Public domain)

WBEZ explains the finer workings of the 20-foot-tall pile:

Basically, it was just a stage to let the uranium do its thing: emit neutrons that would occasionally strike the nuclei of other uranium atoms, thus splitting off even more neutrons. The graphite served as a moderator, which would slow down the neutrons and make them more likely to strike additional uranium nuclei. ... The element cadmium naturally absorbs neutrons, so when the rods were in place, the nuclear reaction would almost stop. To get the reaction going, scientists could pull the rods out of the pile and let stray neutrons buzz freely, striking more and more uranium nuclei. The team was aiming for criticality, the point at which, if you removed the cadmium rods and let the pile go, the chain reaction would continue exponentially on its own.

Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your perspective—Fermi's instincts proved correct. On December 2, the control rods were removed and the reactor went critical, paving the way for the development of nuclear power. Unable to boast of their success on the top-secret project, the 49 observing scientists celebrated among themselves with paper cups of Chianti.

Following this initial testing, CP-1 was disassembled in 1943, moved to Red Gate Woods, and rebuilt, with a radiation shield for safety, as a new reactor named CP-2. Another experimental reactor, CP-3, followed in 1944. When the Manhattan Project scientists were done with these reactors, they dismantled them and buried the remains in the woods, at spots marked Plot M and Site A. Both are now marked by granite monuments—Plot M has the headstone marked DO NOT DIG.

Though the buried waste is radioactive, the site poses no threat to public safety. When WBEZ visited with a geiger counter, the readings in the area were consistent with standard background radiation levels.

The marker at Site A. (Photo: Federal Government of the United States/Public domain)

In Dogtown (Photo: Sarah Laskow)

Some places just can't shake their pasts. Think of the atmosphere in an abandoned factory or the uneasy energy of a neighborhood "transitioning" from one demographic to another, to say nothing about the fate of a house built on top of an Indian burial ground.

Dogtown Common, an overgrown settlement a few miles north of Gloucester, on Massachusetts' North Shore, is one of those spots.

Once, the inland town was a desirable neighborhood. Starting in the 1720s, some of the Gloucester's most well-off families moved to this high ground, where giant boulders had been deposited by receding glaciers. Cleared of forest, it promised safety from pirates (at least, that's what locals say, although there's little evidence that the few pirates working the area were a problem) or maybe from the British, as well as plentiful sources of drinking water, and room to expand from the growing port city.

They named this new town the Commons Settlement. By 1741, at the height of its popularity, about a fifth of Gloucester's population had moved there. Soon, though, the city decided to move the meetinghouse, the center of the Puritanical lives of 18th century Massachusetts residents, further from the town, and living in the heights went out of fashion. By the end of the century, most of the people who lived in the area had little choice: they were poor widows, of sailors and Revolutionary War soldiers, and others not welcome in polite society.

The widows kept dogs to protect them, and those dogs, eventually run wild, may have given the area its new name, sometime after the Revolutionary War. But, as Elyssa East explains in Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, it wasn't just that. "What changed the Commons Settlement to Dogtown was the people: women who dressed like men, men who did housework, alleged witches and former slaves," she writes. Many of the women who lingered up in the town developed reputations as witches: the most notorious was Thomazine Younger, who went by Tammy. She was reputed to be short and plump, and her worst crime was scamming people out of money by threatening to curse them. (Which, if you're already being branded a witch, seems like a pretty good business plan.) Another Dogtown woman, Granny Rich, had her own witchy line of business: She'd tell fortunes in coffee grounds.

By the 1830s, even these outcasts had left Dogtown, and the forest began to regrow. Even after last house was pulled down in 1845, the town never disappeared entirely: there are still walls and old wells and cellars overgrown and scattered among the trees. But Dogtown became an dark, foreboding place. Even a century ago, "once there, you might walk in circles for a week without finding the way out," a New York Times writer warned. 

Today, there's a map of the Dogtown Commons trails. But it's not a good one, and even Google doesn't have a strong sense of what goes once you're just a little bit into the woods. Getting lost while walking the trails is inevitable, even for people who've been there before. And that is how my uncle and a friend of his found something very odd in the woods.

On Friday afternoon, they had set off on a walk, aiming to find the Whale's Jaw, the most famous of the area's boulders, and they had walked the wrong way—at least, they had never arrived at their destination. Instead, while trying to find their way through the forest, they came across something extremely strange, something straight out of a True Detective episode or a horror film about an abandoned children's asylum. My husband and I decided we needed to see this for ourselves.

Finding Pooh Bear

There was no guarantee that we could find the site again. The best directions my uncle could give us would take us to the beginning of the trail, to an area in the north of Dogtown. After that, we'd be on our own. On the map, the area was crossed by more than a dozen of short, interconnecting trails, any of which could be the right one. 

We parked our car a little outside the woods, and started towards the trailhead, walking down a gravel road, past big stone houses set in meadow-like yards, until we found the green metal gate. That marked the beginning of the trail. We'd already passed one wooden sign that warned "I'd turn back if I were u!" and though it was probably meant for some Halloween hayride—it featured an unhappy jack-o-lantern and a ghost that said "Boo!"—it wasn't entirely reassuring, given the mission we were on.

A road not taken (Photo: Sarah Laskow)

We walked passed the green metal gate, and soon the path started following an old stone wall. Occasionally, it would break or turn down a side path: these, it seemed, were the old roads of Dogtown. Inside, the woods were green, cool, and quiet. We guessed at the route, passing one faint turn-off that disappeared between two grey boulder walls, chose a right fork at fallen tree stripped of its bark, and walked over a plank bridge before we came to a T in the path. Right or left?

We chose right, and not long after, in the middle of the path, we saw what my uncle had seen: the beginnings of a stuffed animal installation in the middle of the woods. A Pooh Bear perched in the fork of a tree. He'd been there for long enough that a spider had woven a thick web across his belly. To our left, we saw the rest of the stuffed animal coven, arranged in an occult gathering of toys that defied easy explanation.

Pooh blocks the path (Photo: Sarah Laskow)

To the left (Photo: Sarah Laskow)

Here's what we saw:

(Video: Ben Furnas) 

The Beanie Babies were arranged in a semi-circle on the side furthest from the path (Photo: Sarah Laskow)

(Photo: Sarah Laskow)
The netted and blindfolded baby dolls were at the very center (Photo: Sarah Laskow)

What else is in Dogtown's woods?

In the years after Dogtown was abandoned, its reputation as a mysterious and occasionally dangerous place grew. When East was researching her book, she was warned to avoid entry. "People who went to Dogtown, got lost, and were never found again," she writes. "I had heard similar stories myself. That they could not be verified did little to keep people from thinking that they might, in fact, be true." There have been rumors of ghost dogs and, worse, werewolves in the woods, too.

But less phantasmic dangers have also found a place here. One local man allegedly killed a friend and buried him in the woods. In the early 1980s, a homeless man was found beaten to death, and then in 1984, a schoolteacher died here, after a local man attacked her with a rock. Locals have come to the woods to commit suicide, too. There's enough sad and scary history here that it's easy to conjure a very creepy mood with just a little imagination.

No one seems to know how long the toy coven has been there. Certainly sometime this summer, and probably within the last month or so. While we were in the woods, for maybe an hour and a half, we saw only a few other people—a lone hiker who was recovering from hip surgery, a couple with their dog, and a triad of teens on mountain bikes. "A few teenagers have committed suicide in this area," the hiker said. "I'm not saying this spot is where that was, but it could be connected to that." The bikers thought it was creepy, but had no information. The couple didn't know who was responsible for the installation but, they said, their dog was scared of it.

Whatever those stuffed animals are doing in the forest, they're now one more piece of evidence that Dogtown has become the sort of place where people seek out strange things—or make them happen. Anyone who wants to see this one, before it disappears, can enter Dogtown on the Dennison Trail, and aim for 42°39'20.7"N 70°39'07.3"W—those are the coordinates of the pin I dropped on Google Maps standing on the trail just in front of Pooh.

But even if you feel an eerie mood descend, just remember, it's nothing new for Dogtown. Even without tied-up dolls and stuffed animals, back in 1873, the boulders alone were enough to inspire one Massachusetts man to write: "I know of nothing more wild than that gray waste of boulders...in that multitude of couchant monsters there seems a sense of suspended life; you feel as if they must speak and answer to each other in the silent nights." This is just the type of place where people hear voices.

(Photo: Sarah Laskow)

(Video: Ben Furnas)

The Carte of Coastal Virginia (Image: Theodor de Bry/Wikimedia)

Since 1590, the fate of the colonists who settled on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what's now North Carolina, has been one of America's great mysteries. When John White left the colony in 1587, to ask England for additional aid, there were more than 100 people living on the island; when he returned three years later, they had all disappeared, leaving behind only two cryptic clues as to their whereabouts: the words "CROATOAN" and "Cro" carved in to a fence and a tree. 

Now, archaeologist Nicholas M. Luccketti has found new evidence that might reveal what happened to the colonists—some of them, at least. Back in 2012, the British Museum reexamined a map that White owned and revealed that, under a patch, the map had a large blue and red X marked about 50 miles inland, at the mouth of the Chowan river. Luccketti and his colleagues have been excavating that area and, he tells the New York Times, “We have evidence from this site that strongly indicates that there were Roanoke colonists here.”

The X on John White's map (Image: The Trustees of the British Museum)

That evidence, the Times reports, includes shards of Surrey-Hampshire Border ware—ceramics that were used by early colonists associated with the Virginia Company, which aimed to settle the coasts of North America. But the pottery was not brought to America after the Virginia Company dissolved in 1606, so it's an indication of a residential settlement that started before the early 17th century. 

The site at which Luccketti is working—the team calls it "Site X"—is not the only one being investigated for clues to the Roanoke colonists ultimate fate. To the southeast of Roanoke, on Hatteras Island (once called Croatoan Island), a different team of archaeologists recently found a small piece of what looks like a writing tablet and a metal hilt of sword. These add to the collection of artifacts of European origin, dated to the 16th century, found on the island in the past two decades. 

Neither team's findings have been peer reviewed yet. But one possible explanation for the two teams' findings is that the colonists split up. As National Geographic explained a couple years ago, an earlier group of Roanoke colonists were told to split up into smaller groups if they encountered a crisis. 

It's too early, in other words, to declare the mystery solved. Even if there were Roanoke colonists at Site X, as the Times writes, "only a small number—fewer than a dozen—were present for an indeterminate amount of time." And the question still remains: what was their ultimate fate?

Bonus finds: a white whale, a weird stash of stolen items  

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. 

The scene in the film "Stuart Little," with the Róbert Berény painting in the background. (Photo: Courtesy of Columbia Pictures) 

Last December, Gergely Barki was at home in Budapest watching Stuart Little with his daughter when he spotted a familiar painting in the background of one of the scenes. Thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him, he leapt off the couch and brought his face close to the television, wiping the screen with his hand so he could get a better look at the painting. “It can’t be real!” he thought.

Intrigued, Barki, an art historian at the National Gallery in Budapest, called Sony Pictures and  tracked down the film’s set designer, who was living in the Washington D.C. area. She told him had originally purchased the piece for about $500 from an antiques store in Pasadena. She got an inkling that the painting might be worth more when a friend visited the National Gallery in Budapest and spotted a painting whose style was eerily reminiscent. The friend brought a catalogue home to compare.

Within weeks, based on this information, Barki flew to D.C. so he could see the painting in person. There, he found himself standing in the owner’s apartment, inches away from a canvas by one of Hungary’s most important modernist artists. Barki was able to identify it as “Sleeping Lady with a Black Vase,” a long lost piece by Robert Bereny, the father of Hungarian cubism.

Had it not been for two World Wars and nearly half a century of Soviet rule, Bereny might be as revered as some of his contemporaries, who included Giorgio di Chirico, Georges Braques, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. But Hungary’s turbulent history is written in its art, which was looted, lost and scattered with each new wave of political violence. Bereny’s legacy was just one of many casualties.

Róbert Berény. (Photo: Courtesy of Gergely Barki)

Relatively obscure outside of Hungary, he is known for founding an artistic collective called The Eight, a group of wildly talented, radically-minded painters that developed their own unique style, a kind of cross between Fauvism and Cubism. Bereny was also a master of Soviet poster art, a friend of Gertrude Stein and the composer Bela Bartok, and Marlene Dietrich’s lover. 

Barki, who studies The Eight and seems haunted by their lack of recognition, thinks the painting disappeared shortly before the stock market crash of 1929, “because that was when it was last exhibited,” and then vanished from the country during World War II, since most of the buyers were Jewish.

His discovery made headlines around the world, thrusting Hungarian art into the spotlight for a rare and fleeting moment. Yet most of the coverage focused on the seemingly unbelievable fact that such an obscure, sophisticated painting could appear in a blockbuster Hollywood film about a mouse.

What most stories didn’t address was that this wasn’t the first time that Barki had located a missing Hungarian masterpiece–that in fact, he had been tracking them down around the globe, finding them under beds in San Francisco; on the backs of other paintings, concealed beneath layers of gesso primer; and in private collections in London and Sydney. Or that with each new discovery, Barki seemed to be getting closer to restoring an entire oeuvre of modernist art, a slice of European cultural history that had been missing since 1915.

A postcard for the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. (Photo: Library of Congress)

That was the year that 500 paintings by The Eight and other prominent Hungarian artists were loaned to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair in San Francisco. Afterwards, they were meant to tour America on a traveling exhibition, but with the outbreak of World War I, they became stranded in San Francisco. Since Hungary (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) was allied with Germany, the paintings were branded as enemy property. Many have been “missing” ever since. 

“If you were a German citizen in France when the war broke out, you were likely sent to an internment camp. Well, similar things happen to investments and objects of art,” says Gergely Romsics, director of the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York City.

Even though general principles of international law dictate that such objects be returned, the post-war reality is messier. “These paintings were privately owned, but they were lent by the Hungarian government, so who has the right to claim them? At the end of the war it became very hard to codify every situation, especially a conflict as huge and long as the First World War.”

Béla Kun, leader of the 1919 Hungarian Revolution. (Photo: Public Domain/Wiki Commons)

In the years that followed, the situation worsened for art in Hungary. There was the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1919, followed by World War II, which saw the collections of Jewish families plundered by the country’s Fascist regime and Nazis. With the Soviet Liberation of 1945 came another round of looting, as Russian soldiers claimed their spoils of war. And then came 44 years of Communist rule–and another revolution, this one in 1956–that put a deep freeze over the art market.

“The museums controlled everything, so whenever a private individual had a painting, he wanted to hide it because the museum could take it, or just control it,” Barki says. With the borders closed and prices down, savvy dealers from Milan and Germany swooped in throughout the 1970s and purchased this art for a song.

“The history of Hungary is quite bloody,” Barki adds. “It was not good for the collections because many times the owners of the collections had to leave, or hide the collection, or simply left and collections disappeared or were stolen. There are many different stories, many of them hidden.”

Portrait of György Bölöni by Lajos Tihanyi in 1912, one of "The Eight". (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

A century after they disappeared at the 1915 fair, these stories and the attendant works of art are beginning to resurface. Some of this has to do with demand. In Hungary’s case, a painting by Bereny now commands top dollar in Budapest, which turns out to be a powerful incentive for sellers who have been keeping his paintings hidden under their beds. The set designer that Barki met in D.C. paid just a few hundred dollars for the striking painting she found in Pasadena. When it went up for auction last year in Budapest, the starting price was 110,000 euros.

Barki’s efforts, done on behalf of museums and important private collections in Hungary, seem to be paying off. In his regular column called “Wanted,” written in Hungarian, he publishes photographs of paintings he’s hoping to find. And when something comes up, he curates an exhibit–some as high profile as this one at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris–to generate interest and new leads.

At a recent exhibit in Budapest, Barki hung a photograph of a missing painting on the wall, a 1909 work by Béla Czóbel entitled "Red Nude Sculpture II." On opening night, a lady who had seen the announcement walked in with a painting that matched it. Barki’s latest discovery was a stash of letters and correspondence from the early 20th century, some of it written by Bereny himself.

This 1909 painting, Béla Czóbel's "Red Nude Sculpture II," was recently turned in to a gallery in Budapest.  (Photo: Courtesy of Gergely Barki)

Barki isn’t the only one interested in restoring this art to its rightful place–wherever that might be. Some of the heirs of the paintings that were confiscated after the exposition have been embroiled in lawsuits for years to get them back, raising thorny questions about ownership, cultural heritage, and legacy.

“Everyone has their own interest and claim, a reason why these works are rightfully theirs,” Romsics says, adding that there may be several conflicting claims for any one object.

One of Bereny’s heirs, his grandson Thomas Sos, a doctor in New York City, emailed to say that he has recovered one of the paintings, titled "Golgotha,” and says he knows the whereabouts of another, titled "Portrait of Bela Bartok.” He declined to comment any further.

On a national level, The Hungarian National Bank has set aside a fund of 30 billion Hungarian forints ($106 million) to repatriate art that was once Hungarian owned, or purchase works that are currently owned by Hungarian collectors. Recent acquisitions include a portrait of a Madonna and child by Titian, bought for $16 million from an undisclosed Hungarian collector, and a large nude by another member of The Eight, which Barki had tracked down in Sydney.

At a moment when the Hungarian government has been sharply criticized for its nationalistic rhetoric and corruption, the Bank has been accused by Transparency International for what it sees as financial malfeasance and a lack of transparency about which art it buys and why.

'Sziluettes kompozicio' by Bereny, 1911. (Photo: Courtesy of Gergely Barki)

Meanwhile, the long-lost art is finally getting the global respect it deserves, in the very city where so much of it originally disappeared. The De Young museum in San Francisco is putting together an exhibit called Jewel City that will showcase more than 200 works of European and American art, most of which were on display in 1915. According to Barki, one of these works belongs to Lidia Szajko, a San Francisco filmmaker and granddaughter of Bereny and his wife Eta. It was Eta, famously drowsy, who appeared in “Sleeping Lady with a Black Vase.”

As for Barki, his efforts seem to be genuinely scholarly, if a little obsessive. “There were 100 paintings shown in Paris in 1911,” he says. “Bereny exhibited 49 paintings in 1911 and I know only 23 or 24 pieces. The others are lost, untitled, and we have very few photographs.”

Barki estimates that there may be hundreds of more paintings in Russia, where “they can’t be researched,” since scholars of Hungarian art are rarely given access to collections there. The Russian government has never officially confirmed that the Red Army looted art from Hungary. As for the painting that turned up in “Stuart Little,” its history essentially begins in the 1990s. Before that the trail runs cold–at least for now.

“Most of our colleagues in western countries are lucky,” Barki says. “The oeuvres of their painters are quite whole, there are very few paintings in hiding. For example, Matisse, almost all of his paintings are in private collections or museums and we know everything about him. Here in Hungary we have the opposite. We’re restoring the oeuvres here.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti lets some shade balls fly. (Photo: City of Los Angeles)

It's jet black, fist-sized and perfectly round, and it's going to save California. Give it up for the shade ball.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Shade Ball Cover Project rolled to a halt, rounding off years of work. With a shout of "shade balls away!" Los Angeles city officials overturned a row of sacks and sent 20,000 of the jet black objects cascading down into the Los Angeles Reservoir. The new recruits joined those from previous releases (which have been occurring weekly for over a year), and raised the total ball count to 96 million. They now blanket the entire surface of the 175-acre basin. 

An early round of LA Reservoir shade balls being released last year.

Each ball is the size of a large apple, and contains just enough water to help it cluster with its companions. Together, the ball shroud prevents damage from sunlight, dust, and errant birds, and keeps 300 million gallons of surface water from evaporating each year. Dr. Brian White, a biologist formerly with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, came up with the idea, which has since been deployed in several other cities.

Shade balls elsewhere in California, taking over the Las Virgenes reservoir.

The shade ball initiative aims to bring the LA Reservoir in line with new water quality mandates. The closest competing plan—bisecting the reservoir with a dam, and covering each side with a floating tarp—would have cost $300 million. The shade balls are made in LA and cost 36 cents each. 

Plus, they look like a cheerful horde of alien children tumbling pell-mell into the water. Have fun, guys!

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com. 

(Photo: London looks/Flickr)

Everybody loves dinosaurs, but it takes a special kind of devotion to try and build your own.

Thankfully, though, across America, there are many places to see that passion in action.

Part roadside attractions, part wannabe educational displays, dinosaur parks are a beloved tradition among creators of independent, homegrown attractions. Maybe it's because everyone has a good-enough-for-government-work understanding of basic dinosaur forms, or maybe it's that nothing says fun-for-the-whole-family like non-threatening thunder lizards, but a surprising number of amateur creators have tried their hand at making their own folk art Jurassic Parks. The level of accuracy among the beasts on display in the world's dinosaur parks varies pretty wildly, but all of these nine attractions let visitors take a walk with the dinosaurs that lived in the uncanny valley.

1. PREHISTORIC GARDENS
Port Orford, Oregon

(Photo: Jami Dwyer/Creative Commons)

Oregon's Prehistoric Garden has been around since the early 1950s, when its creator, Ernest Nelson began sculpting giant lizards on his verdant property. Nelson was actually quite concerned with the accuracy of his models, despite what the end product may have been in some cases, and actually went to the Smithsonian to research their fossils. Despite this, many of his dinosaurs ended up looking somewhat silly. In the end, Nelson crafted 23 dinosaurs over 30 some years, all set along the a trail where visitors can come and enjoy his creations. Some of the beasts on display include a cartoonish T. rex, a grinning triceratops, and a 46-foot-tall brontosaurus.

(Photo: Raellyn & Melissa/Flickr)  

(Photo: Bjorn/Flickr)

2. VALLE DE PREHISTORIA
Santiago de Cuba, Cuba

(Photo: rdmazo/Wikipedia)

Cuba's sprawling Baconao Park, has a number of attractions within its borders including a massive volcanic stone known as "The Great Rock" and a replica historic village, but perhaps the most enticing attraction is the Valle de Prehistoria dinosaur park. Throughout the lush sections of the park, somewhere around 200 stone dinosaurs can be found amongst the vegetation. Created with what seems like a pretty good idea of what dinosaurs must have looked like, sort of, but at least they are exciting. There are battling brontosaurs, and dying mammoth being attacked by Neanderthals, spreading its maw strangely wide. The park might be a beautiful sight, but the dinos could use some work.

(Photo: Escla/Wikipedia)

(Photo: vcheregati/Flickr)

3. CRYSTAL PALACE DINOSAURS
London, England

(Photo: Jes/Flickr)

First unveiled in 1853, London's Crystal Palace dinosaurs were intended as a simple novelty, but turned out to become beloved fixtures, even if they only barely resemble any real dinosaurs. The stone creatures were created as part of the decorations on the grounds of Hyde Park's Crystal Palace Park, along with a number of other extinct animals. The models quickly became a popular attraction and small versions of them were sold as toys and educational aids. As the inaccuracies of the models (weird nose horns, aquatic creatures on land) began to to become more glaring over the years, the models fell into disrepair. However in thew 2000s, they finally underwent renovations and are currently protected as national landmarks.

(Photo: Ben Sutherland/Flickr)

(Photo: Loz Pycock/Flickr)

4. THE ROCK AND FOSSIL AND DINOSAUR SHOP
Deerfield, Massachusetts

(Photo: rickpilot_2000/Flickr)

This Massachusetts dinosaur park is the classic educational bait and switch. Lure in the kids with the promise of dinosaurs, then tell them about rocks. But at least the dinosaurs aren't a total lie. This mining exhibit/dinosaur park is held in a small gift shop, and keeps most of it's homemade dinos out back. The collection is small, and is mostly memorable for the wall that has a number of dinosaur heads hanging from it which range from monstrous to strangely adorable. However, again, the real meat of this place would seem to be their rock collections, which to be fair, seem kinda fun.

(Photo: rickpilot_2000/Flickr)

(Photo: rickpilot_2000/Flickr)

5. DINOSAUR WORLD
Cave City, Kentucky

(Photo: Peter River/Flickr)

Starting with the bright orange T. rex standing just off the interstate, beckoning passing motorists, Kentucky's Dinosaur World wears its wonky color on it's sleeve. The actual "world," can be found along the wooded trail where over 150 creatively designed fiberglass dinosaurs can be found, with little plaques explaining their species. The park is the work of Swedish amusement maker, Christer Svensson, who also built two other, similar parks in America. The dinosaurs at each of his parks however are hand made by the employees on site giving them that anti-museum quality that can't be found in many institutions of higher learning anymore. As part of a franchise, this park offers a few more amenities than most, but its dinosaurs still look just as fantastical.

(Photo: London looks/Flickr)

(Photo: London looks/Flickr)

6. DINOSAURLAND
White Post, Virginia

(Photo: Taber Andrew Bain/Flickr)

After being inspired by some dinosaurs that adorned a local mini-golf course, the creator of Virginia's Dinosaurland began creating his own collection of thunder lizards in the 1960s, to decorate his small gift shop. Like many amateur John Hammonds the creator of Dinosaurland did his best to create life-like dinosaurs, but often ended up with strange looking creations like a T. rex seemingly trying to swallow a pterodactyl whole, and a technicolor breed of triceratops. In addition to the dinosaurs, Dinosaurland also eventually became home to a giant King Kong statue as well as a homemade homage to Jaws. Neither looks like dinosaurs, but c'mon, who doesn't like Jaws?

(Photo: nick v/Flickr)

(Photo: Taber Andrew Bain/Flickr)  

7. PETRIFIED CREATURES MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
Richfeld Springs, New York

(Photo: Petrified Creatures Museum of Natural History)

A lot of creations found at dinosaur parks are strange or inaccurate, but few are as straight up impressionistic as the concrete creatures at the Petrified Creatures Museum of Natural History. Despite looking like the creatures were designed by Keith Haring, the park was opened in 1934. It features a number of vaguely dinosaur like shapes with little detail and few sharp angles. Adding to the bizarrely blobby look of the dinosaurs is the paint jobs, which range from bright pink to periwinkle blue, although this would seem to have been a modern addition to the site. Each of the creatures is also accompanied by a mailbox that holds a button that, if pressed, will spout some info about the dinosaur.

(Photo: Petrified Creatures Museum of Natural History)

(Photo: Petrified Creatures Museum of Natural History) 

8. DINOSAUR PARK
Rapid City, South Dakota

(Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

Established in 1936, it's easy to understand why the handmade monsters found in South Dakota's Dinosaur Park are less than 100 percent accurate. But they could maybe have tried to at least make them look like something that could be alive. Looking not unlike a series of children's drawings of dinosaurs sculpted out to three dimensions, Dinosaur Park's titular attractions are pretty friendly to behold. Some of them even have actual grins on their faces. There are five dinosaurs in all at the park, and their bright green coats are regularly touched up, making the park look like it has barely aged in the decades since it's creation. Out understanding of dinosaur physiology may have gotten better over the years, but our love of weird dinosaurs hasn't changed a bit.

(Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)

(Photo: mr_t_77/Flickr)  

9. HISEY DINOSAUR PARK
Granger, Washington

(Photo: Atlas Obscura)

The dinosaurs found in the Hisey Dinosaur Park (and, increasingly all around the city itself), were not created by a single folk art visionary, but a whole town of them. in an attempt to draw tourists to the small Washington town, the locals began building homemade dinosaurs in what would become Hisey Dinosaur Park. Eventually the annual practice grew into the Dino-in-a-Day celebration during which the citizenry of Hisey can come out and help slather concrete on that years wire frame of a dinosaur. The festival has produced over 30 odd dinosaurs which have now expanded outside of just the park and can be found throughout the town.

King in 1964 (Photo: Walter Albertin/Library of Congress)

Eight months before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his most famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he delivered a sort of prequel, in a high school gymnasium in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The only people to hear that early version of the speech were the audience that night. Historians had the transcript, but no recording. 

But in the course of researching his book, "Origins of the Dream," North Carolina State University professor Jason Miller found one, and last night played it in public for the first time. 

The whole North Carolina speech runs 55 minutes, and Miller described it to the AP as "part civil rights address…part mass meeting…[with] the spirit of sermon." He found the recording in Rocky Mount's library: librarians told him it had showed up there one day in a box with the message "Please do not erase" written on the outside.

The August after the event in North Carolina, King was delivering a speech during the March on Washington. He had not written the "I have a dream" sequence into that speech; Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer who had performed just before King's speech, yelled to him "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" He did.

Bonus finds: A sword with a secret code, Great Plague death pit, a planet with two stars

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. 

Acoma Sky City. (Photo: Scott Catron/Wiki Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Acoma Sky City may be the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America, but on a scorching midday walk in July, it certainly doesn’t feel like it.

The sacred “City in the Sky” has stood sentinel atop a sandstone bluff in New Mexico since 1150, and continues to defy all that is modern today. There’s no white noise from TVs or radios, just the sound of crows circling the mesa. The blazing sun supplies all the pueblo’s light, but the adobe homes are often dark and seemingly empty, as are the narrow dirt streets. Meanwhile, the view over the surrounding valley, with its windswept red rock monoliths, is astonishing.

To live here full-time, as only 13 families currently do, is to fully inhabit an ancient village that the Acoma tribe is deeply proud of. For centuries, the only way to get up the 367-foot bluff was a hidden “staircase”–really a series of hand and toeholds–known only to the Acoma.

Buildings in the Sky City of Acoma Pueblo. (Photo: Beyond My Ken/Wiki Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

These days, the pueblo is entered via a sole winding road, built for Hollywood purposes almost a century ago for the 1929 film “Redskin,” which was shot partially in Technicolor, partially in black-and-white. Everything but the cobalt sky is on the warm earth color spectrum: gold, beige, sienna. There is only one tree in Sky City, offering the area’s only real shade; it juts out improbably from one of three open water cisterns that are no longer used for drinking water, as they were contaminated long ago by horses owned by Spanish colonizers.

Our tour guide is a young woman who, like most of the 5,000 members of the Acoma tribe, doesn’t live full time in Sky City. Her name tag gives a common, pretty Spanish name; she explains that long ago all the Acoma were given Spanish names, and then tells us her Acoma name: long, beautiful, and in the Keres language. She waits a beat for others to attempt the tricky pronunciation, laughs, and tells us we can call her by her Spanish name, or by “Sparkles,” which is essentially what her Keres name means. 

For centuries, the Acoma have retained their traditions, culture, and names despite the best efforts of one invading force after another. Sky City’s history illuminates not only the historic traditions of the Pueblo Indians, but the often brutal relationship between native people and Spanish colonizers of New Mexico.

The New Mexico landscape. (Photo: Jessica Roake)

The Acoma pueblo has roots that stretch back more than a millennia, to the mysterious Hisatsinom people. The Hisatsinom (the more commonly known term “Anasazi” is actually a Navajo word for “ancient enemies” and is considered a slur by many Pueblo Indians) inhabited sites like the city of Aztec and Chaco Canyon between 700 and 1300, but when a famine ravaged their population, survivors began to spread out in search of new homes.

According to the Acoma, a group of these wanderers were told by the Gods to go south, shouting “Haa-ku!” until they came to a place where it echoed. After traveling across a long plain, the people found themselves dropped into a stunning valley studded with monoliths–what author and chronicler of the frontier Willa Cather called “vast cathedrals”–rising hundreds of feet into the air, a sacred place filled with echoes. It was in this “Haa-ku” or “place prepared” that the Acoma settled, in 1150.

They built their village atop the tallest sandstone bluff, as close to their creator, the Sun, as possible (some historians believe that Sky City’s unique elevation points to an Acoma-Aztec connection, as the Aztecs built pyramids to get closer to their Sun God.) The tribe chose to build their pueblo on top of the mesa for defensive purposes as well–it offered a perfect view of anyone approaching, and its sheer walls made surprise attacks by neighboring warlike tribes impossible.

Unfortunately for the Acoma, their gleaming city of the sun attracted the attention of people on a perpetual hunt for all that gleamed: 16th century Spanish conquistadors. It marked the beginning of centuries of oppression and brutality for the tribe.   

Acoma in the early 20th century. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The Spaniards’ first meeting with the Acoma, in 1540, was peaceful. The second encounter, though, became infamous in New Mexico history. In 1598, Spain granted Don Juan de Oñate permission to colonize New Mexico for Spain. Invited by the Acoma to negotiate, Oñate sent a delegation of soldiers, including his nephew, to visit Sky City. Oñate’s men were immediately hostile–demanding food, breaking down houses they believed to be made of gold, and attacking Acoma women. A fight ensued, and the Acoma killed all but two of the Spanish soldiers.  

Oñate retaliated by attacking the Acoma with an army, taking the mesa by cannon fire. Over the course of a fierce three-day battle known as the Acoma Massacre, the Spanish burned homes, destroyed much of the pueblo with cannon fire, and killed 800 men, women and children. Oñate then took 500 prisoners, trying and judging them in his own court. Every Acoma man over the age of 25 was sentenced to 20 years of servitude, and had their right hands and feet amputated. Younger men and women over 12 were enslaved for a period of 20 years, and children were “distributed” throughout the Spanish colonies.

Oñate's treatment of the Acoma was cruel even by Spanish imperialist standards, and when King Philip learned of his actions, he was banished from New Mexico for life. Though Oñate is often celebrated as the founder of New Mexico, his legacy is anything but heroic for native people. When a statue of Oñate was erected in New Mexico in 1998, its right foot was promptly removed with a chainsaw. The Acoma took full and proud credit.

After their years of servitude were up, the Acoma returned to Sky City to build again. They found a new force to be reckoned with: the Catholic Church, eager to erect a glorious mission in Acoma. Friar Juan Ramirez oversaw the construction of the San Estevan del Rey Mission, now a National Historic Landmark, starting in 1629. For years, Friar Ramirez was depicted as a beloved and peaceful “civilizing” force for the people he sought to convert, but the Acoma have always vigorously disputed this depiction. “They hated that man,” says Sparkles.

San Estevan Del Rey Mission Church. (Photo: Jessica Roake)

The issue was not necessarily the faith itself, as the Acoma embraced elements of Catholicism starting in the 1600s. Acoma are wary of dates since all records come from their Spanish occupiers, but the pueblo faced a massive drought in the 17th century. In their desperation, the Acoma turned to St. Estevan, the patron saint chosen for them. According to legend, the Acoma said, “if you love us so much, please end this drought.” The next day, it rained. Today, the majority of Acoma practice some combination of traditional religion and Catholicism, while five percent of the people practice only the traditional religion.

But traditional ceremonies always come first, even on Catholic feast days. Many Acoma gather in Sky City to celebrate the feast days through sacred dances and ceremonies, and adobe homes overflow with families sharing traditional chile stews, fry breads, and fruit pies with visitors.

There was no such blending to be found in 17th-century Sky City. Friar Ramirez believed that the Acoma worshipped Satan, and tried to suppress their beliefs by destroying all the sacred round kivas, or places of worship, in the pueblo. The Acoma adapted by making the kivas square and hiding them throughout the village. They can still be identified by their distinctive white ladders, pointing northward towards their ancestors, their poles sharpened to the sky for piercing clouds.

Because every part of the Catholic mission had to be brought from the valley below–some 20,000 pounds of earth and stone–the work was backbreaking for the Acoma. The Church announced that four of the beams in the church’s roof needed to be from wood that had never touched the ground, so Acoma men carried logs from Mt. Taylor 50 miles away up to Sky City, stopping and starting again if any part of the wood dropped.

A wooden ladder leading to the entrance to a kiva. (Photo: Jessica Roake)

The slave labor and abuse of power used in the building of the San Estevan del Rey Mission, which Willa Cather described as “gaunt, grim, gray...more like a fortress than a place of worship,” is sharply dissected in her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, inspired partially by Acoma: “Powerful men they must have been, those Spanish Fathers, to draft Indian labor for this great work.”

But while the site has a painful history–some Acoma still refuse to enter its grounds-–the Acoma people found small ways to integrate their traditional symbols into the church. A vibrant light pink covers the lower half of the inner walls to represent the earth, the shade like a rare kind of soil found in the valley. Rainbows painted on the walls represent the sacred rain the Acoma are always seeking, and the corn their crops. In the nave, the bannisters represent the matriarchal clans of Acoma–all property and clans are passed through the mother’s line in this society.

Sparkles points out these touches while a few Acoma people gather in the cool center of the church to chat–there are no pews for worship or priests for taking confession; they have only one full Catholic service here each year. One of the reservation dogs accompanying us on the tour gnaws on a bench, then runs out into the sun.

After the church was completed in 1642, one problem still remained in the eyes of the Spanish: it didn’t have a bell. The Church said they would gladly send one in exchange for four boys and four girls, but the Acoma refused. Spanish soldiers took the children by force, and soon a bell was gifted to the mission by the Spanish crown. Today, the bell stands in the church in memorial to the lost children.

An aerial view of Acoma. (Photo: Marshall Henrie/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Nearby, there’s a walled cemetery with four layers of graves where only tribal elders and veterans are buried. Clay “warrior spirit” heads sit atop the walls; they are re-etched yearly. The wall contains one hole, made so the souls of the eight missing Acoma children can return home. Tribal elders say the hole will remain open until there is peace between all people.

In 1680, Indians all over New Mexico united and drove out the Spaniards in an unprecedented and coordinated surprise attack. The Pueblo Revolt killed 400 Spaniards, and pushed the rest from the region for 12 years. Many churches were burned, but not in Sky City. Part of this was practical– San Estevan del Rey is made of adobe that wouldn’t really burn–and part sacred: Acoma ancestors were buried in the walls of the mission.

Today, the Acoma continue to work their way back from external and internal threats to tribal life. Like many Native Americans, they have had to contend with the U.S. government, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment, among other issues. For decades, Acoma children were forcibly sent to boarding schools where their knuckles were rapped for speaking Keres. Nowadays the traditional language is taught to all Acoma children at the local schools. There are still Acoma who will not speak Spanish.

In recent years, the Acoma reservation has been able to build new medical and community centers, better schools and housing thanks to the revenue generated from a casino and tourism to Sky City.

A feast day in Acoma in 1905. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Sparkles points out a house near the main plaza, where the feast day dances and festivities take place. It’s not an ancient russet adobe like most in Sky City, instead it’s painted sage blue and has new windows. She is the youngest daughter in her family, and in Acoma tradition, the house is therefore hers. She is meant to care for her parents in it, and if she marries, her husband will come and live there with her.

On the narrow streets, Acoma artists have set up tables and covered them in thin, hand-coiled pottery with intricately painted geometric designs in black, white and deep ochre. Animal figures of the 12 surviving clans, in symbolic colors and patterns, share space with the pots and ceramics, and a few older ladies sell fry bread and soda. Sparkles’ cousins, toting rifles that look like toys but must be real, are climbing down the staircase to go hunting in the valley.

We look over the northern cliff, the border of Sky City that faces the 430-foot butte called “Enchanted Mesa,” and see volcanic Mt. Taylor in the distance. No one seems ready to turn in the other direction: toward the interstate that will take us all back to modernity.

Arjit Kansal of India holds out his PowerPoint 2010 trophy at last year's Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships. (Photo: Certiport/Flickr)

Proud of your word-processing chops? Think you're hot stuff because you know your way around a slide animation? Better (spell)check yourself—unless you're spending the day in a Dallas, Texas convention center, you're nothing compared to the teen finalists of the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships.

Over the past three days, 180 Word wizards, PowerPoint prodigies, and Excel-siors between the ages of 13 and 22 have typed, clicked, and CTRL-ALT-DEL'd in an effort to be named the top users of various Office Suite products, from PowerPoint 2007 to Adobe Digital Design. This incredible computer pageant has been happening for 14 years. 

Surprisingly few events combine the three great achievements of the modern era: teens, technology, and competitive sports. But the Microsoft Office World Championship didn't really mean to hit a nerve. "For us, it was just a way to get students excited about getting certified," says Allison Yrungaray, a PR rep from Certiport who is watching her fifth competition this year. "I'm surprised other companies haven't done it."

To get this far, finalists have already performed better than 700,000 other people on the Microsoft Specialist Exams, which test prowess in different Office programs. "For example, a Word exam might ask a user to balance newspaper column lengths or to keep text together in columns," the exam FAQ explains. They have then trounced their local competition at the nearest Regional Championships.  

Ian Leitao Ferreira of Brazil, last year's Excel 2007 World Champion. (Photo: Certiport/Flickr)

The final gauntlet is a timed exam, during which the students must recreate a document exactly, in their chosen program, before 50 minutes are up. (The Adobe exam is newer, and slightly different—"a lot more visual," with posters, says Yrungaray.) Winners receive $5,000 scholarships. 

"The students get pumped, very competitive," says Yrungaray. "Some of them get a perfect score and perform very fast."

The competition, hosted this year by Microsoft, Adobe and certification and testing company Certiport, features competitors from 40 countries, along with their mandatory chaperones. The U.S. has 9 students in the running, and other big contingents are from New Zealand, Taiwan, Mexico, and Macau. 

Dominique Howard, who took home gold for the USA last year in Word 2007. (Photo: Certiport/Flickr)

If you're in Dallas, Texas, you can go cheer them on—the day's events, which include a parade of all 180 finalists, are going down at the Gaylord Texan Grapevine Resort from 9 am to 12:30 pm CDT. (A livestream is also available here.) Afterwards, Clippy will presumably buy the winners a round of root beer. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.