David Bowie during the Young Americans tour. (Photo: Hunter Desportes/CC BY 2.0)

A new retrospective box set of David Bowie’s music (Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)) is set to hit the streets in just a few days, and for the first time ever, it is going to include his “unreleased” album, The Gouster. The album was recorded in 1974 around the same time as Young Americans, and is seen as a sort of darker version of that album. While many of the songs from The Gouster, such as “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” and even “Young Americans” would be released as singles or on other albums, never before have they been released in their original album.

While the box set will finally recreate the album as it was seemingly intended, the strange name itself says a great deal about the attitude Bowie wanted the record to convey. But what is a "Gouster"?

The term “Gouster” refers to an African-American youth subculture that popped up in Chicago’s South Side in the early 1960s. According to one reading of the term on the Language Hat blog, the word has Scottish roots, originally meaning, “A violent or unmanageable person, a swaggering fellow.” This origin seems to fit with what the Gousters became in 20th century Chicago, with their bad-boy attitudes, and ne'er-do-well reputations. The Gouster trend didn’t last long, and what we know about it seems to come mainly from the recollections of those who lived it.

Like almost every youth subculture from the beginning of time, much of Gouster culture revolved around fashion. Chicago’s Gousters adopted the style and swagger of the local old school gangsters of previous decades. There are scant few images of actual Gousters available online, but one of the more prominent recollections of Gouster culture, in a 2013 post to a blog called Boomacious, gives some idea of their general look. To wit:

“A Gouster’s style was dress-casual. He wore loose fitting, almost baggy clothes. His fine wool, alpaca and mohair sweater had three buttons at the neck, with a lazy, turned down collar. Pants with two pleats at the waist left a little room in the leg so that a Gouster could pimp.”

Another post on the Remembering Chicago During the 1950-1965 blog says of the style, “Gousters were very neat and loved their pleats.”

Gouster fashion shared some common DNA with the clean, but ostentatious, look of zoot suits. True Gousters could often be found sporting suspenders, fedoras, or even carrying a cane. The idea, as ever, was to look the coolest. Women could be Gousters too, and their outfits tended toward pleated skirts accented with nylons and pearls.

But it wasn’t only about the clothes. Dancing was a big part of Gouster culture as well. In an interview in BluesSpeak: The Best of the Original Chicago Blues Annual, legendary Chicago radio personality Herb Kent, said that Gousters had their own club spots like the Peps and the Persian Ballroom, as well as their own styles of dance, such as the Gouster Bop and the Gouster Walk. In that same Boomacious post, she says, “If a guy could Bop, he was king of the night.”

Of course Gousters weren’t the only crowd on the scene in the early '60s. They were directly opposed by anyone who identified as an Ivy Leaguer. In opposition to the loose, swaggering suits worn by Gousters, Ivys wore tight fitting Brooks Brothers outfits, cultivating a clean-cut collegiate look. They were the Socs to the Gousters’ Greasers. The divide was stark and ubiquitous among early '60s Chicago teens. In his autobiography, The Cool Gent, Kent says that you were either an Ivy or a Gouster and there was no in-between, although the actual conflicts were much tamer than today.

“Gousters just always tried to outdo the Ivies in everything. The Competition was there in the form of dressing, dancing, and even getting girls." he wrote. He also notes that when a fight would break out, the rough-and-tumble Gousters usually came out on top.

By the mid-1960s, both Gousters and Ivies and sort of fallen by the wayside as trends changed, but Bowie never forgot the coolness those Chicago teens exuded. As noted on Rolling Stone, in the notes from Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), Bowie’s close friend, Tony Visconti, shed some light on the musician’s choice to name his album after an obscure Chicago trend.“Gouster was a word unfamiliar to me but David knew it as a type of dress code worn by African American teens in the ‘60s, in Chicago," he told the magazine, "But in the context of the album its meaning was attitude, an attitude of pride and hipness.” Even if he didn’t experience it himself, Bowie seemed to understand that “pride and hipness” were what the Gousters were all about.       

The new book from Phaidon, Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, features a rich collection of 300 images of various plants and flowers in the form of illustrations, photography and SEM micrographs. This depth of visuals is suited to the subject matter: images of the botanical world have existed for over 5,000 years, according to the book’s introduction, and have been an essential part of plant identification and categorization.

Not all of the contributors began as botanists, however. For example, one of the most famous catalogers was the 18th-century artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, who became known as the “Raphael of flowers”. Redouté painted stage scenery in Paris and was discovered, and trained, by the botanist Charles Louis l'Héritier de Brutelle. Over the course of his career, as he navigated revolutionary France, both Marie-Antoinette and, later, Josephine Bonaparte were his patrons. He illustrated more than 50 botanical books and his delicate watercolors are instantly recognizable.

Plant also provides biographical information for each image, which is often as illuminating as the work itself. One illustration consists of delicate pen-and-ink drawings of plants, surrounding by small script—a letter exchanged between botanists to document species. In another, shown above, a poppy blazes bright blue. According to the book’s text, this was created for the color edition of the Honzō zufu, the “Illustrated Manual of Plants”, produced by Iwasaki (Kan’en) Tsunemasa in the 19^th century.  

Here is a collection of images from this beautifully illustrated book:

Erich J. Geske, Maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes), from National Geographic, 1925. (Photo: National Geographic Creative/ Bridgeman Images/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

Philip Reinagle, Large Flowering Sensitive Plant from Robert John Thornton's The Temple of Flora, 1799. (Photo: Natural History Museum, London/ Science Photo Library/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

Mieko Ishikawa, Acorns from Brunei, 1997. (Photo: © Mieko Ishikawa/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

Ernst Haeckel, Liverworts (Hepaticae), from Kunstformen der Natur, 1899. (Photo: © Fine Art/ Alamy Stock Photo/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Rosa centifolia: Rosier à cent feuilles, 1820. (Photo: The Art Archive/ Eileen Tweedy/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin and Johannes Scarf, Various flowering plants, 1792. (Photo: Natural History Museum, London/ Science Photo Library/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

Rob Kesseler, Scabiosa crenata, a hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM). (Photo: Collection of Rob Kesseler/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)

The cover of Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, released by Phaidon books in September 2016. (Photo: Courtesy Phaidon) 

An example of a dragon booger in freshwater. (Photo: Braunchitis/CC BY-SA 3.0)

See a mysterious floating blob in the river? Most people would simply leave it be, but residents of Stockton, California recently decided to pull some up and they discovered something that could be a signal of a larger environmental issue: dragon boogers.

According to CBS Sacramento is reporting, strange gelatinous blobs have been appearing in rivers and man-made lakes in various spots along the area delta. As curious fishermen and other locals began to dredge them up and slap them down on the docks (where they looked even more vile), sharing pictures on social media, some answers about their origins began to emerge.

They were not some kind of Lovecraftian discharge, as it turns out, although they weren’t exactly locals either. The strange blobs were identified as organisms called bryozoans. Also known as dragon’s boogers or moss animals, these discomfiting blobs are actually masses of much smaller creatures called zooids, each only about a half a millimeter long. However, they can band together to form larger slime lumps, while reaching out their countless minuscule tentacles to grab food. They just don’t usually appear in Northern California.

In fact they are not normally found west of the Mississippi River. No one is sure quite how they ended up so far west, whether they were accidentally relocated or whether climate change made the waters more hospitable for them. But their presence could disrupt the existing environmental balance in the delta.

At least they’re not from space.  

At a Florida fertilizer plant, a sinkhole 45 feet in diameter and 300 feet deep opened up in the ground—right underneath a giant pool of wastewater. More than 200 million gallons of contaminated water rushed down, into the aquifer that underlies Florida and provides drinking water for people across the state. The water is polluted with a phosphogypsum, a weakly radioactive byproduct of making phosphorous fertilizer. 

The sinkhole opened up in late August; it was three weeks before the news was made public. As the Tampa Bay Times reports, the law does not require public notification until there's evidence that contaminated water has migrated off site (which hasn't happened yet).

DEP: No legal requirement to notify neighbors of phosphate plant's sinkhole https://t.co/JRSnLBJhHW via @TB_Times

— Sarah Laskow (@slaskow) September 21, 2016

The company says water in the aquifer moves slowly, and it's working to clean up the spill; neighbors, naturally, are nervous and are taking the company up on its offer to test their well water for contamination.

This is the second giant sinkhole to open up on this site. In 1994, a sinkhole 160 feet wide at the surface opened beneath a stack of phosphogypsum; investigators determined it was connected to an erosion cavity that went 400 feet down into the soil. It was described as "planet Earth's first moon crater."

Central Florida is home to large fertilizer production facilities because of its natural deposits of phosphate, discovered in the 19th century, in the Bone Valley region, where the land is a sandy mix of phosphate pebbles, clay, and fossils. In this area, the dirt also includes naturally occurring uranium, which remains behind in the phosphogypsum byproduct of fertilizer product.

Environmentalists have been worried for years about the danger of accumulating waste from fertilizer production; it doesn't help that Florida is prone to sinkholes. From an industrial perspective, one giant sinkhole every 30 years could be considered acceptable, but no one wants to be the neighbor who has to worry about a giant hole next door leaking uranium into the groundwater.

According to Bleacher Report, there is one basketball court, and one alone, that is “without a doubt the most famous basketball court on the planet.” The outdoor, two-hoop court of Rucker Park, complete with five rows of bleachers, may not look so famous from the outside. But over time it has been touched by the shoes of some of the NBA’s greats, and witnessed some of the most intense street games of all time.

Rucker Park, in northeastern Harlem, was first built in 1950 by Holcombe Rucker, the playground director of Harlem’s parks. Rucker opened the court in order to start up a legendary basketball tournament amongst Harlem’s greatest street ballers, nicknamed the “Rucker League”, with a generous mission of providing both basketball skills and educational opportunity to the low-income youth of the neighborhood.

To encourage academic growth, Rucker gave playing priority to students with higher scores on their report cards, and his generous educational efforts eventually granted college scholarships to 700 Harlem youth. With the motto of “each one, teach one”, Rucker donated most of his spare time to help with homework and teach reading to the kids.

But Rucker’s legacy wasn’t limited to education: Rucker Park soon became the one-stop shop for emerging basketball players to gain their street cred and boost their playing ability to the NBA level. In over six decades of existence, the Rucker League’s tournaments have been competed in by greats such as Wilt Chamberlain, Dr. J, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and, most recently, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant.

Over the years, Rucker Park has not only hosted some of basketball’s greatest players, but also some of its greatest moves. At a time before the NBA was filled with slam dunks and crossover dribbles, Rucker Park was the international epicenter of jams and jukes.

As of today, Rucker Park is open to the public and is often occupied throughout the day with a match of street ball. Since the fifties, the Rucker League has held onto its educational initiative and currently offers mentoring, tutoring, and career planning to Harlem's economically disadvantaged children. In fact, the late Holcombe Rucker has created so much positive change in the community that his grandson is currently asking the NBA to admit his granddad into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

In northeastern India, there is a city with a mythological history even deeper than the Brahmaputra River that runs through it. Nicknamed “The Land of Black Magic,” the untouched, secluded village of Mayong holds one of the oddest magical backstories on the planet.

While some villages pass down the skills of farming or craftsmanship to the next generation, the elders of Mayong pass down sorcery and magic to the town’s youth.

Many speculate that the name “Mayong” originated from the Sanskrit word “maya”, which means “illusion”. This certainly seems to be the case in Mayong, where, according to legend, people have been morphed into animals, monstrous beasts have been tamed, and men have disappeared into thin air by uttering “Luki Mantra.” 

Mayong has been India's center for witchcraft and wizardry since its inception many centuries ago. In the early days of Mayong, legend has it, if you chanted “Uran Mantra” you would be able to fly through the air and land directly beside your true love.

According to legend, witches and the saints of black magic took shelter in the Mayong woods years ago. In 1337, Muhammad Shah’s army of 100,000 horsemen perished at the hands of witchcraft in a location near Mayong, evidence to the village's locals of the high prevalence of black magic in the area. Excavators have even found swords in Mayong that resemble those used to sacrifice humans in other parts of India.

Mayong today is just as dark and eerie, but slightly more open, with the occasional traveller passing through town. The locals of Mayong offer palm reading to these visitors and claim to be able to predict the future with the help of broken glass and seashells.

Witch doctors are also abundant in Mayong. Local healers treat pain by placing a copper dish on the source of the injury and wait for the dish to “eat away” the pain. If the pain is too severe, the dish will overheat and shatter onto the ground. The witch doctors also serve as a lost and found in the town. If someone loses something, the witch doctor will place a flower in a metal bowl. According to the locals, the bowl will then move along the ground, completely on its own, until it reaches the location of the lost or stolen items.

There are a countless number of spells in Mayong, but, according to mythology, none of them have the power to change the weather. Says Naba Deka, a local to the area, “there are spells to turn a leaf into a fish, or an evil man into an animal, but magic cannot fight against nature’s fury, so there is no spell against the annual floods.”

Every year, a handful of Indians travel to Mayong either to practice dark magic and learn the secrets of witchcraft or to visit the adjacent Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary, which hosts the world’s densest population of Indian rhinos. In fact, the animals and magic of Mayong often go hand in hand. This can be seen at the Mayong-Pobitora Festival, which celebrates the fusion between wildlife and sorcery.

Central Warsaw is truly crammed for space, and many downtown developers are turning horizontal space into vertical space by building tall skyscrapers. But in no other setting in the world is a building’s height to width ratio as insanely preposterous as that of Warsaw’s Keret House. Welcome to the skinniest house in the world.

Designed by Polish architect Jakub Szczęsny, the Keret House in Warsaw is wedged inside a four-foot crevice, nicknamed a "cushion of air," between two buildings. The Keret House stretches over 30 feet tall but is simultaneously only 28 inches wide at its narrowest point—thinner than a stovetop—and just four feet wide at its widest.

With just 46 square feet of floor space and a world record for narrowness under its name, the Keret House manages to fit a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a two-beverage refrigerator in the span of three floors. The first floor features nothing but a staircase to the second. However, when the staircase is retracted it makes for a pleasant (yet claustrophobic) living room. To get from the second floor to the third, you must climb a white ladder.

Since the Keret House is so minuscule, it has no room for traditional electrical and sewage appliances. Szczęsny's makeshift solution to the electrical dilemma involved obtaining electricity from the two buildings it's sandwiched in between. To dispose of sewage, the Keret House avoids city standards and instead uses an innovative customized design.

Built in 2012, Szczęsny’s narrow masterpiece is legally classified as an “art installation” because it doesn’t meet Polish housing codes, but, in practice, it serves as a residence nonetheless. Constructed as a memorial to his family killed in the Holocaust, the Keret House is named after Etgar Keret, the Israeli filmmaker and author who was spontaneously asked by Szczęsny to be the house's first tenant. After Keret agreed to the deal and lived there for a number of weeks, the Keret House became open to traveling writers for the night's stay. As of today, the Keret House is open to all visitors to Warsaw, so long as it's not undergoing maintenance.

In 1920, brothers Lew and Jesse Tisor were walking over the pedestrian bridge at Lovers Leap ravine. The two teenagers would have been used to the sway of the wooden walkway, but this time the planks gave out from under them. In a flash they were at the bottom, miraculously unscathed, still standing upright.

It may have been just a stroke of good luck, or maybe someone was watching over them. After all, the Swinging Bridge—also called Lovers Leap here in Columbus Junction—comes complete with a legend of lost love, and even the occasional haunting.

The bridge goes back long before the Tisor brothers made their crossing. The original one, made from salvaged barrel wood, dates from either 1880 or 1886 (accounts differ), and was built to provide a direct route from Fourth Street to Third without having to walk all the way around the 80-foot ravine.

That one lasted until 1902, when its haphazard construction was condemned by the city. In 1904, bridge number two went up, and it stayed up for sixteen years until it tumbled down under the Tisor brothers’ feet. Two years after that it was bridge number three, and with a few updates and overhauls over the decades, it’s been up ever since.

No one really knows how the ravine came to be known as Lovers Leap, but the most often told tale is of a love-sick Indian maiden, her beau killed in battle, who threw herself to the bottom to end her grief. Or maybe it was a case of unrequited love—that story has some traction too. It’s said that the maiden is buried at the bottom, and if you cross over at night you can hear her mournful cries. Maybe it was her watching over the Tisor boys back in 1920.

A female monarch butterfly. (Photo: Kenneth Dwain Harrelson/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every winter, millions of monarch butterflies from the eastern part of North America migrate south to a forest in the middle of Mexico, where they see out the season until fall comes. 

The forest, which was first discovered in the 1970s, is officially called the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, and has been a protected site in Mexico since 1980. But ever since then—and likely before—the forest has remained threatened by illegal logging.

On Tuesday, Mexican authorities announced steps towards fighting that threat, in the form of the closure of seven sawmills that had been operating illegally in the reserve, according to the Associated Press.

The closures come around two months ahead of the butterflies' arrival and amid a wider crackdown on illegal logging in the area.

The total preserve is some 215 square miles, or about the size of Chicago. But a smaller, core area of the zone is where officials have focused their efforts, almost cutting in half the amount of illegal logging there from 2015 to 2016, according to the AP.

All of which is good news for the monarchs, who need all the help they can get. Their populations have declined massively in the last 10 years, and scientists still aren't quite sure how—or if—they can be saved.

Relatively unknown, moderately physically demanding, and inaccessible to unaccompanied visitors, Mystery Valley is a lightly trafficked but thoroughly intriguing stretch of desert.

Featuring graceful geological formations, petroglyphs, scattered artifacts, and breathtaking views of wide open spaces and the spectacular buttes of neighboring (and more famous) Monument Valley, this hidden gem provides a unique opportunity for a guided tour among ancient indigenous ruins.

Geologists believe that the now sun-dried valley was completely underwater long ago. The remarkable formations are the work of millions of years of slow erosion by wind and water. Mystery Valley, along with much of the American southwest, was once home to the Anasazi people (from roughly 100 B.C.E. to 1300 C.E.) Around 500 years ago—after the Anasazi departed from the area, leaving empty settlements and everyday items behind—the Diné (Navajo) tribe descended from northwestern Canada and settled in Mystery Valley and much of the surrounding territory.  To this day,  Mystery Valley belongs to the Diné and is under their tribal law, and is accessible to visitors only when accompanied by a Diné guide.

While exploring Mystery Valley, one cannot help but feel the immense amount of time that has shaped it.  It is a cosmic place of strange red rock formations that, but for a scattering of desert plants, often resembles a Martian landscape. Exploring the ancient ruins of Anasazi settlements, and gazing at petroglyphs that look like they could have been scratched into the sandstone yesterday, you can hear the echo of the ancient people who once called this valley home. 

(Photo: Public domain)

Wyndclyffe, a mansion in Rhinebeck, New York, which is about 100 miles north of New York City, has been in bad shape for decades, ever since it was abandoned in the 1950s after a series of owners couldn't afford to maintain it. 

Owing to its size, it's not hard to see why: 24 rooms on 80 acres, a pre-Civil War manor house that preceded the Gilded Age, when many such mansions were routinely built, that later fell into disrepair.

But Wyndclyffe (also spelled Wyndcliffe) has a more colorful history than most. The American novelist Edith Wharton spent time there as a child, for one thing, and it's also is believed to have inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses," after its original owner, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, a New York socialite. 

(Photo: Luke Spencer)

Now, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal, Wyndclyffe could be yours, as it's being auctioned off today at a hotel in Queens by order of federal bankruptcy court.

These days, the dilapidated mansion sits on just 2.5 acres, the rest having been carved up and sold in the past several decades. Its latter-day value also matches its condition: just $312,900, modest for most homes along the Hudson.

Any new owner will have a difficult project on their hands, with the option to either tear down a piece of history, or spend hundreds of thousands more to rebuild.

Keeping up with the Joneses, in other words, is about as expensive as you would think. 

(Photo: Luke Spencer)

Everyone needs a place to get away, and violent cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar was no exception. The spot he chose was on the shores of the Peñol Reservoir in the idyllic resort town of Guatapé. There, Escobar built a lavish estate called La Manuela (named after his daughter) that would be the scene of one of the most dramatic episodes in his downfall.

Covering eight hectares (20 acres), La Manuela consisted of a stately mansion surrounded by a pool, tennis courts, a soccer field (which doubled as a helipad), stables, a guest house, a sea plane dock, a special driveway for motorcycles, trees imported from around the world, and a security force of 120 goons. The main house was, of course, luxuriously appointed, and even included its own discotech. It was also built for practicality, however, featuring double-layered walls used for hiding mountains of cash and cocaine. La Manuela was Pablo Escobar's second-favorite house.

In 1993, it was bombed by Los Pepes, a vigilante group whose name stood for "Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar" ("People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar"). Allegedly funded by the rival Cali Cartel and other enemies of Escobar, Los Pepes stuffed 200kg of TNT into a bathroom at La Manuela, the detonation of which blew the house to bits. Police forces quickly swooped in and seized the drugs and money revealed by the explosion. Escobar was shot and killed by authorities eight months later in Medellín.

La Manuela has now been taken over by nature. Visitors may enter the ruins but must exercise care while on the grounds. The walls are filled with holes where people have searched for stashed money; locals note that nobody has ever found any. People can visit Escobar's room, the now-swampy pool, the guard towers, the bathroom where the bomb was planted -- basically the entire estate. The surrounding area also provides beautiful views.

Accessible by water or dirt road, a modern house will greet arriving guests, which is a restaurant owned by Pablo Escobar's ex-butler. Ask in the restaurant for access to the site. Games of paintball in the ruins are also available.

In the middle of Lake Vuoksa, about two hours north of St. Petersburg, sits a small stone island that just barely rises above the waters. The island is so small that it is almost entirely taken up by a miniature wooden church perched charmingly atop it. While that church might seem like the stuff of Baba Yaga and Father Frost, it is actually a modern bit of whimsy built in 2000.

The Church of Andrew the Apostle is a Russian Orthodox Church designed by Russian architect Andrei Rotinov, and was modeled on the famous Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye, a former royal estate in Moscow. Although there are no regularly scheduled ceremonies or masses at the beautiful, idyllic little chapel, it is available by appointment for baptisms and weddings.

The island is currently reachable only by boat or ferry (except when the lake is frozen solid, of course), but there are reportedly plans to build a bridge to provide easier access. There are numerous references to the church being in the Guinness Book of World Records for being "the world's only church built on a tiny island," but these claims have proven difficult to confirm. Andrew the Apostle is the patron saint of fishermen.

This Fleischer Studios cartoon from 1932 opens on a live-action shot of Cab Calloway and his band, with the bandleader performing his iconic boogie.

The toon takes its name from one of Calloway's most popular songs, "Minnie the Moocher." Minnie, played by Betty Boop, is a depressed flapper who can't bring herself to eat her immigrant parents' food. Like so many angsty teens she hatches a plan to run away because they're "not so sweet," and makes her escape with her puppy friend, Bimbo. Betty and Bimbo don't make it very far before they're frightened by shadows in the forest, so they take refuge in a cave. It's here that they're met by Cab Calloway himself—sort of.

Max Fleischer (who created Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and Popeye) used rotoscoping, a technique he invented, to animate Calloway into the cartoon. First he filmed the bandleader performing his famous strut, then projected the film stills onto the back of a glass easel. On the other side of the easel, the animator then traced over over each frame, thus transforming Calloway from the dapper jazzman into a walrus specter. (Why a walrus? Unclear.)

Rotoscoping produced an uncanny result. While the dance troupe of skeletons wiggle their cartoon spaghetti limbs, the phantom bandleader moves in an eerily human manner. This, along with other creepy sights like ghosts impervious to electric execution and kittens that suck the life out of their own mother, drive Betty and Bimbo back to the safety of their own home.

A cautionary tale? Maybe. An impressive example of early cartooning? Definitely.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

There is a church in Leiden called Pieterskerk, or the Church of St. Peter. It’s a 900 year old Gothic beauty, the oldest church in this small city half way between Amsterdam and The Hague. It’s also known as the Church of the Pilgrim Fathers, most famous to Americans as the Dutch refuge where the Mayflower separatists briefly hung out after leaving England, but before sailing to Massachusetts.

The church has been deconsecrated as a religious space since the early 1970s, so you can’t attend services there any more, Calvinist or otherwise. But you can visit the final resting place of one of the world’s great mathematicians, an All-Star named Willebrord Snellius.

Willebrord Snel van Royen is buried under the floor at Pieterskerk, his spot marked by a simple flat stone and small plaque. Snell, as he’s known to physics and astronomy students everywhere, is the brains behind the law of refraction, one of the fundamental laws of physics.

That alone would have secured his math chops, but his reach goes much further. Of his many milestones, he’s also credited with basically inventing triangulation as we know it, managing to figure out the circumference of the Earth to a remarkably accurate degree for the time.

In the Netherlands he is remember with particular fondness and pride for drafting the first accurate map of the country. He achieved it with his new brand of triangulation, climbing up a series of church towers to measure their distances with a giant quadrant. The map was so accurate—and therefor valuable to the Dutch military—that it was kept secret and unpublished until years later.

For all who aren’t familiar with Snell’s Law of refraction or may have forgotten it, there will be no pop quiz. Here you go: 

 Got it? Good.

(Photo: JFK Library)

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

The year was November 1983, and the State Department needed to admit something pretty embarrassing.

For two weeks, it seems they had been able to keep quiet the accidental transfer of highly-classified documents to the Lorton Reformatory, a one-time D.C. prison with a long-time federal partnership. But when a local reporter returned some of the “stratospheric secrets” to the State Department, they had to come out with it, and in headlines across the country, the news broke that the government had lost track of the precious papers. To deliver the Department of State’s side was spokesman Joe Reap.

Who was Joe Reap?

Well, according to another New York Times piece from 1974, nine years prior, he was a graduate of Georgetown University Law School, deputy press officer under eight Secretaries of State, the husband of Anne, and the father of eight children.

He was also dead.

Was federal spokesman the family line of work? Or was Mr. Reap the specter of the State Department?

Since the obituary appeared in the Grey Lady’s pages in 1974, just months after the resignation of Nixon, Mr. Reap has been cited over and over again.

Among other instances, he surfaced (albeit with a suffix) speaking to the Times during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1981….

in an issue of Black Enterprise from 1984…

on behalf of the State Department’s “Terrorism Desk” in 1998…

and operating a fax machine in 2003.

MuckRock has submitted multiple requests to follow up, but while we wait, we’re wondering: can you find Joseph Reap faster than a FOIA?

Twenty MuckRock requests to the person who can satisfactorily solve this mystery, and, in the meantime, we’ll find some humor knowing the CIA isn’t the only agency with spooks.

Recent construction work on a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District unearthed a quite remarkable find; a wall of graffiti from 1976 that had been hidden behind another wall. The graffiti consists largely of signed names of people who had gathered to watch the Bicentennial celebrations in New York harbour. Covered up by a marble wall, it was whilst recently repairing damage caused by Hurricane Sandy that led to the discovery of this quaint time capsule.

Number 125, Broad Street, is one of two southernmost sky skyscrapers in Manhattan. Built 40 stories high in 1970, six years later it proved to be a perfect vantage point for spectators watching the magnificent collection of ships gathered in the harbour and fireworks to mark the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

This ‘Operation Sail’ event had actually been created by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to promote good will between countries through celebrating maritime history. On July 4th, 1976, sixteen tall ships sailed to New York to participate in a grand ‘Parade of Ships.’

The thousands of spectator lining Lower Manhattan were matched by a vast fleet of spectators in sailboats filled the harbour, as the majestic, historic tall ships sailed into the harbour from Bermuda. Bringing to mind the era when New York was still primarily a port city, and the piers and slips around Lower Manhattan was a sea of masts, oyster houses, ship’s chandler offices and thriving fish markets, many of those watching the Bicentennial celebrations chose to leave their mark on the wall running along South Street.

Today the newly uncovered names are a perfect time capsule of the day’s celebrations; Ivette was here 7-4-76 says one, whilst the names of couples such as Clyde + Rosina ’76 cover the wall. Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon get a mention as does one anonymous New Yorker who simply wrote, “Good-bye cruel World of ’76.” Quite what happened to ‘Kathy & Eddie.W’ or Dee Dee S + Lily remains unknown. One New Yorker who wrote on the wall remembers, “the children wanted to see the fire crackers. We got there very early. I remember the Marines were waving on the upper deck of the ships. The sun was shining hard and the people were happy.”

The wall of graffiti was at some point covered over with a marble exterior, until the events of Hurricane Sandy. Today half of the wall remains uncovered, and runs along South Street, around the corner to the Vietnam Memorial, a fascinating glimpse into one day of Manhattan’s storied history.

Lenin, in his rightful place atop Red Square. (Photo: Pharos/CC BY-SA 3.0)

To a casual pedestrian on Houston St., the southern border of New York's East Village, Red Square might not look much different than any other tall-enough apartment building in the area. But when this building was completed in 1989, it was, depending on your perspective, a bold real estate move to bring upscale housing to a new neighborhood or one of the harbingers of doom for an East Village golden age. It also had a secret, starting in 1994: If you looked up to the roof, from the right angle, you could see a statue of Vladimir Lenin on the roof, one arm raised in the air.

If East Villagers had mixed feelings about the building, the statue was a point of pride. This week, though, it was removed from Red Square's roof, reports local blog EV Grieve.

After dark, a crane came and lifted the 18-foot-tall statue from the spot on the roof where it lived for more than 20 years. Lenin came to Red Square after the fall of the Soviet Union: the statue had been commissioned from a Soviet artist but never went on display. A friend of one of the building's owners found it "in the backyard of a dacha outside Moscow," the New York Times reported in 1997. Lenin was positioned on the roof so that he faced "Wall Street, capitalism's emblem, and the Lower East Side, 'the home of the socialist movement,'" the Times noted.

Red Square is reportedly under contract for sale, and presumably the buyers have plans that don't include quirky Soviet statues gracing the roof. And Lenin? Bowery Boogie reports that, like so many New Yorkers who are priced out of their neighborhood or forced out of their building, he's landed in a new spot in the city—and he didn't even have to go too far. Lenin now lives on the roof of 178 Norfolk Street, just down the block from his old place.

Is it a clue?! (Photo: Timothy Vollmer/CC BY 2.0) 

In news that might be a plot point from a Da Vinci Code sequel, a Washington, D.C. Joan of Arc’s sword has been stolen. As NBC Washington is reporting, a statue of the famous warrior was robbed of its weapon recently, and this isn’t even the first time it’s happened.

Located in Washington’s Meridian Hill Park, the bronze Joan of Arc statue was installed in 1922, a gift from the French women’s group Le Lyceum Societie des Femmes de France. The statue depicts the historic giant in full armor, riding triumphantly astride a horse, holding her blade to the heavens. Unfortunately, her triumphant pose makes her sword pretty easy to steal.

The first time it was taken was back in 1978, when someone broke off the extended blade. It wasn’t replaced until 2011. Now, just days ago, another thief once again snapped off the statue’s blade.

Park authorities are looking into the theft, though Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton blames the parks service for not realizing that the sword would be an attractive target in the first place, and failing to take steps to prevent its theft. 

A massive conspiracy involving dead presidents, shadowy sects of the Catholic church, and Joan of Arc’s true identity, has assumedly not been ruled out either.